Everything but the Squeal by Timothy Hallinan Page A

in it. Other people showed up where they were supposed to be. Appointment books had to be the secret. Eleanor's appointment book was thicker than the Oxford English Dictionary and a lot worse organized, and she was always where she was supposed to be. At the moment, unfortunately, she was supposed to be in China.
    The second call was from my mother. “Well, Billy be damned,” she said, getting right to the point,` “if I'd known I was going to spend my life talking to a machine, I'd have given birth to a battery, too. At least you'd be grateful. And speaking of you, I'm sure you remember that you promised to come by tomorrow. I'm sure you know how much your father and I are looking forward to it. Bring Eleanor, if she's speaking to you.” I heard my father's voice in the background. “No,” my mother said, “it's that damned machine again.” Then there was a dial tone. That was how long it had been since I'd talked to my mother. Eleanor had left three weeks ago.
    The machine had promised three messages, so I hung on, watching a little Mexican girl, decked prematurely in her Easter best, argue with her mother about something. Her plump brown sturdy legs beneath half a mile of white ruffled crinoline anchored themselves to the sidewalk as permanently as an Ice Age as she tugged her mother in the direction she wanted to go. In about eight years, she'd be the age of the girl on the slab.
    “Mr. Grist?” It was a voice I didn't recognize. “This is Jane Sorrell. Something has happened. I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I need to see you. Please come. I don't know what I'm going to do.”
    I pressed my forehead against the glass of the telephone booth and watched the little Mexican girl, victorious, lead her mother down the street in the desired direction. Good for her. Somebody loved her.
    To get to the hotel, I headed west on Olympic and then, after miles of stunted architecture and Korean neon signs, swung north on Doheny toward Beverly Hills. Alice was so sluggish and unresponsive that it felt as though she were reading my mind. I didn't want to see Mrs. Sorrell. I didn't want to see Mr. Sorrell. I wanted to go home and spend Easter with my mother and father and pretend that I sold aluminum siding or something that never rusted, never warped, and always looked shiny and new and hopeful. I didn't want anything to do with families that had rotted and turned brown at the edges like Annie's avocado-and-clam dip.
    I was in a fine humor as I chugged up the driveway to the hotel. The clown who opened the driver's door, stuffed into a uniform that looked like something willed to him by the Philip Morris bellboy, didn't do much to raise my spirits.
    “Yes, sir ,” he said with a bright smile as he estimated my income and looked Alice over. It was the smile a talent agent saves for a client who isn't working. “We don't get many of these, this far north of the border. We'll be real sure to park her where we can keep an eye on her.”
    “Park her on your chest,” I said, climbing out. “I sure hope you don't have to live on your tips.”
    “I usually know what to expect,” he said. He aimed Alice toward some unmapped area of the parking lot, the part they reserve for Volkswagen vans with psychedelic designs painted on them.
    Mrs. Sorrell hadn't given me her room number, so I had to go through the formality of finding a house phone. As always these days, they were located behind a bouquet of eight-foot flowers that looked like Venus's-flytraps bred to eat airplanes.
    “Yeah?” said a new voice, a sullen, young-sounding voice that I'd never heard before. It could have been a girl or a prepubescent boy.
    “Is Mrs. Sorrell there, please?” I asked, yanking upward on the frayed bootstraps of whatever residue of courtesy I had left.
    “No,” the new voice said. Its owner hung up.
    I resisted the urge to rip the phone out of the wall and feed it to the flowers, and once again requested the operator to connect me with