Incinerator: A Simeon Grist Mystery by Hallinan Timothy

Author:Hallinan, Timothy [Hallinan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Los Angeles, Mystery, detective, Crime, Noir
ISBN: 9780380713707
Google: SxhurQZuIbYC
Amazon: 0380713705
Goodreads: 492868
Publisher: Avon Books
Published: 1992-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

13

Aftermath

There was more, but it was mainly Schultz and Stang and another expert brought in from God knows where. I reacted like a good monkey whenever I was cued. Eleanor left before it ended, as arranged, accompanied back to whatever hotel she'd been packed away in by her squadron of bodyguards. If the Incinerator decided to turn off his TV set early and show up outside the studio, I didn't want him tagging along after her.

She'd blown me a kiss as she left.

I'd managed to be civilized, but inside I was in a towering rage, and it was all directed toward myself. I'd looked at the content of the letters and not at their form. I'd been so full of comparative religion, so full of myself, that I'd been staring into the wrong rearview mirror. He was back there, all right, but he wasn't in the region of the map I'd been staring at.

Try as I would, I couldn't bring the face back.

Whoever it belonged to, he was back there somewhere, buried in volumes of notes, possibly notes I'd long discarded, from years and years of college, years I'd spent wasting time in a system I understood, postponing the day I'd have to step out into a system I didn't understand. Back then, at twenty-five, I hadn't been able to figure out how they, whoever they are, assign you grades in real life. I still hadn't found out.

The show ended with a round of insincere congratulations. I shrugged off Schultz's questions and headed for the parking lot. Breathing in the heady atmosphere of downtown L.A. in the late afternoon, I stood next to Alice for a good ten minutes, thinking and giving the Incinerator, assuming that he was still watching and that he was still interested, time to make sure I was alone. Then, for want of anything better to do, I went to see a movie.

I never see movies, and I didn't see much of this one. I stared up at large guns and screaming tires and myriad violations of Newton's laws, and improbable heroism, and searched the baggage of my memory. Whatever had sent that worm crawling up my spine when Dr. Cowan had said whatever she'd said, when I'd first heard it, it hadn't been important. It had been nothing.

When I realized I was hungry, I left.

The theater, I saw with some surprise as I emerged from it, was on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from the studio where Velez Caputo taped her show, and even closer to the Red Dog. For a long moment, jostled by freaks, tourists, and drug dealers, I thought about going into the Red Dog to see if Al the Red was terrorizing the natives. Too early, I decided, and anyway, he was with Eleanor. And, of course, we weren't speaking.

At the Gold Jug Coffee Shop, once a center of the underage hooker trade, my waitress stared at me until I wondered whether my nose was bleeding. When she refilled my coffee cup, she poured some into my lap.

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