Timothy Hallinan: Incinerator

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She gazed at me, gray-eyed, through the gloom for so long that it made me feel uncomfortable. “Are you,” she finally said, almost grudgingly. “Yes, maybe you are.” She got up at last.

“Miss Winston. I may not be rich, but I’ve got parents.”

“You’re an actual person,” she said, halfway to the bar. “Aren’t you?”

“On my better days.”

Stopping, she treated me to another mini-nod. “So he got worse,” she said. The bar gave her a silent hello, and she ignored it. “The ludicrous thing was that he got stronger physically as he got weaker mentally,” she said, both glasses, hers and mine, in hand. “After the second series of strokes he could barely lift an arm, but his mind was sharp. Later, when his mind was going, his body came back to him. Toward the end, he could have qualified for the Olympic hurdles, but he couldn’t have found the starting line.” She covered the rest of the distance to the bar in the same straight, economical course; Columbus had sailed that straight for the Indies, steering dead-on for China. Of course, he hadn’t known that a continent had drifted into his way. Something very large had obviously drifted into Annabelle Winston’s way.

“Therefore, the male nurse,” I said as she poured.

“Harvey Melnick,” she said, “may his soul roast.”

“Who was he?”

“Who knows? Somebody with a resume. Big, which was important because, like I said, Daddy was strong. One gold earring. The earring should have told me.” She hoisted both glasses to show me they were full, navigated the room, and sat on the couch.

“There’s nothing you can do about it now.” I took the beer away from her.

“I need your skills,” Annabelle Winston said in a brittle voice. Her body had gone rigid, and she sat back. “I don’t need your comfort.”

“Hey,” I said, “we’re both real people.”

She stood up suddenly and turned away from me. She didn’t go anywhere. She just stood there with her back to me while the light waned and the Bel Air’s highly paid birds twittered and whistled outside. “Excuse me,” she finally said.

“Excused. Take your time.”

“There isn’t time,” she said. “I want the shithead nailed.” Her back was as rigid as rigor mortis.

“Despite the gold earring, you hired Harvey,” I said to her back. Then I reached out and tugged at her arm.

She swiveled as though her arm were a rope and she were a floating boat at its other end. There was moisture on her face. “Daddy needed someone twenty-four hours a day,” she said defensively. “At night, we could use women. In the daytime, we needed a man.”

“Why?”

“He wanted to go to the store.” Slowly, grudgingly, she sat down beside me.

I listened to the words again, sifting them for sense. “What store?”

“The first one.” She gave her cheeks a proprietary little wipe. “The little grocery store. We’d sold it years ago, of course. He’d wake up in the morning saying he’d forgotten to take inventory. Inventory, inventory. He had to count the cans, he said. Every can of soup was twelve cents in profit. By then he was worth maybe four hundred million dollars. He’d lost all that. Mentally, I mean. He was back in the time when every twelve cents could be squirreled away for little Joshua’s education. He kept talking about the day he’d be able to buy my mother a fur coat. ‘She should be wrapped in fur,’ he said. When my mother died, we had an apartment with a walk-in freezer that was used for nothing but to store her fur coats. My mother had more fur coats than the Russian imperial family.”

“So Harvey took him to the store every day,” I said. “But there wasn’t any store.”

“I bought one.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She took another cigarette from the box and lit it. “I bought a store. The one he’d started in was gone, but I bought one near it. In a black area, just like the first one. It opened at nine, about half an hour before my father arrived. It closed half an hour after he finished taking inventory, the minute we knew he was around the corner. We never sold anything, of course. I wrote it off as a business loss. The IRS never asked a question. Anyway, the costs were nothing. All we ever really needed was someone to dust the cans and replace the meat and vegetables once in a while. After we gave them away.”

“Why didn’t you leave it open? Sell stuff?”

“His inventory would have been off,” she said. “He had an inventory from some day in the past, a Tuesday or whatever, stuck in his head like Moses’ tablets. At first we operated it like a real store. We bought and sold. But he got so upset because the numbers didn’t work out that one day he knocked everything off the shelves and sat in one of the aisles, crying. That night I made him write the whole inventory down. It took hours, but I didn’t mind because it was like being with my father again, before… well, before. He remembered everything, every tiny detail. After he went to sleep, we worked all night to stock that store. By the time he arrived the next morning, the inventory matched. I’d made goddamn sure it matched. We kept it that way for more than a year.”

“A museum.”

“The world’s first grocery museum. The last, too, I suppose. And I was the curator.”

“You must have loved him very much.”

She stubbed out the unsmoked cigarette. “Don’t make me get up again,” she said. “He’s still alive, for the moment, at least. I still love him. How could I not love him? This was a man who bought a hundred Christmas trees every year, and all the presents under them, and had them delivered to poor families in Chicago. And he was a Jew, for Christ’s sake.”

“How did he know what to buy?” I asked, fascinated in spite of myself.

“He hired Santas and put them into the worst neighborhoods. The Santas had big bellies with little tape recorders hidden in them. After they talked to a particularly sweet little kid, the Santas were supposed to ask them their full names and where they lived. On Christmas Eve, Daddy or one of his Christmas crews would show up, all dressed like Santa, with the whole shebang. The tree, all the presents the kid had asked for, something practical for the parents. He made a ceremony of telling Mommy and me about it the next morning. Christmas morning. He’d drink his eggnog with cognac and tell us about Christmas Eve. That was our Christmas. Hearing Daddy talk about what happened after they knocked on the doors in their red suits and their white beards, and what the people said and how the kids acted. It was the kids who got to him. Sometimes he cried like a baby. They really killed him. Oh, Lord,” she said, getting up again. “Oh, Lord. Just sit there and don’t say anything.”

She had her back turned to me, her shoulders stiff and high. I tried not to say anything and failed. “You never got anything for Christmas?”

“My whole life was Christmas,” she said without turning around. “I was Santa’s daughter. I was one of the elves.” She lowered her head, and her shoulders began to shake.

She needed something to do. “I’d like another beer,” I said.

Annabelle caught her breath with a rasping sound. “Easily arranged,” she said. She was herself again, or close enough to fool someone who wasn’t paying attention. “This is the last, I think. Shall I call down for more?” She went to the bar and opened the door of the refrigerator.

“This is it. I’ve got an evening in front of me.”

“Lucky you,” she said. “I’ve got a sleeping pill.” I would have traded my evening for her sleeping pill. It was nothing I looked forward to. She uncapped the beer, reached for a glass, dropped the cap into the wastebasket with a metallic ping of precision, blinked, and said, “So we got Harvey, and Harvey took him to the store every morning. That was Harvey’s whole job. Not such a hard job, would you think? And one day Harvey didn’t come back, and neither did Daddy. We hired the world to find him. Hundreds of people. Then I got the call from L.A. saying some bum has been burned half to death and he’s got a MedicAlert bracelet, the bracelet Daddy wore because of the Alzheimer’s, identifying him as Abraham Winston. Do I think the bracelet might have been stolen? Well, I don’t know where Daddy is, so my first impulse was to believe that the bracelet was wherever he was. And I came here, and it took me an hour to recognize him. He didn’t look like Santa Claus any more.”