Timothy Hallinan: Incinerator

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.”

The name registered, as it should have. The lady in question was no slouch at breaking print.

“Her father,” Hammond said grudgingly, “or something like that.”

“Something exactly like that.”

Hammond grunted. He had a vast repertoire of grunts, an Esperanto of grunts that were equally understandable in Los Angeles, on Red Square, and in Djakarta, Indonesia. Willick unwisely attempted a matching grunt, part of his cop training. Nettled, Hammond impaled him with a red-rimmed glance and repeated, “Winston.” He was circling in on it, in his own fashion.

“Annabelle Winston,” I said. “Her father got burned like a pile of autumn leaves right here in L.A. early Thursday morning.”

“Hey,” Willick said, looking up from his notes as the penny dropped. “The Crisper.” At least someone on the force was interested.

“Just write,” Hammond said shortly.

“The Crisper,” I agreed. “The guy who’s spent the last couple of months torching the folks who make Skid Row so colorful.”

“Three months,” Hammond corrected me, to show that he was on the ball.

“This note was from him?” Willick asked, alertly if unwisely. His raised eyebrows were engaged in a battle for territory with his hairline. They’d have won if his hairline hadn’t been in such hasty retreat.

“Is your pen out of ink?” said Hammond, curling his upper lip nastily. Hammond’s upper lip got a lot of use. “Want a pencil?”

“Sorry, Loot,” Willick said, redirecting his attention to his pad and pretending to write something.

“Lieu tenant,” Hammond corrected him.

“Look, Loot,” I said, “this is Sunday.”

“Jesus,” Hammond said, slamming a hand over his heart with a thump that sounded like Dumbo landing. “Glad I’m sitting down. Look, work out a signal, willya? Wave a hand or something next time you’re gonna drop a bombshell.”

“He had to deliver it himself,” I said. Hammond’s expression didn’t change. He still looked sour. “He had to put it into my mailbox.”

Hammond gave me a heavy nod. “Must be why she hired you,” he said. “Brains like that. Wish we had that kind of intellect on the force.”

“You’ve been to my house, Al.” Willick’s eyes widened. He started to take a note, but Hammond grabbed his hand. Hammond didn’t want our personal relationship on the record. “How many houses are there on my street? Five,” I answered myself, since Hammond didn’t look like he wanted to play. “And it’s a dead end.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Hammond said, anticipating me.

“What I’m suggesting,” I began.

“I said yeah,” Hammond said gruffly.

I wanted the idea to find its way into Willick’s note book, so I plowed on. “I just thought maybe it would have occurred to the LAPD to check with my neighbors, see if they saw a car they didn’t recognize. One of them might even have seen the driver. Of course, this suggestion is made in all humility, from one with no experience of the inside workings of a great police force.”

Hammond gave me a silent-movie squint that said, Don’t push it. He hated it when I got ahead of him. Add that to a hangover that would have felled a twenty-mule team, and he was operating under a lot of disadvantages.

“We’re doing it,” he said, accompanying the words with a curt little gesture that told Willick to write. If they weren’t doing it already, they soon would be.

“I figured you were,” I said to pacify him.

“Winston,” Hammond growled, giving me what was for him a gentle prompt. “I’m not exactly at my best, you know.”