Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  Larry had to admit that Arne was probably right. But it was odd that a killer who had tortured and slaughtered five families without any compunction should suddenly decide that he was going to leave the sixth family to kill themselves. There was no pattern to it, no logic. None of that identifiable rhythm that lets you know almost immediately that one sickeningly familiar fruitcake is out on the rampage again.

  “I don’t know…”said Larry. “It seems pretty damn risky, leaving the victims alive.”

  “Maybe the mother wants to get caught,” Houston Brough remarked, his mouth crammed with Hubba-Bubba.

  “No, no,” Arne replied. “When they want to be caught, they usually adhere even more closely to their predictable pattern. It seems to me that this fellow doesn’t particularly care whether we catch him or not. He’s marching to quite a different drummer.”

  Phil Biglieri came up to them, closing his case as he did so. He always reminded Larry of one of those henpecked husbands in Thurber cartoons. The kind of round-shouldered man who arrives home to find that even his house has acquired the thunderous face of his domineering wife.

  “We’ll be taking away the bodies now,” he announced. He set down his bag. “It’s a pretty bad one, for sure.”

  Larry said, “Gunshot wounds?”

  Phil Biglieri made a face. “No doubt about it. You can have an interim report by late tomorrow. Well, maybe after lunch.”

  Larry and Arne and Houston Brough stepped back while the medical examiner and two medics almost religiously took Caroline and Joe Berry Junior down from the wall. There were burned outlines on the wallpaper, where their bodies had been. As soon as the children were lifted gently into body-bags and carried away, the medics took Nina and Joe.

  Arne took out a stick of green chlorophyll chewing-gum and folded it into his mouth. “I suppose that you’re very happy, about winning this assignment?”

  “I didn’t choose it, Jolly, I was asked,” Larry replied.

  “Bullshit, you’ve been told,” Arne retorted. “The same way that I’ve been told to fold my tents and move on to Pacific Heights. Three elderly widows found poisoned in three months. Potassium cyanide, no apparent motive. Very Sherlock Holmes, yes?”

  Larry glanced back at Dan Burroughs, who was standing in the hallway with his hands in the pockets of his slack gray suit, smoking furiously and staring at nothing.

  “Jolly, for Christ’s sake, you’re not going to give me a hard time for this, are you? I don’t want to take on this goddamned Fog City Satan any more than you want to give it up.”

  “I never gave up on anything,” said Arne. “I never gave up on Stan Williams; I never gave up on Jack Couderc. Three years it took me to find Jack Couderc. But okay, fuck it, if I have to give it up, I give it up with good grace. You’re welcome to it. So what, it’s nothing but grief! Torture, mumbo-jumbo. Go on, take it. I’m happy for you.”

  Larry didn’t know what to say. He didn’t like Arne, but he liked even less the way that Dan Burroughs had re-assigned the Fog City Satan case because of political pressure rather than proper police procedure. The case was Arne’s; and Arne had solved more than sixty-two percent of the cases to which he had been assigned, and Arne was proud of his reputation. Arne spent untold hours working on the police computers. He built up files that looked like telephone directories. He analyzed his assignments like a chemist, searching for traces of this and traces of that. Motive? Antecedents? Aliases? Addresses? Automobile ownership? Blood type? He had the closest relationship with the coroner’s department of any detective, ever.

  Compared to Arne, Larry always felt as if his only talents were intuition, a passion for opera, a terrific set of teeth, and a blood-relationship to almost every Italian in San Francisco. Arne made him feel like something between Peter Falk, Sylvester Stallone and Frank Langella. Too romantic for a cop. Too inspirational.

  But maybe Dan Burroughs knew what he was doing. Maybe logic just wasn’t enough. Maybe the only possible way to catch the Fog City Satan was by flying blind. By hunch, and guesswork, and sniffing the wind.

  Larry said, “Tell me—have you built up any kind of picture of this guy in your head? Some kind of psychopath, maybe? One of the Press boys mentioned revenge.”

  “Could be revenge,” Houston Brough ventured. “Joe was a cop, after all. And let’s face it, some ex-cons hold a grudge for ever.”

  Arne shook his head. “I don’t believe that this was done for revenge. What could Joe Berry have ever done to anybody, even to an ex-con, to deserve something like this? This isn’t revenge. This is like some kind of madness. This is like some kind of disease! The perpetrator set fire to Joe’s children! He nailed his wife to the floor! This was done because the perpetrator likes to see people suffer.”

  “You think the motive is cruelty, and that s all?”

  “What else? What makes that so hard to believe? The guy likes hurting people. He’s a hundred-percent sadist. The only thing that makes him different is that he’s a very inventive sadist. He can think up ways of hurting people that you wouldn’t believe. He’s like a nightmare; only you can keep on pinching yourself, and he’s still there. He’s worse than a nightmare, he’s real.”

  Dan stepped reluctantly into the room. “How’re you two boys rubbing along?”

  “With this investigation, or with each other?” Arne asked him.

  Dan ignored him. “Goddamned pitiful,” he remarked, looking around, as if he were considering buying the place. “Poor Joe Berry. Who’d have thought he’d’ve wound up like this? God damn it, I remember shaking his hand, the day he quit the force.”

  Arne said, “We can find him. I don’t have any doubts about that. But it’s going to take time.”

  Dan went to the window, and stared out at the fog and his own gray reflection, and sighed. “Trouble is, Arne, time is exactly what we don’t got.”

  “But, be reasonable, chief,” Arne protested. “This isn’t the kind of case you can solve with a snap of the fingers. With a killer like this, you have to scrutinize every single movement, every single footmark, every single fiber. You can’t just go kicking around down doors and pulling in faces you don’t like and beating confessions out of them. I’m sorry, chief. I know that the mayor and the media have been riding you hard. But this one can’t be hurried. We only have to make one wrong move, and we could easily frighten him off for ever, or frighten him into doing something ten times worse than he’s done already.”

  “Arne,” said Dan, growing impatient. “I’ve made up my mind. Larry is going to take over this investigation as of now.”

  Arne took a deep breath. “And I suppose you want me to give him my fullest co-operation?”

  Dan turned away from the window and gave him a lopsided smile. “Of course you will, Arne. We want this bastard caught.”

  “I know, I know,” Arne replied. “Not only caught, but seen to be caught. You want the investigative equivalent of grand opera.”

  “Arne—I want this maniac on death row,” Dan told him. “And I want him on death row soon.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Arne. “I think we all want that. But I can’t pretend to be happy. I’m not saying anything about the way Larry works. He’s a good detective, everybody knows that. But this investigation… well, it needs science, you know? It needs finesse.”

  Dan said, “Finesse, for Christ’s sake? We’re not dancing the fucking cha-cha.”

  “But it’s the detail—”

  “Arne,” said Dan. “Maybe, for a change, this investigation needs somebody who can see a wood, instead of nothing but a whole bunch of fucking trees.”

  Arne didn’t answer. Whatever he said, it wouldn’t do him any good. When Dan made up his mind about something, it couldn’t be changed except by weeks of intense and closely argued lobbying. The trouble was, Dan had worked on the force for nearly thirty years—and even if you could prove that you were technically correct, he was almost always right when it came down to practical, street-level detection.


  Larry cleared his throat and said, “Maybe I can—uh— take a look around.”

  “Well, of course,” Arne told him. “It’s your pigeon now. But we didn’t discover anything unusual.”

  “Four people were nailed down, and you don’t call that unusual?”

  “Of course it’s unusual. But what I’m trying to say is, we didn’t discover anything that added to what we already know about this Fog City Satan, which is pitifully little. No good old-fashioned clues. No stray buttons from a cable-car driver’s pants; no free pens from the Hair Replacement Center. No Chinese fortunes found crumpled under the couch. No pizza flour sprinkled around the room. Well, not until you walked in, anyway.”

  “Do you want to die quick or slow?” Larry retorted.

  “Quick. I don’t know, slow. I want to see the look on your face as I stay alive from one week to the next. I want to see the slow, slow realization on your face that I’m not really going to die, after all.”

  “One more crack about pizza and you’ll die, believe me.”

  Arne led the way out of the living-room and along the corridor. He laid his hand on Larry’s shoulder and his demeanor suddenly changed.

  “Actually, Larry, there is one thing. But I didn’t want to discuss it in front of so the chief. It’s the only clue that connects this killing with all of the other killings. The one and only thing. If I told the chief, he’d be round to Mayor Amo in five minutes flat, telling him something ridiculous, like we’d all but arrested the guy, and of course we’d have blown the whole thing.

  “This is important. It must be important. But the trouble is, I don’t know why it’s important. I want to see what you think of it.”

  “Why should you care what I think of it?”

  “Because everybody can contribute something positive to a complex case like this, even a Neapolitan kamikaze pilot like you.”

  “I hope you realize that I didn’t actively volunteer for this assignment,” Larry told him.

  “No, for sure, of course you didn’t,” Arne replied. “On the other hand, did you actively turn it down, when it was offered to you? Did you say, ‘No, Dan, thanks very much, this is Arne’s baby’? You know how I feel about this assignment, Larry. This assignment is the bee in my bonnet. This is the birdhouse in my soul.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about this Fog City Satan,” said Larry. He had read all the Press reports and listened to all the television bulletins. Ritual Slayings In Forest Hill. Family Massacred in College Park. Satan Slays Four On Farragut. But he wanted to know where Arne’s thinking was at. He wanted to pick up for himself that same scarcely perceptible scent that Arne was following. That faint but certain aroma that all killers leave on the wind.

  “Sure,” said Arne. “But come take a look at this first.”

  Larry followed Arne along the corridor to the children’s bedroom. “I nearly missed these, you know,” said Arne. He ushered Larry right into the room, and then half-closed the door. “There,” he said. “What do you make of this?”

  “Jesus,” said Larry, and crossed himself.

  A rag-doll and a toy rabbit were nailed side by side to the back of the paneling. They were grubby with years of loving—years of being sucked and cuddled and dragged around the streets. In their heads were embedded the same kind of railroad dogs that had fastened Caroline and Joe Berry Junior to the living-room wall.

  The sight of them pinned to the bedroom door gave Larry a chill that was almost worse than seeing two dead children. It was like a final, terrible assault on everything that normal people held dear.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Larry breathed...

  “I thought that would set you back,” said Arne.

  “Do you have any idea what it means?” asked Larry.

  “Not the faintest,” Arne replied. “Not even a clue. But we came across something similar in four out of the five previous killings. In Bernal Heights, we found live goldfish nailed to the kitchen counter. Well—mashed, more than nailed. In College Park we found a cat nailed by its ears to one of the garden fences. In Crocker Amazon, there was a dog nailed to the garage door by its tongue.”

  “I didn’t hear about any of that,” said Larry.

  “There’s a whole lot you didn’t hear, my friend,” Arne told him. “I’ve been trying to keep this case really low-key, play down the panic, play down the fear. This beast has an appetite for other people’s fear. To him, other people’s fear is like food. Tonight, right here in this condo, he brought these people such terror and despair that he was able to make them kill themselves! Imagine what a feast he had tonight!”

  Arne was angry, and wildly distressed. Larry had never seen him so emotional before. By the way he was staring up at the rag-doll and the rabbit nailed to the door, it was clear to Larry that he would have done anything to force this so-called Fog City Satan over his knee and broken his back. Arne was quite capable of forcing anybody over his knee and breaking their back.

  Arne said. much more quietly, “Who knows? Some of what’s been happening, I’ve been keeping quiet for the sake of my investigation. Other things—I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t want to give this scumbag the satisfaction of picking up the Chronicle and reading about every single stomach-churning little thing that he’s done. Some of it was too sick to be published, especially what he did to the women. Truly sick stuff, you wouldn’t even want to know. Well, I guess you’ll have to know, now that Dan’s turned the case over to you. But—hah! You never came across anybody like this before.

  “Apart from that, of course, I was worried about copycats. If I released that stuff about the goldfish to the Press, the next thing that would happen is that dogs and cats and canaries would be nailed to every fence and every telegraph pole between here and Pillar Point.

  “And most important, I guess—I wanted very much to keep this one particular thing secret, in case the killer tried to contact us, and we needed some way to verify that it was really him. Nailing pets and toys to the wall has been the only consistent connection between all of the killings that we’ve managed to keep out of the media.”

  “Do you have any idea what it means?” asked Larry. He couldn’t take his eyes off the rag-doll and the rabbit. He thought of Frankie and Mikey back home, asleep—Frankie cuddling his matted blue Cookie Monster and Mikey sucking that gray-looking thing called Thing.

  “Do you have any idea what it means?” Arne retorted.

  Larry shook his head. “Crucifixion, maybe? Who knows? Maybe the guy just likes nailing things together. Maybe his parents refused to give him a woodwork set, when he was little.”

  “Do you think this is funny?” Arne demanded.

  Larry said, “I think it’s time we pulled the plug on this guy, that’s what I think. He’s done enough. I respect your technique, Arne. Believe me, I’m not bullshitting you. I think you’re one of the best detectives we’ve ever had. But personally I think it’s time for a little gonzo detection.”

  “You’d better not screw this up for me, Larry,” Arne warned him, his eyes pale. “I’ve put my heart and soul into this assignment. More than my heart. My career, too.”

  Larry took a last look around the children’s bedroom. It was almost too painful to think that less than three hours ago, Caroline and Joe Junior had both been sleeping snugly in their bunk beds, dreaming children’s dreams.

  “Is there anything else that I’m missing?” Larry asked Arne. “I mean, anything ritualistic, anything really weird, like these toys?”

  “No, that’s it,” Arne told him. “From now on, it’s all spadework.”

  “Thanks, Jolly,” said Larry.

  “Oho, shit, Larry, don’t thank me! This isn’t my idea. You’re just about the last guy in the world I would’ve assigned to this investigation. You may respect my technique, my friend, but I sure as hell don’t have any respect for yours.”

  “Come on, Jolly,” said Larry, slapping his shoulder. “We’ll get this guy di riffe o di raffe.
And, by the way, I may respect your detection, but I still hate that fucking raincoat. No wonder you never get wet. No self-respecting drop of rain would even want to fall on you.”

  “You can make jokes?” Arne asked him, his eyes hard.

  Larry said, “Yes, Jolly, I can make jokes. You know why? Because Joe and Nina were dear, dear friends of mine, and I loved Caroline and Joe Junior like they were my own. I can make jokes because there isn’t any other way I know of dealing with something as Goddamned fucking terrible as this short of catching the guy who did it and tearing out his throat. And don’t try to kid me, Jolly, because you feel just the same as me, except you’re Swedish and Swedes don’t understand that when human beings feel so bad about something that they can’t even breathe, they have to laugh.”

  Arne took out a clean handkerchief, unfolded it, and patted the front of his raincoat. “You know what your trouble is, Larry? When you talk, you spit.”

  “Jesus,” said Larry; and walked out of the bedroom feeling like fire, feeling like Vesuvius, feeling sad and furious and explosive, all at the same time.

  He came home at seven o’clock in the morning with armfuls of files and a warm brown paper bag containing four focaccia, the thin, flat, crusty bread which he bought from the Danilo Bakery on Green Street. He had to find a space for his Toyota in the street because Linda had parked the Buick wagon in their small angled driveway. The city was still masked in fog, but up here on Russian Hill the fog was faintly gilded by the sunlight above it, and in the garden the birds were throatily singing.

  Larry laid his files and his bread down on the white-painted porch while he searched for his door-key. A quail perched on the fence nearby, watching him inquisitively.

  “What do you want, pal, breakfast?” he asked it. “You and me both.”

  He stepped into the small hallway, with its pale wooden floor and its antique sea-chest and its oil-paintings of old San Francisco. He leaned against the door to close it. The cottage was silent: it sounded like the whole family was still asleep. He propped the files on the chair just inside the living-room door, and eased off his shoes.