by George Noory
No staff were in the cars—the operator stayed in the small station house at the Bunker Hill end. The ride cost fifty cents and you paid exiting at the top.
Two of the greatest names in film noir and detective stories, hard-boiled Philip Marlowe and hard-hitting Mike Hammer, rode the little railroad while investigating the city’s dirty underbelly.
He didn’t realize a woman had entered behind him until he made his way up the sharp incline to a seat at the top platform of the car. The woman was the only other person in the railcar. She took a seat at the bottom soon after entering instead of making her way up the ascent to the top to be close to the exit, as most people did.
He did a double take and quickly looked away, not wanting to appear obvious. Was it the same woman he saw in an entryway when the police and EMTs were tending to Ethan’s body? He hadn’t gotten a good look at the woman earlier but two different women in similar dark hooded coats was too much of a long shot. But he didn’t know what her presence now and earlier added up to. And he didn’t feel comfortable approaching a woman with a question about what she was doing alone on the streets at night. It was the sort of situation that could go to hell fast.
Not wanting to get caught staring, he snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Around thirty or a little more, he guessed, tall, slender. Her hooded coat was black. The coat looked expensive, probably cashmere. Some untamed chestnut hair stuck out from the hood. Her features were partially covered by the hood but he could see that her complexion was pale. He wasn’t sure, but guessed her eyes were light, maybe green or gray.
He knew why he was out on the street in the wee hours, but wondered about her. Too early to be on her way to work at an insurance company or law office in a Bunker Hill tower. Had she been on her way home from a night on the town or with a lover?
Something about her didn’t jibe with being a businesswoman. She didn’t seem artsy, either. It was something else. She was self-absorbed. Introspective. More than just being cautious about making eye contact with a strange man. Her body language was guarded and tense.
He left the railcar when it stopped at the top. The ticket booth was just outside the exit gate. Beyond the ticket booth was California Plaza’s water court, a granite oasis with a dancing water fountain, open-air eating areas and greenery set in the shadows of two skyscrapers.
He dropped his ticket in the drop box and was walking away from the cable car, deliberately going slow in the hope that she might give him an opening to talk to her. A polite smile or a nod would do it.
He heard her say something and he swung around.
She was still in the cable car, standing at the railing in the car’s exit cage. The railing was closed because the car was about to descend.
“I’m sorry, were you speaking to me?” he asked.
“It’s just begun.”
“What do you mean?”
The car started its descent and she turned and went into the interior as he stood rooted for a long moment.
What the hell?
He slowly let go of the urge to take the next car down and chase after her on the street below. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.
No, that wasn’t true. He’d heard what she said, he just didn’t know what she meant. She might be a crazy and start screaming for the cops the moment he approached her. He shook his head. All he needed to wrap up a strange night was to tangle with a woman on the street who accused him of harassing her.
He turned in the direction of his apartment and got his feet to move, but the impulse to run after her stayed with him. So did her cryptic remark.
It’s just begun.
What bothered him most was the dead accuracy of her remark. The sky sure seemed like it had started falling.
12
A feeling of morbid anxiety, gloom and doom followed him from the water garden to his penthouse apartment. It wasn’t one thing but everything, as if he had accidentally kicked the lid off Pandora’s box and unleashed some of his own demons to taunt him.
Entering the apartment didn’t bring a sense of relief. The place felt empty even though it was well furnished—expensively, at least. It had modern white sectional couches with straight lines set before a large-screen TV and entertainment center he rarely turned on except for music; large smoked-glass coffee and end table; a well-stocked Italian gray marble wet bar, and more marble on the hearth of a fireplace that rarely got turned on because it was in L.A.; those floor-to-ceiling windows that now were reminders of a tragedy; and a balcony beyond. There was no artwork on the walls, just some Mesoamerican art pieces scattered around on tabletops.
He had left the furnishings to an interior designer because he had little interest in the apartment. It was hollow to him because it was just a place to sleep, to camp out in between shows and for entertaining. There was little of him in it.
He felt more at home where he could walk barefoot in the sand than on the plush carpeting of a martini penthouse. A little north of Malibu he had a weathered beach house that had been pounded by wind and surf and roosted on by gulls long before he walked the earth. He had felt at home there the moment he walked in and bought it as a place to think and recharge on the weekends as guest hosts ran the show.
He was on the road so often with speaking engagements he didn’t get a lot of time at either place he hang his hat. When he was in town, he enjoyed having a date and interesting guests to his beach house. He moved freely around people, that’s what made him a good talk show host, but he also would hang back at a party with a glass of wine and study people rather than be in the limelight. He was so used to extraordinary people and ideas that pushed the envelope swirling around him that he found small talk a bore.
He turned on his cell phone after he entered. He didn’t remember turning it off on the street, but he must have after getting the strange call. A voicemail signal popped up and his guts clenched. Another phantom call from the dead? Someone asking about Ethan? He was too beat, too raw and empty inside to hear from someone calling out of curiosity because they’d heard about the suicide on the news.
The moment he heard a Jamaican accent he knew it was Rohan, a best-selling author who, like a rock star, went by one name. Rohan was a media personality in the area of alien abduction. He claimed he had been abducted and examined by aliens during a university sleep and dream experiment. The experience involved a strange encounter with what appeared to be a woman on the surface but that Rohan realized was an alien taking the form of women—Rohan observing changes in the age, look, color and shape of his partner as they had sex.
Writing about it turned out to be a money machine for him. He’d been on the show a number of times to talk about his experience, always emotional about being violated. Rohan was angry that he had been used as a guinea pig. “The teachers running the program sold my soul to aliens,” he said in the opening to his book. “To the professors it was no different than parting out the organs of someone close to death so they can get rich.”
Accusing the university of selling people to aliens sold a lot of books.
“It’s started,” Rohan said on the voicemail. “They killed Ethan because he got too close to their secret objective. Now they’ll come after the rest of us who can expose them. Any one of us can be next but agitators like you and me will be first on their list to eliminate. We have to stick together or they’ll pick us off like Ethan, one by one. Don’t call me—I made this call from a neighbor’s phone because they’ll be listening in on my calls. We need to talk, to figure out what to do before Murad’s creatures get us. Get over here so we can talk.”
The words came out at the speed of bullets in a tone frantic with fear and paranoia. There was enough slurring to make Greg wonder what he had been drinking or smoking before he made the call.
Rohan’s allegations about aliens were nothing new—he was constantly on the run from things from the dark side sent by Carl Murad, the psychology professor who oversaw the sleep experiment and who Rohan claimed
was in league with a secret entity that was seeking world domination.
There were two strange things about the timing of the call. Rohan had made it twenty minutes after Ethan jumped, fell, threw himself out the window or however it would be described. The ambulance had hardly arrived by the time Rohan called. Far too early for Rohan to have heard a news report.
Second, Greg had looked at his phone earlier when he got the phantom call—and there had been no voicemail icon.
He ignored Rohan’s request not to call his number and tried it anyway. He got a recording that said the line was not in service. The message gave him pause. He could understand if Rohan turned off his phone or refused to answer and let it go to voicemail, but “not in service” meant the line had been disconnected.
He tried Rohan’s neighbor’s line. Not in service.
Greg checked the time. Unless he was in some sort of time warp, it hardly seemed possible for Rohan to know about Ethan’s death and to have disconnected his line with the phone company and have a “not in service” message up and running in the middle of the night while Ethan’s body was literally still warm.
Another curious thing about the call struck him. Ethan had appeared on the show under his user name, RainbowHat, but Rohan had used Ethan’s real name in a familiar way, as if he knew the hacker. It wasn’t impossible that the two knew each other, but while they were both into conspiracy theories, from what he knew about them Greg couldn’t see much common ground between them. So what were they up to that had Rohan panicking?
Stealing government secrets and using Greg as their fall guy was the answer that came to mind.
He stood on his balcony while thoughts roiled in his head—Ethan, a call from the dead, intimidated by a van, a mysterious woman, now Rohan jumping in and generating more questions.
The woman at Angels Flight had ripped open and exposed wounds he already had. Her enigmatic comment implied that worse things were coming and at the moment he wasn’t ready to rebut that take on his life.
The root of his connection to callers troubled by strange forces went back to a time when he faced the unexplainable and incomprehensible. He had been the sole witness to his own strange encounter, but as with so many reported encounters, there was a void in his memory. It happened when he was in his teens, but he still felt the trauma and even the fear. He was sure everything he experienced was still registered in his brain, but it had a lock on it. He was certain he had the key to unlock the memory, but the door refused to open, remaining just out of reach.
For a time he was relentlessly and even foolishly drawn to probe the dark matter lying just out of reach in his subconscious, and those urges still erupted some nights when he awoke in the middle of the night. With sleep eluding him, as oblivious to the danger as a moth batting its wings on the edge of a fiery volcano, he tried to probe his memory, to reconstruct what had happened when he encountered the terrifying and the mystifying.
His whole life—his relationships, his career, his fears and triumphs—had been affected by that knowledge wrapped in fog and shadows in his mind, which he couldn’t access.
Greg hadn’t spoken to another person about the experience in nearly three decades, but it was still there, in a dark place in his mind.
When he was a kid and spoke about his traumatic experience, his parents warned him not to tell others because people would make fun of him—even think he was lying or imagined it. When he did tell friends, he got howls of laughter and ridicule rather than understanding.
He got the last laugh because as an adult he took on a challenging career that brought him into contact almost on a daily basis with people who had experienced strange encounters.
But the early experience left him not just with empathy for people who’d had their lives twisted by events that defied acceptable explanation—it taught him that paranoia can be heightened awareness of the strange and unimaginable because he often sensed things about people and places that were out of reach to the five senses.
He gave his callers the freedom to tell the world their innermost thoughts, but kept his own deepest beliefs a secret—along with his fears.
His experience made him a seeker on a quest that he couldn’t define. Rather than backing away from the unknown, he had been drawn to it in a large way, driven to become a national nighttime host of a radio show with a paranormal theme because he sought answers to the unexplainable.
The show wasn’t just a job for him, but part of his quest to find answers. He had told Josh and many others that they were not alone, that he had had an encounter with the preternatural, as had many callers on his show. Millions more looked up at the stars and the utter darkness of the infinite universe beyond and realized that we are not alone in the universe. Even the pope in Rome had established a committee to investigate the existence of extraterrestrials.
He left the balcony and collapsed in bed weighed down by death and conspiracy, a warning from a strange woman and a threatening set of headlights that tried to run over him.
He was awakened hours later by a call from his producer.
“There’s a homicide cop here who wants to talk to you about Ethan.”
13
Two plainclothes officers were waiting in the reception area of the broadcast studio. Greg invited them into his office. He hated talking to people over a desk and had them sit with him in the conference area in the corner of his office, four chairs around a table.
Lieutenant Batista was with the LAPD and introduced his companion, Mond, as being with Interagency. Greg had never heard of Mond’s department. The name of the agency was so vague it sounded like one of those units that had sprouted between the cracks of bureaucracy. He assumed it dealt with suicides.
Batista looked like a man who had seen and heard everything and didn’t believe much of it. He had shiny black hair combed straight back, tired eyes framed by wrinkles and a mouth shaped by cynicism.
Mond was short, stocky and bald. His thick face, broad nose and large eyes reminded Greg of a big frog. A poisonous one. Mond’s dark eyes were recessed behind puffy pouches and all Greg could make of them was that they never altered from looking at him, as if the man was seeing something behind Greg’s facial mask.
Mond’s quiet menace made Greg more uneasy than the homicide cop’s blunt approach. The expression “lock and load,” about getting ready to fire, came to mind as the big frog stared at him. He hoped Mond wasn’t the person whose duty it was to pass news of Ethan’s death on to loved ones.
Batista started hammering him with rapid-fire questions about his relationship with Ethan the moment the two police officials sat down. How long had he known Ethan? What was their relationship on and off the radio? When did they first meet? When was the last time he saw Ethan?
Greg didn’t like the machine-gun approach but figured cops only expected other people to pass an attitude test. And his responses were simple—Ethan had been a caller for a couple of months. They had never met in person. The only thing about Ethan’s work he knew was that Ethan was a reformed hacker working for a government agency. Which agency, he didn’t know.
Only Batista hit him with questions. Mond sat quietly and stared, like a frog ready to pounce. Or lash out with its tongue.
The questions appeared to be fishing for a connection between him and Ethan. There was none. “I know zero about Ethan’s personal or professional life other than what I’ve told you. He’s one of hundreds of callers to the show who shared his concerns about the state of the world.”
“But you had enough problems between the two of you to ban him from the show,” Batista said.
“We had no problems between us. He wasn’t allowed on the air recently because he sounded like he was high and used profanity. The FCC prohibits it. Look, I don’t mind telling you what I know about Ethan, but if he committed suicide, why do I have a homicide cop asking me questions?”
“Just routine, violent death, we need to fill in the blanks. So you say you never met in person.”
“Never met in person. What little I know about him was what he revealed over the air. Said he’d got busted for hacking and ended up working for the government testing security systems. I don’t know how old he was—”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Or much else about him. He was concerned about what he considered hidden forces attempting to control our society but that’s a fear many of my callers have, including me.”
Batista leaned forward with a smirk. “Mine’s aliens that look like big snakes. I saw the movie.” He chuckled and turned to Mond for support but the agent didn’t crack a smile or divert his stare from Greg.
Batista put back on his serious face and puckered his lips. “So you say this guy was just another conspiracy theory nut who called in, period, full stop.”
“I said he was concerned about the state of the world as he and many others see it. About the only thing that set Ethan Shaw apart from other callers I’ve gotten over the years was that he started losing it during calls. Using foul language and sounding high. Ranting about how the time had come, that the world was coming under control of secret forces.”
“Your producer confirmed that you banned him. But you took a call from him last night anyway.”
“Not on the air. We took the call to pacify him.”
“And he said you killed him.”
“And he said I killed him. And you focus on that despite the fact that I was here with witnesses when he threw himself out of the building across the street. Are you finished with your questions?”
“Close. He said you killed him. What did he mean by that?”
“I don’t know. Crazy talk. I told you he sounded high.”
“Your producer said he sounded panicked.”
“That, too. Why do we keep going back to what Ethan said? He was obviously high and I didn’t kill him. I’m getting the feeling that you’re trying to make something out of nothing.”