Black Angel Page 10

  “Let’s just hear what you’ve got,” Larry told him. He was sitting on the edge of Norm’s workbench, drinking espresso. Norm Dianda was the police department’s resident sound expert. He wore terrible peaky-shouldered sweaters that his mother had knitted him, and diseased-looking turquoise Kickers, but he could set up the most complicated wiretaps that Larry had ever known, and his work with directional microphones was legendary. Here, in his basement laboratory, amid stacks of speakers and amplifiers and tape-recorders, he had devised one of the most sophisticated systems of sound analysis in the country—better than anything that the CIA or the FBI could boast. Or, at least, that was Norm’s claim.

  He had spent almost the entire weekend working on the tape-recording that KGO had made of the Fog City Satan’s last telephone call. For starters, he played the traffic noises in the far background. To Larry, they sounded just like traffic noises in the far background.

  “What does that tell us?” he asked. “The guy was calling from someplace close to the street.”

  “Oh, not just any street,” Norm told him. “You listen up some more.”

  Larry listened intently. He could hear cars, trucks; an occasional motor horn. He looked at Houston but all Houston could do was shrug.

  “You’re hearing it but you’re not listening,” said Norm. “This traffic noise has two distinct characteristics. One is, that the traffic keeps starting and stopping, and changing direction. You can hear the change in direction from the change in echo and Doppler effect. This indicates that our boy was making his call close to an intersection where there were traffic signals. First of all the traffic goes one way, then it goes the other.”

  “Norm, do you know how many intersections there are in San Francisco?” Larry protested.

  “Sure… but there’s another sound, too. Listen. Every time the traffic goes in one specific direction, there’s a kind of a clonk-rumble-clonk.”

  “A clonk-rumble-clonk?” asked Houston, in amusement.

  “For sure. Listen. There it goes. Clonk-rumble-clonk. Clonk-rumble-clonk. When a truck passes, it sounds louder, and different. There you are. Clonk-clonk-rumble-clonk-clonk-clonk. Two sets of wheels at the front, three sets of wheels at the rear.”

  “Do you have any idea what it is?” Larry asked him; knowing that Norm was just itching to tell them.

  “Well…” said Norm, a little archly. “My guess is that it’s a sheet of heavy-gauge steel covering an excavation in the road surface. It’s close to the traffic-signals, and it’s only on one side of the intersection.”

  Larry was impressed. “That sure narrows it.”

  “There’s more,” said Norm. He played the tape again, this time emphasizing the music and the conversation in the middle-distance. The voice of the Fog City Satan boomed indistinctly in the foreground, like blurred summertime thunder over the Berkeley Hills.

  The conversation was unintelligible. There was laughter, and a knocking noise. An occasional shug, shug. The music sounded like the lambada.

  “The phone call was probably made in a bar,” said Norm. “There are six or seven different voices in the background, and although it’s impossible to distinguish what they’re saying, their intonation sounds Spanish. You can hear glasses knocking on a wooden counter, and that shug, shug sound is probably the sound of the bartender shoveling glasses into a sinkful of crushed ice. You can hear two distinct tunes, and from the smooth way in which they segue together, I’d say they were probably on tape, rather than any kind of juke-box. The first tune is the Hot Lambada by Juan Ochoa and the Antics. The second tune is Love in Guadalajara by the Border People.”

  “Listen to this guy,” put in Houston. “He sounds like a deejay on one of those Latino FM stations.”

  “A Mexican-style bar located at an intersection with a steel plate in the roadway,” said Larry. “I guess that shouldn’t be too difficult to find.”

  “You’ll know for sure when you’ve found the right place,” put in Norm. “There are no commercially issued tapes in which the Hot Lambada by Juan Ochoa and the Antics is immediately followed by Love in Guadalajara by the Border People. In other words, the tape was probably recorded by the owners of the bar, and is the only one in existence with those two songs in that particular sequence.”

  “You’re some kind of genius, you know that?” Larry told him.

  Norm said, “It’s analysis, that’s all. Of course, this is the first time that we’ve picked up any distinct background noise on a call from our boy, so presumably he made all the previous calls from his home, or someplace quiet like that.”

  “It’s the same guy, though?”

  “Oh, sure, it’s the same guy. Just listen.” He played the tape again, this time emphasizing the voice of the Fog City Satan.

  Larry had heard the tape on Saturday afternoon, and had played it six or seven times. The coldness of the man’s voice had chilled him then. But Norm’s remixed and amplified version was horrifying. He could hear the man breathing. He could hear his tongue clicking in the wetness of his mouth. It was like having the Fog City Satan whispering directly into his ear.

  “We’re bringing him back. They gave their lives willingly. Just like a sacrifice. Just the way it was always meant. And now’s the time. The steps are almost complete. All we have to do is to call him. All we have to do is to feed him. Then you’ll pay. Then you’ll suffer. He’s coming from the other side. All he needs is feeding. You won’t know when he’s coming. You won’t know where. Be warned if you must. Be dust if you don’t.”

  Larry shook his head; and Houston said, “Jesus. What a creep.”

  Norm said, “As far as I can tell he’s male, Caucasian, around mid-forties. He’s a little hoarse; so he’s possibly a cigarette-smoker. His accent sounds local, although there’s a slightly Latin lisp in the way he pronounces his ‘esses’.”

  “I never heard that middle-section before,” Larry remarked. “All that stuff about ‘Then you’ll pay. Then you’ll suffer.’”

  “That was very indistinct on the original,” Norm agreed. “But I managed to enhance it with the computer.”

  “You’ve done an incredible job,” Larry told him, slapping him on the back. “In fact, when we catch this guy, the credit’s going to be yours, not mine.”

  “Please,” said Norm. “Credit I can live without. But a pay hike would be good.” He took a sip of Larry’s espresso and grimaced. “How do you drink this stuff?”

  “It’s good for the chest-hair,” Larry told him. “Did you ever see any self-respecting Italian without chest-hair?”

  “Sure,” said Norm, flicking off rows of switches. “Sophia Loren, for one.”

  *

  The fog was as impenetrable as gray flannel by the time Houston called to say that they had “probably” located the Mexican bar from which the Fog City Satan had made his call. Larry took his Toyota out of the police garage and met Houston twenty minutes later at the intersection of Front and Green. Houston was sitting in his battered beige Saratoga with his mouth open and his eyes closed. Larry knocked on the window.

  “What’s this, bedtime?”

  Houston climbed out of the car and stretched. “I haven’t been sleeping too good.”

  “None of us has been sleeping too good. The time for sleeping is when we nail our boy.”

  Houston said, “Okay—this is the only intersection in the city that has a metal plate covering a hole in the street and a Mexican bar.”

  The night was still foggy. This particular corner of Front Street looked like a set for a made-for-TV detective movie; all fog and unfocused neon and dew-glossed sidewalks. A few cars bounced past, their marker-lights dipping as they crossed the intersection, then clang-bonk-clang as they bounced over the metal plate.

  “Alphonson’s Cantina” stood on the south-west corner of the intersection, between Rainwater Fine Arts and Anselmo Imports, Inc. It was a rundown sausage-and-tequila-and-fajita joint with windows obscured with scratched red paint and a fitfully bu
zzing neon sign advertising Sol Cerveza. Obviously its owner had missed out on the surge of popularity that had turned the “Border Cantina” and “Alejandro’s Sociedad Gastronomica” into the hot places to eat.

  “Have you checked inside?” asked Larry, as they crossed the street.

  “Not yet. Front Street used to be my beat, back when I was a grunt. I didn’t want to risk being recognized.”

  Larry pushed his way in through Alphonson’s double doors. Inside it was gloomy, smoky and almost empty, although mariachi music was playing from the stereo system at deafening volume. There was a long battered bar, a collection of tables with checkered red cloths and empty wine bottles with candles stuck in them, and a huge mural of bullfighting in Tijuana, with an anatomically impossible bull being slaughtered by what looked like a transexual matador, painted blood everywhere.

  A man with a fleshy pockmarked nose and greased-back hair was polishing glasses and talking to a big-hipped black-haired woman in a purple dress. The woman was drinking margaritas and smoking a small cigar. Larry came up to the bar and stood beside her and said, “How are you doing?”

  The woman looked him up and down. She had a big white-powdered face that had obviously been battling for years against the effects of gravity. Her wrinkled cleavage was thick with powder, too; and around her neck she wore six or seven gold chains with crosses and pendants and a rabbit’s foot.

  “Do I know you, my darling?” she asked, in a rasping voice.

  “You do now. Larry Foggia. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Don’t mind if you do. I suppose you want something in return.”

  “Such as?”

  “It depends what you’re into. I gave up blowjobs years ago, but I can read your palm.”

  Larry said to the man behind the bar. “Are you the owner?”

  The man shook his head. “The owner’s in Vegas. I just work here.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Herve, why?”

  “Were you working here last Friday evening, Herve?”

  “Sure. I work here every evening. What are you, a cop or something?”

  Larry produced his badge. The woman in the purple dress raised one overplucked eyebrow and noisily blew out smoke. “Good thing I only offered the palm-reading, hunh?”

  Larry ordered her a margarita, and two beers for himself and Houston. “I’m looking for a guy who made a telephone call from here round about seven o’clock on Friday. A hefty guy, dark-haired, mid-forties.”

  The barman lifted a glass to the light, then polished it some more. “I don’t know. I’m usually pretty busy around that time.”

  Larry looked around. The telephone was on the wall beside the double doors. It was covered by a yellow-painted pegboard hood to keep out the noise, but anybody making a call could have easily been seen from the bar, and if the Fog City Satan looked as distinctive as the forensic and circumstantial evidence suggested he did. it would have been almost impossible for the barman to have missed him.

  Larry took out a $20 bill, folded it, and offered it to the barman between two uplifted fingers. “Tall… could have had his head shaved. Muscular. too; like he worked out a lot.”

  The barman ignored the money and shook his head. “I didn’t see nobody.”

  “Come on, Herve, be serious,” Larry persisted. “There’s no way that you could have missed him.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” interrupted the woman in the purple dress. “About three years ago, Herve had his fingers broken because he told some guy’s wife that he was drinking in here with another woman. Since then he’s suffered from complete customer blindness. But don’t you worry about it, my darling. I think I saw the character you’re talking about.”

  “Really?” asked Larry. He wasn’t sure whether the woman was putting him on or not. But there was something he liked about her. She was upfront and earthy, and he liked people who were upfront and earthy. Maybe it was a reaction against the unreality of his upbringing, walking through the rooms of 144 Belvedere, haunted by his father’s ghost.

  The woman held out her hand. “You don’t think I’m going to tell you for free when you were going to give this bozo a double sawbuck?”

  Larry handed over the bill, and the woman tucked it carefully into her cleavage.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Edna-Mae. Edna-Mae Lickerman. Mrs. Edna-Mae Lickerman.”

  “You live around here, Mrs. Edna-Mae Lickerman?”

  “I run the Hand-Made Pottery on Vallejo. I pot by day and I drink by night.” She let out a bright, harsh laugh.

  “All right, then,” said Larry. “Tell me about this guy you saw.”

  “He came in Friday evening at a quarter after six,” said Edna-Mae, assertively.

  “How come you’re so sure of the time?” asked Houston.

  “I was on my third margarita, my darling, and I time my margaritas. I have the first margarita at a quarter after five, I have the second margarita at a quarter of six, and I have the third margarita at a quarter after six. It’s called pacing your drinking, haven’t you ever heard about that?”

  “Okay,” said Larry. “So what did he look like?”

  “I’ve seen him before. He doesn’t come in all that often, maybe once every four or five weeks. But you can’t mistake him. He’s built like a bulldozer. He wears this kind of scarf knotted around his head, but I never saw his face too clearly.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Larry.

  The woman blew out cigar-smoke. “I don’t know. He has these perfect looks, you know? Blue eyes, good strong chin. A little bit like Yul Brynner, only taller than Yul Brynner. But he’s weird, like there’s something missing in the thinking department.”

  “Have you ever talked to him?” asked Larry.

  “Nossir, no way. He always sits and drinks alone. He doesn’t look like the type who’s going to be interested in small-talk.”

  “Have you any idea where he lives?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Have you ever heard anybody call him by name?”

  “Nossir.”

  “What was he wearing last Friday?” asked Houston, making notes.

  “Jeans, and a sweatshirt, and a black leather motorcycle jacket, or maybe it was dark brown.”

  “Is that the way he’s usually dressed when he comes in here?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “What color was the sweatshirt?” Houston wanted to know. “Anything printed on it?”

  “I think it was red, my darling. It had some kind of writing on it but I don’t know what it said. I don’t go around reading strange men’s sweatshirts.”

  Larry checked his watch. “Do you have some time to spare?” he asked the woman. “I’d like you to come down to headquarters with me and take a look through some pictures. Maybe you can pick this guy out for us.”

  “Well…”said the woman. “I was planning on getting drunk.”

  “You can send out for a bottle of tequila. Believe me, this is very important. You could help us to catch a killer.”

  Edna-Mae widened her mascara-blobbed eyes. “You mean he’s a killer? That young guy?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” said Larry. “But there’s a possibility, yes.”

  “Well… a killer! I never met a killer before. Apart from my former husband, of course, Mr. Lickerman, and all he ever killed was love and devotion.”

  “Do you want to finish your drink?” asked Larry. “Then we can go.”

  “All right, then,” Edna-Mae agreed. “But let me read your palm first. I did promise, after all. Unless you’d rather have the blowjob?”

  Larry grinned. “I think I can live without either.”

  “But I insist, my darling! I never take a free drink! I’m not a kept woman, you know!”

  “All right, then,” said Larry, holding out his hand. “I’ll settle for the palm-reading.”

  Edna-Mae bent back his fingers and examined the lines on his hand. H
er fingernails were very long and painted lilac. On her left hand, instead of a wedding-band, she wore a silver ring with a bright blue human eye enameled on it. The eye was startlingly realistic, and Larry had the odd feeling that it was watching him.

  “Now these are what I call interesting lines,” said Edna-Mae. “I mean, these are not your normal marriage-mortgage-kids-and-a-station-wagon lines. These are very artistic, very individual. You draw, right? And you cook? And you like music? Don’t tell me, you like opera!”

  Houston rolled his eyes up in exasperation. “His name’s Larry Foggia! Larry Foggia, one of the Bay Street Foggias! And don’t tell me you didn’t know that all along! And now you’re asking if he likes opera? Does Pavarotti like opera? Hey—what about pasta? Does he like pasta?”

  Edna-Mae bared her discolored teeth. “Yes, my darling, he likes pasta. See that line there, just around the thumb? That’s his linguine line.”

  “Come on, then,” Larry laughed. “Let’s see what interesting un-normal future I’ve got in store.”

  Edna-Mae traced Larry’s line of fortune, right up the middle of his palm. “You’ll never make any money, believe me. You’ll be poor but honest for the rest of your life.”

  Houston shook his head in amusement. “He’s a cop; and she says he’s going to be poor but honest.”

  “Here’s your heart-line,” Edna-Mae persisted. “You’re extremely passionate, but you’re loyal, too. You’re the type of man who gives all of his love to one woman, for all of his life. But here—look—your heart-line’s broken. You’re going to have trouble with your marriage. I’m not sure what it is, but it looks like it’s going to be soon.”

  “I know, Linda’s going to ask her mother to stay,” put in Houston.

  But Edna-Mae was frowning; and she raised her hand to keep Houston quiet. “No, no. It’s not that. You’re not going to fall out of love. You’re not going to argue. But for some reason, there’s going to be some terrific disruption in your marriage. I mean something really volcanic.”