“We gonna watch a movie, Dom?”
“You seen ‘em all already.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m puzzled.”
“I ever tell you what my great-granddad did with all of the props from the movies?”
“Nope. I just figured they were in the same place as all the movies.”
Aside from what Dom had, most of the old copies of the Black Wraith films had been destroyed a long time ago. Some had fallen apart, some just vanished, others burned up in a studio fire back in the forties. These were the personal copies of the family, handed down from generation to generation and basically ignored until Dom took enough of an interest to save them.
“So, there are films here. The rest of Black Wraith stuff? It’s here, too.”
“What? Like the old costumes and such?”
“Exactly.”
I nodded. He was worried someone had maybe used the props from the movies, or had stolen them. It took only a couple of minutes to move a few boxes out of the way and reach the old wardrobe that held everything. Was it anything remarkable? Not really. There was a gray suit, pinstriped, a pair of shoes, three capes, each tattered and torn. Two fedoras. Two ties, jet-black. A pair of cloth gloves that looked a bit threadbare, a cloth mask, and a second cloth mask that had been padded and sewn. It was not completely black, was, in fact, a dark gray, but had been highlighted in black, which gave more of an impression of a skull. All of it was well worn and, even in a wardrobe, had managed to gather a bit of dust.
I took all of it in with the eyes of a child instead of a detective. I was supposed to be scrutinizing the stuff and I suppose I was, because I knew it hadn’t been moved in a long time. While my inner child was freaking out over a little history from my past, Dom reached into the case and opened a small drawer.
“These were from the movies. Only used for close ups, of course. I think it was my great-grandfather’s cousin that made them. They are one of a kind, best of my knowledge.” He shrugged. “I always kind of figured I’d get ‘em set up in a museum some day or at least make a few bucks off of a collector.”
I looked at them carefully, the brass knuckles. They were massive things, the better to show up in the filmed close-ups. Unwieldy and I guessed at least four or five pounds each. That may not sound like much, but that made them much heavier than the real thing. I didn’t touch them at first. I went for the gloves in my coat pocket. Dom didn’t even think about touching and I knew why: if there were fingerprints to be found he wanted to make sure they weren’t his.
I studied them closely before I touched. There was a thin layer of dust. Like with everything else in the wardrobe.
When I finally picked them up I was impressed all over again with their weight. Like I said, they were larger and unbalanced. They’d never been meant to be used. The boring on the metal, where the fingers slipped in, was smooth and well worn. But the designs on the knuckles themselves? I couldn’t see the faintest hint of wear. I doubt they’d ever hit so much as a pillow with any force.
“No way, Dom.”
“What?”
“No way these were used. I think we need to take them down for a proper examination, but I don’t think there’s a chance in hell these were ever employed on anything. The metal here? It’s too thin and delicate. It would have been marred by hitting someone in the face hard enough to break bone.”
Some of the tension flowed out of Dom in that moment. Listen, I knew where it counted that Dom wasn’t the type. I’d never once seen him lose his temper and while I knew he could fight well enough, I don’t think he’s got what it takes to beat three men to death.
Ten minutes later we were on our way to the M.E. offices with the brass knuckles from the old shows. We stopped by the offices before that, so I could look over the video footage.
What I saw was not much. Three men getting torn apart in a fistfight with nothing but an occasional dark smudge. I looked hard at that footage and saw two things. First, the floor was spotty in the images. The ceramic tiles that were inlaid faded a bit here and there. They disappeared like there was something blocking them. Like maybe dry ice. That was a creepy enough thought, but all three men were seeing something that we could not. I watched four more times and focused on the occasional smudges. They looked a lot like shadows. The sort of shadows that might fall from clothing. Say, a hat and a cape. That is to say, I could almost make out the shadow at the bottom of a hat and the bottom of a cloak or a cape, but there was nothing else there, like bad green screen effects from a show done in a different era, before CGI could hide away the things you weren’t supposed to see.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I also didn’t tell Dom what it looked like to me, because I didn’t want to say it first.
After wasting our time with footage that ultimately showed very little by way of a possible culprit, we were on our way to finish drop off of possible evidence.
According to the coroner’s reports, the next vicious murder was occurring around the same time.
* * *
Seriously, what goes through people’s minds? We looked at the single victim this time and I was appalled. That doesn’t happen very often.
Edward MacDougal was a big man. I mean, physically he was very nearly a giant. Almost seven feet in height and in excellent physical shape. He wasn’t one of the towering and ridiculously thin types you see who suffer from a glandular problem. He came from a family of big people. His sister, Nelly, was six and a half feet tall. I know, because I’d arrested her a few times for beating the shit out of her husband. I wouldn’t have busted her, because I knew he liked to use his fists, too, but she gave me no choice when she threw the drunken bastard through a window and went after him.
Violence was a thing with the family and Eddie had long since made the best of that. He worked in protections and usually just held out a hand and got the money. No one wanted him pulling them in half and most people assumed he could.
One of the only things I ever liked about Eddie is he never resisted arrest. Trust me, I thanked the Almighty for that fact on a few occasions.
Like the others he had been beaten so severely that I genuinely couldn’t have recognized his face, not even with his carrot orange hair. I would have recognized the rings on his fingers though, and his height and weight helped a lot. The fact that he’d tattooed his own name across both of his biceps also helped. Even in October, when the air was bitter, Eddie walked around in a too tight t-shirt and didn’t bother with a coat.
I don’t think a jackhammer could have ruined his face more completely.
His body was a wreck. I mean that. The bastard had been beaten so badly that I even felt bad for him and considering our history I wouldn’t have thought that possible. Big as he had been in life, he’d been whittled down.
Dom looked at the corpse for a long time. I guess we both did, but his scrutiny of the crime scene was more intense than usual – as I already said, he was the one who liked to study crime scenes.
“No part of his face is intact.” He gestured me over so I could look with him. Without touching anything, he pointed to the markings on the ruin and where the flesh had been torn away, where the imprints of knuckles like the ones we had in an evidence bag could be seen clearly. “He got hit harder than I thought a person could punch.”
“He got nailed to the fucking wall, Dom.” There were a couple of uniforms standing nearby and I knew them both. They were good at their jobs but I could see both of them had been busy looking because, seriously, they were a bit green around the edges and looked ready to toss their last meals as soon as they could.
We waited for the M.E. and said nothing. They’d collect the body and be on the way and then we would be on ours. Until then, we both thought long and hard about the kind of force needed to break that many bones with a fist, whether or not brass was involved. The human skull is strong. It has to be. Its bone can withstand a lot of force. Not as much as some of the leg bones, but still, you have to work at it to bre
ak that much. I’d seen freshly ground meat that looked more intact and right then I never wanted to see hamburger again. It struck too close to home.
When it was all over, and the scene secured, we went on our way. I didn’t leave the evidence with the guys who picked up the corpse. Until they said otherwise the old movie props and the crime had nothing to do with each other, and I didn’t want to taint the scene or their perceptions. Also, Dom would have shit himself. The idea of pointing out the possible connection wouldn’t sit well with my partner.
“How did your great-granddad die, Dom?”
His brow got all knotted up in thought. “I don’t know, but I guess maybe I should look into that.”
“Your folks never said?”
“I never asked ‘em, Billy. Never crossed my mind, but something is going on here and I need to know what.”
While he talked, I Googled. Took me all of three minutes to find out that Anthony Galliano, AKA Walter Slade, AKA Blake Hadley vanished and was presumed dead a long time ago. No body was ever found, no proof of a death, and they waited the mandatory seven years to make sure it wasn’t just a case of the man walking off for a pack of cigarettes and finding another family. Believe me, stranger things happen every day. There was evidence of foul play. That was as far as the article said. I told Dom what I’d found and he told me that his ancestor had died here in town and was buried in the cemetery on Mill Street. Local made things easier. We’d have to dig a bit but the police report, if one existed, would be local, at least.
More paperwork. Have I ever mentioned how much of the job is paperwork? I’d bitch more about it, but the next clue we were looking for would revolve around, you guessed it, paperwork.
It didn’t take a lot of work to find out the truth of the matter.
Anthony Galliano had, in fact, vanished. His body was never found, but the very night that he disappeared, the cops answered a complaint at The Benson and discovered serious signs of a disturbance. The pub had been trashed and it looked like there must have been a serious fight somewhere along the way. Broken furniture, shattered beer mugs and of course, a copious amount of blood all over the floor and the bar.
No surprise, no one claimed to know what had happened. There would have been no mention of anything at all, but a couple of off duty cops had stopped by to grab a brew after work and came across the evidence.
The place where three men had been beaten to death was also the last place Dom’s celebrity great-grandfather had ever been seen alive. The difference was fifty years in time, but I got a chill just the same, and I felt it where it counts: there was a genuine connection.
I told Dom and he nodded. “My old man talked about that a few times. Said The Benson used to be a classy place. Hasn’t been for a long time, though. I guess maybe signs of a murder going down could do that to a pub’s reputation.”
I snorted at that. I’ve been to plenty of locations where a body count didn’t change a thing. But that isn’t always the case, is it? We’re talking about a neighborhood pub, and sometimes people don’t like to go back to places where the atmosphere has soured. I know a lot of places like Benson’s that survived fifty years in neighborhoods that changed a dozen times, falling into ruin and then being “gentrified,” etc, and they always managed to stay popular. Benson’s? Not so much.
“Well, maybe it’s haunted.” I meant it as a joke, honest.
The look I got from Dom said he didn’t much think it was funny. Next thing I knew we were on our way back to the pub.
Dom kept looking around, his eyes studying everything in the place. The old wainscoting, the hardwood paneling, all had long since passed their glory days. The old marble tile floor that had seen better days half a century ago. I could see the previous grandeur hidden in the decay. It made me sad some days, but right then as I looked at the taped outlines of bodies on the bloodied floor, it made me nervous.
The day was fading and night was creeping in. Dom didn’t say what he was looking for, but he took his time scrutinizing the place. I did some looking myself, wondering if his great-grandfather, a man who had been my idol when I was a kid, could have really been murdered here.
“What connects them, Dom? We have four bodies, but what do they have in common?”
Dom looked up at me and shook his head. The expression on his face was mildly scolding. “You ever study this neighborhood? Every one of those guys has a family history in this area as long as mine. Longer, four or more generations back, Billy. Every last one.”
That thought gave me a wicked case of the creeps.
“You need to find out more if you can, Dom. From your dad.”
“I know that.” He cast a hard look my way. The shadows in the Benson hid half of his face, but I could see his eyes well enough. He looked angry and scared and more stressed than I’d ever seen him.
I thought of his great-grandfather on those old serials, and how much they looked alike. Like I said before, Hollywood looks.
I spoke before I could stop myself, because there was only one reason we were here and even though neither of us had said it, we both knew it. “Okay, so if somebody is going after the guys who maybe did in your great-grandfather, why? What could they gain at this point? I doubt any of the people who were alive when it happened are still alive now, or even if they are, they’re ancient, like celebrating their late nineties. So what’s the point?”
“I’ve been trying to figure out any possible angle myself, and I can’t. I don’t know what the hell is going on, except someone is beating some serious creeps to death.”
Neither of us said it but that part wasn’t such a bad thing. We’d had plenty of discussions about it in the past, when one or another of the punks who ran in the wrong crowds met a bad ending.
My partner pulled out his flashlight and started looking. He moved chairs, checked around the edges of the walls, and even lifted an old carpet that had probably been sitting there since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
“What are you looking for, Dom?”
“Seeing if there are signs that a body was ever buried here.”
“What? Seriously?”
That was maybe a mistake. The look Dom threw me was not kind or forgiving. “What do you want me to do? Go look at pictures in the Cold Case files? I saw the images you brought up on your phone. They’re probably the same ones.”
“How would you even hope to find anything now, Dom?” I shrugged. “Fifty years is a long time.”
“Gotta at least look, Billy. Come on, what would you do?”
“Same thing, I guess. But I think you’d get more from your dad if he remembers any of the old stories. He knew the man right? The guy was his granddad.”
Dom nodded and said nothing, he agreed, maybe, but he had to do this his way first. I could respect that.
The sun finished setting. Aside from his flashlight the place was nearly dark. There were lights outside, but neither of us had thought to turn on the interior lights. Hell, I wouldn’t even know where to look.
Instead of being useless, I went back toward the kitchen and started looking for a light switch.
That meant I got to see the Black Wraith first.
There was a doorway that was nothing remarkable. It was locked and painted a faded white. So when the Black Wraith came through it I could see every detail.
He looked like he had in the old serials, only more so. The suit was a gray pinstripe, the jacket open enough to let me see the shoulder holsters for two very large pistols. The shoes were glossy and looked like they belonged to a different era. The hat was a wide-brimmed fedora, and the cloak over the shoulders of the suit looked like someone had torn a funeral shroud off a rotting corpse and decided to make a fashion statement with it. The gloves were jet black and so was the mask.
How can I describe it? It was a skull. There were features to that mask. It had sharp, crisp angles and I could see the teeth, each and every one of them, done up in black. There was a cavern where the nose should have been, just li
ke you see on a skull, and there were eye sockets and a bony ridge above. I’ve looked at enough pictures of skulls. This was just that, a skull. Only if I’m honest it looked like someone had covered it in felt, or carefully glued a thin layer of cloth to the thing, so that the bones were carefully hidden under a fine, thin fabric.
All of that worked fine until I got to the eyes. I didn’t see them. I sensed them. They looked my way and held my gaze, and much as I wish I could tell you I did the manly thing and drew my weapon to secure an enemy, I froze, horrified and fascinated.
I had no doubt in my mind what I was looking at. I was staring at a ghost. Not just the Black Wraith, but a genuine specter. Those teeth grinned at me. Those eyes studied me and judged me and I think they maybe found me less than ideal.
The figure was as tall as me, maybe a little taller. He moved with purpose, he didn’t walk, he strode as he turned away from me and headed for the door.
“Wait. Come back, I have to ask you questions.” I could barely make my throat work. It was too dry and my words just sort of fell away like so much ash.
I shook a little. Not going to lie, I was scared. Seriously scared but I shook it off and followed the Black Wraith as he moved toward the front of the place and toward Dom.
“Dom! Dom! Look out!” My voice was a croak, but it was loud enough.
The swinging door that separated the kitchen from the serving area slammed open as the Black Wraith walked away from me. I followed and shoved the door back before it could hit me in the face.
Even as I walked, I felt the chill in the air and saw the vapor pouring from the walls, from the ground, filling the area with a dense fog.
I also saw Dom looking at the same shape I was following. His eyes nearly popped out of his head. His mouth opened in a wide gape and I suspect I had a similar look on my face.
The Black Wraith walked past him, and as he walked, I saw his gloved hands reaching into his coat and pulling out a massive pair of brass knuckles, well tarnished and stained with blood.
Each knuckle had a different shape on it. They were so coated with dried gore that I couldn’t make out the designs.
Wicked Haunted: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers Page 31