Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (31 page)

Chapter 29

“R
elax,” I said to Eleanor.

“He’s dead.”

“That’s very reassuring,” she said, chewing on the side of her hand.

I went over to poor old Ellis. His shirt had turned a dreadful brown color and it was full of sharp creases where the blood had stiffened it. His jaw hung slackly, making me think of the scene in Dickens in which Marley’s ghost unbinds the wrappings beneath his chin and his jaw drops to his chest. It had convinced Scrooge.

“Who is he?” she said.

“He was one of them,” I said. “He was on Brooks’s side. I guess it was the wrong side.”

“How can he be standing?” She’d gotten the better of her fright, which put her half a move in front of me, and she was determined to be analytical.

“Good question,” I said, making the supreme effort to put my hand on his shoulder. He turned quite easily. “Meat hook,” I said. “They stuck it through his jacket.” The entire wall was lined with meat hooks. Fauntleroy dangled there like a parody of the carcasses, the slit pigs and sides of beef, that had hung from them for the delectation of the gourmets upstairs in the dining room of the Borzoi.

I backed away and looked at my watch. After twelve. The Revealing was due to start in less than twenty minutes. And where, I wondered, was Dexter?

“This is a horrible place,” Eleanor observed with an attempt at objectivity.

I looked at dead old Ambrose, or rather Ellis, and suddenly I remembered Nickodell’s. “Holy shit,” I said. “His fingernails.”

“They don’t keep growing,” Eleanor said. “That’s a myth.”

“This was a man who was crazy for clean fingernails.” I started to rifle his pockets.

“Yeah, and look where it got him.”

“Swiss precision,” I said. “It’s got to be here. Why would you take a dead man’s knife? Bingo.” It hung, red and heavy and shiny, from my fingers. “Nine million blades,” I said. “More blades than an army of ninjas. Even a screwdriver. It’s got everything we need except a bazooka.”

“Let’s go, then. He gives me the creeps.”

“He wasn’t much better when he was alive,” I said. “Let’s give it ten minutes. You sit there and read your palms or something and I’ll make sure I’ve got this door figured out.”

“The hell with that,” she said. “I’m going to do some breathing. We both need to be calm and centered.” She closed her eyes, folded her hands in her lap, and breathed rhythmically.

“Anyone in the world, transported magically through time and space into the center of this refrigerator,” I said, fooling with the cylinders, “would know immediately that he was in Los Angeles. I should be forcing this lock with a crystal. Then we could make a slow, slushy escape while New Age music shimmers on the soundtrack.” Eleanor just breathed.

The screwdriver was the thing that did it. It was short, so there wasn’t much leverage, but it was very thick. I knew in a minute and a half that I’d be able to force the lock. Leaving the screwdriver wedged in the cylinders, I sat down next to Eleanor and breathed for eight minutes.

I tapped her wrist. She was up and ready instantly, her eyes clear. Feeling intent and slightly light-headed, I went to the door and worked the knife back and forth.

“Turn off the light,” I said. I was using both hands.

She reached past my shoulder and snapped it off, and I pushed the cylinder all the way to the right and put my shoulder to the door. It opened slowly, and the two of us stumbled out into the kitchen.

“Oh, my God,” Eleanor said, paling. “What in the world could that be?”

“Hold your breath for a minute,” I said. “It’s called Eau de Fluffy, and it’s on our side. That means Dexter’s here.” I pulled out the two handkerchiefs and poured the after-shave over them. I gave one to Eleanor, who promptly clamped it over her nose and mouth, and I breathed through the other. The smell of dead animal was so intense that it cut through the cheap scent. Dexter must have dumped half of the contents of the truck into the intake for the air conditioning.

We moved quickly across the kitchen and out into the corridor. I paused for a moment to check my orientation and then headed for the air-conditioning unit, my first landmark. Two or three people passed us, people who had been basemented apparently, but no one gave us a second glance; they had their own problems. Each of them had something wadded up and clutched over his face. We looked just like everybody else.

The big air-conditioning unit was pumping its evil-smelling lungs out. It was set at medium. I unscrewed the face plate of the control panel with the screwdriver on the Swiss Army knife and then turned the selector to high. Then I slipped the flimsiest of the blades under the rotor switch and angled it so it touched all the contacts, forging a permanent connection between the selector and the high contact. I snapped the blade off and left it there and then replaced the face plate. Short of crawling under it and disconnecting it, that thing was going to be murder to turn off.

“Someone’s coming,” Eleanor said.

Another person fled down the hallway, coming from the direction we’d come in, and made a beeline for the TV studio. I recognized Listener Simpson, she of the Nordic blue eyes, pinching her nose closed and walking very fast. I wondered whether she’d been basemented, and if not, what she was doing down there. I debated backtracking her to see what I’d missed, and then looked at my watch again.

It was time for the Revealing.

We navigated the corridors, me checking my mental map at every turn and Eleanor holding her handkerchief screwed up to her face. We moved deliberately; now was not the time to get lost. Another person blundered past us in high gear, fleeing the stench. He bumped heavily against Eleanor.

“The manners these people have,” she mumbled into her handkerchief.

With the man in front of us, we could accelerate. He led us past my familiar little cul-de-sac and down the broad corridor toward the light. It opened onto a room that flickered under the bluish glow of fluorescent tubes. Four chairs were gathered around a desk. They were empty. Playing cards winked up from the surface of the desk. A cigarette burned in an ashtray next to a pair of spectacles.

“It’s like after the neutron bomb,” Eleanor said.

A door at the far end of the room opened onto a flight of steps that led upward to street level. A metal door at the top of the steps had a single small square window at face level. Above it, a red sign said on the air.

The smell was much less pronounced here. When we opened the door and stepped into the TV studio, the air was relatively fresh. Not for long, though. The banks of lights were burning, the air conditioner was pumping away, and the stench from the effluvia Dexter had dumped into the air conditioning vent was beginning to breeze through. Already people were casting sidelong glances at each other and wrinkling their noses, shrugging their shoulders. One man lifted his foot and checked the sole of his shoe.

A tiny knot of people had gathered at the opposite end of the stage from the set, the people who had bolted from the basement. They were having a heated discussion. Guys wearing headphones turned and shushed them. They subsided guiltily.

I didn’t see Merryman, which made sense, or Brooks or Barry either. On the set, Mary Claire was standing at the podium talking and Angel was seated, petting her kitten and waiting for fate to whisper in her ear. There were the usual masses of flowers.

The auditorium was packed. Not a seat was empty. A camera had been set up in the middle of the audience area to catch every nuance of the ecstasy of the ardent. This was live, to almost half a million people, according to Skippy. If things worked out, they were going to get quite a show.

Eleanor and I leaned against a wall, more or less out of the light. Mary Claire rambled on, throwing an occasional look at Angel. The smell was growing more pronounced.

“What now?” Eleanor said. “We can’t just stand here.”

“For the moment we can. Everybody’s busy.”

On her chair, Angel let her head loll forward. Now even Mary Claire smelled it. Knowing the camera was on her daughter, she looked past the lights with a questioning expression. Angel was past smelling anything.

“You inhabit a burned-out building,” she said, looking sightlessly forward. “You see out through scorched and rippled windows. You built the building, and you burned it. You built it day by day and room by room, and then you closed the doors to those rooms and built new ones. And behind you, the fire crept in and made everything black and twisted.”

“Not a bad beginning,” I said to Eleanor.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Eleanor said peevishly. “Where is everybody? Those creeps, I mean.”

“Don’t worry. They’re going to come to us.”

“Well, goody. And how are we going to make them do that?”

She put the handkerchief to her face and breathed. It was really beginning to stink. People in the audience were fanning their faces with their souvenir programs. Angel’s and Mary Claire’s faces, printed in four colors, flapped back and forth across the room.

“Just wait,” I said.

A spasm struck Angel. She started to stand up. I held my breath. Then she slumped back into her chair and a broad smile crossed her face.

“Wo,” Angel Ellspeth said, “don’t we all be lookin’
fine
tonight?”

Chapter 30

A
ll over the studio, people stood like statues. The lighting man with the Hussong’s T-shirt dropped his clipboard.

“I a new spirit,” Angel said. “Name of Darnell.” Mary Claire stared at her daughter, her jaw loose.

“Aton been given eternity off,” Angel said happily. “He been jerkin’ you people around pretty good. Wo, what a lotta catgut. Burn down the buildin’ indeed. We say to him, Aton, for Chrissakes, cheer
up
. Spirit don’t listen. He that kind of spirit. Been stubborn for a billion years.”

A fat man in a San Diego State sweatshirt was frantically slicing his throat with his forefinger. No one looked at him. They were transfixed by Angel.

“Come on,” I said to Eleanor, moving quickly away from the wall. I took the man by the sleeve of his shirt and tugged hard. He looked up at me unseeingly. I pinched the skin of his forearm, and he focused.

“Knock it off,” I said. “You’re a hired hand. Don’t you know when your footage is going to make the NBC News?” He sawed reflexively at his throat a couple of times and then something clicked behind his eyes. He looked at me with fresh attention.

“You know what they’ll pay for this?” I asked.

The man licked his lips.

“Keep the tape rolling,” I said. I winked at him. He closed both eyes back at me. He was one of those guys who can’t wink. “Practice,” I said, opening my right eye horribly wide with my fingers and closing my left. “Works wonders in a singles bar.” I tapped his shoulder for emphasis. “Keep the tape rolling,” I told him again.

By now the reek in the studio had climbed to the treble clef. Some members of the audience had gotten up, frantically fanning their faces, and were heading for the exit. They were probably the same faint hearts who had left during the music. Even a few of the stagehands were deserting in the direction of the loading dock. One of the cameras was unmanned, peering dolefully at the floor. The people who remained in the audience seats, though, were watching Angel as if their lives, or the life of someone interesting, were flashing before their eyes.

So, I was sure, were the people at home. They couldn’t smell it.

“Here they come,” Eleanor said.

There was a sudden explosion of activity at one of the exits. A sort of roiling force propelled itself in ripples through the people streaming out through the door, and Brooks came in, shoving his way frantically through them and dragging Barry in his wake. Brooks had had a rebirth of energy; he threw people aside like a mother trying to get to a drowning child. Which, in a sense, he was. He pulled Barry behind him like a carry-on bag on wheels.

“We follow them,” I said.

“I knew you were going to say that,” Eleanor said.

Angel had begun to clap her hands. Dexter was improvising. “Every clap,” Angel said, “gone open your eyes a little more.”
Clap
. “No more bullshit about the past.” There goes NBC News, I thought.
Clap
. “No more sendin’ in money to these folks. They just spendin’ it on dope and loose women.”
Clap
. “No more watchin’ TV. How come you not readin’ somethin right now?”
Clap
.

Brooks and Barry had fought their way to the stage. The stairs were clogged with departing technicians, but Brooks vaulted to the stage like a fourteen-year-old gymnast and yanked Barry up after him. The two of them sprinted past a bewildered Mary Claire and right in front of the remaining functional camera, manned by a dutiful gent who was holding his nose. I looked up at a monitor and saw them speed across it.

“Great,” I said, “they’re on tape. Let’s go.”

Brooks was hammering on the door of the dressing room, which was locked. “Allow me,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. He nodded blindly, without even looking at me. I lifted a foot and kicked the door in. It jolted me all the way to my teeth.

Dexter looked up from his headset and gestured at all of us with the automatic in his right hand.

“Damn,” he said. “I thought you’d never come. I runnin’ out of bullshit.” On the P.A. system, I heard Angel say in the same singsong voice, “I runnin’ out of bullshit.”

Barry took a quick step back. I put the tip of Fauntleroy’s Swiss Army knife against his throat and said, “Please try to get away.” He rolled his eyes at me and froze, as still as a Civil War photo.

Merryman was facedown on the floor, his hands tied behind his back with one of the handkerchiefs I’d given Dexter. With the door open, the stench was beginning to pour into the room. I pushed Barry forward, and Eleanor took Brooks’s arm.

“I think you should go inside, Mr. Brooks,” she said politely.

Brooks was in shock. “Thank you, my dear,” he said in a courtly manner. “I believe I will.” He looked older than J. Paul Getty.

All of us filed in. I closed the door against the smell. Dexter, the automatic trained squarely on Barry, said into the headset, ”Th-th-that’s all, folks,” and took it off. Then he gave me the broadest smile I’d ever seen.

“That’s all,” Brooks repeated lifelessly.

“Any trouble getting in?” I asked Dexter.

“Trouble?” Dexter said. “I tell the man I come for the dead animal and he almost pick me up and carry me in.” He beamed.

“Five million dollars,” Merryman said from the floor.

Dexter gave me a quick glance. “Say what?” he said.

“Five million. Cash. Today,” Merryman said. He gave up looking at me and looked at Dexter. “Seven million. In an hour, if necessary.”

“Dick,” I said, “Your little girl just did a spiritual minstrel show. It’s going to be on TV for some time to come.”

“I can fix it.” Merryman stopped craning his neck and rolled onto his back. “I’ll think of something.”

“Man don’t let go,” Dexter said admiringly.

“We can do business,” Merryman said. “Seven million dollars.”

“Must be makin’ a pile of money.”

“Oh, he likes the money, all right,” I said, “but what he loves is the little girls.”

Dexter stared at Merryman and made his eyes glimmer. Merryman, after a moment, looked away. “I ain’t forgettin’ that,” Dexter said softly. “You gone be a big hit in the joint,” he said to Merryman. “All them teeth. Man, they gone to be linin’ up for you. You a two-cartons-of-Marlboro man any day. In about two weeks, you gone to have a rear end you can slip your head into. Probably you be pretty flexible by then, too.”

He got up and crossed the room to Merryman, towering over him. “So I gone do you a favor,” he said, “slow them boys down a week or two. Give you a little time to get acclimated. You’ll thank me later.” Then he lifted his foot and put his shoe on Merryman’s face. It was a very big shoe, black and highly polished. He ground it around for a while over Merryman’s mouth and nose as though he were putting out a cigarette.

“What about Angel?” Eleanor said, watching with a kind of clinical interest.

“Thank you, Eleanor,” I said. “Go out and get her and Mary Claire, would you? Mary Claire may take a little persuasion.”

She left the room and I turned to Dexter. “May I borrow one of your guns?” I said.

“Wif pleasure.” He reversed it and handed it to me with a flourish, butt-first. “You,” I said to Barry. “Down on your knees.”

He looked from me to Dexter. Merryman was trying very quietly to spit out the taste of Dexter’s shoe. His nose was bleeding nicely. Brooks was staring at a wall, looking like a man trying to do long division in his head. Barry went down on one knee and gave me a great sacrificial gaze.

“You’re doing great,” I said. “Keep going.” He closed his eyes and knelt.

“Now turn around. Face the wall.” I held out a hand to Dexter, and Dexter materialized his other pistol from the waistband of his uniform trousers. He handed it to me.

I pressed the barrel of the automatic against the base of Barry’s well-barbered skull. An involuntary muscular ripple ran down his back. “You enjoyed yourself with Sally Oldfield,” I said, “and with Eleanor. You enjoyed yourself so much with Sally that you left a little souvenir on her face, didn’t you? After you pulled out her fingernails. If you hadn’t done that, Barry,” I said, “if you hadn’t masturbated on her, I think I probably would have given you to the police. As it is, I won’t.”

“No,” he said. “Please. You can’t.”

“I sure can,” I said. Dexter was watching me with one eyebrow elevated. I even had Merryman’s attention.

“Good-bye, Barry,” I said. I pushed the gun against his head sharply and pulled the trigger of the other one.

Barry swayed once and collapsed. He lay on the floor like something swatted.

Eleanor came in with Angel. She was carrying Angel’s kitten. She looked from Barry to me with wide eyes. I held up the other gun, the one I’d fired into the floor.

“He fainted,” I said. “Let’s call Hammond.”

Hammond brought five men with him, one of them the redoubtable Um Hinckley. They stood there clutching handkerchiefs to their faces and looking bewildered at the two men on the floor, the vacant lawyer, and the little girl.

“Welcome,” I said, “to the Burned-Over District.”

Hammond ranted at me while I told him what had happened. He ranted at me while his men put cuffs on Merryman, Brooks, and Barry and hauled them out to patrol cars. He continued to rant while his men brought in Mary Claire, who’d been hiding behind the podium. He stopped ranting when I took him down into the basement and showed him Ellis Fauntleroy hanging from his meat hook with his sign around his neck. When he saw Fauntleroy, he had a photographer start taking pictures.

“The Santa Monica TraveLodge,” I said. “Room three-eleven.”

“Tell me the whole thing again,” he growled. “I wasn’t listening.”

I told it again while I led him on a tour of the basement. “Macaroons,” he said, “this’ll make the news. Hell, it’ll make
Time.”

“You’re out of Records,” I said. “It’s all yours.”

“You mean that?” he said suspiciously.

“You figure out how to keep me to a minimum,” I said. “This is the work of Alvin Hammond, grade-A cop.”

In a drawer in Merryman’s office we found stacks of small bills, almost thirty thousand dollars’ worth. I flipped through it, counting, while Hammond watched.

“Mad money?” Hammond asked.

“He was pretty mad,” I said. “But we didn’t find this,” I added, pocketing it. Hammond looked at me, the picture of innocence.

“Find what?” he said.

The only time he went stubborn was when we had to decide what to do with Angel. Merryman had brought her out of her trance as we all watched, and she had watched the proceedings in silence ever since, shrugging off Eleanor’s attempts to comfort her.

“She goes to the Hall,” Hammond said doggedly. “Her mother’s in the can.”

“Her father isn’t,” I said. “She hasn’t done anything wrong.” We were back in the dressing room.

“She’s a material witness.”

“She’s a little girl.”

“They got a place for little girls at the Hall.” Hammond’s mouth was as straight and implacable as the center line in a game of tug-of-war. Angel looked up at us indifferently. She might have been sleepwalking.

“Al,” I said curtly, “she’s going home.”

“Little girl belongs at home,” Dexter said. It was the first time he’d spoken since the police arrived.

“Thank you for your opinion,” Hammond said with the charm he reserves for black people.

“Tell your cops to go outside,” I said to Hammond.

He gave me a hard, stubborn stare, then motioned them out of the room. I took the money from Merryman’s desk out of my pocket and gave roughly half of it to Dexter. Hammond scratched the back of his neck in disbelief.

“Without this man,” I said to Hammond, “You’d still be watching Um Hinckley pick his nose.”

“How you doin’,” Dexter said to Hammond with the aloofness of a subatomic particle that can pass through a cubic foot of solid lead without hitting anything. He put the money into his pocket.

“This is the Spirit Darnell,” I said to Hammond. “Also known as Dexter Smith.”

“Smif,” Dexter said.

“Smif,” I amended. “He has the makings of a first-rate cop.”

“No, thanks,” Dexter said, buttoning his pocket. “I don’t shine no more to cops than I do to riptahls.”

Hammond turned dark red.

“You’re going to want Dexter to keep his mouth shut,” I said. Dexter zipped his lips closed. “And neither Dexter nor I will keep our mouths shut if you don’t let Angel go home to Daddy.”

Hammond wavered.

“I don’t want Daddy,” Angel said in her New York cabdriver’s accent. “I want Dick.”

“You shut up,” I said to her.

Angel, Eleanor, and I were driving toward Venice. A police medic had bandaged our fingers and let us go. It was nine o’clock, and the rain was back with us. A patrol car, Hammond’s compromise, was following at a demure distance.

“There has to be a cop,” Hammond had said. “There has to be a report, Simeon. No discussion.” I’d let him win the point.

Eleanor had maintained a remote silence all the way. It was as though the interlude in the refrigerator had never happened. I reached over and took her bandaged hand. She withdrew it.

“I have to think,” she said. I put my hand back on the wheel. The kitten on her lap mewed twice.

“This is your kitty-cat, Angel,” Eleanor said to the little girl huddled in the back seat.

“Toldya I didn’t want him,” Angel said spitefully. “He’s got fleas. He was
her
idea.” Angel, like Jessica, referred to her mother as “her.” Another of Merryman’s legacies.

“Just leave him in the car,” I said as I pulled to the curb in front of Caleb Ellspeth’s house.

“You don’t like cats,” Eleanor protested.

“I love cats,” I said, thinking about the way she’d pulled her hand away. “I live for cats. I’m leaving all my money to a home for stray cats.”

“All your money,” Eleanor said pointedly. She’d seen me give a wad of it to Dexter.

“You’ve got your story,” I said. “Come on, Angel, we’re home.”

“Home?” Angel said, looking at the house. “This junk heap?”