He opened his eyes and twisted around, panicky.
Linda said, “What’s the matter, Larry? What’s wrong? You look—”
“Ssh!” he asked her, “please, ssh!”
“No I won’t ssh! You’re right in the middle of making love and now you’re bouncing around again!”
He climbed out of bed, feeling the wetness between his legs. He went to the bedroom door and opened it. Nobody. Nothing. Not even a quivering shadow. Out in the street he heard the slow tortured grinding of a garbage truck.
“Larry, will you tell me what’s wrong?”
He stayed outside the bedroom door for almost half a minute, listening. But it was already beginning to grow light. The windows had changed from glossy black to melancholy gray.
“Larry, come back to bed,” she begged him.
He said, “No. You get some more sleep. I’m too wired.”
“Larry, I want you to hold me.”
Reluctantly, he climbed back into bed, and held her in his arms. She took his hand and held it between her legs. “That’s you. That’s you and me. Even forensic analysis couldn’t tell us apart.”
He kissed her ear, kissed her cheek. But his mind kept racing. Had he really seen Roberta Snow, standing in the room? He turned around to stare at the spot where she had been standing, and he couldn’t believe it. It must have been a dream. After all, if Wilbert Fraser really was dead, he would have been the first to hear about it.
MAN Roberta had whispered. MAN But what man? And why had she come to tell him? MAN and then AX. Maybe she’s got it all ass-about-face, and she was trying to say AXMAN.
In spite of himself, he dozed off. But he woke up with a jolt ten minutes later.
“I have to get up,” he said, his mouth thick. “Take a shower, get to headquarters.”
“Do you want me to make you some breakfast? Maybe some pancakes?”
“Come on, Linda, at ten after five in the morning? You don’t want to do that.”
“I’m your wife, Larry. Wives do things like that.”
He kissed her. “Not necessary. Besides, I want to get to the office before anybody else.”
She frowned at him. “Are you worried about something?”
“I’m always worried about something. It’s my job. If I didn’t have anything to worry about it, I’d be worried.”
He showered. AXMAN, he puzzled. What axman? Ax, man. Man, ax. It didn’t make any sense. Yet Roberta had clearly made an enormous effort to appear in his bedroom, and tell him.
Linda had made him some strong coffee and toast while he was showering. She sat in her pale pink robe and watched him eat.
“Something’s really bugging you, isn’t it?” she said.
“It’s this investigation, that’s all. It’s like nothing I ever worked on before.”
“Want to talk about it?”
He shook his head.
“Are you going to be free tonight? I’m picking up the boys at three. Maybe we could all go to ‘Cafe Riggio’.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Maybe? More than likely, once Dan Burroughs had clapped his eyes on Bizarre Death At SFG. Supernatural Only Explanation Says Detective.
She held his hand, stroked his knuckles. “I’d love it if you could. I’m beginning to miss you.”
“I still live in the same house, you know, in the same city. It’s not like I’ve gone off to Darkest Africa for six months.”
Linda laughed. “I wish you had. And I wish I was with you. Boy, what I’d do for a magic wand.” She held out both hands and said, “Mandrake gestures hypnotically… and Larry and Linda are both together on a slow boat on the Upper Limpopo.”
Larry slowly lowered his coffee-cup. Mandrake. Man. Drake. Man. Ax. Mandrax.
MANDRAX. That was what Roberta Snow had been trying to say to him. Mandrax, one of the Black Brotherhood. And possibly the last surviving member of the Black Brotherhood. Wilbert Fraser and George Menzel had burned them in their automobile, but one of them had gotten out alive. Burned, but alive.
The strongest of all of them. Mandrax.
“Larry?” asked Linda. “You look like somebody just dropped a brick on your head from nine miles high.”
“I have to go,” he told her. He stood up without finishing his coffee and wiped his mouth on a kitchen towel.
“You have to go now, this instant? You can’t even finish a quarter of a slice of toast?”
“Keep it for me. I’ll be back later.”
“And what about tonight?”
He shoved his gun into its holster, collected his pale blue cotton coat from the bentwood stand in the hallway, shucked on his right loafer, and hop-skip-jumped to the door while he tugged on his left.
Linda hurried after him and kissed him. “I love you,” she said. “Come back safe. The boys’ll be home by four.”
“Take care yourself,” he told her. “And I love you, too. Kissy-wissy-itchy-snookums-huggy-wuggy-bing-bong.”
That stopped her dead in her tracks. “Wh-what?” she laughed.
Larry suddenly looked embarrassed; then rueful; then a little sad. “It was something that momma used to say to me, when I was very small. I guess it just came out by itself.”
They stood looking at each other under a morning sky that was clear and high. Then Larry said, “I’ll call you, okay,” and walked down to his car, and climbed in. He drove away without even looking back, and Linda closed the door.
He knocked and rang at Wilbert Fraser’s door for nearly five minutes, but there was no reply. He stood in the porch looking out over early-morning San Francisco with its glittering windows and its hazy Bay, wondering what to do. He had no warrant, and no just cause for breaking in.
“Actually, your honor, I was visited in the night by the ghost of a drowned girl who told me that Mr. Fraser was dead. This was a piece of information that I felt it my duty as a police officer to follow up immediately, so I broke down Mr. Fraser’s door and scared the hell out of him.”
He negotiated the rickety wooden steps down to Wilbert’s front yard. He beat his way through thistles and creeper and grostesquely-overgrown hogweed until he found his way round to the side of the house. He frightened a flock of young birds and frightened himself almost as much.
At the side of the house he found the door to the laundry-room. Smearing the dusty window with his hand, he could just make out the shapes of a twin-tub washing machine with a power mangle attached, the kind of washing-machine you would have seen in early series of I Love Lucy. He looked around, but the neighborhood was quiet and the street was almost deserted. He picked up a brick from the long grass, and used it to smash the glass.
He found Wilbert almost at once. He was lying pinned to his kitchen table, with a river of red treacle between his outspread legs. His eyes were still open, although blowflies crawled all over his face, in and out of his mouth, and rose in a fierce buzzing storm from the blood that had congealed all over the floor. The glans of his penis had been replaced by a glistening, crawling glans of flies. The whole kitchen was filled with a foul smell, like bad chicken.
Larry carefully picked up the telephone in his handkerchief, dialed 553-1551.
“Houston? You’re in early. Listen, I’m over at Wilbert Fraser’s house. He’s been wasted. Yeah, that’s right, and pretty damned viciously too. Unh-hunh. No. Somebody cut off his weenie.”
There was a pause, and then Houston said something about Dan Burroughs having already seen this morning’s Examiner, and that Larry would very likely be sharing the same fate as Wilbert Fraser.
“He’s breathing fire, Larry, I warn you. I mean he’s totally breathing fire.”
“All right, I’ll deal with him later. Maybe I should bring some marshmallows and a stick. Will you roust out the coroner, please, and everybody else we’re going to need? Let’s have Jones and Glass here, too; and maybe the Jolly Green Giant would like to check it out. He knows the m.o. better than anybody.”
“Do you think it’s our boy again,
or just the revenge of the faggots?”
“It could be our boy. It’s sadistic enough. Any sign of that van yet?”
“Nothing. A patrol car clocked it in the Mission District, but after that it vanished.”
“Find out the exact location where they saw it.”
“Okay, lieutenant. And—lieutenant?”
“What is it, sergeant?”
“I’ve got to say this. I don’t think it was a particularly hot idea of yours to talk to Fay Kuhn. Not the way things are.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, ‘the way things are’? What way are they?”
Houston hesitated, and then he said, “I have to think about my career, too, lieutenant. But let’s say that Deputy Chief Burroughs didn’t assign me to this case for my investigative skills alone. Remember the little birdhouse in your soul.”
Larry hung up. So Fay was right to be suspicious about Dan Burroughs. But what had Houston meant about “the little birdhouse in your soul”. That was a pop song, wasn’t it, by They Might Be Giants?
He couldn’t even remember the words. Something about blue canaries by the lightswitch, real hippie-type stuff. It had gone down a storm in San Francisco. But then he clearly recalled the hook; the real stand-out chorus in the whole song.
“I’m your friend… but I’m not actually your friend” Was that what Houston was trying to tell him?
And then the next line, “Who watches over you?”
Larry turned away from the phone and back to the fly-glittering body of Wilbert Fraser. So that was it. Dan Burroughs had appointed Houston Brough to keep an eye on him; and to report back on whatever he was doing. Houston was warning him that for the sake of his own career, he would have to do what Dan Burroughs had told him. But if Houston didn’t know what Larry was doing, then he couldn’t be compromised.
He stood over Wilbert Fraser and crossed himself and said, “Requiescat in pace, Wilbert.”
*
His interview with Dan Burroughs lasted less than three minutes. In an office crowded with cigarette smoke and copies of this morning’s Examiner, Dan asked Larry for his gun and his badge.
“By the time you reach lieutenant, you should have acquired at least a basic grasp of public relations and police protocol,” Dan rasped. His eyes looked deader than ever. “I’m disappointed in you, Larry. This mess is going to take days to clear up, weeks. Mayor Agnos is just about biting the fucking carpet. I can’t believe you did it. It’s like career suicide. ‘Supernatural Only Explanation.’ For Christ’s sake, Larry! Even if you are a wacko, at least have the good sense to keep it to yourself.”
Larry said, tightly, “You transferred me to this assignment because you wanted somebody with imagination, somebody who was prepared to investigate any possibility, no matter how weird.”
“There’s weird and there’s weird.”
“For sure. And this is weird with a capital ‘Wuh’. The Fog City Satan is performing a series of ritual murders with the specific intention of raising a demonic being.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Dan Burroughs protested. “I’m sure that you’re absolutely right. But just because the Fog City Satan believes that he’s going to raise a demonic being, that doesn’t mean that you have to believe it, too! Did you hear the TV news this morning? The general opinion is that the San Francisco Police Department have gone totally birdseed. NBC called us the Monster Squad. CBS played the theme from Ghostbusters.”
“Dan, there have been certain events in this investigation which have been impossible to explain any other way. Look at what happened to Edna-Mae Lickerman. Look at what happened to that nurse. Go talk to Officer Rickenbacker, and asked him what happened. He fired six times at Edna-Mae and killed a girl in another room.”
Dan Burroughs drew an orange manila folder across his desk and opened it up, dropping cigarette ash on it. “According to the doctors at SFG, Edna-Mae Lickerman was suffering a massive endocrinal collapse, a common feature of AIDS. The nurse was a twenty-three-year-old girl named Carole Fremont. She’d been treating AIDS patients at SFG for over eighteen months; and she suffered a similar endocrinal collapse to Edna-Mae Lickerman’s. End of story.”
“And what about my mother?” asked Larry, in a trembling voice. “I suppose you think that she was suffering from AIDS, too.”
“Your mother was struck by a Kenworth TransOrient tractor-and-trailer traveling at nearly sixty miles an hour. Pardoning your filial sensitivities, there really wasn’t enough left of her for anybody to form an opinion about her medical condition at the time.”
“What about the shooting? How do you explain that?”
“Ballistics examined the hospital corridor. Each of the six bullets struck a concrete pillar about twenty-five feet from where Officer Rickenbacker was standing, and ricocheted back into room 9009, hitting Nurse Fremont where she lay. It was a freak accident, no doubt about it. But Officer Rickenbacker has a remarkably steady hand, and that’s why the bullets all followed a near-identical ricochet. Here, take a look for yourself.”
Dan Burroughs opened another folder and took out three or four black-and-white photographs. They showed the chipped concrete pillar, and the scarred metal hinge at the bottom of the door. Larry didn’t even lower his eyes to look at them. Houston Brough and Fay Kuhn had given him enough evidence to know that Dan Burroughs was playing a double game with this investigation, although he didn’t understand for a moment what he hoped to achieve.
Nothing in the world could convince Larry now that this wasn’t a full-scale psychic disturbance. He had seen three grown women, shrunk down to their bones. He had seen a parrot with his own face. He had seen a drowned girl dance. On his own hand, he had seen the face of a long-dead killer, and heard him talking.
In a tight voice, Larry said, “Dan, I’m going to ask you this once only. I’m going to ask you to back me up, with the mayor, and with the media. The worst we can get is a ribbing. I’m going to ask you to give me carte blanche to clear up this case by whatever means it takes. I believe that I’m very close to cracking it. Give me thirty-six hours and I’ll bring you back the Fog City Satan, all trussed up and ready for the oven.”
Dan Burroughs coughed. “If I back you up, Larry, that’s tantamount to my coming out in public and saying that I believe in the supernatural, too. You’re not just talking about unorthodox methods of investigation here. You’re talking about the supernatural! Spooks and vampires and things that go yolla-bolla-wolla in the night! Jesus—the Commissioner would have me playing horseshoes down at the Happy Home for Deranged Detectives before you could say abracadabra. You may want to take a dive down the toilet, Larry, that’s your privilege. But I’m not diving in after you.”
For a moment, Larry felt all of his Italian fire rise up inside him. Liar! Cheat! Bastard! He could have thumped Dan’s desk until everything jumped up in the air. But while he had his father’s fire, he had also inherited his mother’s self-control. He remembered his father raging from room to room whenever a business deal had gone awry, roaring and slamming doors. He remembered his mother remaining quite serene and still, as if all the shouting and banging in the world would never disturb her. Nobody in the house would dare to speak until the front door had crashed shut, and his father had gone off to the Garibaldi Club to take out his ire on all of his friends, and get drunk on grappa.
But knowing what he did about Dan Burroughs, he was able to damp down his temper, and stay relatively calm, even though his heart was racing and his fists were clenched.
Hoarsely, in a voice like Marlon Brando playing Don Corleone, Dan Surroughs said, “I guess that impetuosity has its own price, Larry. You’ve disappointed me. For Christ’s sake, you’re not a TV detective. A moral value is a moral value, but there’s no point in having moral values if you have no authority to exercise them. That’s what you’ve done to yourself. You’ve just lost your authority… so your moral values stand for zilch. If only your father were here. There was a man. Mario Foggia. He
knew when to stand up for something and he knew when to back off. He had intelligence. Shrewdity. He didn’t stand for any crap but he knew when it was time to compromise, too.” Dan Burroughs tapped the side of his nose in the age-old gesture of knowingness. “You should learn that. Shrewdity.”
“So what do I do now?” asked Larry.
Dan Burroughs crushed out his cigarette. “You hand over your notes and any additional information to Arne. Then you go home and play with your kids. Or maybe go fishing. Take Linda to Big Sur. You’re on full pay until this investigation is over, then we’ll have a disciplinary hearing. Don’t lose any sleep over it. The worst they’ll do to you is bust you down to sergeant.”
Larry laid down his gun and his badge right on the very edge of Dan’s desk. Then he turned to go.
“Larry?” said Dan, as he reached the door.
Larry waited, without turning around.
“I just want you to know that this is nothing personal,” Dan told him. “This is police discipline, that’s all.”
Larry didn’t reply. He knew now that it was personal; that Dan Burroughs was engineering something, although he couldn’t work out what. Dan would have been better keeping his mouth shut and saying nothing at all. Because Larry knew now that he had entered a different world altogether, the world of lies; the desert of deception; where the truth was never told, and where trust was a word engraved on a tombstone.
8
He drove directly to the “Waxing Moon”. He found Tara Gordon at the counter, serving a tall, serious Norwegian sailor who wanted a love potion to make sure that his wife stayed faithful to him while he was at sea.
“You have your three basic ways,” Tara Gordon was telling him, while Larry leaned against the counter close by, pretending to inspect a tray of silver amulets. “We have this—” holding up a green glass jar “—this is fat from a buck goat. You smear this on your private parts before you make love to your wife, and she will never ever look at another man.”
Black Angel Page 28
