Grist 04 - Incinerator (5 page)

“Behind you,” Peppi said. She plunked down a couple of glasses that held, conservatively, triples.

“About time, too,” Hammond said. “Next time I’ll have my parrot make it.” Peppi gave me a concerned look and headed for the relative security of the bar.

Hammond hoisted his drink and knocked back half of it. I drank most of mine and put the rest closer to him. He’d drink it eventually. The whiskey sang off-key in my veins. He hunched his massive shoulders up around his ears, making his neck disappear completely, and said, “A moving van. She hired a fucking moving van. All that was left was my chair, the stuff in my den, and a couple guns. Hazel never liked the guns. Also my bed. Did I tell you we slept in twin beds?”

“Better that way,” I said. “Women have cold feet.”

“Hazel has feet like the polar ice cap. It was like sleeping with Greenland.” He finished his drink and stared at what was left of mine. I put it into his hand.

“Not drinking?” he said. He didn’t really care.

“I already had a few.”

“Who was buying?”

“Client.”

“Anything for the cops?”

“Yeah. About this pyromaniac who’s torching the homeless.”

I might as well have been Demosthenes at the seaside, waiting for applause from the waves. Hammond’s kerchief had slipped down over his left eye, and he tugged it upward. “Where’d this come from?” he asked, looking up at it.

“Al the Red,” I said, abandoning the topic. “Scourge of the Caribbean.”

“Bet your ass,” he said. “There’s not a palm tree safe.”

“Well, what are they good for anyway?”

“Target practice.” He made a pistol out of his hand, sighted over it, and said,
“KABOOM!”
People gave us nervous looks. It takes a lot to make a roomful of drunk cops nervous, but whatever it takes, Hammond had it.

He blew on his fingers to disperse the smoke. “She took the kids, of course,” he said.

“She would,” I said. “She’s their mother.”

“Yeah?” he said. “What’m I, an unindicted coconspirator?” He drained the drink and signaled for two more.

We’d had this discussion before. “You said something about paper plates,” I said.

“Wrapped in cellophane.” He closed his eyes for a long time, and I hoped he’d gone to sleep. “With little blue flowers on them,” he added, eyes still shut. “On the sink, right where the real plates would have been if she hadn’t taken them. My mother gave us those plates. Did I tell you my mother’s on Hazel’s side?”

Peppi clunked a couple of drinks onto the table, and Hammond opened his eyes and put four ounces of whiskey into the realm of memory. I took a whack off the other one. I was getting drunk.

“So what was I supposed to think?” he asked me.

I’m not a guesser. I wouldn’t guess my own weight if I were standing on a scale. So I just said, “What?”

“I figured it was like she was tipping me a wink,” he said, sighting me through the bottom of the whiskey tumbler and looking like a middle-aged pirate with a truncated spyglass. “It was like she was saying, Hey, I’ve taken the kids and the furniture, but I’m still worried about what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to eat it off of. You can still get us back. I was alone in the house, it was the middle of the night and the house was empty, but there were these paper plates, and I looked at them like they were the fucking Holy Grail and figured she’s pissed off but we can straighten it out. We always did before.”

“Good for her,” I said. It was my turn to wave for Peppi. Peppi shook her head meaningfully and looked away. “That’s a woman for you,” I added, flagging Peppi again. “Sentimental.”

Peppi poured and trudged grudgingly toward us. She didn’t look sentimental. She looked like a woman with a rattlesnake in her hip pocket.

“Except it wasn’t,” Hammond said as the drinks landed loudly on the table.

“What wasn’t?” I asked. To Peppi, I said, “Two more.” I was tired of waving.

“You’re driving,” Peppi said unpleasantly. Peppi had unpleasant down cold.

“Aren’t you listening?” Hammond said to me. “Plates. We’re talking about paper plates. I sit around for eight days going out of my mind. I’m trying to pick the tattoos off my arms. There’s no note, no phone number, no nothing. I go to the assholes in Missing Persons and they laugh in my face. Guys I
know,
for Christ’s sake. Every morning I wait for the mailman, catch hell because I’m coming in late. No letter. No birthday card, even.”

“Happy Birthday” didn’t seem like the right thing to say. I drank instead.

“And then her sister calls me,” he said as Peppi plunked the full glasses on the table. For once, Hammond didn’t give them a glance. He still had half a belt in his hand. “Her sister. Zora, for Christ’s sake. I’ve only called the bitch forty or fifty times since Hazel left, and it’s always ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about it. How terrible for you.’ So Hazel finally lets go of her sister’s leash, and the bitch calls me and says everybody’s okay.

“ ‘Everybody who?’ I say. ‘I’m not okay. I seen DOAs who are more okay than I am.’ And she laughs this pissy little laugh and says, honest to Christ, Simeon, she says, ‘Oh, you men. You don’t know when you’re well off.’

“ ‘Well off,’ I say. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

“ ‘Hazel told me how you swore,’ she says. ‘I must say, it’s not very becoming. Not in a grown man, anyway.’ ” Hammond finally registered the new drinks. He finished the one in his hand.

“Drink, me hearty,” said Al the Red, hoisting the fuller of the two new ones.

I drank. The room was beginning to waver as though I were seeing it over an active radiator.

“Well off?” I asked.

“Sure,” Hammond said in a voice that would have straightened the hair on a sheep. “After I apologized for my French and asked her real polite and genteel where they all were and she said she couldn’t tell me, then she said, and listening to it would have given Liberace diabetes, she said, ‘Wasn’t it sweet of little Al to go out and buy you those paper plates? He wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.’ ” He lowered his head onto his bulging forearms. “Little Al,” he repeated. “Holy Jesus, little Al.”

Without thinking, I reached over and put my hand on top of his head. Sober, he’d have killed me. “Hey, Al the Red,” I said, “let’s go home.”

He straightened up and looked at me as though he’d never seen me before. I yanked my hand back. Three feet from my nose, it smelled of hair oil.

“Fuckin’ A,” he said. He threw the half-full glass to the floor. It splintered and splashed. Still no one looked at us. We were invisible.

Hammond lurched to his feet. “To the ship,” he said, adjusting his kerchief. “And damn the torpedoes. Full fucking speed ahead. Whatever way ahead is.”

After I drained my glass, I guided him unsteadily to the street, my arm around his Mount Rushmore shoulders, and steered him into Alice, my car. He snored all the way to his empty house and then refused help getting inside. I watched Al the Red go, and waited until the door was slammed shut and locked. A hot wind blew, and the air smelled of smoke. I had to make a detour on the way back to Topanga to avoid a fire area, a long-familiar profile of mountains now enveloped in flame.

Between the beer and the whiskey, it took me only a few minutes to fall asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was famous.

4

Fame

The phone started
in at eight o’clock. It rang several times, penetrating a rather large region of murky pain that turned out to be the inside of my head. When it became apparent that the phone had more stamina than I did, I rolled over and picked the damn thing up.

“Hang up and call me tomorrow,” were my first words of the bright new day. I’d sweated into the sheets, and they were damp and wadded. They stank of whiskey and smoke and the Red Dog and something even ranker, something I couldn’t place.

“This is Channel Five,” said the female voice on the other end, as though that explained everything.

“I don’t care if it’s the Channel Islands,” I said. “Get the hell out of my ear.” I hung up, hard enough to crack the handset. Then I rolled over, clutched the dank pillow to me, and pretended that the pillow was my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan. Eleanor smelled better, but she wasn’t there. My eyelids scratched and closed over shards of broken glass, and I dozed instantly.

I hadn’t even had time to work up an erotic dream when the phone screamed again. “What time is it?” I demanded.

“Eight-twelve by my unreliable, mass-produced watch,” said a supernaturally cheerful voice, “Seventeen jewels, and all of them fakes. How you doing, Simeon?”

“What a goddamn stupid question,” I said.

“This is Pat.”

In the whole world, I couldn’t think of a soul named Pat. Pat Nixon came belatedly to mind. She was dead, though, and this was a male.

“Patrick Henry, at the
Times.”

I rubbed my eyes with a hand that smelled like a rubber glove full of wet cigars. It had to be important for Pat to call himself Patrick. He’d been my student once, when I was still teaching English at UCLA.

“You’re up early,” I said. Good. I congratulated myself. A civil sentence.

“And you’re on the front page,” Pat said.

“Slowly, Patrick,” I said. “Of what?”

“The
Times.”

It took both hands to make my head feel smaller. “Pat,” I said, pressing the phone between ear and shoulder and working on my temples with fingers that felt like Smithfield hams, “it’s Sunday.”

“That means you’re reaching our biggest circulation,” he said proudly. He’d always been a smart-ass.

“Sunday,” I said, “is a day of rest. Go rest somewhere.” He sputtered at me, but I hung up. Then, at long last, I yanked the cord out of the back of the phone, rolled over onto my left side, and grabbed my other pillow. It smelled terrible in a familiar fashion. It growled at me.

“God damn it, Bravo,” I said, shoving at the foul-smelling pillow, “where did you come from?”

Bravo Corrigan, Topanga’s itinerant generic dog, exhaled a bagful of dead fish at me, got to all four feet, and shambled to the foot of the bed, pausing just long enough to shake himself. With a fine snowfall of long dog hairs settling over me, I shut my scratchy eyes and aimed myself toward the Land of Nod.

Bravo’s stomach rumbled. I forced my eyes to remain closed. I thought about getting a drink of water. I thought about it for so long that I finally fell back asleep and dreamed of helicopters dumping tons of cool water over acres of fire. It didn’t do any good. The water exploded like gasoline.

When a hand touched my shoulder, I jumped all the way to the foot of the bed, clawing at the air for a weapon. Instead, my foot found Bravo, and then my other foot found nothing at all, and I collapsed on the floor, shoulder first.

“For heaven’s
sake,
Simeon,” Eleanor Chan said.

I got my eyes open and focused with an effort that seemed to involve even my stomach muscles. Eleanor stood there, looking cool and unruffled and amused, wearing a loose, wrinkled white shirt—one of mine, from the years when we’d lived together—and tight, ragged bleached jeans with a rip exposing one creamy knee. She’d had her black, perfectly straight hair cut short and spiky on top. On her it looked good.

“You’re green,” Eleanor said. She’d always been observant.

“Hammond,” I said by way of explanation. I tried to unknot my legs. “Dawn patrol.”

“Poor baby,” she said. She liked Hammond. I liked him, too, but I’d never have called him baby. “And speaking of Baby,” she said, holding out a newspaper.

“I can’t read,” I said desperately. “I can barely talk.” I became aware of the fact that I was naked and plucked up a corner of the dank sheet. Eleanor laughed.

“The media should see you now,” she said. “Hello, Bravo.” Bravo’s tail thumped.

“Eleanor,” I said, getting experimentally to my feet. The room swam. “Can I go dynamite my teeth or something before you start telling me about the media?”

“You’re a star,” she said, waving the paper at me in an aggressive fashion.

I shrugged it off for the moment and slipped laboriously into a pair of drawstring pants. Standing on my left leg took most of my day’s meager allotment of equilibrium. “Make coffee,” I said, barely avoiding dropping to my knees in supplication. “Please?” I went into the bathroom and tried to scrub off the residue of the night. Hot, cold, hot, cold. Then some more cold. Wash the hair twice. Slap both sides of the face sharply under the stream of icy water. It was a routine I’d practiced frequently in the weeks since Hammond’s wife had left. Hammond was doing fine, I reflected, pulling on a T-shirt. I was the one who was turning into an alcoholic.

I heard Eleanor puttering familiarly around in the kitchen of the house she’d rented for us all those years ago as I combed my hair with trembling fingers and checked the mirror for signs of permanent damage. My parents’ durable genes had survived another fusillade of abuse. I still looked like someone to whom you might conceivably lend a quarter.

Two cups of Eleanor’s bitter, highly stimulating coffee later, I was wired enough to look at the
Times.
“How do you do it?” I asked. “Have you got a corner on the caffeine they take out of decaf?”

“You’ll need it,” she said, handing me the paper. Bravo, sitting directly on Eleanor’s feet, watched it suspiciously. Whoever his original owner had been before Bravo gave him a final high-five and went out to play the field, he’d apparently been a member of the rolled-up newspaper school of training. “This is going to make you really popular with the cops.”

I glanced down and read. My eyes closed of their own accord. “Mother of God,” I said. And that was just the headline.

MILLIONAIRE IMMOLATED ON SKID ROW, it said. Under that, in type the size of John Hancock’s signature: HEIRESS ACCUSES POLICE OF INCOMPETENCE.

“It gets better,” Eleanor said over the rim of her cup.

Taking another sip of coffee, I accidentally cracked the heavy mug against my front teeth. It helped me to focus.

Police spokespersons last night positively identified a transient who was doused with gasoline and set on fire Thursday night on Skid Row as Chicago multimillionaire and philanthropist Abraham Winston. Winston, 68, is in critical condition at the Blumberg Burn Treatment Center in Sherman Oaks.