His first stop was the master bedroom. The white-painted door was two or three inches ajar, and through the gap he could see Linda, lying on her back on the pale yellow ruffled bed, her eyes closed, her hair spread out across the frilly pillow. Above her head was a framed Currier & Ives’ print depicting two self-satisfied cherubs spooning cream from a sundae-dish.
He didn’t open the door, didn’t attempt to wake her. Somehow he felt that if he entered the bedroom, he would drag into her dreams all the blackness and brutality of the previous night. Fire and blood, nails and flesh.
He watched Linda for a while. He felt sad for her. He felt sadder still for Joe and Nina Berry. Dan Burroughs had once said to him, after half-a-bottle of Jack Daniel’s: “When you work for homicide, my friend, you’re in permanent mourning.”
Larry didn’t know whether “mourning” was quite the right word for it. It was closer to rage than grief—at least for him. He left the bedroom and tiptoed across to the kitchen.
He opened the icebox, and inspected the contents. While he made up his mind what he was going to have for breakfast, he gulped orange juice straight out of the carton. He was just about to place the carton back in the icebox door when a firm young voice behind him said, “How come you can do that and we’re not allowed? You said it was unhygienic.”
He turned around. Frankie and Cookie Monster were standing in the doorway watching him, one solemn, one bug-eyed. Frankie was wearing one of Larry’s old shirts instead of pajamas because that was what Frankie liked to wear. Cookie monster was naked if blue fur constitutes naked. Frankie was dark eyed and curly haired and so thin that Linda’s mother had accused her of starving him. “Look at this child, like a bird! It’s all that pasta! Pasta has no nutritional value whatsoever! You might just as well eat the box as eat the stuff that’s in it!”
Linda had explained often enough that Larry insisted on fresh pasta whenever they ate pasta, and as a matter of fact they didn’t eat pasta particularly often. But Linda’s mother had set her heart on her beloved only daughter marrying into serious San Francisco money; gold and hotels and limousines, not to mention Anglo-Saxon Protestant money. The wedding picture of Larry and Linda outside Grace Cathedral was framed in black, as if they were both already dead. Linda’s father, however, couldn’t have cared less: his brains had been gently frittered by years of golf at Burlingame. The biggest excitement of his life was the annual swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and he still hadn’t come to terms with the fact that Ronald Reagan was no longer President.
Larry opened the oven and switched on the grill. “Hey, Frankie, you want a focaccia coi ciccioli?”
Frankie climbed on to one of the woven-topped kitchen stools, and sat Cookie Monster on the tiled counter. “I sure would.”
“In that case, keep your mouth shut. Parents have a special indulgence from the Holy Father to drink from the carton, just like they can put their elbows on the table and make rude noises whenever they feel like it. We have it in writing, direct from Rome. Okay?”
“Yes, sir,” said Frankie. “Can I have plenty of bacon?”
Larry laid strips of bacon on the grill. He wasn’t exactly a purist when it came to making focaccia coi ciccioli: strictly, you were supposed to do nothing more than roll crispy bacon scratchings in with the dough. But just like the heresy of pizza heaped with sausage and peppers and sweetcorn and tuna and God knows what else, his focaccia had been changed by American affluence for ever. Larry’s father used to take a focaccia to school in his satchel, topped with nothing but sea-salt, or a little fresh sage. For a treat, maybe, a few slices of onion.
“Mommy says you had to work all night,” said Frankie.
“I sure did. Is Mikey awake?”
“Mikey’s in the yard.”
“What the hell is Mikey doing in the yard?”
“Mikey had to do twos.”
Larry stared at Frankie intently. “Am I hearing this right? Mikey went into the yard to do twos? What’s wrong with the bathroom?”
“We saw Tarzan and Mikey wants to be Tarzan.”
“And that’s his idea of being Tarzan? Doing twos in the bougainvilleas?”
Frankie shrugged. “Tarzan doesn’t have a bathroom.”
Larry opened and closed his mouth. “Tarzan-doesn’t-have-a-bathroom,” he repeated. “Tarzan doesn’t have a car, for God’s sake! But that doesn’t mean that Mikey has to go to school by swinging from tree to tree.”
The door to the laundry-room opened and Mikey appeared, frowning. He was completely naked except for his Fred and Barney slippers and his pajama-top knotted around his waist. His belly-button was sticking out and his forearms were all goose-bumpy.
Larry eyed him with a wry, pretend-angry expression, and Mikey stared back at him with six-year-old defiance.
“Well?” asked Larry. “How was it?”
Mikey made a half-hearted attempt to pummel his chest. “Me Tarzan.”
“Sure, I know that,” said Larry, turning over the bacon. “What I asked was, how was it? You know, two-ing al fresco?”
Mikey hesitated for a long moment, his eyes searching the kitchen as if some kind of magical answer to life’s problems was hidden in one corner.
“Does Tarzan use leaves?” he asked, eventually.
A pause while everybody thought about it.
Then, “Sure, I guess,” said Larry.
Mikey nodded, quite seriously, hesitated, and then plodded off toward his bedroom.
Larry called after him, “Didn’t you realize? That’s why Tarzan keeps yelling out ‘Owwoowwwooooow-wwoooooh!”‘
“Not funny!” Mikey snapped back, and slammed his door.
“Will you shut up!” Linda called, unexpectedly, from the bedroom.
*
They ate focaccia and crispy bacon in blissful masculine silence in the dimness of the kitchen, Larry and Frankie and Mikey. Three guys, big and little and littlest, bonded by humor and love. Cookie Monster tried to snatch some of Mikey’s focaccia but Thing retaliated by swallowing one of Cookie Monster’s eyeballs.
Larry tried not to think about Caroline and Joe Berry Junior but he couldn’t help it, and his grief and his anger was almost too much. He scraped more than half of his focaccia into the sink and stood looking out into the gilded fog and wondering if there really was a Blessed Virgin, who would take those two poor children into her arms.
When he was a boy, he had always imagined that the Blessed Virgin’s arms would be cool and pale, cool like ivory; and that when She kissed him, She would leave tears on his cheek—crystal tears, like dew. Mothers cry for their dear dead children, after all. But only the Blessed Virgin could cry for all of us.
Frankie said, “Did somebody murder some kids?”
Larry turned and stared at him. “Yes, they did,” he said, quietly. “How did you know?”
“I always know when somebody murdered some kids because you always cook us nice breakfasts and you never say ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full!”‘
Larry thought about that, and then nodded, and scruffled his boys’ hair. “I guess I do. I guess it always makes me appreciate you guys extra much, when somebody else’s kids get killed.”
Mikey said, “Tarzan could sic ’em.”
“Oh, yeah? The first thing that Tarzan has to do is show Daddy where he fertilized the yard.”
Later, when Frankie and Mikey were watching television, he carried a tray of espresso and orange juice into the bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed while Linda continued to sleep.
She looked like Snow White, poisoned by her husband’s occupation, waiting for the kiss that would finally release her from lonely nights, guns in the bedroom closet, and the endless anxiety that one of those rabid crack-brained psychos would one day decide that he was going to take one of those pigs down to hell along with him, no matter what the cost.
She looked like a woman who had attended too many funerals, and who was sleeping so that she wouldn’t have to go to any more.
She rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”
“Eight.”
“As late as that? I promised myself I was going to be awake for you, when you got back.”
“Doesn’t matter. The boys were up. I made them breakfast.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Linda, taking hold of his hand. Italian hand, short-fingered, neatly formed, with streaks of black hair. An engraver’s hand; or an architect’s hand; or the hand of glassmaker.
“What are you sorry for? I needed some time, you know? A little time to breathe.”
She drank half of her orange juice, then she lay back on the pillow. It never ceased to please and amaze him, how beautiful she was. Every time he looked at her, he knew exactly why he had fallen in love with her.
“Snow White,” he said.
Linda smiled. “Snow White was wakened by a kiss, not a cup of espresso.”
He kissed her forehead, oddly warm from sleeping; and then he kissed her orange-tasting lips. “You get both.”
“Was it bad?” she asked him.
He nodded. He knew that he was very tired, and that if he tried to explain to Linda how bad it had really been, he would probably upset them both, and the boys, too.
“Was Arne mad?”
“Oh, sure. Arne was mad. He tried not to be, but he couldn’t help himself.”
“Do you know why Dan gave you this assignment?”
Larry sat up straight. “Not at first. But I guess I do now.”
“He’s not doing a Kevin Defendorf on you, is he?” Kevin Defendorf was another of those up-and-coming young detectives whose careers had been suddenly sidetracked, and who had found themselves, in the words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “out on the rusty spur which ends up in the dead grass where the rusty tincans and bedsprings and old razor blades and moldy mattresses… lie.”
Larry shrugged, sniffed, said, “Maybe. But it doesn’t really matter.”
“Of course it matters!” Linda protested. “This is your career!”
“Unh-hunh,” Larry disagreed. “You didn’t see what I saw. If you’d seen what I saw, then you’d know that it doesn’t really matter. Somebody has to find this guy, no matter what it takes.”
“Larry…?”
He tried to smile. He almost succeeded. “Linda, this job isn’t worth turning up for, unless once in a while it becomes a crusade.”
“But you have your whole life to think of! What about Frankie and Mikey? What about me?”
Larry took hold of her hand and twisted her wedding-band around and around. “And what do you think will happen if I refuse to accept this assignment? What do you think Dan will do to me then? What do you think everybody else on the squad will do to me then? Arne and Brough and Migdoll? They’ll treat me like I’m chickenshit, which is exactly what I will be, if I try to tell Dan that I’m not taking it on.
“Anyway, it’s nothing to do with Dan. I want to take it on. For myself; for Joe. For Nina. Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to find who killed their kids.”
Linda watched him twisting her ring. Then she said, “You know what Nina always used to say to me? She said there was something inside of Joe that made him a cop, and she could never understand what it was. He didn’t even like being a cop. But he was born with it. The day he couldn’t get up and go to work, she went to the church and she lit a candle, and she thanked God for sending her a miracle.”
Larry said, “Is that how you feel?”
Linda shook her head. “I hope I understand you better.”
There was a strange and lengthy silence between them. Outside the bedroom window, the day remained adamantly foggy. They wouldn’t see the sun today. They wouldn’t see the sun for days. Larry had a feeling about it.
“You want some breakfast?” he asked Linda.
She shook her head. “I want to do my yoga first. Besides, I’m meeting Marjorie for coffee.”
“Oh, the painting society,” said Larry. “Well… if you don’t mind, I’ll seize some zees. But you can interrupt me if you want to. No Foggia ever complained about being raped. You can check it on police records.” After Linda had taken Frankie and Mikey to their summer sport class, Larry showered in the green-tiled shower. Afterward he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at himself. Lean, muscular, but not in outstanding shape. Dark slanted nipples like almonds, black hairy chest. A heavy penis, and balls like ripened fruit. Curved thighs like Italian furniture.
He dressed in sand-colored slacks and a mauvish Hugo Boss polo-shirt. Then he sat in the kitchen on his own and drank two poisonously strong cups of espresso and read the Chron. It was the fiftieth anniversary of Herb Caen’s column. Larry knew Herb Caen well, and liked him: as much as an over-romantic thirty-eight-year-old Italian detective could ever know and like a perverse and puckish seventy-two-year-old newspaper columnist. But they had breakfasted at Sam’s together a few times; and Herb had written a piece about policework in San Francisco, saying that it was like composing an opera, all highs and lows.
The fog clung, the cable cars clanged, but those were the symptoms of San Francisco, rather than its mystical essence. It was the Gold Rush that had made San Francisco what it was; and even today, in 1988, it was still a Gold Rush city, haunted by bravado, haunted by greed; a city of hills and superstition; a city of ghosts and get-rich-quick and Lady Luck.
It was a city on the brink of the world; and Larry lived on the brink of the world, too; and maybe there was something about living on the brink of the world that nurtured the bloody irrationality of the Fog City Satan.
For seven hours, until the fog began to darken, layer on layer, like grimy net curtains, Larry read all of Arne’s files. He was interrupted again and again—first by Houston Brough, who was painstakingly doorstepping everybody who lived within a half-mile of the Berrys’ condominium, then by Dan Burroughs, then by Phil Biglieri the medical examiner, with preliminary reports on how the Berrys had died. After five o’clock, he took no more calls, although he heard his answering-machine clicking and recording again and again. He read notes, diagrams, laboratory reports, forensic analyses, interviews. He couldn’t have wished for better groundwork. Arne had covered every aspect of every murder that Larry could think of; and a few more, besides. He had reconstructed cleaver-wounds with computer graphics, and identified the type of cleaver that the killer had used, and even the brand of cleaver, and then located the hardware store in Berkeley where it had been bought.
He had commented on the extreme force which the Fog City Satan had used to gain entry to all of the premises that he had violated. In each case, he had burst in like a bombshell, taking out whole windows, wrenching out doors. But Arne could think of no logical reason why. In almost all of the six cases, a crowbar would have been sufficient; and in the College Park murders, where a whole living-room window had been ripped out the back door of the house had actually been left unlocked.
Larry leaned back in his Western-style armchair and stared for a long time at all the papers on his desk. They were comprehensive; they were brilliantly cross-correlated; but somehow they were incomplete. Arne talked about motives, for sure. He had interviewed social workers and criminal psychologists; he had attempted to find parallels with other ritual-type murders from all over the United States, and some from Europe, too. He had even looked into Fay Kuhn’s far-fetched report that the killer was repeating the ritual murders of 1905. He had gone so far as to show some similarities between two of the ritual killings with similar murders in Port-au-Prince, in Haiti.
But what was missing was purpose. What was missing was why? What was missing was any kind of convincing reason – logical or illogical – why anybody should want to inflict such elaborate torture on so many innocent families.
What was missing was that inspirational leap into homicidal madness that was needed to put the detective behind a killer’s eyes. The same leap that Larry alway
s tried to take when he was dealing with an enraged Neapolitan father who had beaten his daughter’s lover to death; or a cold-blooded Korean shooter who had killed a crack-dealer in a Haight Street doorway; or a spaced-out relic from the City Lights days, who (from no other motive but mercy) had suffocated his dying middle-aged mistress with a Victorian tapestry cushion.
He folded back a large legal pad and wrote himself a list of all the ritual murders to date, with the basic details of each killing, along with Arne’s suppositions.
Forest Hill, 3/9/88: the Tessler family home on Magellan was broken into shortly after 2 a.m. when the garden door was sledgehammered. Mr. Alan Tessler, 47, and Mrs. Irene Tessler, 42, were forced to strip naked. They were bound tightly together face to face, and gagged. Their daughter Jeanette, 24, and their maid Maria, 26, were also stripped and bound together. Both young women were raped in sight and hearing of Mr. and Mrs. Tessler, and both were then sexually violated with glass rolling-pins from Mrs. Tessler’s antique collection. The killer sawed off Mr. and Mrs. Tessler’s legs with a chainsaw, halfway through the thigh. Mr. Tessler died of traumatic shock; Mrs. Tessler died of massive loss of blood. Jeanette and Maria were both killed by blows to the back of the skull from the same sledgehammer which had been used to break down the back door. Mr. Tessler’s thirty-eight cage birds had all had their legs broken.
Crocker Amazon, 4/20/88: the Wurster family home on Farragut was broken into sometime around 11 p.m. when the side door was pickaxed. Mrs. Pamela Wurster, 40, was tied to a kitchen chair and doused in inflammable fluid. Her husband Douglas Wurster, 39, was apparently ordered to thrust his right hand down the sink-disposal unit, under threat of his wife being set alight(?). His fingers were severed and his hand was badly mangled. With his hand wrapped in a towel, he was then tied to a chair next to his wife. Their three children—Lance, 17; Andrea, 12; and Peter, 9—were brought from their bedrooms and tied to chairs facing their parents. Mr. and Mrs. Wurster then had their tongues cut out with their own kitchen knife, in front of their children. Afterward the children were strangled one by one with nylon cord. Then Mr. Wurster, who remained alive, was killed by a single pickax blow to the back of the head. The Wurster’s Labrador dog was found with its tongue nailed to the garage door.
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