Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (17 page)

“Be drippin’,” Dexter said, rattling the pot and peering into it. “Move your ass.”

“What did they take?”

“Well, that’s hard to say,” Hammond said with exaggerated politeness. “Because it wouldn’t be there, would it? I mean, after they took it, we wouldn’t find it, so we wouldn’t know if they’d taken it, would we?”

“I knew there was a reason I hadn’t joined the force,” I said. “The difficulties you overcome in the line of duty. Was there a personal phone book?”

“No.”

“Don’t most women have a personal phone book?”

There was a silence. “Are you going to let me tell this my way, or are we going to play Twenty Questions?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Just trying to gain insight into the police mentality.”

“Police?” Dexter said. “Get a man out here to arrest this coffeepot. It gone on strike.”

“Someone’s there?” Hammond said.

“A man from the county,” I said. “Animal Homicide.”

“Ask a stupid question,” Hammond said. “No phone book, no checkbook, no letters, no fingerprints. Not many photographs. They wanted to know who she’d been talking to, who she’d been writing to, who she really was.”

“Who was she?”

“Sarah Theresa Oldfield. Married, divorced. Husband in Utica. That’s in New York. No kids. In L.A. three years.”

“Utica?”

“That’s what it says. Sounds like something that hangs in the back of your throat. Booming little town. Saturday night, you ask your date if she’d like to go down to the beer factory and watch the gauges rise.”

“How long in the Church?”

“That’s coming. Ought to know this afternoon.”

“You’re not talking to the Church.”

“Please,” Hammond said. “We’re going to check her bank records.”

“I got a idea,” Dexter said. He yanked the empty pot out from under the spout.

“You’ll make a mess,” I said warningly.

“Somethin’ this contrary, a mess is what she want.”

“Jesus,” Hammond said, “it’s nice to have your attention.”

“Here she come,” Dexter said with nicely modulated triumph. A stream of brown coffee splattered on the hot plate. Dexter slipped the pot back under the filter.

“I never thought of that,” I said admiringly.

“There is much in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Dexter said, “that is not in your philosphy.”

“Maybe you’d like me to call back to tell you about Wilburforce,” Hammond said. “Or maybe you’d like to call me when Animal Homicide has gone to that big kennel in the sky.”

“Sorry. What about Wilburforce?”

“A real
shtarker
. An old-time con man named Jason Jenks, aka Jinks Jenks. Actually, I sort of remember Jinks. He was jugged about fifteen years ago for practicing medicine without a license.”

“What’s so memorable about that?”

“He was doing surgery.”

“Ah.”

“Pretty well, too. He cut them open and sewed them up again. Sometimes he even got what he was after. Apparently he had some medical school in a previous life. After that he was arrested for running a weight-loss clinic, pretending to be the doctor in charge. They put people on a diet and then fed them all sorts of bright little pills and injected them with water and B-12 every couple of days. Also, apparently, a little cat piss.”

“Wilburforce running a weight-loss clinic?” I asked. “He’s bigger than Luciano Pavarotti.”

“He was svelte in those days,” Hammond said. “Weighed a chic two-oh-five when he was booked. Called himself Dr. Pounzoff, with a Russian spelling. Place was called the Pounzoff Clinic. Cute, no? The fat lady is his wife, Clara. She was pretending to be a nurse then.”

Dexter poured a cup of coffee and waved it questioningly at me. I nodded, and he went to the counter and got my cup.

“Why was he arrested?” I asked. “L.A. has more phony weight clinics than fire hydrants.”

“Couple of customers got hepatitis and complained. This is in the early seventies, before AIDS. Even then, we dumb cops knew that meant that someone wasn’t being really scrupulous about sterilizing needles. And then, of course, there was his surgery conviction. We couldn’t have him getting delusions of grandeur and cutting honest citizens open again. Think how the doctors at Cedars would have felt.”

“Since then?”

“After the Pounzoff dodge he dropped out of sight. Went somewhere and gained weight. Then he surfaced in the Church of the Eternal Moment.”

“And you guys left him alone?”

Dexter handed me my cup. The coffee wasn’t as good as Roxanne’s, but it was better than nothing.

“Freedom of religion, remember?” Hammond said. “Anyway, he didn’t seem to be bothering anybody.”

“He was passing himself off as the little girl’s personal physician.”

“Well, we didn’t know that. Unless somebody gets killed, we leave the religions alone.”

“Somebody got killed,” I said.

“Yeah, and you went all cute about it, didn’t you? Our buddy Jenks was long gone by then anyhow. Set up his own shop, didn’t he?”

I slurped my coffee. Dexter crossed his legs and examined the crease in his pants.

“So tell me about this year’s Jenks. Dr. Richard Merryman.”

“Nothing.”

“By which you mean?”

“Nothing at all. Nothing illegal, nothing legal. He’s a whaddya-call-it, a blank slate.”

“Tabula rasa.”

“You took the word out of my mouth. Or words, maybe. Not even a parking ticket. The lad is cleaner than a nun’s conscience.”

“Licensed for California?”

“Not so far as we can tell. He could have been licensed in the past six months or so. Sometimes they’re a little slow up there in Sacramento.”

“Can you get them to hurry?”

“Not without telling them why I’m interested. You want I should do that?”

“I’d rather you got leprosy.”

”Wo,” Dexter said. “That’s cold.”

“I agree with the man from Animal Homicide,” Hammond said. “Anything happening on your end?”

“A dead cat,” I said. “I’ll call you when there’s something more interesting.”

“You’d better,” Hammond said, meaning it. “Listen, one more thing about Sally Oldfield—you probably should know it although we’re keeping it out of the papers.”

“What’s that?” I didn’t like the edge in Hammond’s voice.

“She was hurt.”

I chewed the inside of my lip and remembered Sally’s face, Sally’s smile. “Hurt like how?”

“The man left with four of her fingernails in his pocket.”

“The son of a bitch.”

“She’d been gagged with her own panty hose, a big knot stuffed in her mouth. Kind of odd, don’t you think?”

“To keep her quiet,” I said, and then I said, “Oh. Right.”

“Yeah,” Hammond said. “Let’s say in four cases out of five the guy who takes the time to pull someone’s nails out before he closes the door for good wants to learn something. And if the person whose nails he’s removing wants to say something, he’s not going to be able to understand her with a big knot of nylon in her mouth, is he?”

“He did it for fun.”

“There was probably nothing on TV. But then he goes and tosses her house. So maybe there
was
something he wanted to learn.”

“No,” I said. “I think he did it for fun. I think he already knew whatever it was, or he wouldn’t have killed her. I think he held off killing her until he was sure about what she knew.”

“Then why take the house apart?”

“To find out if she’d told anyone else. Think about what they took, Al.”

“Girl’s hands were a mess,” Hammond said. “You get any closer to the man, let me know. I’d like an introduction. He had such a good time that he jerked off on her before he left. Ten-four,” he said, knowing I hated it. He hung up.

“Ten-four,” I said automatically as my mind tried briefly to reject the last thing Hammond had told me. Thinking very hard about Needle-nose, I looked up into the eyes of Dexter Smif.

“Ol’ Broderick Crawford always said that,” Dexter said. “Ten-four. Like it mean something. How come the man can’t say good-bye?”

“He couldn’t get his upper lip down far enough for the B.” I wanted to get up and out of the house, to work off a little unwholesome energy before focusing on the day.

“Lotta cops do that. Look like they tryin’ to give they teeth a tan.”

I pushed Needle-nose from my mind’s eye and an image of Merryman floated in to take his place. “If you were a doctor,” I said, “why would you go into religion?”

“This detective work?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the fevered questioning of a philosophical mind.”

“Right, be nasty. Some lady been killed apparently, but be nasty. Take refuge in philosphy. Okay, me too. Nothin’ comes from nothin’, right? I’d say he’s after a little less nothin’. ”

“Money.”

“Why does anybody go into religion? I mean, unless they soul in peril. Most folks, they soul in peril, they the last one gone to know. Look at all those dildos in the three-piece suits and the dry-cleaned hair preachin’ on the TV. All they worried about is the cost per thousand. It’s the good folks worry about they soul.”

“There’s a sucker reborn every minute,” I said.

“And they all got they dollar-fifty to send in every three days. From then on it’s all multiplication. Be fruitful and multiply. ‘Cept I don’t think that’s what it supposed to mean.”

“So how do you trace a doctor?”

“Ask a doctor.”

“Good idea.” I picked up the phone and started to dial.

My friend Bernie picked up the phone on the third ring. Outside, the rain used the roof for a kettle drum. ”Wo, listen to that,” Dexter said. Have to go out through the valley.”

“Bernie,” I said. “How’s Joyce?”

“Okay,” Bernie said. “She’s on call at the hospital.”

“What are you doing?”

“Studying.” Bernie was always studying. He was the only person I knew who had more degrees than I did, and he still couldn’t bring himself to leave school.

“Can I buy you guys dinner?”

“Anybody can buy me dinner. But I don’t know about Joyce. She thawed something before she went to work.”

“Thawed something.”

“I think it’s lasagna. It’s usually lasagna. Joyce cooks a boxcar full of lasagna and cuts the thing into one-foot squares and then freezes them. Our freezer flies the Italian flag.”

“Well, then, how about I come over for dinner?”

“Listen to that,” Dexter said. “Man invites himself.”

“Like I said, I’ll have to ask Joyce,” Bernie said. “I don’t know why there should be a problem. A square foot of lasagna is a lot of lasagna.”

“It
sounds
like a lot of lasagna.”

“It’s good lasagna, though,” Bernie said defensively. “Joyce makes a terrific lasagna.”

“I’ll bring the wine.”

“Red,” Bernie said. “I’m sick of Frascati.”

Dexter picked up my doodle pad and wrote something on it. He waved languidly at me and headed for the door.

“I’m going to want to talk to Joyce,” I said. “Will she mind?”

“Depends on what you want to talk about,” Bernie said.

“See you,” Dexter called. “Check the pad.”

“Thanks for getting the cat,” I said.

“Joyce likes cats,” Bernie said. Then he said, “What have cats got to do with anything?”

“Nothing much. Seven o’clock fine?” Dexter pulled the door closed and went down the hill, whistling.

“Fine. Unless Joyce can’t make it. Is this about cats?”

“No,” I said. “It’s about doctors. See you at seven.”

I hung up and went to the kitchen to dump my cup in the sink. On the doodle pad Dexter had written dexter smif.

555-0091. CONSIDERIN’ ABOUT A CAREER CHANGE.

Chapter 16

M
rs. Yount’s pendulous lower lip trembled. So did the paper cup in her hand. The cup, courtesy of McDonald’s, said fresh coffee but the aroma was pure Jack Daniel’s.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” Mrs. Yount said. “I always knew she’d come home. And now she won’t.”

Mrs. Yount’s living room was in its usual state of chaos. Clothes were piled about eight inches thick on the carpet, if there was a carpet. An old, worn fur coat was spread out in front of the TV, which was tuned to a daytime show about the turbulent emotional lives of doctors and nurses. Two yolk-spattered plates, the refuse of Mrs. Yount’s significant breakfast, littered the coat’s shedding collar. Outside, a waist-high wall of empty whiskey bottles dripped water around Mrs. Yount’s pathetic little garden. Mrs. Yount didn’t like to throw her dead soldiers away. The trashmen might talk. Instead, she stacked them neatly inside the cinder-block wall that surrounded her scraggly patio.

“I should of felt something,” she said. “Wouldn’t you think I’d of felt something if she was dead?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There couldn’t have been any pain, the man said. She ran right under the truck, and it was over.”

The lip trembled again. I was terrified that she’d begin to cry. “I guess that’s something,” she said. “He was a nice man?”

“Very nice. He felt terrible.”

“What kind of truck?”

I wasn’t ready for the question. “A beer truck. Making a delivery to the grocery.”

“Fluffy liked beer. I gave her a little saucerful just before bed. She drank Anchor Steam.”

“She had good taste,” I said idiotically. “I drink it myself sometimes.”

“Would you like one?”

“No,” I said. “That’s all right.”

Mrs. Yount raised her paper cup to her lips and started to swallow, but then she made a sputtering noise and drops of whiskey spattered the crumpled clothes at her feet. A fat tear squeezed itself loose from her eye. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, dear … oh, dear.”

“Please, Mrs. Yount,” I said.

“What am I to do?” She looked at the television screen and the tears flowed down. “She was only three. What am I to do?”

“You’ll be fine.” I reached out and patted her arm.

She looked down at my hand and then heavily up at me, and there was a little click behind her eyes and the old Mrs. Yount was back. “A lot you know, mister,” she said. “Go away. Send me a bill.” She waved me away and picked up an empty Jack Daniel’s bottle. Without turning back, she tottered toward the back door to add it to the wall of empties. “Just send me a bill, mister, that’s all.” The glass door to the patio slid open with a squeal that started a dog howling somewhere.

I left without saying anything about the leak in the roof.

In the high and palmy days of Hollywood glamour the place had called itself the Borzoi, and it had offered temporary and very expensive shelter to various Huntingtons, Hartfords, Sepulvedas, and Doheneys, not to mention a clutch of Barrymores. The Californians came there when the fires of autumn razed the elegant homes on the hillsides and when their wives were suing them for divorce, and the Barrymores when they were desperate enough for money to desert the adoring audiences of New York and hop the
Twentieth Century
for the three-day trip to Los Angeles. All day they’d labor in silence in the converted barns on Gower and Sunset, letting their famous voices go to waste and loathing themselves for pandering to a vulgar new medium, and at night they’d return to the Borzoi in their long white limousines to enjoy the fruits of their labors. They seldom took much money back to New York.

What remained of the Borzoi’s elegance was mostly in the refined bones of the building, a sharp-elbowed piece of Art Deco that laughed at gravity, and in the long-dark neon portrait of two impossibly slim dogs that raced each other over the spiky chrome doors leading into the lobby. There were six pairs of doors in all, needing nothing more than a little chrome polish and a few hours of work to be restored to glory, but they hadn’t been touched in years.

In fact, from where I stood, across the street, I couldn’t see that the Borzoi’s current owners, the Church of the Eternal Moment, had done much for the neighborhood. The sign that for sixty years had said the borzoi in angular letters had been replaced by a large, clunky hand-painted affair announcing the new landlord’s presence, but that was about it. I’d arranged to meet Eleanor at one at the
Times
, and since that meant going downtown it seemed like an opportunity to take a look at Church headquarters. I don’t go downtown much, and every time I go I remember why.

The Borzoi faced west across a sodden square that had probably once been a pleasant little park. Dozens of homeless men and women had moved or been herded into the square, using plastic trashbags and cardboard cartons to shield themselves from the rain. It was about as effective as it sounds. The sanitary facilities were as low-tech as the housing, and the square smelled like an open sewer, which, in effect, it was.

The extent of the Church’s charity toward the dispossessed on its doorstep was evident from across the street. Ragged men and women sat, glazed and absent, in the doorways on either side of the Borzoi, and lurched up and down the sidewalk to the right and to the left. But no one huddled for refuge in the Borzoi’s doorways, and no one strolled bedazedly in front of it. A waterlogged red carpet ran from the six pairs of chrome doors to the very edge of the curb. The carpet was flanked by thick black dripping wire ropes that traveled down the steps on heavy metal stanchions and terminated exactly eighteen inches from the gutter. There was enough room for someone with minimal motor control to squeeze by on his way to or from the brown-bag store at the corner, but there was obviously no invitation to sit on the Borzoi’s steps and rest a spell.

This message was further underlined by the presence of two beefy jokers wearing the nautical outfits I’d seen up in Carmel. They stood just inside the right- and left-hand doors and glared vigilantly out toward the street. They were obviously ready to protect that wet red carpet with their lives, if the need arose. The one on the right had the kind of face that suggested that he hoped the need would arise, and sooner rather than later: fat, downturned lips, a short thick pug nose, and two stupid little eyes lurking close together under a bony brow-ridge that I thought had been eliminated from the gene pool several million years ago. The other one just looked dumb.

As I crossed the street and set foot on the squishy red carpet, I decided on the dumb one. I didn’t know whether I’d get a big smile, a salute, or a demand for a password, but whatever it was, I preferred not to get it from someone who was clearly upset that fate hadn’t made him a Shi’ite Muslim with a lot of opportunities to die for something he believed in.

What I got from the dumb one was a burp, redolent of burger and onion, and a halfhearted attempt to open the left-hand door for me. I beat him to it without dislocating my shoulder, pushed it open myself, and went inside.

The sad old lobby arched dark and dirty above me. Spots of damp dotted the carpet and tainted the air. A few people came and went, looking businesslike. Above the long reception counter at the far end of the room hung a whopping color photo of Angel and Mary Claire Ellspeth. A pin spot dangling from the ceiling picked it out and made it dazzle. It was the only bright thing in the room.

When in doubt, as my mother always says, look like you know what you’re doing. I nodded briskly to the two women at the counter and went to the elevator. The doors squealed open with a shrill plea for oil, and I pushed close door and stood there for a moment, thinking.

There were six floors above me and one below. A sign on the elevator wall obligingly informed me that the second floor was the Listening Centre, quaint British spelling and all, and that the third and fourth were Church Offices. Five and six were labeled Residence Halls.

There was no label for the floor, presumably a basement, below me. There was no way to get there, either. One could go up simply by pushing a button. To go down, one needed a key.

That narrowed my options. They were further narrowed by the fact that I had no plausible business in the Church Offices and no interest in the Residence Halls. I pushed two and made a clanky ascent.

The doors opened on a narrow hallway illuminated by bare bulbs plunked into what once must have been elaborate sconces. A young man seated behind a desk that faced the elevator looked up at me incuriously. The sign in front of him said listening centre. The young man was pudgy and unhealthily white, with a dirty-looking fall of straight brown hair sloping across his forehead in a way that made him look like a latter-day member of the Hitler Youth.

“Room twelve,” I said, hoping that there was one and that the number was high enough to place it around the corner and out of sight.

He pushed a register at me, tossed back the little fringe of hair on his forehead with a fat index finger, and held out a pen. “Down and to the left,” he said. “Name and time, please.”

ALGY SWINBURNE, I Wrote. ELEVEN-FORTY.

He swiveled the register around again and crossed out the time. “Eleven-forty-four,” he said with severe satisfaction, writing it above the scratch marks. “Your watch is slow.”

“My gosh,” I said, setting it ostentatiously, “it certainly is. Is Listener Simpson around?”

“She’d be in the studio now, wouldn’t she?” He’d probably been a smartass since he was four.

“The studio?”

“The television studio,” he explained with a hint of weariness. “She’s working the noon broadcast.”

“Of course, she is,” I said. “Boy, there are days when I don’t know my own name.”

He looked down at the register. “How could you forget a name like Algy?”

“I can try,” I said. “And thanks.”

“For what?” he said, genuinely puzzled.

“Just an expression.” I trundled off down the hall.

Most of the room doors were firmly closed. No ghosts of Doheneys or Barrymores, swathed in floor-length ermine trench coats, paced the hallway. For that matter, no one paced the hallway. The Listening Centre was obviously not the place where church members went to pace. I made it all the way to room eight without having to look businesslike.

The door to room eight was open.

I glanced back at the winning youth behind the desk. He had his back to me, probably gazing balefully through his forelock and trying to guess what kind of idiot the elevator would next deliver into his day. I went into room eight.

All remnants of the Borzoi’s past glory had been resolutely swept away. The inevitable picture of Angel and Mary Claire hung in glorious color on one wall, but the furniture seemed to have been chosen for its drabness: a folding metal chair in front of a Formica card table, facing another folding metal chair. A sleek contraption that looked vaguely like an aluminum carton of cigarettes sat precisely in the middle of the table. It was bolted down. From the side of it facing the chair near the wall protruded a tangle of wires that terminated in a pair of thick cuffs. The cuffs sported electrodes, round and black, about the size of eye patches. The side of the contraption facing away from the cuffs and the electrodes featured an on-off switch, something that suggested a volume control, and a couple of dials. It could have been one thing and one thing only: a lie detector. Crude, but probably effective.

A door at the end of the room led to a bathroom. The entire place smelled of cigarettes and sweat. The cigarettes were just cigarettes; the sweat was probably fear. For that matter, the cigarettes were probably fear too. The little machine didn’t look very forgiving, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the anxiety of being hooked up to it and asked questions about the most intimate aspects of your life. I’d once been scared half to death by a psychiatrist, and at least I could lie to her.

I sat on the metal chair nearest the wall, where I figured the person who was being Listened to would sit. I picked up the cuffs: Velcro snaps clasped them together. I put one idly around my left wrist and sat there thinking about Sally Oldfield sitting in a room like this one, pouring her heart out to someone she’d never met, someone who nodded and smiled encouragingly and watched the dials. Sally Oldfield, fresh out of Utica, New York, and lost in the city, looking for the key to her life in the eyes of a stranger. Telling that stranger something very dangerous.

Peeling off the cuff, I looked at my recently reset watch. Twelve noon. I didn’t think I wanted to see much more of the Listening Centre. Unless I was very wrong, it was just more of the same.

As I got up, my attention was caught by a sudden pop and whine from the television set sitting on a little table behind the Listener’s seat, right where the—the what? the Talker? the Listenee?—would have been forced to look at it. Cartoons? The soaps?
News of the World
? Alistair Cooke? None of them sounded very likely. And none of them, so far as I knew, had the power to turn on sets automatically, although I was sure that somewhere some producer was working on it. I sat back down as the screen came to life.

I was watching something called “Celebrity Corner,” if the large sparkly sign hanging on the back wall of the set was to be believed. On chairs that looked much more comfortable than anything to be found in room eight, three familiar-looking people sat smiling into the camera. One of them was Skippy Miller, one was an actress whose name I couldn’t remember, and the third was an anemic-looking young man with shoulder-length hair. The other two chairs were occupied by Angel and Mary Claire Ellspeth.

“… sharing gains,” Mary Claire was saying. “Not all of them, of course,” she added with a smile. “We’ve only got an hour.”

The three celebrities beamed. Angel looked slightly fuddled, as if she wondered why she wasn’t in school. “Clive,” Mary Claire said to the anemic-looking young man, “why don’t we begin with you?”

“Wul,” he said delightedly in an accent that was pure Midlands English, “why don’t we, then?”