Cemetery of Angels (16 page)

She turned away and looked back toward the window. She couldn’t shake the impression that he was lying. “Okay,” she finally said. “Thank you.”

Before turning out the lights for the night, she checked Patrick’s room. The basketball had indeed taken a roll on its own, or so it appeared. She picked it up and put it into a toy box. Patrick, she told herself, had probably gone to sleep with the basketball on his bed.

Rebecca glanced at the turret room as she returned to the master bedroom. The door was firmly closed. Warily, she even checked it. And that was just the way she wanted it. She left a light on in the hall and returned to her bed.

Bill turned the light out after she was settled.

She was able to sleep, but not without some unease. There was a feeling that was nagging her, and it wasn’t even from the events of the afternoon. Just before drifting off, she realized what it was.

That funny tune was flitting around in her mind again, but that wasn’t it. Rather, after living with a man for so long, she knew when he was lying to her. And “lie” was written all over his answer to her final question. Had he ever experienced anything strange in the turret room? What had it been, she wondered, that he hadn’t told her?

Her thoughts went weird as a half sleep claimed her. Well, she concluded, if she couldn’t trust Bill anymore, at least she could trust her children. And Melissa. She could trust Melissa. Plus, there was always Dr. Einhorn, too. Another instinctive feeling: at least there was someone watching over her.

The next day Rebecca continued her assault on the turret room.

She went to a flea market and bought a twelve-by-twelve carpet remnant. Great purchase. Only twenty bucks. At a thrift shop, she found a couple of cabinets that could be used for toys and games. Then she went to IKEA again and found a chest of drawers that could be used for play clothing. Item by item she brought her purchases back to the house. Conveniently, Melissa arrived in the driveway and quickly became part of the day’s operation, helping Rebecca carry furniture upstairs.

“Where you going next?” Melissa asked toward 1:00 P.M.

“I thought I’d buy some classy, expensive curtains for the window,” Rebecca said. “Any suggestions?”

“Von’s,” Melissa suggested.

The two women laughed and were in the car again. Rebecca found exactly what she needed. Something cheap that didn’t look cheap. Melissa helped her hang the curtains. They were a dark navy blue with some red and yellow pinstripes through them. They hung perfectly and looked just right. On the final foray of the day, they found some posters in a variety store. Sports, ballet, and wildlife. The posters would fill the walls and add some color for a net expenditure of twelve bucks.

Once again, perfect. Rebecca was on a roll.

Rebecca and Melissa moved the furniture into the room that afternoon. They put up the posters. Together, over sandwiches and Diet Cokes, they assembled the chest. Then they stood back and admired what they had done.

“Nice job, partner,” Rebecca said, taking Melissa’s hand in a congratulatory shake.

“You did everything,” Melissa said. “The room is you now.”

“And not Ronny’s room anymore,” Rebecca thought. “It’s Patrick and Karen’s playroom, and that’s final!” She thought this but didn’t say it. She hoped Bill would be pleased when he returned home.

She congratulated herself. She had done a good job. She was a great wife and mother. One of the all-time greats. It was Hollywood: an award should be given!

Then, “no”, she told herself, that feeling was upon her again. That gnawing in her gut. Here she had freshly scrubbed the turret room, painted it a nice sunny yellow, and she still thought she had just caught a whiff of that sour, bitter smell that had followed her from the first day.

She stood still. She cocked her head.

“Melissa?” she asked. Her friend was admiring the job they had done on the IKEA chest.

“What, honey?” Melissa’s brow furrowed into an anxious frown. Rebecca could hear that pesky music again.

“Do you hear anything? Or smell anything strange?” Melissa listened. The tune seemed to cease.

“I hear Maurice Lerner’s mutt barking a couple of doors down, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Melissa shook her head. She didn’t hear anything else. Then she sniffed at the air.

“There’s a scent to the new carpet. That usually disappears in a few days. And I can still smell fresh paint.”

“That’s not what I mean, either.” Eye to eye across the room, Rebecca looked at her friend. Then Melissa glanced away.

“There’s nothing wrong here, honey,” Melissa said. “Stop worrying about everything. This is a beautiful room. You’ll learn to love it, okay.”

“But do you
smell
anything?” Rebecca pressed.

Eye contact returned. Now there was something in Melissa’s eyes that Rebecca didn’t like. Something she saw. Or thought she saw.

“Nothing, Becca,” Melissa said. “I hear nothing and smell nothing other than what I just told you.”

“Come on, Melissa! Out with it!” Rebecca insisted.

There was a pause. Melissa seemed hesitant. Then, “Listen, Becca,” she said, “maybe sometime you should look up the definition of ‘schizophrenic hallucinations.’ Okay? It’s just a thought. I mean, I’m on your side.”

“All right,” Rebecca said softly. “Thank you.”

Why, Rebecca wondered, was the whole world so anxious to lie to her?

But the smell was gone and so was that subliminal tune. She drew a breath and accepted her small victories where she could find them. After all, she had dressed the room over in her image. If that wasn’t the first step of reclaiming it, she didn’t know what was.

Detective Ed Van Allen was home having coffee when the telephone rang at a few minutes after 1:00 P.M. He looked at the phone in his kitchen and did not pick up. He had worked a double shift the previous day closing a case against a Cambodian fencing operation. The day’s work had culminated in a night court appearance and the associated paperwork. It had kept him on duty until 6:00 A.M. Van Allen wasn’t due at his office until four that afternoon. So when the phone rang, he growled.

He considered letting his answering machine do the dirty work. But deep down, owing to a perverse dedication to his job, he felt that answering machines were cowardly. So on the fourth ring, he grabbed it.

“Van Allen,” he mumbled into the handset. His own voice echoed in his ear. It was the first word he had spoken since waking and to his own thinking his pipes sounded creaking and elderly. Then he listened.

The call came from one Armando Martinez, the seventy-year-old caretaker at the San Angelo Cemetery. “I was wondering. Can you stop in here on your rounds today?” Martinez asked.

“You okay, Armando?” Van Allen asked.

“I’m okay, fine,” Martinez said. “No danger. But something here you should see.” “Where are you? At San Angelo?” Van Allen asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I could come by on my way to my office. Between three and four this afternoon.”

Martinez gave Van Allen a respectful hesitation in response. The hesitation told Van Allen that sooner would be better than later.

“The thing is, Detective,” Martinez said, “I want you to see before anybody comes by and changes things. See this just happened. Or must have just happened.”

“What happened, Armando?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Edmund, sir,” the caretaker said.

“Maybe you will tell me.”

Van Allen rubbed his tired eyes. If it hadn’t been this call from Martinez, it would have been something else. There was never a moment’s peace in this world for a conscientious policeman, never a moment when a man could grab a morning coffee a few minutes after noon and enjoy it without interruption.

“I’ll be there shortly,” he answered. “Is that good enough?”

Martinez said that it was.

A quarter hour later, Van Allen was in his car. As he drove, he thought of his daughter up in Oregon and his son at Santa Clara. He wondered how they would carry on if he died. He wondered why he was entertaining that thought. He wondered with whom his former wife was sleeping. Then that creepy anxious feeling came over him again. What was bugging him? He couldn’t place it. Something was askew in the universe.

Van Allen had known Martinez for a decade and a half. The old Mexican, as he affectionately thought of him, was one of the people in any neighborhood to whom Van Allen had always made a point to pay attention. Various assignments around the city had earned him many such friends over the years.

Caretakers. Janitors. Doormen. Postmen. Cab drivers. Car jockeys. The human brick and mortar of any city. Even in a sprawling suburbanized metropolis like Los Angeles, these were the citizens who always had their fingers on the pulse of what was happening. They followed the same routines five days a week. So they were the first to notice anything unusual. Van Allen had built up a lifetime of contacts and trust among such people. He had learned always to listen to them and to serve them. On occasion, he had risked his life to protect them. In return, people like Martinez called him first.

Van Allen arrived at San Angelo in forty-five minutes. He gave a polite toot of his horn, stopped outside the iron gates and parked his car.

A lean gray-haired man in an avocado green shirt and an American Harvester cap came out of the caretaker’s hut on the other side of the gates. The man raised a hand to greet the policeman.

“Hello, Armando,” Van Allen said.

Martinez nodded but didn’t speak. Van Allen could read the guarded expressions of old men like Martinez, to whom something bizarre had happened. And that’s what Van Allen saw here.

Martinez unlocked the gates of San Angelo. Chains and a padlock rattled against the old iron bars.

“Thanks for coming over,” Martinez said. “I know LA is going to hell. But this tops all.”

“You don’t normally have trouble in this place, do you, Armando?” Van Allen asked.

“Normally, no. You know me, Mr. Edmund, and you know this yard. Ah, but these days, no one’s safe. Anything happens.” There was a pause. “And this I no understand.”

“Show me. Okay?”

“I show you.”

Martinez closed the gates behind them. He pulled a chain across the bars and locked them from within. Then they walked side by side, among old headstones and graves.

“You okay? You’re not hurt, are you?” Van Allen asked. The old man looked at the detective.

“When my yard is hurt, I’m hurt,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

Van Allen knew. As he walked with the caretaker toward the south end of the San Angelo Cemetery, he made casual conversation. But Van Allen had this faculty of carrying on a concise conversation with the forward section of his mind while other lines of thought were being processed in the rear.

Today, that sense of being blobby and aging was upon him again, particularly as he walked through the soft soil of San Angelo. His feet felt unsteady, as if an ankle might buckle at any moment. His unsteadiness angered him; it mocked the usual care that he had taken of himself over so many years. Then, to make things worse, that confounding sense of imminence and anxiety was upon him yet again. He wondered whether it was a basic insecurity that followed every good cop all the way to the grave. Those words repeated on him, ringing heavily with their irony.

… followed every good cop all the way to the grave.

And there he was with Martinez, traipsing through San Angelo. The Cemetery of Angels. Sometimes life’s irony was staring a man right in the face; other times, such as this one, it reared up and bit him on the throat.

Something knocked him back to the present. He refocused. Martinez was going on and on about the cost of water, the difficulty of keeping San Angelo irrigated and green, and the lack of care by the city of Los Angeles for its old cemeteries in general.

“This was a peaceful place in the sunlight,” Van Allen found himself thinking, a spot of rest with open breezes even on the most oppressively hot days across Southern California. In fact, San Angelo was a little jewel of a cemetery, primarily because a man like Martinez had set it as his life’s work to keep the place protected. In the recesses of his mind, Van Allen found himself dredging up an old fact: Money from a trust established in the 1920s by Lillian Gish, combined with the shrewd sale of some contiguous real estate over the years, had left San Angelo solvent into the Twenty-first Century.

Van Allen felt his concentration flash back to the custodian, but to his shame he wasn’t even sure when the topic had changed.

His thoughts drifted again, this time back to his attitude of two and a half decades ago, back when he’d been a trainee out of the LA Police Academy. He had grown up in a working class neighborhood up north in Palo Alto, but had been drawn by the sunshine of Southern California. He wanted a job that would keep him there, preferably something that would allow him to help people. The fire department in LA hadn’t been recruiting. The police department was. The choice had been that simple. Yet now, today, he sometimes thought he was as ill-equipped to deal with the world of 2010 as would be, say, some of the people buried beneath his feet.

And now this.

For Ed Van Allen, not only did life get stranger, it also got worse. Sometimes, there were fewer and fewer explanations for anything. Up ahead about a hundred feet a massive gray marker lay on its side.

Martinez fell silent as they approached. Then the custodian glanced at the detective.

“Almost there,” Martinez said. “But you can see it already.”

Van Allen’s eyes scanned ahead to see what the “it” was. And then he realized that the marker itself, the one that was lying on its side, was their initial destination. They arrived at it a few seconds later. It was a death monument of solid gray stone. It was about twelve feet in height with a base four-foot square. And it was a striking piece, even as it lay on its side.

Van Allen recognized the monument and remembered it from where it had stood. It was the most striking and impressive marker in the entire cemetery. It was the figure of an angel, wings extended majestically, while one arm was raised in a gesture presumably of peace and salvation. Or was it a gesture of warning? The other hand held the book of God’s judgment. Van Allen had never paid much attention to whose grave the marker had adorned. But he remembered it as the angelic centerpiece of the cemetery, a statue that had set the style for several lesser tombs over the years.