by Noel Hynd
Carlton had enjoyed being known around town as “Billy.” Just ‘Billy,’ Martinez explained. So, beneath that striking gravestone he had hoped to rest exactly the same way. As Billy.
Van Allen had no quarrel with that. If only the old actor’s remains could have stayed put, he would have had no quarrel with the Cemetery of Angels at all. Oh, heck, he thought to his own amusement, Billy probably would have been happy to have stayed in the ground, too. Probably wasn’t even Billy’s choice to come back up and join us. Now, Van Allen pondered, if I were a corpse, and I came up out of the ground after several decades, where would I go? Disneyland? Dodger Stadium? Pink’s on La Brea for a chilidog? Mel’s Diner?
Van Allen was getting goofy, and he knew it. Too many Jerry Garcia tunes on his own time, he told himself with no attempt at seriousness whatsoever. But he was at work now, and it was time to concentrate.
So his thoughts became more serious. Mercifully, the press hadn’t caught on to the tomb desecration yet. In Van Allen’s worst nightmares, he saw that overturned granite angel on the front page of every two-bit tabloid in the country.
Just what he needed. He prayed that those Salvadorans would keep their mouths shut. Why couldn’t the angel just flutter back into place? Maybe he should see a priest, Van Allen mused. An intellectual Jesuit with some real clout Upstairs.
Father Karras, where are you?
Nah, he quickly decided. Wouldn’t do a thing. And furthermore, he, Van Allen, was an atheist, not a Catholic. He wondered next whether God answered the prayers of atheists. If The Almighty answered Unitarians, Van Allen mused, why not non-believers?
He smirked. And when he felt his thoughts rambling too far in that direction, he knew he was overtired and preoccupied. He went out to the 7-Eleven and got himself a large cup of coffee. Nothing like a good Cuppa Joe to get a man thinking right again.
Van Allen returned to his office. He set aside the file on the Guatemalans. The case irritated him. He picked up a sheet of paper that had just been faxed to him while he was out on his caffeine run.
The page was from the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The dudes who gave out the Oscars.
Ah, he thought. This was what he had been waiting for. The page was a listing from an index of men and women who had worked in American films since the first bit of celluloid had passed before a camera. Van Allen read it with interest:
Carlton, Billy (1892- 1931) (William Bryan Carlton, Jr.) Handsome American character actor of the silent era. Often the sympathetic second lead, frequently in Westerns or light romance. Late in career made a moderately successful transition to talkies. Filmography: Rio Grande, 1920, Desperate Trails, 1920, Man to Man, 1922, Trilby, 1923, Son of the Sahara, 1924, Captain Blood, 1924, The Texas Trail, 1926, The General (with Buster Keaton) 1927, Resurrection, 1927, Ramona, 1928, Evangeline, 1929, The Spoilers, 1930, Trader Horn, 1930, See America Thirst (with Harry Langdon) 1930.
The listing told Van Allen little. It was a curriculum vitae. It accurately reduced Billy Carlton’s professional lifetime to a neat three inches in a film directory. But it told Van Allen nothing about the man. Where he’d come from. What he was like.
Van Allen’s eyes settled upon Carlton’s dates. The actor had died young. Age thirty-nine. Thirty-nine? That was curious. Had there been an accident? A murder? Had it been life-style? Had William Bryan Carlton, Jr. — sorry, Billy! — drunk himself to death? Van Allen wondered.
And why such a large tomb for a guy with second lead in some mediocre films? Well, Carlton must have had a number of successful friends in his lifetime, Van Allen figured. Hollywood was like that.
His policeman’s suspicions continued: Suicide? Illness? A murder that looked like an accident? There had been an outbreak of influenza in Southern California during the Depression, Van Allen recalled. It was also not uncommon in that era for actors to die of things like tuberculosis or Bright’s disease, ailments all but eradicated in modern time.
Then again, he found himself thinking anew, there were subtle forms of murder back in those days, sly poisons that could have evaded detection then, but wouldn’t now.
Had someone snuffed Billy Carlton and gotten away with it for all these years? Well if so, Van Allen grimaced, fat chance of catching the killer now. The policeman looked back to the actor’s date of mortality.
1931. Many decades had passed. A lifetime. Billy Carlton’s lifetime. He wondered how he could find out more. Where was Carlton’s body? Who could have wanted it, particularly after all these years? Why was it risen from the earth, however it had risen?
Then he almost shook himself.
Hey! Reality check, my man! How could any event from 1931 have any bearing on the world of 2010? He was thinking too much on this case. Go back to the basest motives of all, he reminded himself.
Money. Sex. Power.
Long ago as a cop he had realized that almost all crimes were somehow motivated by one of these three components of the insatiable human wish list. But where could there be any sex in this case? Where could there be any power?
So? What did that leave? Money. Always follow the trail of money. He turned the question over again in his head. To whom could this actor’s remains have had some contemporary value? There was movement at his door. He did a double take. His spirits lifted.
“Hey,” he said.
“Good morning,” Alice Aldrich answered. She came in and sat down at her desk.
Van Allen smiled. Double-A was eating breakfast. A carrot. And presumably not just any carrot. An organic carrot.
“What’s new?” she asked between crunches.
“Know anything about grave robbery?” he asked offhandedly.
“How’s that again?” she asked.
“Someone broke open a grave over at San Angelo.”
“Yeah? Whose? Anyone I know?” Alice knew how to get right to the point.
“Not unless you lived a previous life,” he said. Van Allen knew he was on dangerous ground with Alice with a sentence like that.
“I’m sure I did, I just don’t know what it was,” she answered. Van Allen continued quickly. The grave belonged to an old-time film actor named Billy Carlton,” he said. He waited. “Name mean anything to you?”
She shook her head.
“No. But I know this guy who’s a silent film freak. I can ask him. Should I?”
“If you think of it. I have a film encyclopedia listing for Carlton, but it doesn’t give me much.”
Van Allen handed her his fax. She took it and examined it, crunching the carrot as she read. When the carrot was finished, she pulled another one out of her purse.
Van Allen looked her up and down as she read it. Only on the LAPD, he thought to himself.
“What’s this San Angelo?” she asked. “Like part of Hollywood Memorial?”
“No. It’s a small separate burial lot in West LA.”
“Yeah? How come I never heard of it?” She gave the fax back to him.
“Nothing new has been buried there since the war. “
“What war?”
“The Second Big One.”
“Oh. That one.” She digested the point, as well as the remainder of the carrot. “My grandfather was in that one. Normandy.”
“Cemetery of Angels,” Van Allen said, sticking with the subject at hand. “That’s what San Angelo is called.”
“Why is it called that? From Los Angeles? You know: like ‘City of Angels’?” she asked. He shrugged.
“I don’t know. And I don’t know anything about Billy Carlton, either.” She paused and thought about it.
“Body snatching. That’s gross. Someone actually busted open his grave?”
“Opened his coffin, Double A,” Van Allen said. “The body’s gone.”
She curled a lip and shook her head again.
“Man,” she said. “I mean, like we got some sick people out there.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Think this is some sort of Hallow
een thing?” she asked. A moment passed.
“I thought of that,” he said. “And I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like a Halloween stunt,” he said, leaning back in his chair and elaborating. “The methodology was too elaborate, too complicated. If someone wanted a decayed corpse, there were plenty of others that were much more accessible. You should have seen this huge monument, this big granite angel. It got overturned and moved twenty yards just so this grave could be dug up.”
“Yeah?” she asked. The carrots were gone.
“Yeah.”
“Ed, this is really bitching weird,” she said.
“We share the same impression,” he said to her. He liked when she called him Ed and wished they shared more of the same thoughts, particularly on a personal level. He kept to work, however. He was about to ask her where he might find out more about grave robbery, the motives and the twisted psychology behind it. But already he knew the answer. The Internet and the Central Los Angeles Library. So he fell silent.
Alice took a pair of files from her desk. When she spoke again, she told him that she was working a vice ring along Sunset that peddled cocaine and pimped thirteen year old boys. She was posing as a mom with a snow habit who had a son and who wanted to make some money.
“Good luck,” he said. “If you need me to watch your back…”
“Thanks. I’ll let you know,” she said. “I got a SWAT backup, though. I think they want to blow these guys away if they have a chance.” Van Allen grimaced and worried about her.
“Have fun,” he said.
Double A vanished. Every once in a while, he noted with fascination, Alice Aldrich reminded him of his ex-wife when she was fifteen years younger. So he watched her go, not without a trace of an unhealthy interest, and not without wishing that he were fifteen years younger himself. Which he wasn’t.
So instead, Van Allen busied himself with paperwork till four that afternoon. Then he drove out to Santa Monica for an hour of much needed R & R. It was time to see the ocean, time to clear his head and get it together at the same time. There was little doubt in his mind now that he was on the brink of something extraordinary.
Fine, he told himself. He would be ready for the challenge. The next move was for the other side. In the meantime, he would do his homework as best possible the next day, crawling among books and records that were as musty as graves themselves.
Chapter 20
It was happening again to Rebecca. Another bad dream. The fourth in five days. She lay in bed in the darkness of her bedroom at l:00 A.M. the morning of October 21.
This dream was every bit as awful as the others. Something terrible was going to happen to the children. That was central to all of these dreams. But now it was even more specific. In her dream, Patrick and Karen went out to trick-or-treat on Halloween and they never came back.
She tossed in bed. She couldn’t evict the nightmare vision that was in her mind. At the fringe of her consciousness, more doggerel;
Let them come, your children to me
And in death’s arm, protected they’ll be …
Her eyes popped open, reentry into the real world. The dream’s message still in her mind, that insane poetry dancing through her head.
“Oh, how horrible…” she reasoned sleepily. She would lay down the law with Bill. She wouldn’t even allow the kids to go out on Halloween. Whatever was out there to menace her kids, she would thwart them by not even putting Patrick and Karen at risk.
She would keep them home. There! That was settled! She closed her eyes. An image of the horrible killer with the werewolf face and the wraparound sunglasses was before her. Her eyes flashed open. The bedroom was empty.
Momentarily, she was reassured. She had gone to see Dr. Einhorn again. The diminutive doc had given her some Ambien. So far, she hadn’t taken any. She wondered if she should. She wasn’t getting one night’s rest at this rate.
She tried to sleep again. But again she felt that sinking, falling feeling that so often led her into a nightmare. And she didn’t think she could stand one more nightmare.
“Rebecca? Rebecca?”
In the darkness, someone was whispering to her.
She opened her eyes. The voice had called to her so clearly, summoning her from the realm of bad dreams, that she thought it had been Bill’s voice.
“Bill?” she asked, corning upon her elbows in bed.
But her husband was sound asleep.
“Rebecca?”
She heard it again. What the heck was that? Something creepy at the lowest level of her waking consciousness. Something calling her. Her eyes were open now. She was awake! And she was still hearing it! What in God’s name… ?
She rose from bed, as if she had received an invitation.
And now there was something else. That creepy piece of music was really in her head now. She caught parts of it that she had never caught before, as if its source had moved closer. There was a discernible theme, a melody that she could almost repeat. And instead of being at the edge of her consciousness, the music was right there in front of her, at the forefront of her mind. Instead of thinking she was hearing something distant on the radio, this was as if someone were banging away somewhere at an old ragtime piano.
She stood at the doorway to her bedroom. The hall was dim. The only illumination was from a nightlight that she had installed when the troubles first began.
“Rebecca?”
The voice was unmistakable now. Except, where was it?
She stepped into the hallway.
“Rebecca?”
The voice seemed to beckon from the yellow room. The turret room.
Ronny ‘s room.
She walked toward it. The only other sound was the thundering of her heart. She moved as if in a dream, smoothly and evenly across the old floorboards. Occasionally one would creak.
She found herself a few feet in front of the closed doorway to the yellow room.
The only way to dispel fear was to face it. Sure. That’s what Dr. Einhorn had said. The only way to accept reality was to confront it. That’s what everyone told her. That was even what she told herself. But, easier said than done, right?
She moved to the door to the yellow room. She placed her hand on the knob and summoned up all the courage she owned. There was no resistance. She turned it slowly.
With a loud click, the latch gave. The door opened to Ronny’s room.
The music stopped. Like a cricket’s chirp when a human walks too close. No more banging at an old piano.
Rebecca pushed the door hard.
It flew open, going so wide that it clattered against a metal doorstop. She expected a flood of demons to burst forth. It didn’t happen. And immediately, before even a small demon could spring forth from the darkness, Rebecca pushed her hand into the room and found the light switch.
She could still hear a voice.
Softer now: “Rebecca?”
She flicked the light switch. The room filled with a hundred watts from the overhead. Nothing moved in the room. All the furniture was in place. And she thought she heard a male voice whisper.
“Yes, Rebecca… Thank you.”
But there was no one she could see. She stepped farther in.
“Thank you for what?” Rebecca asked aloud. “Thank you because I know something’s here?” she asked. Her voice had a slight echo against the old walls. She looked at the children’s toys, the new curtains, and the crisp colorful posters depicting the world of ballet and the world of professional sports.
It all seemed so logical between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M. on another morning when sleep fought her: this chat with an empty chamber.
“So tell me,” she asked in more conciliatory tones. “Thank you for what?”
Silence answered. Dead silence. Then…
“Thank you for coming”.
It wasn’t a voice this time, it was a thought, a notion that seemed to take shape inside her head.
“Coming where?” she asked. “Here?”
/> “Yes, Rebecca.”
“Why?” No answer. Not the slightest. No voice. No tinkling music. No thought from outer space slipping into her head. Nothing. She waited. Still nothing.
“Find the message.” These words formed on her lips. Rebecca wasn’t certain whether this was her thought or Ronny’s. Find the message. She asked aloud.
“What message?”
She scanned the room. Something crinkled behind her. Something made a noise. Like paper being crumpled. The sound came from the posters on the wall. A breeze beneath them caused the posters to flutter. Of course. But, no! Impossible! The window was shut, hence a breeze was impossible. Then how could…?
Suddenly Rebecca jumped as if her body had been hit with electricity. She stared at the wall of the room, upon which were the two posters that had made the crinkling sound. Beneath them, almost subliminally, there were big bold letters on the wall.
She was incredulous. Her heart raced. She had painted this wall herself, and…
“But, no!”
This was the wall that had seemingly painted itself. This was the wall that she didn’t recall applying the paint to, but which was covered when she returned to the room.
She stared. There was a message on the wall beneath the yellow paint, as if it were trying to come forth, even though she had painted it over.
Yet this, too, was impossible. Her husband had put a heavy white primer on the walls. There was no way that any old marking should seep through. Her heart continued to flutter. Rebecca went to the wall. She placed a hand against it. The wall felt the way it always had. The paint was dry, the wall firm and secure.
But there was a large ER protruding from beneath one side of a baseball poster. Rebecca stepped back and realized that there was a large I between the posters. And when she looked to her left she saw the letters YO to the left of the first poster.
“Look for the message.” She had found one.
Her heart continued to kick. The poster on the left was of the New York City Ballet. The poster on the right featured Many Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers.