Grist 04 - Incinerator

When a wealthy man is set ablaze by the "incinerator"--a deranged pyromaniac who is stalking the homeless of L.A.--professor-turned-private investigator Simeon Grist is determined to catch the killer. Reprint. *AB. *

### From Publishers Weekly

Tiresome hero and narrator Simeon Grist duels with a homicidal pyromaniac, while willfully alienating his lady love, his best friend and the LAPD.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

### From Library Journal

After the serial murderer who immolates skid-row bums torches her father--an Alzheimer's sufferer who disappeared from Chicago--ultra-rich Annabelle Winston hires LA investigator Simeon Grist ( The Four Last Things , LJ 5/1/89) to track down the villain. When she splashes the story across the front page of the Sunday paper, the "Incinerator" contacts Grist, the police realize they must act, and Grist dubiously coordinates a plan to entrap the ubiquitous villain. Quite different from Fyfield in style and setting, but just as vital and full of conflict. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Praise for Timothy Hallinan and Simeon Grist

“ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING of the new private eyes”

Booklist

“AN EXCELLENT JOB … When it comes to making a quick run up Topanga Canyon in the 1990s, Hallinan has the top down and he’s ready to go.”

Chicago Tribune

“Effective prose, engaging repartee, sharp and witty characterizations … Hallinan has a genuine ability.”

Washington Post Book World

“A generous and inventive writer … Hallinan has talent and skill… Simeon Grist is a classic California hard-boiled detective, beautifully playing the role of knight errant.”

Drood Review of Mystery

“Grist bears watching … Hallinan writes with humor and insight into the Los Angeles scene. He has a good eye for detail and accurately sketches all the scary shadows of nighttime Hollywood.”

Los Angeles Daily News

“Hallinan’s novels are entertaining and occasionally disturbing fantasies … HIS PROSE SPARKLES.”

Virginian Pilot & Ledger Star

Incinerator

Simeon Grist Mystery #4

Timothy Hallinan

Hallinan Consulting, LLC

Venice, California

Incinerator

Copyright © 2011 by Timothy Hallinan

eBook ISBN-10: 0-9828302-5-4

www.timothyhallinan.com

eBook Digitally Published 2010 by Hallinan Consulting, LLC

Published in the United States of America

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination of are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

“Ashes by Now,” words and music by Rodney Crowell. Copyright © 1976 Tessa Publishing Company (BMI), Administered by CMI. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are overdue for the contributions made to this and previous books by Alex. G. Shulman, M.D., and William Wanamaker, M.D., whose hard-earned medical knowledge I’ve put to such appalling uses. It wasn’t their fault. And acknowledgment, both prior and current, is also due to the person who should certainly hold the Guinness record for the world’s briefest phone calls, my ever-understanding agent, Joan Brandt.

Preface

When you go back
to a book 15 or more years after you wrote it, you can be
almost
objective.

Incinerator
is the fifth book in the Simeon Grist series, and I’d been writing one a year when I turned it out. The series was getting a little mechanical for me, so I decided to try something different: to talk about an unsettled incident in my own past.

About six months before I wrote the book, I received a letter, several pages long, about how the writer had changed his approach to life, at least socially speaking, by modeling himself on me, back when we were in school together. How that change had won him friends for the first time in his life, and how he’d carried the approach over into his career, and on and on. And now he was writing a belated thank-you, just to tell me what I’d meant to him.

I didn’t recognize the writer’s name.

The incident bothered me enormously. If I had helped someone without being aware of it, were there also people I had harmed? Had I just been too self-centered even to have
noticed
this interaction, which was apparently quite important to the other person? Since I tend to go to the negative, the whole thing resolved itself into a single question: How many people had/have I unknowingly screwed over?

That was the germ of the book.

Now, all these years later, I don’t think I dealt with the question very well. Still, there are things I really do like in the book, things I think are as good as anything I wrote then, and maybe as good as anything I’m writing now. I disliked the book for a while because it received my first really, really bad review, from a woman at one of the trades who just hated every syllable of it and hated me for having written it. And I’m afraid I let her color my own feelings about the book. (I actually owe her thanks because she caught a whopping factual error, which I have corrected for this edition.)

Reading it now, I like it quite a bit. It’s got its excesses, but it’s got its strengths, too.

I hope you enjoy it.

For Pat and Mike,
brothers and friends,
and, still, for Munyin

Incinerator

part one

IGNITION

In the first moment all was fire, and all shall return to fire.

—Vedic Scripture

When we dream that we are dreaming, the moment of awakening is at hand.

—Novalis

1

First Spark

This is what
it said:

You only get to squeeze the bottle four times.

The first two are business. You aim for the clothes.

The third is for fun. Does he have long hair?

You squeeze the bottle the fourth time after you wake him up, to let him in on the joke. Then you throw the match.

As the flame rises from the offering, the gods of carrion gather like flies to wheel and circle in the smoke. But they do not come for the flame. They come for the smoke and the dirt of the offering, and the offering is carrion. The Flame purifies it.

The only clean gods are the gods of Fire.

Flame licks the heels of the corrupt gods and consumes their wings, and they spiral like bats into the Flame. Flame turns corruption into heat and Light. When the Earth is cleaned of its corruption, what a Light there will be. It will dim the sun.

There is so much corruption.

The words were written in metallic gold ink on the back of a brown square of paper cut from a supermarket shopping bag. The first letter, a capital
Y
, was much larger than the others, set up straight to form a twisted cross in a tiny landscape of flaming hills. At the bottom of the paper, in the same shiny gold, was a very skillful drawing of flames. Arms and legs, inked in vivid colors, protruded from the flames like bits of human barbecue in a demonic illuminated manuscript.

The lines the words formed were painstakingly and precisely parallel. He’d kept both margins plumb-line straight. The text of the letter formed a square that could have been framed with a ruler. The paper had been folded sharply, once in each direction, and the folds intersected in the absolute heart of the square. Once folded, the letter had fitted exactly into the envelope, so tightly that I’d had to tug at it to pull it out.

The paper smelled of gasoline.

Three days earlier, I was relatively certain, the person who wrote the letter had poured gasoline over a sleeping drunk in a doorway somewhere in downtown L.A., and then struck a match.

The letter was addressed to me. At home.

Even though I’m a private detective, I did what anybody else would have done. I called the cops.

“Why you?”
Lieutenant Al Hammond asked. Actually, “asked” is a euphemism. Hammond was demanding an answer, not asking for one. He was literally bristling at me. It was a Sunday, and nowadays Hammond didn’t shave on weekends. He said it was because he didn’t have to, but I figured he’d read a men’s cosmetics ad that said that shaving was hard on the skin, and Hammond, recently separated from his wife and reluctantly on the loose in his middle forties, was trying to save his face for anyone who might conceivably be interested in it. Hammond was supposed to be my friend, so he was the cop I’d called. Now he glared at me over a thick, unlit cigar while the other cop in the room downtown, the fat young cop, kept his eyes demurely on the steno pad and took notes. The young cop’s name was Willick.

“Hell, Al,” I said, yet again, “I suppose it’s because of the girl.”

Willick scribbled to show how busy he was. His hair, pale and already thinning, framed a face that could have been sculpted from margarine. It melted downward, dripping a tiny, pinched nose that almost touched the upper lip of a mouth made of rubbery fat, as uneven as a discount-store gift bow. The bow had been tied over a dimpled chin that looked as if it puckered easily and a thick, soft neck. It was hot in the room, just as it was everywhere else in L.A., and sweat gleamed on Willick’s forehead like congealed cholesterol.

It wasn’t hot enough, though, to melt the sliver of chill that had bisected the center of my back ever since I’d opened the letter.

“What girl?” Hammond’s eyes, on this hung-over afternoon, were an interesting two-tone scheme, brown and red.

“We’re all over the news,” I said. “Al, that’s why the lunatic wrote me, if it really is the lunatic. Because of who the press is pleased to call the beautiful heiress. The newly orphaned Miss Winston.”