Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  He entered the apartment, quietly closing the door at his back. The room in which he stood contained a sofa and a coffee table, on which lay an aluminium tray that contained the remains of a TV dinner, one dehydrated meatball and two small carrot wheels. He made his way around the sofa, drawn to a door on his left. Pale light emerged from the room beyond.

  A woman’s whispered voice said something Galloway couldn’t quite catch. A man laughed in that intimate way suggestive of impending coitus. Galloway peered into the space between door and jamb. What he saw at first was a fringed lampshade on a bedside table and a plump white hand extinguishing a cigarette in an ashtray. Then yellow hair, a bare white back, well-fleshed shoulders, buttocks dimpled with cellulite.

  “Slip it in.” A man’s voice. “Yeah. Oh. Like that.”

  The woman coughed.

  The man said, “You make my balls ache when you cough.”

  “Poochie’s sorry.”

  Poochie! Galloway, eavesdropper, voyeur, had the distinct sense of reaching the limits of his trespass. At any moment he was going to kick the door wide open. He hesitated. You gathered nerve, hoped for a rush of adrenalin. His forehead was damp from sweat. And yet. How could he intrude on this moment? How could he barge in, an agent of coitus interruptus?

  Besides, the man had mounted the woman now. Having rolled over on her back with a grunt, her thick thighs spread to heaven and her fingers drumming her lover’s spine, she gazed through half-shut eyes toward the door, where she appeared to see Galloway in the narrow space but didn’t react, almost as if she were so far gone into screwing that the presence of a stranger might have been for her some form of sexual hallucination. She was straining through levels of increasing effort for orgasm and maybe she perceived nothing of the external world. Who knows?

  It was a sight, Galloway thought, and it froze him. He couldn’t take his eyes away. The little brown man aboard Brenda, a weird circus act, Human Fly Scales Impossible Cliffs of Flesh. Saddled, Freddie Joaquin thrust away without finesse but with appreciable abandon. His clothes, Charlie noticed, were hung neatly over the back of a nearby chair. Even his dark socks were folded, his necktie rolled up.

  “Oooh, you fucker, you beauty fucker,” the woman said. “You fuck me so good, babe babe babe, sweeeet baby, so good, oh fuck, oh Christ, ride me, Jesus, motherofgod motherof motherof.”

  Her coming was an event to witness. Charlie Galloway was transfixed. Fascinated, he saw the entire expanse of her white body shake, as if racked by an internal quake of quantifiable seismic activity. Her veins became rigid in her neck and arms, a purple network of narrow elevated ducts through which her blood pounded and raced. Her jaw hung open and her face was tilted back and she cried out in the impenetrable glossolalia of profound orgasm, muttering words that were not words, but suggested instead the hissing of snakes or indecipherable Aramaic, the language of a religious experience such as one might undergo in the presence of death. Her hands contorted, became claws that raked Freddie’s back, and her upraised knees, formerly locked around him, parted and wobbled and plopped flat on either side of the little man, and she sighed the longest sigh Charlie Galloway had ever heard in his life.

  And then the woman plummeted back to reality and registered the stranger in the doorway. She shouted, “Hey! You! Asshole! What the hell?” and raised her hand, pointing one thick white finger at Charlie Galloway, whose first reaction was the shame of the voyeur, the man caught with his face pressed against the greasy glass window of a private pube-show, hands suspiciously tucked in the big pockets of an Aquascutum where he had scissored holes that gave him surreptitious access to his dick. He pushed the door wide, stepped toward the bed. Freddie Joaquin turned his face, simultaneously rolling off Brenda much as a man might dismount an awkward, dizzying fairground ride.

  “I’m sorry,” Galloway said. “I could have chosen a better time.” Master of the understatement, he smiled wanly at the couple in the bed. He had the impression that the room was dominated by bare buttocks, random genitalia. I came at the wrong time, he thought. The only one who did.

  “This is great, this is just fucking terrific,” Freddie Joaquin said and reached for a telephone on the bedside table. “This is what I call illegal. This is gonna interest Duffy.”

  “Who is this geezer?” Brenda wanted to know.

  “He goes around saying he’s a cop, but I learned different today. He’s unemployed. Suspended. Right, Galloway?” Joaquin, drawing a bedsheet over himself, began to dial a number.

  Charlie Galloway had absolutely no intention of letting Duffy learn of Evelyn Thompson’s eyewitness account just yet, if indeed ever. Duffy was a twit, or, as they phrased it so cryptically in Glasgow, a nyaff. Galloway brought his hand down with no great force on the back of Freddie Joaquin’s wrist and the little man dropped the telephone. Brenda lunged at Galloway with a foot. Tangled in the bedsheet, her foot was somewhat impeded, although a blow managed to land in Charlie’s groin. It took the wind out of him briefly. He felt a weird implosion; in his testes some small tent had collapsed.

  “Sick fuck,” Brenda said. “Coming inside the privacy of somebody’s bedroom. You do this a lot, mister? You spy on people? Go round pretending you’re a cop just so’s you can watch people make love?”

  “What the hell do you want, Galloway?” Joaquin asked. Brenda was kissing his aching hand like a woman comforting an ailing chihuahua.

  Charlie Galloway had his hands in his pockets, as if to prevent the pain he felt from spreading. The woman had clipped him nicely. Had her blow been uninterrupted he would have been levelled on the floor, eunuchoid. He whistled tunelessly, pretended nonchalance, walked to the window and looked out across the San Diego Freeway. Incessant traffic, almost two unbroken threads of light, flowed north and south. He sucked in some air and gazed down at the lit green water of the rectangular swimming-pool. A swimmer kicked up froth and the underwater lights fragmented. Pain, such as Galloway felt then, dissipated all the quicker the less attention you paid it. Granny Galloway’s Household Book of Hints, page twenty-three, chapter heading, Sore Balls and What To Do With Them.

  He turned away from the view. The ache was fading. “Now we’ve got the violence out of the way, Freddie, let’s get down to business. You said you saw Ella Nazarena for the last time the night before she was killed.”

  “Sure. We had dinner. Pico Boulevard. Polynesian food. I told you all this.”

  “Aye, I remember, and the food was unbearable,” Galloway said impatiently. “But here’s the rub, Freddie. I’ve got an eyewitness that can place you at her house last night, at the time when she was shot.”

  “An eyewitness? What eyewitness?”

  Galloway sat on the edge of the bed. An intimate threesome, he thought. Did you hear the one about the Scotsman, the big blond stripper, and the little Filipino? He wondered what the punchline could be.

  “You lied to me, my wee friend. And I’m bloody disappointed in you.” He studied Freddie’s face, trying to imagine him committing murder. But then Galloway couldn’t imagine anyone killing Ella Nazarena. During his deskbound years, he must have lost touch with that whole world of serious brutality. He’d relegated to some cranny of his memory the darker urges of the creatures in the human zoo.

  With emphatic scorn, Joaquin said, “Listen to the man. He talks to me about lying. You’re the liar, Galloway. You never said you were suspended. I don’t have to answer questions. You don’t have no eyewitness.” Joaquin reached for the telephone with his uninjured hand.

  Galloway said, “Will you never learn?” and twisted the receiver out of Joaquin’s fist. He understood the Filipino’s need to put on a manly show for the sake of big Brenda, but enough was enough. Galloway yanked the cord from the wall this time, a decisive gesture that gave him some quiet, transient pleasure. Basically, though, he didn’t have the taste for violent displays. You needed to enjoy violence before you became good at it.

  “Don’t say a word, Freddie. Call your lawyer, you w
ant my advice,” said Brenda, who was still gently holding Freddie’s bruised fingers.

  This tenderness, obviously so genuine, reminded Charlie Galloway of how the varieties of love and compassion were infinite, a fact he sometimes forgot. In this rich world of love the most unlikely partners came together in the heart’s strange mambo, some briefly, others for a lifetime. He’d always imagined he belonged in the latter category. Now he wasn’t sure. Certainty wasn’t his forte these days.

  “You don’t want to call your lawyer, Freddie. And you don’t want to call Duffy just yet. Let’s talk, you and I. Man to man. Then we’ll see where we are.”

  Joaquin rose from the bed, draped in a white sheet. “Who’s your eyewitness?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Freddie.”

  “Somebody blind, I bet. Some loko-loko person,” and here Freddie Joaquin tapped the side of his skull with a finger of derision.

  “Call your lawyer, hon,” said Brenda, staring fiercely at Galloway.

  Freddie Joaquin stared at the woman. “Just keep your face out my business.”

  “Well, pardon me,” she said, sulking.

  “I don’t need to answer anything this guy asks,” Joaquin said. “He’s bluffing. You can see that.”

  Charlie Galloway shrugged. “My eyewitness is prepared to swear in court you entered Ella Nazarena’s house on the night of her murder. A court of law, Freddie. Think about that, my wee friend. Let that one sink in. And then if you still want to call Duffy, just plug the phone back in the wall and do it.”

  “Yeah yeah. You know what? I still think you’re bluffing, Galloway.”

  “That’s your prerogative, my man.”

  Joaquin opened the balcony door and the whine of the freeway entered the room. Pensively, he peered out into the darkness, flicking his cigarette away and watching it create deep red sparks as it fell toward the swimming-pool. Then he turned to Galloway and smiled. “It would be your eyewitness’s word against mine, Galloway.”

  “True. But juries take credibility into account, Freddie. My eyewitness has led a law-abiding life. Can you say the same? I don’t think so. You’ve got a dirty wee secret here and there. Who’s a jury going to believe? Twelve good folk and true, Freddie. Who are they going to listen to? You? Or my witness?”

  The word ‘jury’, with all its implications of courtrooms and lawyers and immersion in a legal system Freddie had experienced before in his life, jolted the little man. A whole awesome world, defined by great leather law volumes that terrified him, opened out before him. Stern judges, sceptical juries, the confines of courtrooms, harsh interrogations. It was an unpleasant universe of boobytraps and tell-tale witnesses. In a court of law people talked about you like you were absent. And nothing was simple in a court, nothing made any sense. Surrounded by gangs of dark-suited men talking about his fate in a language he didn’t understand, he was lost.

  And then the slammer – Cristo! How could he deal with that again? Barred, slung in a bare ten by ten room with some white racist – which was what had happened last time when he’d been locked away in the company of a big hairy man called Warren Schwerm, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood who hated anything yellow, brown or black, and had referred to Freddie as ‘his goddam gookness’. Is his gookness awake yet? Did his goddam gookness have a pleasant night? A sadist of truly spooky proportions, Schwerm had once tried to carve a swastika in Freddie’s chest with a carving-knife. It’s a holy symbol, Schwerm had insisted, a fucking Christian sign, you pagan gook. A few times he’d banged Freddie’s head off the wall just because he was bored. And Schwerm wasn’t the only one with a racial grudge to exercise. He had his Brothers too, all of whom considered cruelty a way of life. These were men who thought Hitler soft. Freddie was subjected to kickings, petty acts of viciousness, sexual harassment in the shower-room, a whole slew of humiliations.

  No way was he going back to that. No way. Uh-huh.

  “If you want to talk, Freddie, I’m listening,” said Galloway, wondering if any jury would actually believe his witness or simply consider Evelyn Thompson a senile English eccentric given to lapses of memory. “Remember. It’s you against my eyewitness, and I wouldn’t bet on you.”

  Joaquin’s instincts told him that Galloway was no bluffer: he held the eyewitness card just like he claimed. But Freddie had a sudden notion that if he played his own hand properly he would face neither jury nor jail, which was why he’d slid the balcony door open in the first place, so that he might have quick access to a potted fern, in the mulch of which lay concealed a Beretta – not, of course, the gun used on Ella Nazarena, a Colt purchased in the john of a bar in East Los Angeles from a black guy whose speciality was removing serial numbers from weapons. That particular Colt, wiped clean, had been wrapped in aluminium foil and tossed into a dumpster behind a Ralph’s supermarket in West Hollywood, whence it would travel to the city dump or some faraway landfill.

  The Beretta was handy. It made him feel secure. He had only to stretch a couple of feet. But he didn’t reach because it occurred to him that shooting Charlie Galloway without further deliberation was a very wrong move, ill-considered, impulsive. The guy was the Law, suspended or otherwise, and you didn’t go round killing cops except as a last resort. Such an act, Freddie was convinced, would bring down the wrath of God on him. He decided on a half-truth because he had a greater affinity with distortion than murder. Lies could be changed. Murder was final.

  He turned, faced Galloway. “I never killed her, Galloway. I swear on my life.” He crossed himself deftly.

  Charlie Galloway sighed. “And you didn’t go there last night, right? My eyewitness made a mistake. You can prove you were someplace else. As I recall, you said you were glued to Wheel of Fortune.”

  Freddie Joaquin shook his head. “Lissen. I admit. I went to see her. I don’t deny it. I got nothing to hide. I went to see her.”

  Brenda interrupted, “You don’t have to talk to this foreign geek, hon.”

  Joaquin glanced at the woman without seeing her. “Only she was dead when I got there, Galloway. I swear. A guy like me, a prison record, we don’t call cops. You understand that? I saw she was dead and I got out fast. Put yourself in my place, Galloway.”

  Galloway leaned against the wall, arms folded. “Bullshit. You killed her.”

  “Why, huh? Tell me that. Go on. I’m listening.”

  “Try this one. Let’s say there was talk of marriage. Let’s say she thought you were going to make her your wife.” He paused a second, lingering over this last word which echoed inside him like a harpstring. “But you refused. Maybe you’d fallen out of love. Happens all the time. Nothing is forever. Romance over, violins back in their cases, dancehall empty. Let’s say all the roses had withered for Ella. But she insisted. No, Freddie, she says, I still love you. Don’t leave me. I’ll do anything, she says. There was a bad scene. Violence. You slap her about a bit. Things get out of hand. You shoot her.”

  “Sweeeet Jesus,” Brenda said. “What is this dickhead saying, Freddie? What romance? Who was this Ella anyway?”

  Galloway said, “There’s motive, Freddie. It’s plausible. Best of all, it has the squalid ring of truth.”

  Joaquin said, “Make it stick.”

  Charlie Galloway smiled. Freddie’s hardassed line lost something when it was delivered by a man in a bedsheet. Outside, the freeway droned like some monotonous background gossip. Flying ants, a partnership of praying mantises, all drawn by light, flapped through the open door and went in search of the bedside lamp. Flustered, Brenda beat them vehemently away with a rolled-up copy of People magazine, the swish-swish of which was for a time the only sound inside the room.

  Then Galloway said, “Aw, face it, face it. You’re up shit creek, Freddie. It’s stacked against you. The time. The motive. They’ll turn you into mutton-pie in a courtroom. You confess, you might see freedom again in your very old age with the aid of strong bifocals. You stick to your denial, sonny boy, you’re going away for the remai
nder, especially if the best you can afford is an overworked public defender in an off-the-peg suit. You’re jail fodder, Freddie.”

  Freddie Joaquin felt a weird pressure. Its source appeared to be inside his own head. A stroke? he wondered. A tumour? But it was plain fear, nothing else, an eruption of activity in that part of the brain where dread is manufactured by assembly lines working to a hellish production quota. He considered the Beretta again, but Galloway had moved closer to the balcony door and stood now only a few feet from him. The man’s proximity paralysed Freddie: how could he grab the gun and turn and fire without Galloway taking steps to protect himself? Was Galloway armed? Too many unknowns.

  Freddie sweated. Moisture ran over his scalp, his forehead, collected in his eyelashes, slid down the side of his nose. The bedsheet stuck to him. Panicked, he decided to try another lie. He was buying time now. He was going to have to get the gun. He couldn’t let Charlie Galloway put him away. He wasn’t going through all that crap again. A trial, a jail cell, never – especially for something as serious as first-degree murder. In his flustered state of mind he reached for the first plausible perjury that came to him, one with some minor element of truth to it. He had no real talent for embellishment, no gift at the best of times for spellbinding fabrication. And suddenly these were not the best of times. He tossed truths and half-truths together in a careless salad. All he could think of was the Beretta. It’s going to end real bad for somebody anyhow, he thought, but it’s gonna be Galloway, not me.

  “I’ll tell you who did it, Galloway.”