Timothy Hallinan: Incinerator

“Still alive?”

Annabelle Winston twirled a ring on her right hand. The stone was an emerald. “In a matter of speaking,” she said, looking down at the ring. Emeralds are basically corundum, same as sapphires and rubies, but even more expensive. She regarded it as though she were trying to figure out why it was green, rather than blue or red.

“What does that mean?”

She turned the stone inward and closed her hand over it protectively. “It means his vital signs are being monitored and, to whatever extent it’s possible, maintained. It means they’re pumping fluids into him to keep him peeing because that means his life isn’t evaporating faster than he can replenish it. That’s what happens when our skin is gone, you know. We evaporate. I don’t suppose that’s common knowledge, is it? They’ve put a plastic shell above him, like the spatter shield over a salad bar, to slow the evaporation.” She looked at the stone folded into her palm as though she could see through her fingers, using the other hand to pick at the corner of her mouth again, although she knew nothing was there. “It means that one or two days and a few hundred thousand dollars from now, he’ll be dead.” Except for the nervous finger at her lips, there was still no sign of emotion.

“Where did it happen?”

Now she looked at me. “Skid Row.”

“Miss Winston,” I said, “if you can afford this suite, why was your father on Skid Row?”

“Why was he in Los Angeles, you mean,” she said. She picked up a black lacquered box and took out a cigarette, then lit it with a filigreed gold lighter. The hand was as steady as a dial tone. Belatedly, she offered me one. I shook my head. I wanted one, but I’d quit again.

She turned the ring back around and addressed the emerald. “He was here because he got lost, Mr. Grist. He got lost on his daily walk in Chicago when his male nurse stepped into a bar for a couple of quick ones. Isn’t that what they call it, ‘a couple of quick ones’? The nurse didn’t stop knocking back his quick ones until he realized Daddy was gone. Then, according to the police in Chicago, he went to the station and got on a train going somewhere.”

“Why’d he do that? Why didn’t he report your father missing?”

“Because he knew I’d kill him.” There was no attempt at drama in her voice. She might have been reading the farm report.

She tapped the cigarette into the ashtray at precisely the right moment. Another second, and ash would have tumbled into her lap. “My father was Abraham Winston, once.” A minor chord sounded in her voice, and I recognized it as fierceness. “When he was still Abraham Winston, he built a dirty little grocery store in the poorest, blackest part of Chicago into a chain of sixty-two supermarkets. Then he decided to make some real money. He bought up the ranches that supplied the meat and the farms that supplied the produce. He bought canning factories and dairies. He owned the companies that made the paper for the shopping bags that women put his vegetables and meat and milk into. He was a man who liked to own things.”

“When did he stop being Abraham Winston?”

“Not all at once,” she said. Then she closed the gray eyes for a second. When she opened them, they were clear and dry. “Drink your beer. And I’ve changed my mind, which was supposed to be a woman’s prerogative, back when women still had them.” She gave me the wisp of a smile.

She got up and went again to the bar, where she poured a finger of bourbon into a heavy cut-glass tumbler. She lifted the glass in a mock toast and drank all the whiskey at once. Her throat hardly moved. Even Hammond would have been impressed.

“He went into commodities after my mother died,” she said, pouring another. “That was three years ago. He’d done most of what he did for her, my analyst says, and she wasn’t around anymore. I guess the satisfaction of it died when she did. And there wasn’t a son, of course.”

“I wouldn’t know.” I swallowed some beer, just to be polite. Okay, that’s a lie. I needed it.

“Well, there wasn’t. There was only me. Only Baby.” She pronounced her nickname with the kind of venom one associates with the more effective Islamic curses. “Not that any of this matters now. I was enough, as it turned out. But after she, meaning Mommy, was gone, it wasn’t enough for him to own everything in the present tense. He had to have a piece of the future, too. That way, you see, he could own time. Time was his enemy. It had given him almost everything he ever wanted, thought he wanted, anyway, and then it took away his reason for having wanted it in the first place. Mommy, I mean. Leaving only a few hundred million dollars and me.” She emitted a short, ugly laugh and took a swallow, a sip this time, from her glass.

“And?”

“And what?” She arched an eyebrow. A single eye brow; more economy. Whatever it was that was going on inside, it needed most of her energy. “There are a million ways I could answer that.”

“So choose the one that appeals to you.”

She lifted the green silk shoulders a quarter of an inch and let them fall again. “Do you know much about commodities?”

“I don’t even know what they are.” I pulled at the beer again.

She was leaning against the bar with both elbows. It was supposed to look relaxed. “They’re futures, bets against the future. Choose an item, pork bellies or platinum or September wheat, and bet which way the prices are going to go x number of months from now. Rise or fall, it doesn’t make any difference, as long as you bet right. Bet right, you make a million dollars.”

“Bet wrong and you eat the big patootie,” I ventured, drinking again.

“This is a small part of the story,” she said, straightening up. “I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

“You said a hundred an hour to talk,” I said. “I’m not getting fidgety.”

“Good. I want you to understand.” She took another judicious sip. “You don’t like me.”

It was my turn to shrug. “Your father apparently got burned pretty badly two days ago. Without any attempt to be offensive, you don’t seem exactly desolate.”

“I haven’t the time to be desolate,” she said. “I told you there wasn’t a son. I’m it. I’m Winston Enterprises.” She tossed a hand toward the briefcases as though several thousand tiny employees were slaving busily away inside them. “I’ve got too much to do to be desolate, or to waste the day trying to make you like me. All I want to do is sell you on helping me.”

“Sell me?”

“You’re stubborn, they told me,” she continued. “They told me that you worked on that case with the little kids even after you lost your client. ‘He has to be interested,’ they said.” She tapped out a military drumroll on her glass with the formidable fingernails.

“Who are they? ” I asked. “And why not hire them?”

She put the glass against her cheek as though it cooled her, although she looked cool enough already. “Who says I haven’t?”

I looked at my watch. “Call it an hour,” I said, putting down the beer and getting up. “You can mail the check.”

“Sit down.” She pointed to the couch with the hand holding the glass. The glass was heavy, but it was a truly imperial gesture, a gesture that belonged to the days of the Holy Roman Empire.

I stayed on my feet. “Skip it. I have a policy. It’s called staying alive. And it means that I don’t get involved if anyone else is.”

“And why not?”

“Fuckups,” I said. “If anyone’s going to fuck up, it’s going to be me. At least that way I know there’s been a fuckup.”

What she did with her face wasn’t exactly a smile, but it was the closest thing I’d seen in a few minutes. “That’s a good answer,” she said. “A good business answer.”