Timothy Hallinan: Incinerator

“Thanks. Call me after you fire them.”

“I haven’t hired them. I didn’t say I’d hired them. I said, Who says I haven’t.”

“Eleven hundred and thirty-two,” I said. I was still standing.

“What?”

“That’s how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Medieval theological mystery. ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ The answer is eleven hundred and thirty-two. Exactly. Anyone gives you a different number, he’s wrong. Or, on the other hand, maybe he’s lying. Or maybe I’m wrong. Trouble is, who can tell the difference?”

“There isn’t anybody else.” The imperial gesture had been a dud, so she reversed tactics. She went to the couch herself and sat down, going for submissive instead. She was surprisingly good at it. She gazed up at me, looking like the Little Match Girl with only one match left.

“Is there going to be?”

A minute shake of the head. “Not as long as you’re on the job.” She stretched out a green silk arm and patted the couch next to her, and I sat back down. How often do you get a chance to say yes to silk?

“I’m insulated,” she said, putting a hand on my wrist. “It’s the nature of money. I can’t help it.” This time both eyebrows went up to show me how insulated she was and how much she couldn’t help it. “Everybody pretends he wants something different, except that it always comes down to the same thing. Money. Please. Please, Mr. Grist. What was I supposed to do?”

I sighed. “Nobody else is on the job.”

“Nobody.” Her fingers tightened on my wrist as though she were afraid I was going to run. I couldn’t tell whether the gesture was a real impulse or just the next card off the top of the deck. She seemed to have the fullest deck this side of Las Vegas.

“Nobody except the entire LAPD,” I said.

“Them,” she said dismissively. “How long has this been going on? Five people are already dead. Burned to death on the sidewalk, for God’s sake. If it hadn’t been for an old lady, my father would be dead now, too. What does it take to get their attention? If somebody set up Auschwitz on Sixth Street, it would be a year before they noticed, as long as nobody respectable got burned. When you talk to them, if you have to, they won’t know what you’re talking about. The case doesn’t matter to them. The homeless don’t pay taxes.”

She released my wrist and gave me a full-bore twelve-gauge gaze.

“Will you do it?” she said.

My wrist felt cool now that her hand was gone. I rubbed it once and then reached over and picked up the beer. I hadn’t decided, but I was open to persuasion. Fire is an awful way to die.

“Tell me what happened to him,” I said. “Not how he got burned, but-”

“Commodities,” she said promptly. “I suppose that was the first thing. He ate enough of the-what did you call it?”

“The big patootie.”

“Enough of the big patootie to make him feel mortal. Financially mortal, at any rate. He’d been feeling personally mortal ever since my mother died, but that was the first time he’d been wrong in a business sense. He dropped about seven million pretax dollars.”

I probably winced.

“He didn’t say anything at the time-he never said much about anything that was bothering him.” She settled herself further into the cushions and clinked her glass against mine.

Obediently, I drank. I felt like a good puppy.

“My father believed in good news or no news where his family was concerned,” she said. “He was the wall around us. The Great Wall of the Winstons.” She put the glass down, and I swallowed some beer. “But he began to drink more than his usual one or two cognacs after dinner, and he started putting in fourteen-hour days instead of his usual twelve, and about a month later he had a stroke. Such a calm word, stroke. It sounds like something you do to a cat.”

The best thing I could think of was to take another sip of beer. She did the same with her whiskey and then poured more. She’d brought the bottle to the table.

“Nothing serious,” she continued. “Completely reversible. That’s what the doctors said, reversible.” Her voice could have grated Mozzarella. “But what does reversible mean? He got back his speech and the use of his legs, but he was older. He started to dodder. Do you know what I mean?”

I nodded and drank.

Annabelle Winston gave me the agate-gray eyes, full-on. “So that was when I began to get involved, not that I wanted to. I had to. I wasn’t the son he’d been supposed to have, and he wasn’t the kind of man who could hide his disappointment that I wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything else he could do. It was me or some accountant. He chose me.” She sounded like an abandoned child. I took refuge in my glass.

“And I did what I could,” she added, ignoring my reaction. “It was a big business, about three hundred million a year at the time, and I set out to learn it the same way I’d learned my ABCs. First you memorize, and then you try to use what you’ve learned. I was up to about D when he had the second stroke, and he had the third one six hours later. He hadn’t even left the hospital.”

She stretched out long, thin, elegantly articulated fingers and used them to rub her eyes. “This is his story,” she said, “not mine. Winston Enterprises was-is-a conglomerate, and it was more complicated than world-class Parcheesi. Still, you have to understand something about me. I sat next to him, on a chair next to his bed with a dopey schoolgirl’s pad and a cheap ballpoint pen in my hand, locking my ankles together for months, bleeding him dry. He couldn’t see my ankles. I couldn’t let him see them. If he’d seen them, they would have been a dead giveaway. If he’d seen them, he would have stopped talking. I was too anxious, and my ankles gave it away. So I kept them under the bed. I couldn’t let him stop talking, I had to understand what was what and what was where. There’s no dramatic punch line here. The ankles were my problem.”

She took another belt of whiskey, and I snuck a look at her ankles. They weren’t locked together. “He got more and more vague,” she said over the rim of her glass. “He stopped caring if they shaved him in the morning. He began to call me by my mother’s name.” She paused again, looking at the pattern cut into the glass. “Then he began to call me Joshua.”

“Who’s Joshua?” The sun was doing a depressive slant through the windows, and I’d stopped counting the hours, even at a hundred dollars per. She hadn’t gotten up to turn on the lights, and the tasteful rosewood furniture was beginning to disappear into the walls.

“There wasn’t any Joshua,” she said in a muffled voice. “Joshua was the name he and my mother had chosen for me if I’d been a boy.”

I waited for another piece of upholstery to fade and listened to my watch ticking. “He invented a son,” I said to animate the silence.

“He reeled in the past,” she said, “and cast it out again, and when his hook came back to him, it had an imaginary son at the end of it.”

“You.”

“You can’t imagine how I hated it. ‘Joshua this, Joshua that,’ he’d say. ‘Joshua guard the money.’ I mean, I answered to the name anyway, but I went to bed every night and before I fell asleep, I killed the brother I’d never had, over and over and over again. God, if you could be punished for imaginary murder.” She drained the whiskey.

“You can’t. Except in your imagination.” I held out my empty glass, and she took it.

“If you could, my father would have outlived me,” she said. She seemed to have forgotten that she was about to make the economical trip to the bar. “There I sat at his bed, me, Joshua Winston, learning the business.”