Cemetery of Angels (17 page)

Cemetery of Angels. This had been the most prominent of the celestial spirits. The policeman felt a quickening of his pulse.

“This is what you wanted me to see?” Van Allen asked.

The old man nodded. Martinez stared down at the massive fallen gravestone. He let Detective Van Allen take the first steps of trying to make sense of what lay at his feet.

“Take a good look,” Martinez said. “Then follow me, there’s more.”

The inscription on the marker, the part of the inscription that Van Allen could see, was in big bold letters. It said simply, “Billy.”

Just “Billy.”

The name meant nothing to Van Allen. The detective tried to figure whether the name should have meant something in terms of the city, in terms of Hollywood or in terms of his own career in law enforcement.

“Billy, Billy, Billy,”
he repeated mentally.

He still came up empty. And the granite marker was lying downward in such a way that the dead individual’s first name, last name, and earthly dates were almost impossible to read, although he thought he could see a death date in the 1930s.

“Whose marker is this?” he called to Martinez. The old man shrugged.

“Been there as long as I been here,” he said. “Billy something. An old actor. I never knew no more than that.”

Van Allen leaned against the overturned angel and knelt down for a better look. But he still couldn’t get the angle to read the inscription. He pushed the marker. It was much too heavy to budge. When Martinez was looking farther down the south lawn of the graveyard, Van Allen put his shoulder to the marker.

He pushed again, much harder this time. He dug his feet into the ground for traction, shoved as hard as he could and felt something pop.

He cursed. The pop was in his right leg, just below the knee. Martinez whirled and looked, just in time to see the policeman clutching his right knee.

“What happened?” the custodian demanded, coming over to him. Van Allen was sitting on the marker, massaging his calf.

“I think I pulled something,” he said, trying to make as little as possible of the sharp pain below his knee. He’d pulled something badly and he knew it.

“What were you trying to do?”

“Move the stone a little. I wanted complete name and some dates.” He grimaced and tried to dismiss the pain. He still came up empty.

“Man, you pick the wrong marker. That piece got to weigh two thousand five hundred pounds.”

“Yeah. I noticed.” Van Allen frowned. “So?” he asked, anger starting to creep into his tone. “So tell me whose stone this is? And who overturned it? Vandals?” Van Allen asked. “That’s not so unusual in the grand scheme of things?”

“Notice anything unusual?” Martinez asked.

Van Allen had already noticed. He looked around and still couldn’t find the grave that belonged to the marker.

“Okay. No grave. You got me. I know this marker was in the cemetery. Where’s the grave? Where’s the marker from?”

“That’s the thing,” the custodian said. Martinez turned and pointed to a strangely configured gouge in the ground about sixty feet away. Van Allen was still trying to apply logic.

“Way over there?” he asked. As soon as he had spoken, he understood the long distance that the stone seraph had traveled.

“Come over here to the grave.” Martinez said.

They walked to the hole in the earth, Martinez arriving first. The custodian looked downward and waited. When Van Allen was next to him, without speaking, the custodian indicated that the detective should peer downward in the same spot. When things came into focus, Van Allen grimaced. The ground was ripped aside as if from some underground explosion.

The hole was unlike anything Van Allen had ever seen before. It didn’t follow any pattern of hand shovels or of mechanical digging. Rather, the ground looked as if it had been pushed aside by some infernal feral beast tunneling or clawing upward, something buried that was trying to escape the confines of the earth.

But again, that still wasn’t the worst of it.

At the base of the hole, five feet below the surface of the graveyard, lay the remnants of the front of an old coffin. The woodwork looked like pine. No frills. Probably from the 1920s or 1930s, the detective reasoned. But the burial box had been broken open. Van Allen, who had a pretty strong stomach, and who thought that he had seen almost everything, had never seen this.

“And the whole thing happened during my lunch hour,” Martinez said.

“What?” Van Allen asked. Martinez repeated.

“I walked back here this morning, so I know this grave was intact,” Martinez said. “I was tending to some flowers back here.”

The custodian turned and indicated a blooming garden several feet away.

“I close up at twelve o’clock and everything’s fine. I come back at one o’clock and I see this!”

There was nothing going on in the back of Van Allen’s mind now. His entire concentration was necessary to process what Martinez was giving him.

“How does anyone human do something like that?” Martinez asked with thorough perplexity in his tone. “Would you tell me? How is this possible?”

Van Allen stared down at the defiled grave. He would have been happier if Armando Martinez had never asked him that question.

“Someone came in with some equipment, Armando,” Van Allen suggested. “They worked very quickly and…”

“The gate was locked.”

“Someone else must have a key.”

“It’s locked by combination. Only I know it.”

“Someone somehow discovered it.”

“There’s no tire tracks to move that monument,” Martinez continued. “You’d need a small truck. Ten strong men couldn’t carry the marker that far.” He paused. The imponderable questions posed themselves. How could a vehicle or an armada of workmen get in or out? How could they have defiled a grave so quickly? Where had they gone? Why would anyone have done this as a prank, even with Halloween coming?

“And then, how do you explain this?” Martinez asked next. “How do you account for what someone did here?”

He pulled a flashlight from his pocket. He threw a bright beam down the narrow hole so that Van Allen could get a better look at what lurked or what no longer lurked below. Martinez’s hand was unsteady on the light. But for one horrible second, which would always remain frozen in Van Allen’s memory, the light was right on the spot where the wood of the coffin had been broken.

Above, a cloud helped by passing over the sun, taking away some of the brightness of the day.

There, down below the earth, was the satin pillow upon which the head of the deceased must have rested for years. The pillow looked stained where the head would have lain, as did the sheet below it where the corpse would have rested. But Van Allen couldn’t see any remains.

“Now. Final funny thing, Detective,” Martinez said. “You see about the wood on the coffin. About how it broke?”

Van Allen had already noticed. He stared at it but was helpless to make any sense out of it.

“The wood looks like it was broken from within the coffin. Not from the outside,” Van Allen said evenly. “Is that what you’re suggesting, Armando?”

“That’s what,” the custodian said. “Apply some explanation to this, please.”

“Very simple,” Van Allen said, stepping away from it and replying with all the cynicism that he had accumulated over two decades on the job. “After being dead for many years, this particular corpse tired of being in the ground. The corpse smashed open his box, burrowed upward while you were away on your lunch break, threw over his granite marker weighing twenty-five hundred pounds, scaled the gates, and is currently loose in Los Angeles, probably at Mel’s Diner on Sunset having a burger. There, presumably, no one will pay much notice as long as he doesn’t cause any other trouble.”

Martinez held the cop’s gaze for several seconds then finally blinked.

“Very funny,” the custodian said. “Now, please. What you really think?”

“Sorry, Armando,” Van Allen said, feeling the sun come out on him again. “Aside from the facetious explanation I offered you, I have no guess at all.”

The custodian let Van Allen’s answer sink in. “We got to file police report?”

“Yes, we do,” Van Allen answered.

The policeman took out his notebook. He did better these days when he took notes. In the breast pocket of his jacket was his prized pen, a sturdy green Mont Blanc fountain pen that his father had given him upon graduation from college. The pen had some heft to it. It had always felt good in his hand. Using it made him feel professional.

Normally he had kept it on his desk at home. But now that he had decided to make more written notes, he carried it.

Van Allen began to write. At least, he told himself, he was now on duty and could bill the city for his time. After several seconds, he looked up from his notepad. “If I were you, I’d keep your gates closed this afternoon.”

“Gates,” Van Allen heard the custodian mumble. “Gates don’t matter none, anyway. People. Bodies. They go in or out whether I lock the gates or not. Some kind of city we live in, huh? Some kind of place where dead men walk away at lunch hour.”

“Some kind of city, Armando,” Van Allen agreed.

Van Allen was busy writing. He let Martinez’s comments pass. But he had heard the old man very clearly, and was ill at ease with the idea.

Two hours passed. Van Allen remained at San Angelo. A squad car with two uniformed cops came by to witness the disturbance. And because a tomb had been violated, an investigator from the Los Angeles County Board of Health had to be notified.

The investigator, a fat, bald man named Jack Ritter, appeared in a Windex blue Chevy Nova. Then Martinez summoned a pair of union gravediggers. Martinez spoke to them in Spanish. They were Salvadorians. The presence of so many police made them nervous. The diggers were also skittish about their task, which was to enlarge the hole in the ground that had come up from the grave.

Van Allen crouched nearby, massaging the back of his leg where the pulled muscle still throbbed. He watched with growing apprehension and a widening sense of disbelief. Both the gravediggers and the investigator from the Board of Health remarked about the narrowness of the hole coming up from the grave. The two cops, a male and a female, stood nearby and watched curiously.

“Just wide enough for a man’s shoulders, right?” Van Allen finally said, looking at the hole and giving voice to what they were all thinking.

No one answered when Van Allen made this suggestion. Six sets of eyes were perfectly averted,

“Come on, you bastards,” Van Allen said. “Get a grip on reality. Tombs don’t fly open by themselves.”

“What’s your guess?” Ritter asked. “What did happen here?”

“I don’t know. What are you suggesting?” Van Allen asked. “Spontaneous combustion within the coffin? Or some restless corpse that came up to join us?’

“So you give me an explanation,” Ritter said.

The Salvadorans hadn’t communicated a single word in English during their entire visit. But they appeared to be tuned in perfectly to this conversation.

“Ask me again in a few weeks,” Van Allen said. “We’ll find out.”

Van Allen’s reasoning did little to ease the gravediggers. Once they reached the coffin, the Salvadorans couldn’t wait to leave. They spoke to Martinez in agitated Spanish and climbed back up to ground level. Martinez tried to calm them. He was failing.

“The men refuse to dig any farther,” Martinez told Van Allen. “They no want to touch the grave any further, either.”

“None of us do,” Van Allen said.

The uniformed cops smirked. The Salvadorans laid their shovels aside and walked away from the pit. At the same time, two more cemetery workers arrived in a black vehicle that seemed to be part hearse, part pick-up truck. There were chains and a winch in the vehicle. The truck’s occupants stepped out and waited for some command. Van Allen knew the procedure. Martinez retrieved a motorized forklift at the same time.

When all his helpers were assembled, Van Allen felt a fatigue in his own spirit. There was nothing quite like a task that no one wanted to do. He sighed. Then, bad leg and all, the detective jumped down into the grave.

The men from the utility van dropped four chains into the pit. One of the workmen came down into the grave with Van Allen. He and the detective attached chains to each side of the coffin. The Salvadorans returned to the hole and cleared dirt from each side. Then someone turned on the winch. Its mechanism, like a rusty lock giving way, began to grind. The handles on the coffin, presumably untouched for decades, creaked. So did the chains from the truck.

Van Allen and the cemetery worker climbed out of the grave and stepped back. Van Allen nodded to the man in the truck.

The winch noisily continued its work.

Then, with a groan, the coffin came loose from the earth. Van Allen gave an order to halt the digging for a moment and the chains stopped pulling. The detective leaned down and steadied the coffin. Then the winch continued and raised the casket completely from where it had rested. When the casket was up to ground level, the forklift took over and transported the pine vessel to the truck and set the coffin into the vehicle.

Van Allen continued to watch it. Then he turned.

“I want everyone who worked on this to come over here,” he said. He summoned all seven men present. “I don’t know what we’re dealing with here and my guess is that none of you do, either,” he said. “But I’m going to make a request. You know how the media eats up something like this. You know what a circus this can turn into. So nobody tells what he’s seen here today. Do I have a promise from everyone on that?”

Assurance was forthcoming from all present, except the gravediggers. Martinez had to translate. Then the Salvadorans nodded their agreement. They seemed anxious to go. Van Allen released them, nursing a bad feeling about their ability to keep quiet.

It was nearly dark. The driver turned on the lights of the transport truck.

Van Allen climbed into the truck and knelt by the coffin. He put his hand to the side of it and found that there was plenty of give in the lid. He gave it a slight push and found that it would lift.