2
GEORGE NELSON SAT in his law office on the Plaza, waiting uneasily for the arrival of a business associate—Murray LeRoy. Through the window he could see the Plaza fountain and the small wooden nativity scene next to it. A lamp in the grass cast light on the nativity scene as a discouragement to vandals, but the light apparently hadn’t done its job, because the packing-crate manger was kicked to pieces, its palm frond roof scattered into the street, and the plaster of Paris figures knocked over and broken. It was almost ironic: Nelson himself represented a citizens’ group opposed to the display of nativity scenes on public property—the suit against the city was still pending—and here someone had come along in the night and done the job single-handedly.
He picked up the phone and dialed LeRoy’s number. Nothing. LeRoy was already out, already on his way. There were only a couple of hours left before the arrival of Nelson’s secretary, and before then he wanted to be finished with LeRoy. There were a number of reasons for cutting LeRoy loose forever. Mostly it was because LeRoy was a little unsteady these days.
In fact, if his behavior yesterday morning was any indication, the man was positively cracking up, and that was a dangerous thing. He had looked like he’d slept in his clothes, and he hadn’t shaved for days. He was half drunk, too, at nine in the morning, and his head shook with some kind of palsy that had made Nelson want to slap him. Six months ago the man didn’t drink except at weddings, and then he didn’t enjoy it and was always willing to say so in a loud voice. Nelson knew that there had been good reasons for LeRoy to keep his personal life private, but he had the public persona of some kind of scowling Calvinist missionary, and that’s what made his downhill slide so strange—he was making it so damned obvious. The thought wasn’t comforting.
Nelson had no idea exactly what he’d do about it in the end, but this morning he intended to try to buy the man out. That was the simplest route—something he should have done two or three months ago when LeRoy first started to crack. He wondered suddenly if the business with the nativity scene had been LeRoy’s doing. It would certainly fit the pattern. If the man were arrested again, he’d probably babble like the nut he’d become.
He heard a sound then, like the laughter of cartoon devils. “Murray?” He stood up out of his chair, listening. He opened his desk drawer and slipped his hand in, sliding the loaded .38 to the front. Then he saw a glow beyond the window curtains, and he realized that what he heard now no longer sounded like laughter. There was a crackling, almost like fat sizzling on a griddle, and at that moment he smelled the burning. There was something sulphurous about it, something that nearly choked him even though the windows were shut and locked.
Abruptly it dawned on him that the building might be on fire, that LeRoy had torched it. Thank God the man had become an incompetent fool! He slammed shut the desk drawer and hurried out into the foyer, opening the coat closet and pulling out the fire extinguisher. In a second he had unlocked the door and was out on the sidewalk, yanking the little plastic cotter key out of the lever of the extinguisher. The streets were empty. He slowed down, fully expecting to find LeRoy himself squatting in the flowerbed and dressed up like a clown or a little girl. He angled out toward the street and peered into the alley, which was lit up now with flames.
At first it looked like someone must have dumped burning trashbags onto the pavement. The heat was intense and glowing with a corona of white haze that obscured the burning figure, whatever it was. The fire flickered, rising and falling as if something were literally breathing life into it. The effect was almost hallucinatory, and for a moment he seemed to be looking into the mouth of a burning, circular pit. He heard what sounded like voices, like human cries, and a sulphurous reek drifted skyward like a mass of whirling black shadows.
Clearly it wasn’t trashbags. A big dog? The burning thing had a face like an ugly damned goat. He saw then that there were shoes at the other end of it. A man! He pointed the nozzle of the extinguisher in the general direction of the body and squeezed the lever. White dust sputtered out of it, but it was as if a whirlwind encompassed the burning body, and the chemicals blew away uselessly in the air. The flames didn’t diminish; shouting at them would do as much good. He tried to get closer, but gave it up; there was no way that he intended to have his hair singed off over this. He pointed the extinguisher into the air and blew the rest of the contents in the direction of the flaming body, knowing it was pointless—no one could live through such a thing anyway—but wanting to make damn well sure that the extinguisher was empty when the investigators had a look at it.
There was something about the shoes…. He looked closely at them, recognizing them with a start of surprise—loafers, white, with tasseled laces.
God, it was Murray LeRoy! Someone must have dumped gasoline over him and lit a match. One of the shoes ignited just then, with an audible hiss, and Nelson backed away, turning around and heading up the sidewalk again, hurrying toward the door to the office, swept with relief and fear both.
This certainly solved the problem with LeRoy. He wouldn’t be babbling to anyone now. But who had done this? In his mind Nelson ran through his list of enemies. Its being done outside his office, in the early morning like this, that was the bad thing. LeRoy must have talked to someone, said something. God, but to whom? Nelson and his associates were involved in a lot of shaky dealings, but nothing that would warrant something like this.
Inside he locked the door before punching 911 into the phone and reporting the incident. He sat down then at his desk, taking out the .38. If someone wanted LeRoy dead this badly, there was no reason to think they wouldn’t want him dead, too. But who, damn it? Argyle? He was capable of it. It dawned on him just then that perhaps there were other explanations. The city didn’t have any real gang problems, but there’d been several incidents in the past couple of years of homeless people being mugged, and he seemed to remember something about a man set on fire somewhere—probably Santa Ana. Who could say how long LeRoy had been in the alley? No doubt he was drunk as a judge and was easy prey for a gang of sadistic skinheads who happened to be out joyriding.
And then there was the possibility that LeRoy had simply gone to Hell.
He pushed the idea out of his mind. There were flashing lights outside the window now—a paramedics truck. He returned the gun to the drawer and went out, carrying the fire extinguisher. The fire was already out except for a weird flickering on the surface of the asphalt itself. The paramedics stood looking at the body, or what was left of it—only a heap of gray ash and charred fragments of bone. One of the shoes sat on the ground, strangely intact, but the other was gone.
“You called this in?”
“What?” Nelson looked up at the paramedic. He realized that he’d been gaping at the shoe with its ridiculous tassel. There was an ankle bone thrust up out of it, charred in half, and he wondered suddenly if there was still flesh on the foot. The idea made him sick, and he turned away and looked across at the Plaza, at the big grinning Santa Claus waving at the traffic coming up Glassell Street.
“Was it you that called, sir?”
He turned back, pulling himself together. “Yes. I tried to put the fire out, but this didn’t seem to do any good.”
“Probably too much heat,” the paramedic said. “If there’s enough heat it can blow this stuff right back at you. It’s like spraying a hose into the wind. You did what you could.”
Another truck pulled up, followed by a squad car, and in a moment the alley was full of investigators taking pictures and searching the ground, talking in undertones, their voices full of disbelief. There was a flurry of raindrops, and in moments the rain was coming down hard. Four firemen unfolded a tarp, trying in vain to keep LeRoy’s ashes dry while a plainclothes investigator hastily swept it all into a black metal dustpan that he emptied into a plastic sack. Nelson saw that there was a dime in among the ashes, and something else that might have been a tooth.
Without warning, rainwater sluiced out of the drainpipes on either side of the alley and flooded out onto the asphalt. A fireman attempted to dam it up with a yellow slicker, but it was no use: the water washed the alley clean, and within two minutes there was no trace of Murray LeRoy left in the world except the heap of ashes and teeth and bone that lay with the godawful white shoe in the bottom of the plastic sack.