Grist 04 - Incinerator (6 page)

Police have tentatively linked the assault to five others committed over the past three months, all in the same area. In each case, the victim was a transient, and all incidents have occurred between three and five A.M., when the victims were asleep on city sidewalks. All five of the previous victims died of their injuries.

Winston, who reportedly suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, disappeared from his Chicago home more than a month ago. It is not known how he got to Los Angeles.

“We can’t say for sure it’s the Crisper,” said LAPD spokesperson Lieutenant Alfred Brown, using the name police have given to the assailant. “All we can state at this time is that the method and the choice of victim are consistent with the Crisper’s past attacks. We’re pursuing our leads with all due alacrity.”

“ ‘Alacrity’?” I asked Eleanor.

“Keep reading,” she said.

At a press conference called immediately following the LAPD announcement, Abraham Winston’s daughter, Annabelle, denounced police inaction on the case to date. “The victims are dispossessed persons,” Miss Winston said, reading from a prepared statement. “That does not lessen the agony they experienced. If these people had lived in Bel Air or in Beverly Hills, rather than on the streets, someone would be in jail by now. Instead, five people are dead and my father will probably die within a matter of hours. I have no faith in the ability of the Los Angeles Police Department to bring the murderer to justice. Therefore, I have hired a private investigator who will report to me, and I have put the resources of Winston Enterprises at his disposal. At the least, I hope my action will goad the police into a renewed effort. At the most, I believe that the man I have hired will bring this monster to justice.”

“Where are you?” Eleanor asked.

“Something about monsters and justice. I wonder who wrote this stuff for her.”

“A PR man,” Eleanor said. “You don’t just call a press conference, you know. Somebody has to know which press to call.”

“Sweet bleeding Jesus,” I said, reading ahead.

“I was waiting for that,” Eleanor said. “Read it out loud.”

“In response to reporters’ questions, Miss Winston, who was nicknamed Baby by the media during her reign as one of America’s most prominent debutantes, identified the investigator she had retained as Simeon Grist of Topanga. Mr. Grist, thirty-seven, came to prominence several months ago in the breakup of an interstate ring that was trafficking in children for immoral purposes. Several suspects are now in custody, awaiting arraignment in that case. One of them is a former LAPD sergeant.”

“See what I mean?” Eleanor said. “Double whammy.”

“ ‘Attempts to reach Mr. Grist for comment were unsuccessful,’ ” I read. “That’s because I was out getting poisoned with Hammond. They called again this morning, though.”

“Don’t talk to them until you know what to say,” Eleanor said. “What about your answering machine?”

“I didn’t check it.”

“If you had,” Eleanor said, “you’d have known that I called to tell you that your name was on the radio last night.”

“Radio?”

“And television. And now print. Home run.”

“I haven’t got a friend in the world,” I said.

“You’ve got Baby.” Eleanor’s tone wasn’t pleasant.

“Swell. An ex-debutante with a checkbook. I feel like the last candle before the ice age.”

Eleanor sat back and regarded me as though I were a new and unpromising life-form. Jealousy hadn’t been a factor in the early stages of our relationship, but it had found its way in when I began cheating on her, for reasons I still didn’t understand. Now that we were no longer together, the jealousy remained, vestigial, like the knee-jerk reflex in an amputated leg.

Balancing my cup unsteadily in my hand, I checked the machine. I had urgent messages from channels Two, Four (twice), Five, Seven, Nine, Eleven, and Thirteen. Also CBS News in New York and six local radio stations.

“Just what every private detective wants to be,” I said. “Public.” I changed chairs and sat on a large, uncompromising lump.

“If I might suggest a policy,” Eleanor said, softening enough to lean forward. She looked good enough to spread on toast.

“Suggest until you’re blue in the face,” I said, fishing the lump out from under me. It was Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie,
one of the challenges I’d promised myself I’d get through in what had looked like a nice, slow summer. “I haven’t got a clue.”

“It’s a two-point policy,” she said. “First, plug your phone back in and say something boring to everyone who calls. That was Henry Kissinger’s policy. Whenever he was asked a question he didn’t want to answer, he began his reply with the words, ‘As I said yesterday,’ and everyone stopped taking notes. Just tell whoever calls that you’ve given an exclusive statement to someone else. At least it’ll get them off your tail.”

“And the second point?” I realized I was still holding
Sister Carrie.
It felt heavier than a broken promise, and I dropped it to the floor. It landed with the substantial thump of serious literature.

“Quit the case.” She put down her cup. Bravo’s ears went up, as they always did, at the clink of crockery.

“That’s not so easy,” I said.

“And why not? This guy could wind up burning you.”

“Abraham Winston was a good man. He didn’t deserve to be cooked on the sidewalk. And she’s right, the cops
haven’t
been doing all they could, or even half of all they could. It’s just a bunch of bums as far as they’re concerned. Remember the Skid Row Ripper? They never worked that one out, either.”

Eleanor gave me an eloquent Chinese shrug, a shrug with thousands of years of equivocation behind it. “So hang yourself out to dry,” she said. “There’s still point one. Plug in the phone.”

I did, and it rang. I looked at her questioningly, but she’d already gotten up to get more coffee. “Boring,” she said, over her shoulder. “Just be boring.”

I picked it up.

“Mr. Grist?” said a voice I almost recognized. “Please hold for Mr. Stillman.”

I covered the mouthpiece. “Norman
Stillman,”
I said in agony.

“He could be interesting,” Eleanor said without looking around. She was pouring.

I doubted that, but I hung on. I had met Stillman before. In fact, I’d worked for him, and not very happily, when one of the stars he employed had gotten himself into trouble. His company, imaginatively named Norman Stillman Productions, gave the television audience what it wanted, which is to say blood and guts and sex and sensationalism and depravity, all under the banner of family entertainment. Stillman’s sole virtue, in my eyes, was that he actually
liked
the shows he produced.

There was a muffled
click,
and Stillman came on the line. “So, Mr. Grist, you’re famous at last,” he said unctuously. It wasn’t hard to picture him in his big, fat office with nautical charts all over the walls and a big brass-and-wood wheel from a nineteenth-century sloop mounted above the desk.

“You can’t imagine how I’ve hungered for it, Norman,” I said. “It’s a dream come true.” I shrugged helplessly at Eleanor.

Stillman judiciously measured out a laugh. “Well, when I saw your name this morning, the old penny dropped.” He sounded paternal and jocular. When Norman Stillman sounded paternal and jocular, it was time to button your wallet and count your change.

“Was I in
Variety!”

There was a moment of silence, during which Stillman decided to take it lightly. “I read the
Times,
too, Mr. Grist,” he said. “I must say, I had hoped time would have mellowed you.”

Eleanor handed me a fresh cup of coffee. “You were saying something about a penny,” I reminded him.

“A penny? Oh. Oh, yes, the famous dropping penny. Only figurative, of course. I had something considerably more substantial in mind.”

Eleanor sat down opposite me, her eyebrows raised. I waited. Stillman didn’t say anything. After a moment, I started to whistle. I’ve found it irritates the hell out of the person on the other end of the phone.

Stillman said, “A few minutes, Dierdre.” I was willing to bet that Dierdre, his long-suffering secretary, wasn’t even in the room. Then he said: “Do you know Velez Caputo?”

“Personally?” I mouthed at Eleanor, “Velez Caputo.” Eleanor made a sign in the air that looked like a backward
S
with two vertical strokes drawn through it.

“I wouldn’t expect you to know her personally,” Stillman said avuncularly.

“And your expectations would be correct,” I said.

“But you know who she is.”

Indeed I did. Velez Caputo was a svelte, acutely intelligent middle-thirties Chicana who helped 20 or 30 million Americans waste their afternoons five days a week. Into her viewers’ living rooms, with chronological predictability, Caputo brought an unending parade of rapists, batterers, batterees, bigamists, trigamists, transvestites, and people who enjoyed dressing as members of other species, who spent ninety minutes happily calling national attention to what should have been their deepest secrets. And Americans tuned in by the millions to see the country’s newest subculture: the proudly weird.

“I never miss Velez’s show,” I said, “unless I can help it.”

Eleanor laughed, but Stillman was beyond listening. “Velez has a concept, a brilliant concept, one that will make television history. What are the two most popular kinds of shows on the air today?”

“Norman,” I said, sipping my coffee, “how the hell would I know? The last time I watched television, Raymond Burr could still see his feet.”

“True-life crime shows and game shows,” he said promptly.

“That’s depressing.”

“So what do you think Velez’s concept is?” He liked to ask questions.

“A true-life crime game show,” I said. Eleanor held her nose. Bravo looked at her expectantly, waiting for the next move in the game.

“A true-life crime game show,” Stillman said triumphantly. “What do you think?”

“I’m speechless.”

“So do you see where I’m going?”

“To the bank, probably.” I drained the rest of my coffee and held the cup out. Eleanor poured part of hers into it.

“The format’s already in the can. Three contestants, Velez as hostess, of course, footage from some true-life crime with clues planted here and there, three suspects. One of them is the real-life crook.”

I drank the coffee and grimaced. Eleanor, despite her New Age convictions, put enough sugar in her coffee to rot a tyrannosaurus’s teeth.

“The home audience sees one or two clues the contestants don’t see, just to make them feel smart,” Stillman said rhapsodically. “The audience always has to feel smarter than the contestants,” he added, reciting the time-honored dictum of game-show producers all over the world. “The jerks should always be sitting at home slapping their foreheads and swearing over how much money they’d be winning if they were in the studio.”

“And the winner gets a date with the crook.”

“That’s what’s so brilliant,” Stillman said. “The winner gets a reward that’s posted at the beginning of the show. Remember Wanted posters?”

I looked at my watch. If I was going to quit the case, now was the time to do it. “Look,” I said, “you can’t imagine how exciting this is, being on the inside like this. It’s almost as good as having a subscription to
Broadcasting.
But what’s it got to do with me?”

“Advisers,” he said, a bit petulantly. “We’ll need advisers. Somebody to help us reconstruct the crime scenes, plant the clues, guide Velez in her prompts to the contestants. So whaddya say?”

“I’d say it’s a lot of work for a penny.”

“Twenty-five hundred a week,” he said.

I began to whistle again. Eleanor winced. I can’t whistle on key.

“Three if you work out,” Stillman said, a bit too hastily. “Maybe thirty-five if the show goes.”

“
If
the show goes? Norman, have you got a show or not?”

“I told you,” he said, sounding huffy, “the format’s in the can, plus we’ve got Velez. Come on, it’s a certified check. There’s just a few little wrinkles to work out.”

“Like selling it?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “We still have to sell it, of course.”

I waited. He waited, too. While I was waiting, I polished the phone with my shirt. I was working on the earpiece when I realized he was talking, so I put it back to my ear.

“… only exploratory, of course, just to see if you’re interested. You’re at the top of my list.”

“Norman,” I said. “The sun is approaching its zenith. I have a beautiful woman with me. It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. Why in God’s name are you calling?”

He put a lot of work into a manly chuckle. “That’s why I thought of you,” he said. “ ‘Sharp,’ I said, ‘the boy’s sharp.’”

“Well, now that we’ve settled that I’m sharp,” I said, “what do you really want?”

There was the kind of silence that liars loathe.

“Ah,” Stillman said reluctantly, “there was one other thing.”

“I thought there might be.”

“First,” he said.

“What do you mean, first? If there’s only one other thing, how can what you’re about to say be first?”

“See?” he said. “See why I called you? ‘Sharp,’ I said. ‘The boy’s sharp.’”

“See?” I echoed. “See how sharp I am? See why I’m going to hang up?”

“Okay, there’s two things. About this dinkus with the lighter fluid.”

“Ah. As a great man once said—Jesus, I think it might have been you, Norman—‘The old penny drops.’”

“You’ll be great on the air. Will you do Velez’s show tomorrow? It’s about the people who track serial murderers. The title is ‘In Death’s Footsteps.’ Or maybe it’s ‘Footprints.’ Whaddya think? A thousand, cash.”

“No. I’m not going on Velez’s show.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Stillman said promptly. “I told Velez you’d say that. What about two thousand?”

“No. And second?”

“Um,” he said. I visualized him shining the buttons on his nautical blazer. Norman owned a yacht solely as an excuse for his taste in clothes and interior decorators. “Has any other producer called you?”