horizon. A name with mint juleps in it. All that was left of the vision was the mint juleps. The Hermione I was faced with, in a relatively comfortable cell in Parker Center, was someone whose skin was coated in the kind of dirt you couldn’t remove with steel wool, whose hair hadn’t been washed in a month, and who would probably choose a mint julep over a pint of turpentine if the choice were at hand. If not, she’d have drunk the turpentine.
“From England, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Who are you to say where I’m from?”
“Girl Guides,” I said. “Girl Guides are British.”
“Well, aren’t you the nosy parker,” Hermione said. “What difference where I’m from? I saw him, didn’t I? Am I going to get my blanket back?”
“You don’t want that blanket,” I said. “It’s all burned. We’re going to give you a new one. Was he black?”
“A new blanket?” Hermione asked cannily.
“Brand-new. Plus a hundred dollars.” Hammond sneezed discreetly behind me, but I ignored him. “Was he black?”
Hermione rubbed a rope of dirt between her right thumb and forefinger. “You can get me out of here?”
“Are you sure you want to get out? You saw him.”
“And he saw me. He couldn’t have been less interested. A right poofter, if you ask me.” She waved a limp and extremely dirty wrist in the air to indicate that any male who could resist her charms was a right poofter indeed.
“And was he black?”
“He was wrapped in black,” Hermione said. “He was as white as you and me.”
“What else?”
The wrinkles around her eyes deepened into rivulets. “Can you get me out of here?” she asked again.
“Al,” I said, since nothing else would satisfy her, “can I get her out?”
“Absolutely,” Hammond said.
“You’re out,” I said. “What do you mean, he was wrapped in black?”
“Head to toe,” she said. “All black. Wrapped up tight, like I said, like a cigarette. Light hair, he had. The color of good champagne. Do you like champagne?”
“I like beer better.”
“Another member of the dreary proletariat.” Hermione scratched familiarly at something under her left arm, probably something I’d spent most of my years trying to avoid. “Where’s the life these days?” she asked the world at large. “There used to be life.”
“It’s where it always was,” I said. “Hanging out in expensive places. What else can you tell me?”
“Very tall,” Hermione said again, running a tongue over her lips before she disclosed her secret, whatever it was she hadn’t told the cops.
“What else?” I said again.
“Walked with a tilt.” She pronounced “with” as “wiv.”
“With a tilt?” I asked.
“Wrapped all in black,” she repeated. “Walked wiv a tilt. Crippled. Clubfoot, if you ask me.” She got up. “Squeaked, too. Now where’s that blanket?”
Hammond said, “Squeaked?”
Hermione was back on the street, and I was nowhere.
I was in the precise section of nowhere where the burnings had taken place, the area Los Angeles calls Skid Row. Skidded Row would be more precise; it’s where people wind up at the end of their skid. For a few people, a statistically dismissible few in these years of Republican optimism, the trapdoor beneath their lives drops open one day, and they find themselves on a slide, a slide greased with alcohol or psychedelics or opiates or racial discrimination or just plain rotten luck, and the end of the slide dumps them out on Skidded Row. Some of them bring their children with them. The American postnuclear family.
What the hell did “squeaked” mean?
I’d considered the idea that I knew the Incinerator and dismissed it as useless. I was inclined to agree with Schultz, up to a point: He might know me, but I certainly didn’t know him. Our lives are full of people who remember us with love or loathing, and whom we’ve forgotten entirely. He’d sounded, in Hermione’s description, like a fairly memorable figure: tall, blond, walked with a limp. I’d played flash cards with my memory for hours after the meeting without coming up with anyone who fit the bill. Of course, the limp could have been faked. The hair could have been a wig. He could have been a dwarf on stilts, too.
Why hadn’t he killed her? She’d seen him. Under the circumstances, chivalry didn’t seem like an acceptable reason.
So at four on a hot Monday afternoon, I was walking aimlessly around the outskirts of Little Tokyo in downtown L.A., looking at people with neither money nor hope, feeling guilty about Annabelle Winston’s five- thousand-dollar check in my pocket, and-and doing what? Gathering impressions, I told myself. Visiting the scenes of the crimes. This was where they’d happened: This was where the Incinerator had materialized nine times, tall, black, slanting, and squeaking, over his sleeping, wine-sodden victims, poured gasoline on them, and struck a wooden kitchen match. The police had found wooden kitchen matches at all the scenes, broken matches that had failed to strike. I imagined him, frenzied, furious, desperate to light the sacred flame, flinging the defective ones aside. He must have been frantic. But he’d taken the time to stand there and strike match after match, moments that must have seemed like centuries to him.
Gathering impressions, I looked down at two men, two unimaginably filthy men, sleeping as though they were dead in the doorway of an abandoned shop. Their limbs were sprawled loosely, and one of them had thrown his arm heavily over the chest of the other. I could have been John Philip Sousa, marching band in tow, and they wouldn’t have known I’d paid them a visit.
Setting people on fire, I thought, is a labor-intensive method of murder. For one thing, it requires that the victim hold still. First you had to squirt the gasoline, four times, according to the first letter, and then you had to strike matches until one finally caught, and the victim had to cooperate by not going anywhere in the meantime, while three or four or five matches broke or sputtered out before you got the one that did the job.
Schultz came unbidden to mind-I certainly wouldn’t have consciously summoned him-and said something about it being unusual that the Incinerator struck at people at the bottom of the social ladder, such a smug phrase, and I suddenly dismissed the Incinerator’s verbiage about carrion and biological misfire, and imagined myself asking him the question: “Why the homeless?”
“They hold still,” he answered in my imagination.
Experimentally, silently asking someone for pardon, I nudged one of the sleeping men with my foot. He held still.
I went knocking on doors.
I must have knocked on forty doors, concentrating on the dreadful little apartments one story above the abandoned, urine-sodden shops, the apartments that faced the street and whose windows opened only ten or twelve feet above the sidewalk, before I hit Mrs. Gottfried. I’d been rejected in various dialects of English and Spanish before Mrs. Gottfried peered out at me through a door featuring no fewer than three slip-chains on the inside and said, “So? Nu? ”
It was a new dialect, at any rate. “I’d like to talk to you,” I said.
“I paid the water,” she said. Her face was so narrow that I could see most of it through the two inches of cracked door, and her bright black eyes regarded me with enough distrust to suggest several lifetimes of unrelieved betrayal.
“It’s not about the water,” I said, searching through my repertoire of ingenuous facial expressions to find one that would reassure her. I failed.
“So go away,” she said, trying to close the door. When she couldn’t, she looked down and saw my foot wedged between the doorjamb and the edge of the door.
“Move the foot,” she said. “You don’t move the foot, I call the cops.” The accent might have been Polish.
“Call them,” I said. “Call Lieutenant Al Hammond downtown and tell him that Simeon Grist is here. I’ll wait. I’ll even move my foot and let you close the door if you want, as long as you promise to open it and talk to me after
