Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  I just can’t take it any more, Charlie.

  He walked inside the living-room, which had the appearance of a room in which nobody lived. Mrs Nazarena’s work again, of course – and now he remembered what had nagged him earlier in the bar, and that was the promise he’d made to call her tonight. He opened his address book, flicking the pages even as he wondered how he could possibly help Ella Nazarena when his hand trembled the way it did and his brain had the texture of used toilet-paper.

  He dialled the number. Mrs Nazarena answered at once, as if she’d been waiting by the phone. “I am happy you called,” she said.

  He lay back across the sofa with his eyes shut. “Do you want to discuss … whatever it is …?”

  “I don’t like phones. I prefer face to face.”

  Galloway, sighing, wondered why. It was unlike Mrs Nazarena to be this secretive. “Do you want to meet me tomorrow?”

  “Tonight would be better. If convenient.”

  Tonight, he thought. How could he go out into the world and be exposed under that great full moon? He needed rooms, small manageable spaces he could control. The external world was menacing in his fragile condition.

  “Can you come here?” he asked, then remembered she had no car. He, on the other hand, had a Toyota in his garage, although the prospect of driving across Los Angeles with this thudding drum of a hangover was dreadful.

  “I could catch a bus,” she said. “Or a cab.”

  “No, I’ll come to your house. Give me about half an hour.” Big-hearted Charlie.

  “Don’t drive if you’ve been drinking too much,” she said. “I don’t want you to do anything unwise.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll be okay.”

  “You have the address?”

  Galloway said he’d find the street. “Did you see Karen when you were here today?” he asked, as if the subject of Karen were an afterthought.

  “She telephoned me. She wanted some of her clothing. I took it to her.”

  “Where?”

  “We met at a supermarket. She no want to come to the house.”

  “Did she say anything? Did she say where she’s staying?”

  “I shouldn’t tell. It’s a confidence.”

  “But you know, right?” He tried to keep his questions light and off-handed, but he could hear tension in his voice.

  “She said a name.”

  “What name?”

  “I shouldn’t answer.”

  “What name, Ella?”

  “Okay. This one time I tell. But not again. She said Justine.”

  “Justine Harper?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember.”

  Charlie Galloway thanked her, then set the receiver down. Justine Harper, he thought. Why would Karen even have mentioned where she was living if she didn’t want him to find out from Mrs Nazarena? It was a hopeful sign; she expected him to make contact. At least that was how he read the situation.

  Justine Harper, a colleague of Karen’s in the copyright department of a music-publishing company called Monumento Incorporated, was a divorcee who lived in Santa Monica. Charlie Galloway had always found her friendly in a somewhat guarded manner, as if she expected all human relationships in the state of California to be temporary at best, so why become too close and vulnerable?

  He got up from the sofa. His head ached. He dreaded the freeways, those poisoned bloodstreams of Los Angeles that would take him to Ella Nazarena. But he’d made a promise, the keeping of which seemed a good place to begin if he was thinking in terms of redeeming himself – an odd phrase that made him feel like something left in a pawnshop, something dry and cobwebbed and waiting to be wanted.

  Ella lived in a neighbourhood of third-world tract housing near LAX. One street looked pretty much like the next, one house practically identical to the other. For Sale notices, dried-out lawns, vandalised streetlamps, here and there an abandoned house without windows where squatters moved in with their crack pipes and cokehead girl-friends, glazed cookies who’d suck anything for a buzz. Walkways were strewn with dead kitchen appliances, shattered cars, lampshades, plastic sofas, as if everything was one big sidewalk sale. Something more than despair possessed this district, something against which Charlie Galloway wanted to shut the window of his car as if a toxic vapour were rising invisibly through cracks in the pavement. Desperation was the jailer here.

  Dogs, maddened by moon and heat, deranged by changes in planetary rhythms beyond the detection of humans, roamed everywhere. They appeared in front of his headlights, snarling into the beams. They skulked along the sidewalks, scavenged through spilled garbage, yelped and howled and struggled with one another. Some of them might once have been domestic pets abandoned by fleeing owners, but others looked as if they’d always been wild. Black shapes slunk around the corners of Galloway’s vision and for a time he wondered if these were figments of his own creation, delirium’s menagerie. But the barking and howling were real enough, piercing his brain.

  He found the street where Ella lived. It adjoined a large area of darkened wasteland, presumably the kingdom of the dog packs. He parked his Toyota outside her small house, then locked it. Several curs sniffed him in a predatory way. When he hissed at them they backed off and barked with their heads uplifted and their jaws slack. Creatures of the full moon, he thought. But it would always be full moon time, always Hallowe’en, in this neighbourhood. Punk rock music played loudly and a motorcycle was being made to roar every few seconds before fading, and now and again a girl could be heard laughing in a manner Galloway thought was inspired more by some hilarious dope vision than by happiness.

  The yellow light on Ella’s porch was obscured by foliage and barely illuminated his path. He pushed open the gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the front yard. The dry stands of brittle oleander were rattling, alive with movement, as if at any moment there might be an explosion of vicious dogs who lay concealed among the leaves. It was not a good night to be abroad, he thought, and he rushed up on the porch where both screen and front door lay unexpectedly open and you could see a TV playing in a corner of the living-room, a night-time soap, an hysterical woman screaming at somebody.

  There were dogs in the living-room too.

  Dogs indoors.

  Charlie Galloway didn’t move for many chilly minutes. The dialogue on the TV might have been spoken in Estonian, so little sense did it make to him. But nothing made sense in this small tidy room with its floral curtains and framed velvet Christs, nothing, not the open doors that ought to have been closed against the night, certainly not the five or six dogs clustered under the window with heads busily bent.

  Everything bewildered him. He couldn’t breathe. He took a step toward the dogs, who turned to gaze at him. Blood dripped from their teeth.

  His head throbbed. He raised his face to the ceiling. Through small vents damp air blew from the evaporative cooler, which vibrated on the roof. This isn’t what I think it is, he told himself. This isn’t what I think it is. The small room shrunk around him. His clothes stuck to his skin. He felt fevered.

  He stepped closer to the dogs, who snarled and barked. But they parted in his advance anyway. Sated by their recent meal, they were less belligerent than they might have been. He kept moving. The dogs, black and brown, white and grey, continued to back off, some whining, others growling half-heartedly at him. There was a certain controlled madness in their eyes; at any time they might just go berserk and savage him next.

  But he didn’t move any nearer. He’d gone close enough. Another step would take him where he didn’t want to go.

  He’d seen.

  He began to shake. He needed a drink. Inside the narrow kitchen he searched the refrigerator but found nothing except cold boiled rice and egg salad. He opened one cabinet after another until he came upon a bottle of Gallo red. He wouldn’t have chosen it for himself, but there was a drinker’s saying: Any port in a storm.

  He made a phone-call from the kitchen. He wondered if the operator understood an
ything he was telling her because he was asked to repeat his information, which he did in a voice that wasn’t strictly his own, but thin and stretched, as though his words were latex. When he hung up he leaned into the sink and stuck a finger deep into his throat. His stomach muscles knotted and his chest ached, but he brought nothing up. He doused his face with cold water, then returned to the living-room with the bottle. The dogs had gone, leaving behind the musty smell of fur. On TV a diaper commercial was playing. Babies blew soap-bubbles, rainbow-coloured spheres, a pristine little world. No dogs.

  Charlie Galloway, deflated, slumped on the sofa, the wine bottle jammed between his unsteady legs. He didn’t open it, but he kept his palms upon the comforting curve of glass.

  6

  “And they call them man’s best friend,” said the Lieutenant named Kenneth P Duffy, who arrived with an entourage in response to Charlie Galloway’s phone-call.

  Friedmann, Duffy’s forensic expert, said that Mrs Nazarena had clearly been shot once in the side of the head before the animals, drawn by blood, had come inside the house to dine. Death was a result of the gunshot wound, not the savagery of dogs. A didactic, unfeeling gnome, Friedmann was a cousin to those clay creatures one occasionally saw lingering with quiet malice on suburban lawns. He prefaced almost everything he said with the word ‘clearly’.

  Charlie Galloway hadn’t risen from the sofa for the last hour and still clutched the unopened bottle of Gallo, which tempted and terrified him. He was irritated by the circus of Friedmann and Duffy and the studious fingerprint guy in the seersucker jacket who whistled If I Were A Blackbird as he dusted and the two uniformed cops who ransacked the little house with all the finesse of dray-horses. Despite himself, Galloway found his eyes drawn to the sight of the white sheet thrown over Mrs Nazarena. Blood, blackening now, had soaked through the fibre.

  Duffy stepped into the kitchen and spent some time talking quietly on the phone. When he came back he sat on the arm of the sofa and smoked a cigarette. He had a very small ginger moustache. His teeth and fingers were stained with the dull bloom of nicotine. “And you say you just dropped in, Galloway?”

  “She was a good family friend,” Galloway said. “She wanted to see me about something.”

  “And you don’t know what?”

  “When I got here she wasn’t in any position to tell me.”

  Duffy smoked feverishly. He was no cocktail party smoker, no well-mannered nicotine amateur. He was the real thing, a fiercely addicted fiend. Smoke shot through his nostrils, billowed out of his mouth, creating a modest vanishing illusion.

  “The story downtown is you walked away from the drunk-tank,” Duffy said.

  “It wasn’t exactly a drunk-tank, Duffy.”

  “Clinic then. Whatever. What the hell’s in a name? Point is, you haven’t licked the old boozeroo problem.”

  “I’m working on it,” Galloway replied reluctantly. He had never liked Duffy and was reluctant to talk about his personal failings in front of the man. Duffy was a locker-room gossip, a broadsheet on the bulletin board. Tell Duffy anything and it was bruited about with abandon.

  “I can see you’re doing real well.” Duffy nodded at the wine-bottle, which was like an enormous pacifier in Galloway’s lap. “I can tell you’re coming to grips with it.”

  Charlie Galloway ignored the broad sarcasm. Why bother? The bait was bad, not worth taking. He was consumed by weariness and sorrow, even as he was bedevilled by clear-headedness; this was the dead centre of some limpid nightmare. He smelled the evaporative cooler blowing musty shafts of luke-warm moisture through the room. He wanted to go back up into the canyons, where the air might be fresher. The frail house rumbled a moment. Overhead, an enormous jumbo jet ferrying people to Saudi Arabia or Thailand rose into the stars. First-class passengers would already be sipping in-flight cocktails, he thought.

  The forensic expert said, “I’m through here. I’ll have my report on your desk first thing, Duffy. I’m late for supper. My wife had a humungous roast in the oven when I left.” Friedmann looked at Galloway now. “A good meat has to be rare. It spoils if you overcook it.”

  Part of the continuing nightmare, Galloway thought. A cop with a face made out of smoke. A forensic expert, who’d just examined a bloody corpse, yearning for the taste of underdone animal flesh. Galloway felt he’d fallen through a trapdoor into a greasy subterranean cellar inhabited by persons who were just the wrong side of being securely hinged.

  Friedmann departed. Outside, dogs barked at him.

  Duffy asked, “Was she in any kind of trouble?”

  Galloway observed the fingerprint man dust the window ledge, his head bent over his work. “I don’t know.”

  “Did she have enemies?”

  “I’d hardly think so. She was a nice woman. Religious. Good-hearted.”

  “Nice people sometimes have enemies,” Duffy said. “Was there a man in her life? Scorned lover puts bullet in mistress’s skull, that kind of thing?”

  Galloway said he didn’t know. He gazed into the wine-bottle. The deep red liquid appeared secretive. Sometimes, inebriated on wine – which was not his drink of choice – he’d experienced a kind of mystical high, affinities with the universe, dizzying insights beyond language, cosmic moments. Unfortunately, wine almost always made him throw up.

  Duffy wandered over to the window, looked out into the dark street. He put his hands into his pockets and rattled loose change as he swayed a little on the balls of his feet. “It’s a hell of a neighbourhood,” he said. “It’s like some other country out there. Fucking Nicaragua or something. Drive a couple of miles from here in one direction, shit, you’re in Beverly Hills. Go in another, Santa Monica.”

  Charlie Galloway agreed these were baffling contrasts.

  “I’d raze the whole goddam area, Galloway, if it was up to me.”

  Galloway let Duffy’s notion of urban redevelopment pass without comment.

  Duffy went on, “A lot of things don’t make much sense. You find that, Galloway? People murdered for a few nickels. People murdered for nothing but kicks. And this woman,” – here Duffy glanced down at the sheet – “who’d want to kill her? It doesn’t look like robbery, does it? I don’t get the impression the joint’s been turned over. What’s worth stealing here? You want a velvet portrait of Jesus? A plaster madonna or two? Rosary beads? Trash. Schlock. Even the TV’s ancient. The stereo goes back to when hi-fi was state of the art. All this woman had was crap.”

  This crude inventory of Mrs Nazarena’s world struck Charlie as needless. Given to a sentimentality that was both the burden and blessing of his race, he understood, and was touched by, how much her religious artefacts had meant to Ella Nazarena. A simple woman without malice, she believed unquestioningly in her religion. She lived a peaceful life. So what could possibly have troubled her so much that she’d needed to talk to him? What was it she didn’t want to discuss on the telephone? And why was this clown Duffy demeaning her in death?

  “Maybe she did a little dealing on the side, peddled dope, nothing big,” Duffy said. “You think that’s a possibility? Smalltime dealer offed by drug-crazed junkie?”

  Galloway shook his head and thought: drink the Gallo, Charlie. You’ve earned it. People like Duffy were walking tabloids. They thought in headlines. That way their world was concise, smaller, easier to handle. Complexities were rare birds they could neither cage nor categorise.

  Duffy said, “You ought to wander off home now, Galloway. Seeing as you’re suspended and don’t have any official business here, I don’t see much point in you staying. We’ll probably speak again. If I need you I know where to find you. Toodle-oo.”

  Charlie Galloway stood up. His legs were leaden. He left the wine on the coffee table. Through an open door he could see into a bedroom where the two uniformed men were rummaging around a closet. A large double bed, covered by a patchwork quilt, dominated the room. On the wall was the inevitable crucifix which, having been disturbed by one of the uniformed cops
, hung aslant; Jesus at a bad angle. The cops were discussing a recent baseball game.

  Galloway limped outside. The darkness had the texture of a hot flannel pressed against his face. Beyond the fence that surrounded Mrs Nazarena’s yard, a few neighbours, drawn by cop cars, silently observed the house. He passed among them, reached his car, got inside. As he turned the key in the ignition he noticed his radio had been taken. Goddam! From the vacant slot on the dashboard red and black wires dangled like thin petrified eels of exotic origin. Here, in this neighbourhood of murder and mad dogs, he’d been burglarised. It was wondrously symmetrical. A dead woman with something left unspoken. A stolen radio. He had the feeling he’d been cut off from all sources of information in a land of thieves and killers.

  Disconcerted, hearing the Cossack horsemen of depression thunder across the steppes toward him, he drove back to the freeway.

  When he entered his house, Galloway turned on the lights in every room. He dispersed all darkness and stalked the place with the nervous energy of a man who has just been assailed by horror, back and forth, up and down, conscious of how silence was not banished by the blaze of lights but instead underlined: electricity accentuated everything. He switched the TV on then off again, assaulted only briefly by the chaotic sadism of the Three Stooges. In the kitchen he found a little stack of mail that Mrs Nazarena, on the last afternoon of her life, must have placed on the table. He’d overlooked it before. Now he sifted it without interest, imagining the dead woman’s hand aligning these envelopes just so. Bills, plastic windows through which he had no desire to peer, a dull assortment. Only one item engaged him, a card from his father in Lennoxtown, Scotland.

  Daniel Galloway lived in a rest-home on the outskirts of Glasgow, a converted Victorian house at the foot of the Campsie Fells. Daniel, seventy-nine, had been sending postcards to his son for the last three years. Usually these contained enigmatic messages, or random family references. This latest, which had a view of Loch Lomond at sunset, read: