Cemetery of Angels (40 page)

Van Allen led Rebecca in. The program that evening was a cartoon, followed by a Harry Langdon comedy. But it wasn’t the great comedian Langdon they were there to see.

The name of the film that had drawn Van Allen was
See America Thirst
, a piece of cinematic mischief from 1930 that carried with it a less than favorable opinion of the Volstead Act.

Seventeen minutes into the story, a young actor came into view in a speakeasy scene and shared the screen with the star. He was a handsome young man, sandy-haired, classic features, clean-cut in this picture. White shirt, crisp as new snow. Dark slacks. It had been Billy Carlton’s last silent feature before he had been murdered. He portrayed a character named Paul Hammond.

Rebecca should have been startled to see him, but she wasn’t. Instead, she had an overwhelming sense of admiration for the man. Almost a longing for him. And surely there was affection.

He looked not too different than when he had been her lover seventy years ago, as well as earlier that week. And when Rebecca turned toward the policeman who was sitting next to her, she found that he was staring at her.

Then he turned his attention to the screen.

“I know, I know. Remember, I’ve seen him, too, now,” Van Allen said. “Call me tomorrow. We’ll talk further. There’s still a matter about your children, I submit.”

Rebecca allowed that he was correct. But a strange sense of contentment had come over her. Whether she felt herself protected or simply resigned to her fate, she couldn’t tell. But she suspected it was one or the other.

“Can you get home all right?” Van Allen asked.

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

“I should stay with you until you get home,” he said.

“It’s not necessary,” she insisted. He sighed.

“I still need to talk to your husband,” Van Allen said.

Rebecca nodded and said she understood.

The policeman rose and left the theater. Rebecca Moore stayed and was enthralled by the entire movie. When she emerged from The Silent Movie it was close to ten-thirty, and the dampness and cold of the night had turned to a steady drizzle.

And as much as Rebecca was conscious of the dangers of city streets after dark, she took no notice of the man in the car across the block and down Fairfax Avenue a hundred feet away from her.

Waiting for her, specifically.

Watching for her, specifically.

It was difficult to see with the precipitation. But she probably would have recognized him anyway, even though his wraparound sunglasses were in his pocket. It was the face that she would remember.

The drizzle intensified, turning into a steady, monotonous rain. But aside from the temperature, which was warmer in Southern California than Connecticut, it might just as well have been a certain horrible evening in February all over again.

Rebecca was halfway to her car when she heard the footsteps.

They fell like little blows of a hammer on the pavement behind her. First the footsteps were a hundred feet away, then fifty. A sixth sense told her that they were closing in. But when she turned and looked, a more tactile fear kicked in.

She knew the shape of her pursuer immediately. She could see his face under a rain hat and, more than anything else, she knew a surge of life and death fear when she felt it.

She ran. Her heart in her throat beat so fast that she could taste it. She screamed, but it was late evening in a deserted neighborhood. The few cars that passed kept going.

“Rebecca!” he called after her. “Rebecca, stop!”

But she didn’t. And she wondered strangely if he, too, this man who wanted her dead was a ghost. She reached her car. A trembling hand held the keys. She wished she had carried a gun.

She tried the keys in the door of the car, and they wouldn’t turn. She whirled and flung her keys at her assailant and ran. Why had she let Van Allen depart? How could she have been so foolish? Or had he lured her there to set her up, she wondered.

She ducked around the car, and the man lunged at her, hitting hard on the hood of her vehicle. She swung a fist wildly and struck him a glancing blow near the eye. She fled across Fairfax Avenue as a surge of traffic came northward toward Hollywood. She heard car horns blaring at her and tires screeching to avoid her.

An angry driver shouted at her, cursing profanely.

“A man’s trying to kill me!” she screamed back. But no one stopped.

She had momentarily evaded her attacker. He hadn’t followed her across the street, but he was tracking her again from the other side.

She ran to a corner at Waring Avenue, then turned the corner and fled eastward. The rain intensified. She hoped it would hide her. It didn’t.

She pressed her body to the side of a building. Her attacker stopped at the corner and scanned, looking for her. She was visible in a street lamp and knew he would see her. She ducked into the first recessed doorway she could find, that of some sort of plumbing supply company. And even as the rain fell, she heard the man’s footsteps start to come near her.

Her hand found the doorknob behind her. She tried the knob. The door was locked.

Her heart thundered. Tears welled in her eyes. Was this her destiny? Were her children already dead, she wondered, and now was she to be murdered?

Was this the only manner in which she and her children would be reunited? Was this the whole intent of this entire inexplicable involvement with the ghost of Billy Carlton?

A reunion in death?

All of these thoughts shot through her within a heartbeat. She knew the man was within a few feet of her now on the sidewalk. Would she burst from hiding and run? Would she cower and beg that the end would come with merciful quickness and lack of pain? Her knees began to buckle. Her back began to sink downward against the locked door. She sobbed uncontrollably.

She was, she knew, as good as dead. In the afterlife, she wondered, would she eventually learn what had happened to her children?

The man’s shadow was visible before her. He was only a step or two away. Then the inexplicable happened again. The unlocked door behind her gave way. It opened with a loud clatter, and her body fell within the door.

An unseen hand, guiding the lock? She barely had time to wonder.

She regained her balance and gathered herself, stumbling to her feet. She came fully through the door, and the last thing she saw accompanied by her own scream was her killer, who turned the corner and rushed after her.

The door re-locked. His shoulder hit it hard. He tried to smash his way in. The impact of his body against the old door was enormous. He called to her.

“Rebecca! Rebecca! I’m trying to protect you! Open this! Open this!”

Protect? The assertion was insane. She turned and saw a staircase, dimly lit by emergency nighttime lighting.

The man behind her was still walloping the door, banging it harder and harder with his shoulder. She knew that if the door had opened for her, it would open for him. She was soaked with perspiration now as she started to mount the stairs. She could hear the wood of the doorframe start to give.

For a moment there was silence. She was one and a half flights up the stairs. Then she heard a single shot from a pistol, followed by the sound of crunching wood. Her killer had shot his entrance into the building and was again in close pursuit.

She climbed the steps. She could hear the heavy male footsteps coming up the stairs after her. She ran as fast as she could. Each floor she came to was quiet, with dark closed doors facing a dim hall.

She kept climbing.

She came to the top floor. Three doors — 1940s style, they looked like something out of a Raymond Chandler movie — faced a small landing. She tried one. Locked.

She could hear the footsteps one floor below her. She tried the stairs again. They led to the roof. The door to the roof, she found seconds later, was unlocked.

She came out onto a tarpaper landing, which reminded her of tenement rooftops she had known in New York years ago. There was one square chimney and a pair of ventilation pipes. Her eyes adjusted from the light of the city around her, but she could already see that this building stood alone. There was no adjoining rooftop to which she might escape.

There was, she saw quickly, no escape. She had cornered herself perfectly. The rain continued to fall. It would muffle her cries for help. In this way, too, she had sealed her doom.

She stood still by the bricks of the old flat chimney tower, her back against it. She heard her assailant come onto the roof. His footsteps ceased. The door to the roof clicked closed behind him.

“Rebecca?” he asked softly. “I know you’re here.”

He was looking around, she knew. And, obviously, he read the situation perfectly. The chimney was the only place where she could have taken cover. So he approached it.

She heard his steps growing louder. He was ten feet away, then five. Then he turned the comer to the chimney. His huge shape hulked into view right in front of her, eclipsing her vision of the city.

He stood in front of her. A horrible, scarred male face. The face of a convict. A murderer. She looked into his eyes, and he into hers.

His eyes were mean and sharp. Brutal, though with little emotion. In his soul, she saw something horrible, something morally unredeemable.

“Please,” she gasped softly. “Let me go.”

He shook his head. Almost a smile came to his lips.

“No, Rebecca. I’m not going to do that.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I was hired.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t care. You’re a job.”

He raised a hand and took her wrist.

“Who hired you?”

“Your husband.”

“What?”

“You’re in his way?”

“What?” She was crying harder now, close to a wail.

“My children…?” She pleaded. “Where are they?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“Does
he
know? Does Bill know where they are?”

“He doesn’t know where your brats are. Doesn’t know. Doesn’t care.”

“But!”

“Look, I’ll do you fast. I’ll do you painless,” the murderer said. “That’s my only favor.”

The pressure of his hand on her wrist tightened like a vise. At first, she reacted with a tremor of resistance then she fought wildly. He slapped her hard across the face. The force of the blow shook her and knocked half the fight out of her. When she continued to struggle, he hit her again, harder this time.

She sobbed uncontrollably.

“You’re going to commit suicide,” he said. “You’re distraught over the children. You’re going to jump off a rooftop.”

He pulled her.

Then a third voice intruded. “Here?”

The killer froze. He looked around. Rebecca thought she was hallucinating.

“What’s that?” the killer asked.

The voice came again.

“Are you there?” the voice asked.

The killer looked in the direction of the voice.

He pushed Rebecca to the ground and again pulled his weapon from his belt. “Who’s here?” he asked. “Where are you?”

The voice was soft. Silken on the rain, muted with the night. A voice like black crushed velvet, traversing years.

“I’m here,” it said.

Rebecca raised her eyes and saw a vision. At the same time, her assassin turned and thought he saw the flickering figure of a man at the edge of the roof, much like an image of an old film from a projector, if there were no screen. The image seemed to hang in the air then it was gone.

“What are you doing?” came the velvety voice from the edge of the roof. The assassin faced that direction.

“None of your business,” the killer answered, trying to find the speaker.

“Are you hurting this woman?”

The killer’s eyes narrowed into little mean slits. He glared in the direction of an unwelcome witness. But he could not find anyone.

“Where are you?” the killer asked. The killer thought quickly and pulled a rope from his coat. He tied Rebecca’s wrists.

“I don’t like what you’re doing,” the voice answered.

“Yeah? Well, you don’t have to!” the assailant snapped. He raised his automatic pistol and brandished it. But he appeared frightened.

The killer gagged Rebecca and pushed her roughly to the tarpaper. He turned toward the voice that was taunting him and still couldn’t find the course. The killer looked in every direction. Then he thought he saw another flickering movement in a shadow. He squinted and peered at it.

“I’m here,” the voice said.

The killer turned back to the spot where he had first seen the vision. Nothing again. The killer wondered how he could have missed him.

“What are you doing to that woman?” the voice asked.

“Same as I’m going to do to you,” the assailant said. “I’m going to kill her. What’s your name, pal?” the killer asked the empty rooftop.

From somewhere…

“Hammond, Paul Hammond.”

“You’re going to die, Paul Hammond.”

“You’re going to shoot me?”

“Double suicide. The two of you go over the ledge.”

“You have to find me first. “

Again, the figure of a man shimmered near the ledge of the roof. The quivering nature of the figure unnerved the assassin, but attracted him at the same time. Then the flickering figure seemed to glide, as if it were on casters rather than moving on its feet.

“Okay. Hold it there! “The killer said.

“If you want me,” the voice said, “come get me.”

“I’ll do that.”

The killer thought he saw another image. He approached and cornered it. The attacker was much bigger than his victim, taller, wider, and sturdier. It should be an easy task to propel him over the side of the building, the killer thought. Four flights down, straight onto concrete. Neither body would be found until morning, when all life would be out of them.

It appeared as close to perfect as it could.

“Then come get me, Francis,” said the victim. “Are you man enough?”

“How did you know my name?”

“I know that your grave is waiting for you.”

Angrily, indignantly, the killer stepped forward.

He was within twenty feet of a vision that he still couldn’t see well enough to describe. Then ten. But to Rebecca’s attacker, it still seemed as if there were something odd about the light that reflected upward from the parking lot. The unwanted witness approached and receded at the same time. At one moment, it appeared that the spirit glided through a small ventilation pipe on the roof. Rebecca watched as the bizarre endgame played out in the rain and darkness.