Before There Were Angels (9 page)

The police and the ambulance were both with us within five minutes.

The ambulance crew went straight over to Zack’s body and eased Belle away,
running tests for which there could be only one outcome. They brought in a stretcher and strapped Zack to it, removing him to the ambulance with resolute precision after one of them had carefully brought the Christmas tree inside with a shake of his head, either for Zack’s chances or in the face of the tragic symbolism, or both.

Another ambulance attendant
immediately addressed himself to Belle, examining her as she resisted.

“I want to go with him in the ambulance,” she said.

“No question,” he replied.

For a second Belle assumed that he was saying that there was no question of her going with him, whereas what he had meant was the opposite, so there was a frantic confusion.

“Come on, Ma’am,” he whispered to her. “The ambulance is leaving. You can ride in the back with him.”

This time Stevie let me hug him. He folded into me, sobbing, “Why?”

“I don’t know, Stevie. I don’t know why.”

“How could he do it? Why did he do it?”

“He didn’t,” I assured him firmly. “Zack did not do this.”

He looked
up at me, startled but recognizing the truth in my words. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know. I only know that Zack didn’t. He wouldn’t. He never would have. He
loved you far too much, your mom too.”

A policewoman
wanted to lead Stevie off while they questioned me but Stevie wanted to stay with me.

“Let him hear what I have to say,” I said. “It will be horrible for him either way but he wants to be with me.”

The cop wanting to interview me demurred and we shuffled into the sitting room where George came to join us, his head on his paws in front of us.

“Can you tell me what happened?” the cop asked.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “We were doing Black Friday at Target, Belle, Stevie and I. Zack wanted to stay behind -“

“Do you think he was planning this?” the cop asked quickly.

“No. I don’t think he ever planned this.”

“When did you get back?”

“About half an hour ago.”

We went through all the details. It was not the slightest consolation that we had a watertight alibi, all three of us, because that wasn’t the point anyway. The question hanging there, so to speak, was whether Zack had killed himself or whether he had been murdered.

“Your wife left her previous husband last year?” That was a weighted question leading down a whole avenue of assumptions. “Did Zack show any signs of depression?”

“No, never.”

He looked at Stevie who watched him dumbly.

“Did Zack ever seem sad about leaving his father and coming to live in San Francisco without him?” the cop asked Stevie gently.

Stevie shook his head.

“I never saw the slightest signs of depression,” I said. “Depression was about the last thing anyone would have associated with Zack.”

“At school, was Zack ever bullied?”

The idea was so ludicrous that I actually laughed abruptly and Stevie laughed too.

“Zack wasn’t the kind of kid who was ever going to be bullied. He might have bullied others, Stevie can probably answer that one, but I would say it would have been impossible to bully Zack.”

“Stevie …
”

Stevie
teared up. “Zack wasn’t a bully.”

“Stevie and Zack were very, very close,” I said. “Stevie can tell you everything about Zack, and everything he tells you will be the truth.”

“So what do you believe happened?” asked the cop after taking further notes.

“I really haven’t
got a clue.”

“Have you ever been threatened?”

“Belle, my wife, Zack’s mother, has. She recently received two death threats, one by e-mail, the other through the mail slot of the front door.”

“Did you report these to us?”

“Yes, a month ago.”

“Where?”

“The local station, here.”

“Do you remember the name of the officer you reported this to?”

“No.”

“Can you describe him?”

I forced a smile. “Don’t cops all look the same …? Thirties somewhere, dark glasses, average build. He told us how to file for a restraining order if we could figure out who it was who was threatening us, at the Court House on McAllister.”

“Could you?”

“The person we thought mostly likely to be sending death threats was my ex-wife because she has threatened Belle before, but she is in England as far as we know. There was also a murder here three months ago, and they … you … haven’t arrested the woman believed to be responsible for those four deaths,” I didn’t mention the dog this time, out of respect, “but what possible motive could she have for killing Zack, even if it were physically possible for her to do so. Zack and Stevie were … are … twelve, but both of them are strong and Zack was headstrong too. Unless she drugged him, I cannot see how she, or any woman, could possibly have done this. Well, I suppose she could, but there would at least be evidence of an almighty struggle. I haven’t looked around the house yet but I haven’t seen any immediate signs.”

“And he didn’t call you on your cell phones? Did you have them with you?”

“We had our cell phones with us, all three of us, and no.”

“Mine was turned
off,” Stevie interjected. He pulled it out of his pocket and turned it on. There was a terrible pause while it intoned, ‘Metro PCS, hello, hello, hello. Wireless for all’, and we waited for any pings to announce that there was a message pending.

It pinged.

One missed call - from Zack’s cell phone.

One voicemail.

This was horrific. Macabre.

“I think I had better go and listen to it in another room,” suggested the cop. “Would you tell me your security code for your voicemail, Stevie?”

“1,2,3,4.”

“Thanks.”

The cop got up and left the room.

He came back ashen-face, which I would guess is rare in a cop. “There was a message,” he said. “It was a call for help.”

“Did he say why?”

“No, he only said one word. ‘Help!’”

“And that was it?”

The cop shook his head. “Not quite it but that was the only thing he said.”

“What else was there?” I asked.

“Not now,” cautioned the cop.

Stevie’s eyes were wide open. He didn’t ask to hear what the rest was.

*  *  *

The cop and I went to the kitchen to listen to the message from Zack, leaving Stevie briefly alone in the sitting room
, patting George distractedly as George watched him with concern.

The cop handed me the phone. “Are you sure you are ready to listen to this, Sir?”

“I’m ready,” I replied, steeling myself.

I clicked on the voicemail icon and entered the 1,2,3,4 security code.

Rustling came from the phone, then “Help!” from Zack sounding beside himself, a tone of voice I  had never heard from him before, then what sounded like a woman’s voice laughing in the background before the message was cut off abruptly.

I played it again. Was it a woman’s laugh or a girl’s? Could I get any sense as to whether she was American or English, or any other nationality?

I frowned and played it again, and again, and again - fifteen, twenty times.

I could make no sense of it.

I was still re-running the message when the cop we had seen down at the station to ask about the restraining order, and the murders in the house, entered the room, introducing himself as Luiz Martinez.

“I am really sorry for your loss,” he started.

I inclined my head.

“There was a voicemail left,” the first cop explained to him. “Mr. Parsons has been trying to identify a woman’s laugh on the recording.”

“A woman laughing?” Martinez repeated.

“Yes, there is a woman laughing but it is so short that I
cannot make any sense of it. I told you a month ago we were getting death threats, quite possibly from my ex-wife, but I cannot say it was her laugh.”

“You also said you met a ghost here, didn’t you?”

“Yes. If you remember you sent us down to the library to look up the
San Francisco Chronicle
reports on the murder, and the ghost I met looked exactly like Jess DeGamo, the woman victim.”

“I’m
sorry, I do not remember the details. You saw this ghost and then she left - it was something like that, wasn’t it?”

“It was actually more than that,” I explained. “We didn’t give you the full details because we thought you would th
ink we were insane if we did, but she actually walked past me up on the landing,” I pointed through the ceiling of the kitchen, “and she disappeared into our bedroom at the top of the stairs.” I adjusted the trajectory of my finger to trace her progress. “I couldn’t find her in the bedroom but later I returned there and looked for her under the bed. She was there, looking straight past me as if she was hiding from somebody and trying to work out where they were.”

“She was hiding under the bed?” Martinez seemed suddenly engaged.

“Yes.”

Martinez stroked his jaw. “Now that is interesting. A freak show but interesting. I don’t think I told you but Mrs.
DeGamo came down to the station before she was killed to report that her husband’s ex-wife, Martha DeGamo, had broken into their house on numerous occasions, and on one occasion she had been in the house and hidden under the bed to escape her.“

“I never knew that.”

“There was no way you could have.”

“No, there was no way I could have. Nobody told us what had happened. That is why we came to see you.”

“Let me listen to the voicemail.”

Martinez proceeded to listen to the recording another ten times but he could make no sense of it either beyond, “It almost sounds like a young girl. Martha used to put on th
is young girl’s voice, they said. She sounds triumphant.”

“She does.”

“You should change all your locks. Did the owners change the locks, do you know?”

“No. We never asked.”

Luiz Martinez looked hard into my eyes. “Change them tomorrow. CSI are already in the house. I’ll go and talk to them.”

Chapter 14

I won’t describe the next few weeks. I’m not sure that I can even remember them in detail. I only remember the infinite pall over our lives, the funeral, the endless discussions of ‘How could this have happened?’ inside what was left of our family - and with friends and other family - Belle’s depressed listlessness and Stevie’s wide-eyed, unreachable devastation.

Belle returned to her religion - Catholicism -
attending Mass every day, huddled up against God in the National Shrine of St. Francis in North Beach while I attempted to steer Stevie back into the course of his life where he could do no more than stumble along. He had not so much lost a half of himself with the death of Zack as lost his sense of himself entirely.

Belle decid
ed that she was being punished - punished for leaving Robert, punished for marrying me, punished for whatever sins she had committed during childhood, punished for her recent happiness and becoming distracted from her relationship with God.

I was the only living person left in the house. Callous as it may appear, and deeply upset as I was at the empty chasm Zack left behind for every second we carried on living, Zack was not my child and I had only known him for a short time. So
, much as I liked him, much as I loved him easily, his death did not unhinge me, it merely saddened and challenged me.

How would we ever move on from h
ere? Was there to be any sense of purpose in the everlasting absence of Zack?

The cops had checked over the whole house and could find no evidence of there
ever having been an intruder, or a struggle, or of any outside presence whatsoever beyond the voice on the cell phone message which the coroner decided might have come from the TV. The official party line was that Zack had decided to commit suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed and that his ‘Help!’ message, and his subsequent hanging of himself, was maybe a plea for just that, help. We had never realized the depth of despair Zack was in until after he was dead.

I didn’t buy it.
Stevie was literally dumbstruck most of the time, Belle blamed her sins, and Robert, his father, blamed us with a level of viciousness that was understandable, if hard to hear.

Luiz
Martinez, on the other hand, was tenacious. He was convinced that Zack did not commit suicide. He couldn’t put his finger on what had actually happened but he was sure Zack had not laid hands on himself.