Innocent Blood

Eleven

Wednesday was gray and chilly. The wind had a nasty saw-toothed edge to it and rain was forecast for later in the day. More than sixty guests came to St Luke’s for Danny’s funeral service, including Frank’s father and mother; Margot’s mother; Carol and Smitty; Mo and Sherma; Lizzie Fries and her partner, Walford; Joe Peruggio, their executive producer, and his wife, Sharleen; Rick and Lynn Ashbee, as well as Frank’s agent Nero Tabori and most of the cast of Pigs. Frank and Margot sat together but they didn’t touch each other or exchange more than two or three words, even though Frank could feel the pew shaking as Margot sobbed. She wore a black hat with a black veil. Frank couldn’t help thinking that she looked like a grieving widow in a Charles Addams cartoon.

Reverend Trent climbed into the pulpit, thirtyish but pinkly bald, with circular glasses, so that he looked like the boy at school who always went home in tears.

‘We have all shed tears for young Daniel today, but none grieves as sorely as Christ, our Lord, who always weeps when one of his little ones falls asleep and never re-awakens.

‘We saw only the early morning of Daniel’s life, and we shall never know what he could have become if he had reached his noonday hour. But I can tell you this: he would have shined as brightly as the sun high above, and the world will be a dimmer place without him.’

Before he finished, Reverend Trent said a prayer for the hundred and six victims of the bomb that had demolished Studio V at Panorama-TV, and condemned Dar Tariki Tariqat. ‘A group of people are terrorizing our community – a group who have acted without pity and without remorse. They are slaughtering our friends and our loved ones without discrimination. They took young Daniel away from us, and his schoolmates, and his teachers, and yesterday they took away over a hundred more innocent lives.

‘We pray for the souls of all of those lost, that they may find eternal peace and happiness in Heaven. In spite of our anger, we also pray for all of those misguided people who have conspired in these terrible outrages, that they may look into the mirror and see how evil they have become, and what misery and anguish they have caused, and repent.’

He hesitated, and then he said, much more quietly, ‘I hold out very little hope, however, that they will.’

There was an even longer pause, as if he were trying to make up his mind if he really ought to say any more. But eventually he lifted his head and took off his glasses, his lower lip trembling with passion. ‘If it were possible for us to ask the Lord our God to act on our behalf as a vengeful God, and to show no mercy to those who have broken his Commandments, then I have to confess that I, for one, would ask Him now.’

They stood under the overcast sky and Danny’s casket was lowered in the ground. Frank threw a handful of crumbly soil on to the lid, and then Margot did the same.

‘So that’s that, then,’ she said.

He looked at her, but the smokescreen of her veil made it impossible for him to see the subtleties of her expression. Did she mean that this was the end of their life as parents, as Danny’s dad and mom – or that this was the end of their marriage altogether? He didn’t know how to ask her, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to.

Without another word, Margot walked off and linked arms with Ruth. Frank was left alone by the graveside. He stared down at the casket and thought of what Francis Bacon had written: ‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.’ Now Danny was in the dark, forever. Frank knew that Danny hadn’t forgiven him, but he prayed that he wasn’t afraid.

Somebody came and stood close beside him. When he turned around, Frank saw that it was Nevile Strange, wearing a black shirt and a black necktie and a very long black overcoat, and carrying a black Homburg hat.

‘Very moving service,’ said Nevile.

‘Yes.’

‘I like a clergyman who can show some genuine Old Testament wrath once in a while. Nothing like an occasional smite to keep the sinners shaking in their shoes.’

Frank took a last look down at Danny’s casket, and then he turned away. ‘We’re having a few drinks back at the house. Are you going to join us?’

Nevile replaced his hat. ‘Actually, I need to talk to you, but this may not be the time for it.’

‘Why not? Things can’t get very much worse than they are already.’

‘Oh, you mean the séance. That was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. It didn’t turn out to be very helpful, did it? Not as far as your marriage is concerned.’

‘Not only the séance.’ Frank told him about the graffiti that had been smeared over Margot’s paintings. ‘I even began to believe that maybe I did do it, that I drove back home from my sister’s house and ruined her paintings in my sleep.’

Nevile laid his hand on Frank’s shoulder. ‘It wasn’t you, Frank; that’s for certain.’

‘Oh, no? If I didn’t, who did?’

‘Well . . . there’s a remote possibility that Margot did it herself, so that she could blame you for it, as a way of conceptualizing her anger toward you. But personally I very much doubt it. I suspect that there are other forces involved here.’

‘When you say “other forces,” you mean what? Like, spirits?’

Nevile shrugged. ‘We can always discuss this another time.’

‘Nevile, I know what I saw on the patio, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it really was Danny. A friend of mine . . . well, you may think this is offensive, but a friend of mine even suggested that you rigged it somehow – that it wasn’t really a spiritual manifestation at all, but some kind of optical illusion.’

‘And what do you think about that?’

‘If it was an optical illusion, I don’t see how you could have found the time to set it up, to be honest. Or why. My friend said you might have done it for the money – you know, to induce me to pay for more séances. But I can’t believe you would go to those lengths just for five hundred bucks.’

Nevile smiled. ‘Your friend is perfectly entitled to have doubts, Frank, especially about this particular séance. This was the very first time that anyone apart from myself was actually able to see a spirit, as well as hear it. So believe me, I think it could have been a fake, too. Not a fake in the sense that your friend obviously means – not a con-trick with lights and mirrors. But a spiritual impersonation. Another spirit, pretending to be Danny.’

‘When you first walked into the house, you sensed another presence, didn’t you? That little girl, maybe.’

‘That’s true, but she was only eighteen months old, wasn’t she, when she died? Far too young to stage an elaborate deception like this. Children who pass over, you see, they never grow older. In fact nobody who passes over grows older.’

They had reached Nevile’s shiny old Mercedes, which was already speckled with rain. ‘No,’ said Nevile, as he took out his keys, ‘I think we’re talking about an adult spirit here. It was the way Danny spoke, mostly. He said something like, “You didn’t care . . . you took away my whole life because you didn’t care . . . and not caring is the greatest sin of all.”’

‘That’s right.’

‘Don’t tell me Danny ever spoke like that. I didn’t know him, Frank, but he was only eight years old, wasn’t he? I don’t think I’ve heard any eight-year-olds speak like that.’

Frank thought about it. ‘I guess you’re right. It didn’t hit me before. I couldn’t think about anything else except how much Danny hated me, and was never going to forgive me.’

‘Mull it over, Frank. It could be very important. If it wasn’t Danny, then we should try to find out who he was, and why he went to such lengths to deceive you.’

Margot approached them. She had lifted her veil and draped it over her hat. Her eyes were reddened but her lips were thin and tight and she wore no lipstick.

‘I’ve asked Nevile back to the house,’ Frank told her.

‘I suppose I can’t stop you.’

‘I’ve asked him as our guest, Margot.’

‘All right. So long as he doesn’t conjure up Danny’s ghost again. I don’t think our friends would find it very amusing.’

‘Margot, we just buried him.’

‘Exactly,’ she said, and walked away.

Nevile watched her go, and then he said, ‘Listen, I think it would be more diplomatic if I didn’t come. Let me meet you later. Where are you staying?’

Frank lay on his bed at the Sunset Marquis with a cold bottle of Molson, watching the television news. Outside his window, three girls were screaming and laughing as their boyfriends threw them into the pool. It was late afternoon already, over twenty-four hours since all of those people had been killed at Panorama-TV, and soon it would be Thursday, and then Friday, and then a week.

It was already a week since Danny had died, but he would always be stuck at Wednesday, September 12, like a small boy who has missed the bus home, gradually receding out of sight, and one day, out of mind.

On the news, the anchorwoman was saying ‘. . . killing one hundred and six people and seriously injuring a further seventy-three, including TV personality Garry Sherman, who lost an arm and was badly disfigured by the blast.

‘However it was confirmed less than an hour ago that the FBI anti-terrorist task force has positively identified the truck driver. He was named as Richard Haze Abbott, twenty-seven years old, an unemployed construction worker from Simi Valley.’

A blurry color photograph appeared on the screen of a grinning young man with a red baseball cap and a sunburned nose, with his arms around a black and white mongrel. Frank narrowed his eyes to focus on him. He certainly didn’t look like an Arab terrorist. More like one of those spotty kids who flipped burgers at MacDonald’s.

‘If you recognize Richard Abbott, or ever knew him, or have seen or talked to him recently, FBI agents and police would very much like to hear from you. The numbers are—’

The phone rang. Even before he answered it he knew it was Astrid. Maybe he was starting to develop that psychic sense that Nevile had talked about.

‘Frank? Are you OK?’

‘Sure, I’m fine.’

‘The funeral – it must have been terrible for you.’

‘Well, it was. But it’s all over now, and I guess it helped.’

‘How did Margot take it?’

‘Margot and me, we’re not really talking at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry. You really need someone to talk to at a time like this.’

‘I suppose I’m lucky, then. I have you.’

‘Do you want me to come round tonight? I won’t if you’d rather be alone.’

‘No, no. I’d like that. Come around ten thirty, we’ll have a couple of drinks together.’

‘Frank . . .’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I’ll tell you later.’

‘Tell me now.’

‘No, forget I ever said anything. I’ll see you later.’

Frank turned back to the TV. At a media conference in Sacramento, the Governor of California, Gene Krupnik, had declared a state of emergency in the greater Los Angeles area, and was calling out the National Guard to set up security cordons around all the major studios. A bomb threat had been received by Sony and they had evacuated their lot ‘until further notice.’ Production on seven daytime soaps had been suspended and two new series – the gung-ho military drama Desert Force and the dark supernatural thriller Exorcists – had both been canceled, and the cancellation of other shows was ‘imminent.’

The Governor said, ‘There are no two ways about it. War has been declared on America’s broadcasting industry, which means that war has been declared on our freedom of speech, which we hold more dear than life itself. Well, I can tell you this: violence will be met by determination. Terrorism will be met by steadfastness. We refuse to flinch. Whatever it takes, we are going to prevail.’

The news channel immediately switched to pictures of the San Diego and the Pomona Freeways, which were jammed solid with SUVs trying to escape from the city.

Nevile arrived just after six and Frank took him to the Alligator Bar on Sunset. They sat in the shadows in a semicircular booth, with the lights of Los Angeles glittering below them. The bar was conspicuously empty. It was a favorite haunt of some of Hollywood’s older celebrities, TV stars of the seventies and eighties, but not tonight. The pianist played a desultory version of the theme tune to Hill Street Blues, and kept stopping every now and then for a drink and a chat with one of the hostesses.

Nevile had changed into a dark gray three-piece suit with a cream shirt and a red silk necktie. ‘I agreed to be guest of honor at a new art exhibition,’ he explained. ‘“Visions of the World Beyond.”’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Rodeo Drive, the Kleban Gallery, nine o’clock. Don’t ask. I know just what it’s going to be like and I’m beginning to regret it already. Most American artists seem to think that the “world beyond” looks like one of those episodes of Star Trek when Kirk and the crew go on shore leave. You know, all Greek pillars and orange skies and girls walking around in lime-green mini-dresses.’

‘You’re quite a cynic, for a psychic.’

‘Not at all. I’m just a realist. The world beyond looks exactly like the world of the living, except that everybody’s in stasis – the same as they were the day they passed over, for ever. If you die angry, you stay angry. Let that be a warning to you.’

‘Tell me about Danny. Or this spirit that pretended he was Danny.’

Nevile sipped his Tom Collins. ‘When I spoke to Lynn Ashbee’s little girl, Kathy, there was no question at all that it was her. Young Kathy was shocked, and she was very faint, and she didn’t really understand what had happened to her, especially since she had suffered such massive physical trauma. The way you die has an enormous effect on you. If you pass over peacefully, your spirit adapts to death much more easily; you’re ready for it, you can accept it. But if it’s wham! – the way it was with Kathy and all of those other school-children – it can take you a long time before you adjust. Months, or even years.’

‘Did you see Kathy?’

‘I saw a dancing light, like a will o’ the wisp, and only for a few seconds. That’s all I would have expected to see, so soon after such a violent death. That’s why Danny’s appearance was such a surprise to me. Danny may not have passed over instantaneously, like Kathy and her classmates, but all the same he wasn’t really expecting to die, was he?

‘Yet there he was, and his image was almost as clear as if he were still alive. Not only that, he wasn’t bewildered or confused. Quite the opposite. He was full of resentment, and he was able to articulate that resentment very clearly. That’s why I’m ninety percent convinced that it wasn’t Danny, but another spirit trying to pass itself off as Danny.’

‘Can spirits do that? I mean, take on the shape of other spirits?’

‘Of course. A person’s spirit has no physical substance. It’s nothing but a highly charged collection of all the electrical impulses that made up their personality when they were alive. A spirit makes itself seen and heard by stimulating the synapses in your brain, so that you think you can see it and you think you can hear it, even though it’s invisible and it’s not making a sound. Why do you think there are no authenticated tapes of spirit voices, and no video recordings of ghosts – even though people swear that they’ve heard their dead mothers talking to them, and seen their dead lovers standing over their beds? What you saw outside the window was very vivid, but it was nothing more than a picture from your own memory.’

‘So how come you saw it, too?’

‘Because whoever this spirit is, it was able to conjure up Danny’s image in my brain, too, and Margot’s, and Lynn’s, so that we all witnessed what was more or less the same manifestation.’

Frank finished his vodka and beckoned the hostess for another one. ‘What I want to know is, why would another spirit do that?’

‘I’m not at all sure. But spirits often make attempts to influence us, so that we can take care of unfinished business for them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, there are some things that spirits can do for themselves. If a man never got the chance to tell a woman that he loved her before he died, he might whisper it to her, inside her mind, or evoke a song or a smell that reminds her of him. He might even be able to appear to her, or give her the feeling that he was touching her. But spirits can’t hurt anybody. They can’t take revenge – not with their own hands, anyway.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely. That’s why people shouldn’t ever be scared by ghosts. Spirits can sometimes make a room feel chilly, or make the lights appear to go dim, but that’s not because it really goes colder or darker; they’re just affecting our perception. They can move objects, sometimes, that’s elementary psychokinesis. But they certainly can’t strangle you or stab you or push you off a building. That’s because they can’t make your brain act against your own self-preservation. What they can do, however, is try to persuade some other living person to get their revenge by proxy.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’ve done quite a lot of research into it – and there are several recorded instances where people have been killed and this seems to be the only plausible explanation. The most recent case I heard of was in New York two or three years ago when Antonio “Horseface” Agnelli was shot dead by one of his closest friends, George D’Auria.

‘In his defense, D’Auria said that he had met one of Horseface’s cousins, Bruno, in a restaurant in Brooklyn and that Cousin Bruno had tipped him off that Horseface had been having a passionate affair with his wife.

‘However it turned out at the Grand Jury hearing that Bruno had been expelled from the Agnelli family in 1994, and that his body had been found in 1997 in a burned-out car in Queens. So we have to ask ourselves, who did George D’Auria meet in that restaurant, if anybody? The manager and the waiter swore blind that he had eaten alone.’

The pianist started to play an even more careless interpretation of the theme from The Love Boat. Frank said, ‘I still don’t understand why a spirit should have appeared to me as Danny, and told me that he didn’t forgive me.’

‘Quite honestly, Frank, I don’t either. But it stirred up serious trouble for you, didn’t it, between you and Margot? And that graffiti all over her paintings – that must have been the last straw, as far as she was concerned.’

‘You think a spirit could have spoiled her paintings?’

‘I suppose it’s possible. As I say, spirits can’t hurt you directly, but many of them are capable of moving things, like pictures, or even furniture, and some spirits can fling things around.’

Frank said, ‘I have a very bad feeling about this. I feel like I’m being led somewhere, but I don’t know where.’

‘Well, there’s only one way to find out. We ought to try another communication session – another séance. And before you say no, this one will be free of charge. I’ve been commissioned to write a new book about psychic detection and this will make a terrific chapter all on its own. It’s an extremely unusual case, Frank. It really is.’

‘OK . . . if you think it might help.’

‘More than anything else, I think it’s a sensible precaution. I don’t want to be alarmist, but it seems to me as if this spirit is intent on doing you some serious mischief.’