Boyfriend from Hell (22 page)

“I didn’t kill him, so get lost.”

“We can talk here, pleasant,” Greenberg said, “or you can come down, and we’ll talk at the station house.”

Gabler left the door open for them to enter. The dark rear studio apartment reeked with urine from an unclean bathroom and beer from opened cans scattered about. The bed was unmade. Surfaces in the room—a bridge table, chest of drawers, an end table—were covered with soiled underwear, socks, tossed shirts, items that would be put away somewhere under normal living conditions. The television set was tuned to the Cartoon Network and in a move toward self-respect Gabler turned it off. He stood, back to the wall, not offering the detectives a place to sit, and the only chair in the room was being used for dirty laundry.

“I gave the maid the day off,” he said.

“You were a member of the Dark Angel Church?” Greenberg asked.

“For a couple of minutes.”

“Why did you join?”

“I was looking to improve my station in life,” he said acidly.

“Your wife, she didn’t join?”

“No, just me.”

“Got another reason why you joined?” Carter asked.

“Sounded interesting, like I could get something out of it. Lost my job and figured what the hell.”

“What was your job?”

“Security in a club called Horizon in SoHo. Some guy wanted to get in, had to wait, called me a bozo. You don’t call me a bozo. Got a little rough, they sided with him.”

“Your wife, did she call you a bozo?” Carter asked.

“My wife is garbage. Ex-wife.”

“You had an argument, so you choked her.”

“Wouldn’t call it an argument exactly. I told her she might get off her ass and look for a job and she kicked me in the balls.”

“So you choked her,” Greenberg said.

“If I punched her, I would’ve killed her.”

“A lot of logic there,” Greenberg offered.

“But she dropped the charges. Why was that?” Carter asked.

“Part of our predivorce agreement,” and he laughed for his own enjoyment.

“What happened at the church, why did you quit?” Carter asked.

“Was a sham. One night after a mass I say to Cummings, ‘I’d like to throw my wife out the window. Do I have Satan’s permission?’ I mean, I didn’t need Satan’s permission, but I thought I’d ask, see what he’d say, whether he was just conning us, which is what I was getting. And he says, ‘What’s the problem?’ And I say, ‘I got fired and she won’t get a job to help out. She watches TV all day’ And he says, ‘Maybe you should get some help,’ and he tries to give me a number of somebody at a goddamn health services place. Health services! I’m in a satanic cult and this guy is telling me to get help from some health services? ‘Take Satan into your heart. Do something evil.’ It was a joke.”

“Sounds like you had a lot of anger for Cummings,” Greenberg said.

“Sounds like you had a lot of anger for Cummings,” he repeated in singsong, mockingly. “I got a lot of anger for a lot of people. What else is new?”

“May twentieth, Tuesday, in the afternoon. Where were you?” Carter asked.

“You want to book me for the murder of Cummings? What’s your evidence? Monday, Thursday, any day, I play cards at Farrell’s Bar on 136th.”

“That’s your alibi?” Carter said.

“No, that’s my goddamn life. I drink some beer, I play some cards. My pal scores tickets for a ball game, maybe I go. You got nothing here, guys.”

“Don’t book any trips to exotic places,” Greenberg said. “We’re going to want to talk to you some more.”

He gave them an I-could-care-less look, and didn’t hold the door open for them to leave.

The detectives went to Farrell’s, a long, narrow, musty bar, the only occupants an elderly man at one end, and a burly bartender in his forties with a toothpick in his mouth watching stock car racing on television. To the side were a couple of booths with torn red cushioning. Posters from beer promotions were peeling off the walls. Carter flashed his badge at the bartender, who nodded, expressionless.

“What’s your name?” Carter said.

“Jim Meehan.”

“Jim, know Mike Gabler?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“And he comes in here?” Carter asked.

“Every day now he’s not working. We play cards, watch a game, he has a few beers. What’s the problem?”

“Every day?”

“Yeah. Hey, Sal—how often Mike come in?”

Sal was at a barstool; a gaunt man in his forties who did not look up, using the bar counter as a pillow.

“All the time.”

“We’re thinking specifically the afternoon of Tuesday, May twentieth,” Greenberg said to Meehan.

“Hey, man, I don’t know if I can remember one day from the next. Tuesdays, though, that’s easier. Tuesdays, I open. I would’ve been here.”

“What time did he come in, can you remember that?” Greenberg said.

“He always comes in around noon. He would’ve come in around noon. Sal—”

“What time Mike comes in?”

“Whatever you say.”

“Around noon.”

“And you remember him here on Tuesday, May twentieth from two until …”

“Five, when I got off. End of story.”

The detectives went around again, getting the same answers to the same questions.

Carter and Greenberg met with Rourke and reported on this round of interviews. Gabler was physically capable of performing the crime. He was known to Cummings so it might have enabled him to gain entrance to the church. Cummings could have let him in. And he resented Cummings. The elements were closer to fitting the profile of a crime than anything they had thus far. He was a big, angry man, probably angry at Cummings, and he was someone who had used his hands in violence. However, nothing directly linked him to the murder. Gabler had someone providing an alibi for the time the crime was committed and possibly Sal would be a second person vouching for Gabler being in the bar. They brought Gabler in for further questioning, a lawyer was provided; he never wavered from his basic story, he was in Farrell’s all that afternoon. This wasn’t anything they could begin legal proceedings on and when Rourke discussed it with the district attorney and with the police commissioner, they were in agreement. Gabler was the definition of unindictable circumstantiality.

They added Gabler to Ronnie as people they were keeping an eye out for, although Ronnie was a special case; “Gomez’s Folly,” Santini called the random surveillance.

Gabler’s anger over his exchange with Cummings fascinated Rourke, Cummings looking more and more to Rourke like having been the wrong person for the wrong work. The next day when Mr. Cummings phoned to ask, “Anything new on my son?” Rourke said, “We’re still working on it,” thinking the murder victim, despite his public presentation of himself as a man extolling the powers of evil, was oddly, and sadly, an innocent who played with fire.

In writing the Cummings piece, Ronnie had been interested in getting a representative from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York on the record as to the presence of a satanic cult in the area. She played telephone tag with someone for a few days, her deadline was closing in on her, and she finished the piece without a quote from anyone. She suspected they preferred not to go near the subject and not give Cummings the dignity of a comment. She considered the Catholic Church the prime authority on Satan matters, they had been at it for so long, and she sent a letter with her bona fides to the archdiocese, looking to give herself some lead time on what she thought was essential for the book, the church position on possession and exorcism. She received a reply from Father John G. McElene, suggesting they talk in his office. She arranged the meeting with his secretary and brought her notebook and tape recorder to the archdiocese offices on First Avenue and Fifty-third Street.

Father McElene was a fit sixty-four, white hair, six feet one, and as the framed photographs on the walls indicated, a former army chaplain. Other images showed him with church luminaries, Pope John Paul II, Cardinal O’Connor, Cardinal Egan, photographs with civilians and with children in several settings, and there were several framed awards for public service.

“An impressive life,” Ronnie said.

“A life in service of the Lord. Impressive isn’t in my reference, Ms. Delaney.”

“My apology. So you understand, I’m trying to give an overview of satanic possession in this book and somewhere along the line I’m obliged to deal with where the Catholic Church stands on the subject and on exorcism.”

“I don’t speak for the entire, worldwide church. I can give you a sense of some of the current thinking around here, in this archdiocese. Right now, I’m what you might call our spokesperson on church matters. So I can say to you we’ve gone up and down on the subject of possession. For a long time we didn’t have anyone officially appointed as an exorcist. And we still don’t do many exorcisms hereabouts, usually under extreme circumstances, when all traditional methods have been exhausted.”

“Could you give me a number, per year?”

“I’ve heard a hundred or so a year within the American Catholic Church bandied about, but that’s from writers such as yourself. I don’t have a number like that based on my conversations with people. In our archdiocese, which is Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, and some counties outside the city, a handful, less than a handful. Of course, if you go outside the Catholic Church, to the Protestant deliverance ministries of which there are hundreds, there are probably thousands of exorcisms per year. How many of those people we in the Catholic Church would categorize as possessed is another matter. I don’t know where you are in your research. You do understand the distinctions in possession?”

This seemed like a test question. She felt he was entitled to assess his audience and she answered, “Demonic possession, full-scale possession, is usually defined as a person taken over completely by Satan or one of Satan’s demons. The person no longer really functions as himself and is more of a vessel, an instrument of Satan. While a demonic oppression is more common, where the person is infected by the demon, but not taken over completely and the victim still functions as a person.”

“I would give you an A on that,” he said, confirming for her that he was administering a little quiz.

“Of course, there’s another distinction,” she said, “the fundamental one: Whether or not it ever really happens.”

“That’s why we’re conservative here. In the deliverance ministries, when you read about some of the exorcisms they perform, I’d have to say the problems can be explained more easily by psychological factors than by invoking the demonic. I read your article, by the way. Very good.”

“Thank you.”

“What you said about self-help with Satan as a hook is relevant. I think sometimes beyond this archdiocese, beyond Catholicism, so-called demons are exorcised in what is closer to self-actualization, human potential movement kinds of things, with Satan as a hook, as you put it, than it is to religious belief. Depressed? It’s demonic. Do an exorcism. And for many people it works. I’d hazard they never were demonically possessed or demonically obsessed as I understand the terms. Of course, if someone thinks they’re possessed that doesn’t mean they’re trying to pull off a hoax.”

He was so natural in his manner, direct, Ronnie made a fundamental error, misreading him as though she, as a nonbeliever, was in the room with another nonbeliever, ignoring his collar and the context of the conversation, that they were in a church office and he was an official of the church. And it was then he surprised her.

“But there are the times when a person
is
possessed.”

She was so caught off guard she said, “I beg your pardon?”

“The rare, true possession. The Devil is an awesome thing. I know how he works. With the full force of his evil.”

“You believe there are possessions that
are
Satan’s work?”

“Definitely. And as you write your book, I would be so bold to suggest you never become so embracing of rational explanations that you fail to recognize that for those unfortunate to be chosen by the Devil, he is a fallen angel, of higher intelligence and higher will than mortal man. To be afflicted by the Devil is a dreadful affliction. It takes a great purity of faith by an exorcist to rid a person of his terrible power.”

Ronnie asked about his direct experiences with exorcisms and he was vague, suggesting that any time it became known, “in a knee-jerk response, the people claiming to be possessed come out of the woodwork.”

Lingering for her on the way home was the pure belief he expressed. She felt it was unprofessional on her part to have assumed his beliefs were hers. He was someone who could say to her sincerely, openly, “The Devil is an awesome thing. I know how he works.”

She was in a hall of mirrors in an amusement park fun house. Her parents were there with her in the fractured reflections and then the image changed, she was an adult, and they were gone, no one else was there, and she was frightened. The expression she saw on her face in the reflection was fear, and she turned to leave, but she was lost, blocked by mirrors, and then coming into focus, in multiple images on all sides of her—front, left, right, everywhere she turned—was Satan, the dark angel with human features and lascivious lips, smiling, patronizing. The mirrors broke, shattered glass, and as she ran, new unbroken mirrors formed a tunnel, she ran through the tunnel, the Satan multiple images continued along the tunnel, moving with her as quickly as she ran, and she saw dim light at the end. She burst out into a street, it was night, the light was from a lamppost, and leaning against the lamppost, smiling, with an expression that said to her, Run, but you won’t get away, was Satan, the last image when she awoke.

Her dream had movie qualities, an element of cinematography to it, and camera angles, as she later explained to Kaufman, Orson Welles’s
The Lady from Shanghai,
and the therapist offered that people sometimes do copy movie techniques in dreams, that movies are dreamlike in the first place, in the way they reorder reality, and dreams can reflect movies we have seen.

“There’s a new level here that interests me,” Kaufman said. “Not Satan, he’s a familiar player in your dreams and not the broken glass, also familiar. Your father and mother together. Is it possible, Veronica, that with all the other guilt you take on yourself, that you also take on survivor guilt, they’re gone and you remain?”