Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  “Hallo, Mussolini,” he said to the parrot. The parrot viciously clawed and bit at him, and then ruffled up its gangrenous feathers and croaked, “Che violino! Che violino!”

  “It’s time you gave that bird’s body to the Audubon Society,” Larry remarked.

  His mother was pouring capuccino, with chocolate flakes. Larry never drank capuccino anyplace else, too sweet and creamy for his taste, but his mother liked to make it for him, and how could he refuse? Especially when a huge oil-painting of his father hung over the fireplace, dark and lean and censorious.

  “You’d like some cake,” his mother asked him, although it wasn’t really a question. “Torta casereccia di polenta.”

  “Sure, sure thing,” Larry reassured her. “But not too much. Detectives have to keep in shape.”

  They sat down in big velvet-upholstered spoonback chairs – almost knee-to-knee, as if they were about to play chess, or hypnotize each other.

  “Well, then, what is it.” his mother wanted to know, noisily stirring her coffee. “Linda said you were worried.”

  “Linda called you?”

  “Sure Linda called me. You don’t expect a daughter-in law to call her mother-in-law when her husband’s acting strange?”

  “I haven’t been acting strange. Linda didn’t say that I was acting strange. Or did she?”

  “Linda said that you’d been given those terrible murders.”

  “That’s right. The Fog City Satan.”

  “She said you were acting abnormal.”

  “Abnormal? Not me.”

  “That’s what she said: abnormal. Over-excited. Anxious.”

  Larry took a mouthful of polenta, filled with raisins and figs and pine-nuts. “The case is abnormal,” he told her, in a muffled voice. “And maybe the only way to crack it is to think abnormal. But I wasn’t conscious of behaving abnormal.”

  “Linda said you were abnormal. Have some more cake.”

  Larry lifted his hand. “No thanks. That’s plenty.”

  “I made it all for you,” his mother protested.

  “Give it to Mussolini, maybe he’ll do us all a favor and choke.”

  “Tieni duro! Tieni duro!” croaked Mussolini. “Stick to your guns! Stick to your guns!”

  “It’s about time they did Kentucky Fried Parrot,” Larry observed.

  Eleonora Foggia leaned forward and laid her dry, long-fingered hand on her son’s knee, with all of those huge white diamond rings. “You wouldn’t have come to talk to your momma if you weren’t worried.”

  “Well, you’re partly right,” Larry agreed. “The point is, you were always into that spiritual stuff, weren’t you? All that hocus-pocus you used to do with grandma, ouija boards and crystal balls.”

  His mother’s eyes slitted; exactly the same way that his did, when he was suspicious. “How come all of a sudden you’re interested in that?”

  “Because of this case, that’s why. We’ve had six mass killings so far—six mass killings in six months.”

  “I’ve been reading about them,” his mother nodded. “Terrible, all of them. Terrible.”

  Larry said, “The weird thing about all of these killings is that they’re all different, but in some way they’re all the same. I just can’t work out what that sameness is. There’s a connection, right? But I can’t understand what it is.”

  “And you think I will?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. The point is that, up until now, the guy has always called up KGO radio and given out some kind of warning. Like, ‘If you tell what you saw, I’ll cut out your tongue and feed it to the fish.’ But this time, he said something different. This time he said—here, hold on a moment, I have it written here—this time, he said, ‘He’s coming from the other side… he’s coming. They gave their lives willingly, the same way that Jesus gave His life… and now’s the time. The steps are complete, and he’s coming from the other side. Be warned if you must, he dust if you don’t.’”

  Eleonora Foggia was silent for an uncomfortably long time. Then she looked up at Larry and Larry realized for the first time that she was not only momma, not only handsome, but old. Her skin was finely crumpled, like white tissue-paper out of a hat-box…

  “I still don’t understand why you came to me,” she replied; although she must have done, by now. She just wanted him to spell it out loud and clear, the way she had always insisted he did when he had asked her for anything. Don’t mutter, don’t mumble. Speak up, and tell me what you want. And don’t forget to say “please, momma.”

  Larry said, “Come on, momma. You used to talk about ‘the other side’ all the time, especially when you used to hold those what’s-their-names—seances with grandma. I just figured that you might have some kind of inkling of what this maniac’s trying to tell us.”

  Eleonora Foggia turned and stared up at the oil-painting of her late husband, Larry’s father. Then she said, “You look so much like him, do you know that? You look so much like him, I used to think when you were growing up that maybe you were him, reborn. Your grandma used to think the same. She lost a son. I lost a husband. But we always had you. Your grandma used to call you ‘Mario’s Little Ghost’.”

  “Just tell me about the other side,” Larry asked her.

  “The other side is where you live when you’re dead but you’re not ready to be dead.”

  “And what happened when you held these seances with grandma? Did you ever get in touch with anybody on the other side?”

  His mother looked a little sad. “We thought we did. But maybe it was just our longing that was talking to us. We used to hear whispering. We used to feel people touching us. But, who knows? It was probably nothing. I gave it up years ago; long before you grew up.”

  “You went to a spiritualist session on Nob Hill on June 17 this year. The address was 1591 Jackson, if you want to be picky about it. The host was a man called Wilbert Fraser.”

  She slowly withdrew her hand. “Have you been having me followed?” she demanded, in motherly horror.

  “Of course not. Are you crazy? I’m a detective, that’s all, and detectives detect. Besides, you told Linda all about it, and you didn’t think that Linda wasn’t going to tell me?”

  “Women don’t keep secrets any more,” his mother complained.

  “Of course they keep secrets. But Linda’s my wife and you’re my mother. Why should we have secrets?”

  Eleonora Foggia squeezed her son’s fingers, and smiled. “Cuore di Mama,” she told him.

  “Sure thing,” said Larry, and leaned forward to kiss her. “But tell me something about the other side.”

  “For years I wasn’t sure,” his mother told him. She scraped back her chair and stood up: silhouetted thin and attenuated like a Giacometti sculpture against the fog-whitened net curtains. “Sometimes I used to believe it. sometimes not. Sometimes, I used to lie on my pillow at night and I could hear your father’s voice whispering. I could hear him breathing, slow and regular, the way he always used to! Sometimes we held a seance and I could feel him standing in the room—standing real close, just next to my shoulder—I could feel him and I could smell him, too. His tobacco, his cologne. But then my friend Anna told me to go to Wilbert Fraser.”

  “And what happened at Wilbert Fraser’s?” asked Larry; a little sadly.

  His mother turned and smiled at him. “I saw him. I spoke to him. That’s what happened.”

  “You’ve seen him? You’ve seen poppa? Are you kidding me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’ve seen him and talked to him? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  Eleonora shrugged. “You wouldn’t have believed me, would you? You would have thought I had Alzheimer’s or something, and stopped me from going to see Wilbert any more.”

  “You’re right. I don’t believe you. Jesus, momma! I can understand you feeling that he’s still around, but talking to him—!”

  “It’s true, Larry,” his mother said, with great
simplicity. “The other side really and truly exists.”

  Larry put down his coffee. “You’re telling me that you’ve been to Wilbert Fraser’s and you’ve actually seen poppa and talked to poppa and everything?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, what did he say? Did he tell you what it’s like, being dead?”

  “Don’t mock me, Larry. I’m your momma, and it’s true. As a matter of fact your poppa asked after you. I said you were doing well.”

  Larry stood up; circled around the furniture with his hands in his pockets, and then sat down again. “I don’t know what to say.”

  His mother seemed completely calm. “You asked me about the other side and I told you. What can you say?”

  “All right, then,” said Larry, “let’s suppose for a moment that it does exist. Do you think that it’s possible for people on the other side to—how can I put it?—to come back to this side?”

  His mother raised one eyebrow. “You’re asking me if people can come back from the dead.”

  “I suppose I am, yes.”

  “Well… I don’t think so. Once you’re gone, you’re gone. That’s what I believe, anyway.”

  “Was there ever anybody at Wilbert’s who thought different?”

  Eleonora Foggia thought hard. “There was one… a girl. She believed that she could bring back her dead son. She really believed it. But nobody else took her seriously. I certainly didn’t. Oh… and a young man once. He argued with Wilbert about something, I don’t know what.”

  Larry said nothing for a long time. Quite frankly, he didn’t know whether to follow up this line of investigation or not. He had always been superstitious (salt tossed over his left shoulder; never walking under ladders). But he didn’t seriously believe that it was possible to talk to the dead; or even to smell the dead’s tobacco. However, all of the Fog City Satan’s killings had displayed a ritual quality; almost a religious quality; and his final boast that somebody was coming through from the other side was enough to convince Larry that the killer believed in some kind of spiritualism, even if he didn’t.

  The question was: what religion, with what ceremonies? What did the Fog City Satan worship? A cruel god, a bloody god, for sure. But why were all of these sacrifices necessary? What were they meant to achieve? They were all savage, they were all indescribably cruel. In fact they were so cruel that Larry refused to believe that they hadn’t been done for a purpose; and that he could still work out some kind of pattern behind them, if he tried.

  A pattern would mean predictability; and predictability would allow him to be standing in the next would-be victim’s home, ready to put the cuffs on the Fog City Satan just as soon as he smashed his way in through the door.

  “Are you going again?” he asked his mother.

  “Going? Going where?”

  “To Wilbert Fraser’s, for another seance?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Supposing I asked you to go? And supposing I asked you to take me along?”

  “Why should you want to do that?”

  “I just want to understand what this ‘other side’ stuff is all about, that’s all. It may have nothing to do with the Fog City Satan, but it’s something I have to check out.”

  Larry’s mother said, “Well… I wasn’t planning on going again. But if that’s what you want. They meet Tuesday evenings. There’s only one thing, though: I’d have to make some conditions. You must promise me that you won’t tell everybody there that you’re a police detective; and you must also promise not to embarrass me.”

  “Momma,” Larry told her. “Would I embarrass you?”

  “Yes,” said his mother, sharply. “You’ve been embarrassing me all my life. Children always embarrass their parents, just the same way that parents always embarrass their children. I haven’t stopped. Why should you?”

  “Momma!” Larry protested.

  She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “You can have as much help from me as you wish. But don’t ever take me for granted.”

  She went to the other side of the room, and he watched her face in the gloomy mirror as she opened the polished lid of her record-player, and put on Si, mi chiamano Mimi from La Boheme.

  “You should have remarried,” he told her. “You’re a beautiful woman. Years ago, you should have found yourself somebody else.”

  Her reflection looked at him and smiled. “There was nobody like your poppa. Nobody that I ever wanted.”

  “Hard to please, hunh?” Larry asked her, finishing his capuccino. “And I always thought you were such a soft touch.”

  “L’abito non fa il monaco,” she replied. “And there’s one thing more you to remember, if you come with me to Wilbert’s.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You may see poppa. You may even talk to him, if the vibrations are good. But you must promise me not to be frightened.”

  “I’m not too sure that I want to see poppa. You know, dead is dead.”

  “No, Larry. Dead is just like living in another place. Close by, very close by, but very different.”

  Mussolini screeched out, “Pesci in fascia! Pesci in fascia! Fish in your face!”

  “Do you believe in euthanasia for old parrots?” Larry asked his mother.

  *

  That evening, Houston drove him back to Fulton to talk to a woman who lived across the street from the Berry condominium. She claimed to have seen a man “pacing up and down” outside the house shortly before nine o’clock on the evening that the Berrys had been killed.

  She lived in a second-floor studio apartment that smelled of cat-litter and sour milk. She kept herself wrapped in a large multi-colored blanket while they talked to her, creaking from side to side in a basketwork chair. Larry stayed by the window, looking down into the foggy street. Everything was covered in cat-hairs, he didn’t feel like sitting down.

  Houston asked her, for Larry’s benefit, “You told me he was tall.”

  “Tall, that’s right,” she agreed.

  “How tall would you estimate? Six? Six-one? Taller?”

  “Tall, that’s all. And big, too.”

  “And how was he dressed?” Houston asked her.

  “I told you before. Jeans, and a kind of a loose shirt. And he had some kind of a pouch or a bag hanging around his waist.”

  “What color was his hair? Dark, do you think, or fair?”

  “I told you before,” the woman replied. “He was bald, or what looked like bald. It was foggy, just like tonight. Hard to see anything too well.”

  “So he was pacing up and down, that’s all? You didn’t see him enter the building?”

  The woman shook her head. A marmalade cat jumped possessively onto her lap and started to rub the top of its head against her arm. “Now, Basil,” she admonished it. “Don’t be so jealous.”

  “Did you see the man do anything else?” Houston demanded, as loudly as a prompter in a bad amateur play.

  “Of course I did. I told you before,” the woman snapped back.

  “Would you please tell me again, just for Lieutenant Foggia’s benefit?”

  The woman creaked around in her seat and stared at Larry with penetrating eyes. One of her cats let out a doleful miaow, and then they all joined in.

  “My cats don’t like you,” the woman told him.

  “They can smell parrot on me,” Larry replied.

  “Would you just tell the lieutenant what you saw?” Houston asked her, desperately.

  “Well… I saw him put a bag on his head.”

  “A bag?” asked Larry, “What kind of a bag? Or was it a hood? Or maybe a scarf?”

  “It was a bag, stupid I know a bag when I see one. Like a big black sport bag. Or a bowling bag. He bent down and he put it on his head.”

  Larry peered across the street. It was difficult to make out anything at all in this fog. “You looked out of the window and you saw a tall bald man put a black sport bag on his head?”

  “That’s correc
t.”

  “All right, then What did he do next?”

  “He just stood there for a while.”

  “I see. With this bag on his head?”

  The woman drew her blanket more tightly around her. Her nose was hooked, and she reminded Houston of a tattered eagle sitting in a tattered nest. “Are you trying to tell me that I was mistooken?”

  Larry shook his head. “Of course not. How’s your eyesight?”

  “Better than your manners, boy.”

  Larry said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. But we get so many people calling us up with false information—well, we have to be certain, that’s all.”

  “And you don’t believe that I saw a man standing outside that house with a sport bag on his head?” the woman retorted, defiantly.

  Larry hunkered down in front of her, trying to smile, trying to be warm and reassuring. Close up, the woman stank strongly of dried urine. “I believe you saw something that looked like a man with a sport bag on his head. But, let’s face it, how often do you see people wearing sport bags on their head? It’s not the kind of thing you see very often, is it?”

  “That’s why I told the officer about it,” the woman retaliated. “I said those exact words, almost. It’s not the kind of thing you see too often, is it?”

  “Well, you’re right; and thank you for your help.” Larry told her.

  Halfway down the darkened staircase, Houston said, “I’m sorry. She sounded more rational, the first time I talked to her.”

  “That’s all right, don’t apologize,” Larry told him. “I want to see everything. Every interview. Every report. There’s something hidden in all of this. Something that’s staring us right in the face, but which we can’t understand. Do you know what I mean?”

  “What about this bald guy with a bowling bag on his head?”

  Larry opened the street door, and shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he thought that if his head looked like a bowling ball, he might as well carry it around in a bowling bag.”

  “I can taste cat litter,” Houston complained. “I can actually taste it.”

  *

  Norm Dianda took off his earphones and blinked at Larry like a disturbed bush-baby. “Okay… we have several different auditory events going on here. I’ve separated each of them as far as I possibly can, but it’s hard to be specific about some of the sounds in the distance.”