thin green and red stripes about two inches apart. He wore lizard-skin loafers with no socks. I’ve never trusted men who don’t wear socks.
“Bobby is the one who arranged the press conference,” Annabelle Winston said. “He handles all my West Coast PR.”
“Good job yesterday,” I said nastily.
“We had a real story,” Grant said in a higher voice than I’d expected. He obviously thought he was looking at me, but his eyes were focused about two inches above my head. “It’s easy when you’ve got real news,” he added, modestly minimizing his accomplishment. “A lot easier than product.” He also, I noted, sported a single gold earring, a modest loop that dangled from his left earlobe. He reached up and tugged on it, and Annabelle Winston looked on obliviously. The lesson of Harvey Melnick hadn’t taken.
“Product?” I asked. I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“We put Bobby in charge of introducing our new skinless franks a year ago,” Annabelle said. She was wearing a silk suit that could have been a twin of the one she’d worn yesterday except that it was gunmetal gray. It complemented the agate eyes very nicely. “There wasn’t much space from that one.”
“Well, wieners,” Bobby said. I wondered if he’d still call himself Bobby when he was sixty, and decided that he probably would.
“Franks,” Annabelle Winston said absently.
“Miss Winston,” I began.
“Call me Annabelle,” she said. She reached up and touched my cheek. “I feel I know you well enough for that.” She wasn’t making it easy. “You’re my main hope,” she said, making it even worse.
“I spoke to the cops today,” I said, by way of starting out.
“And they didn’t know what you were talking about,” she said.
“Well,” I admitted, “not at first.”
“Even after the papers this morning?” Bobby Grant sounded personally affronted. “My God, front page of the Times. What are these people, blind?”
“Do you see why I need you, Simeon?” Annabelle said.
This was not going right. By now I should have been back out in the parking lot, sweet-talking Alice into starting. I drew a breath.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m quitting.”
Annabelle Winston took a step back, and Bobby Grant put out a hand to steady her. Even at that moment, I’d never seen a woman less in need of steadying. Her eyes widened.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means I’m off the job. Finished. Kaput.” The word brought Velez Caputo to mind, and I shrugged it away. “You told me I was the only person on the case.”
“You are,” Annabelle Winston said, her eyes fixed on mine.
“Yeah? What’s he?” I asked, nodding toward Bobby Grant. “A skinless wiener?”
Bobby Grant’s lower lip protruded even further. I wondered how much of it he was holding in reserve. Maybe he kept it curled up, like a butterfly’s tongue.
“He’s not a detective,” she said, as though that answered everything.
“He held a press conference,” I said. “He and you,” I amended. “You announced to the whole world that you’d retained me. You didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know. I wake up in the morning, and everybody except David Frost is calling me for an interview.”
“David Frost is in England,” Bobby Grant said professionally. “If he weren’t, this is his kind of story.”
“I don’t want to be part of anybody’s story. I’m a detective. I need a certain amount of anonymity in order to be able to do my job. Not to mention the fact that the guy who burned your father wrote me a letter and delivered it to my house.”
“He did?” It was the first time I’d seen Annabelle Winston look genuinely surprised.
“Himself,” I said. “When I took the job, I acknowledged that I was willing to go looking for him. I’m not willing to have him looking for me. I’m flammable.”
“We made a mistake,” Annabelle Winston said contritely.
“What are you talking about?” Bobby Grant said. “He’s writing letters now. That could be a breakthrough,” he added, sounding like Hammond Lite.
“Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said. It was the vocal equivalent of a one-way ticket to Siberia. “Go away.”
“But, but,” Bobby sputtered.
“Just scram,” Annabelle Winston said. “Down the hall. Anywhere. This instant.” She snapped her fingers. Bobby gave her a betrayed look and faded about six feet behind her.
“We made a mistake,” she said again. “All I was trying to do was light a fire under the cops.”
“Miss Winston,” I said. “You succeeded. You also robbed me of whatever advantage I might have had in trying to find the Crisper.” She winced at the word. “What’s more, and what’s probably more serious, you pissed off the police. Before Bobby orchestrated his headlines, I had a chance at getting hold of whatever they have. Now I might as well be wearing a bell around my neck and a sign that says Unclean. They’re embarrassed. Cops are macho, you know. They don’t like to be embarrassed. It makes them feel impotent.”
She lowered her head. “Forgive me,” she said.
“I forgive you,” I said. “But I’m finished.”
“We’re finished, Miss Winston,” echoed a male voice. “You can go back in now.” I hadn’t heard the door open.
The owner of the voice was a young doctor wearing an ill-advised pencil-thin mustache. His face was the shade of gray that the relatives of patients don’t want to see. He’d been through something for which his training hadn’t prepared him.
“Is he…?” Annabelle Winston let the question hang in the air.
“Sedated,” the doctor said, touching the mustache with an experimental thumbnail. “This is the part that hurts.” He looked at me. “Changing the dressing,” he explained. “We have to put him out.”
“I thought it all hurt,” I said.
“He’s got third-degree burns,” the doctor said. “That means total loss of skin. The nerves go with the skin. Where he hurts most are the boundaries between the third- and second-degree bums. Where he’s got some skin left.”
Annabelle Winston started crying. This was nothing controlled, nothing like the averted face in the suite at the Bel Air. This was tears and snot and screwed-up eyelids and a sound like someone exhaling golf balls.
“Now, now,” the young doctor said ineffectually, out of his depth again. The mustache made him look like a kid fancied-up for Halloween. He put a hand on her arm, but she shrugged it off and grabbed my wrist. Her fingers felt like bridge cables. “Come in here,” she said fiercely. “Get your ass in here.” She dragged me through the open door with a strength that almost dislocated my shoulder. Bobby Grant followed us, hovering like a bad conscience. The doctor, abashed at the reaction he’d provoked, came in and closed the door behind us.
“Take a look,” Annabelle Winston said shakily. “The brotherhood of the pumpkin.”
Abraham Winston-what had once been Abraham Winston-lay in a bed that looked like one of the roasting racks at the Escorial, the Spanish palace of Philip II where heretics had been barbecued for the enlightenment of the Saved. The bed was a metal frame hitched up to a complicated series of levers and pulleys. Winston was swathed from feet to nipples in white bandages, and the skin that was exposed was covered with a ghastly, greasy white ointment.
His head was enormous. It was swollen and blistered, all the features concentrated into an area in its center. His hair was gone. His face looked like the crimped end of one of Hammond’s cigars, eyes, nose, and mouth pinched into the middle. The eyes, mercifully, were closed.
“Um, pumpkin,” the young doctor said. “All serious burn victims look like this.” I was looking at what Annabelle had hoped I’d never see, the reason it took her an hour to recognize her father.
“Why not a real bed?” I asked. I just needed to make sure that I could talk.
“We have to be able to turn him,” the doctor said. He’d used the time to recover his equilibrium. “You can’t change his bandages, you can’t put the ointment on him, without turning him.”
“Why is his head swollen?”
“Blistering.” The doctor made a small motion that took in Annabelle, asking me not to force him to discuss it
