Beware the Night (33 page)

Naturally, we followed procedure. We woke the girls up and immediately got them out of the apartment and to a hospital. Their health checked out okay, so we notified Children’s Services so they could be placed in foster care. The so-called mother showed up at the Four-Six around 6:00
A.M
. screaming that she wanted her kids. We promptly arrested her for endangering the welfare of a minor, three counts.

And then there was the first DOA case I responded to as a rookie. Apparently this man didn’t have a friend in the world, because he’d been dead in his apartment for a month by the time his neighbors got around to reporting a foul odor. Although the man was Caucasian, the body had turned black and was moving in an odd way. Nudging one of the other officers at the scene, I asked, “What’s that?”

“Flies,” he said. After that, I must have looked pretty comical to the other cops, the way I started leaping around and frantically shooing away any fly that came near me, thinking it might have touched the dead man.

Far worse than the flies was the overpoweringly fetid stench. I didn’t see how anyone could stand it for a second, but I’d been ordered to remain in the apartment until the medical examiner arrived, which turned out to be all day. To keep from vomiting, I’d get a deep breath of fresh air in the hallway, then run into the apartment and throw coffee grounds on the burner of the stove. This made the smell barely tolerable for a few minutes, then I’d burn some more coffee grounds. To this day, whenever I smell burnt coffee, I think of my first DOA. The worst part, however, was when the officers lifted the dead man into a body bag. The gases inside the corpse exploded, and the man actually split open.

If I could survive my first DOA, I was pretty sure I could handle whatever mess Frank and JoAnn were harboring in their home. I asked Keith, a cop I’d worked with briefly in East New York, to come along as backup, since Joe was taking a sabbatical from the Work. I could understand why: You can’t go balls to the walls against the demonic year after year without taking an occasional break to recharge your spiritual batteries.

This was Keith’s first investigation, and I could sense his excitement. A year earlier I’d run into him at Brooklyn Central Booking, when he was bringing in a female prisoner. I recognized him from PSA (Police Service Area) #2 and said hello. After securing the prisoner, he came over and said, “Don’t think I’m crazy, but…” I figured he was going to tell me he had a ghost in his home, but I was wrong.

“I’ve been taking courses in parapsychology,” he continued. I couldn’t help but wince, since I hate that word—and the supposedly “scientific” approach to the demonic. Keith seemed to recognize that he wasn’t striking quite the right chord, because he quickly added. “What I’m really saying is, can
you
teach me about this stuff?”

I immediately tried to discourage him. “You have no idea of what you’d be getting into. Lots of people think the Work sounds exciting, but this isn’t a scary movie, where it’s fun to be afraid because it’s all make-believe. This is reality—and anyone who tries it pays a spiritual price. I’ve known people who were so frightened on their first case that they were never quite the same again. That’s what happened to one of my students a few years ago.”

Keith insisted that he was more than tough enough for the Work. He’s Italian, in his late thirties, with dark hair and a powerful build. He’s a very aggressive street cop, so I knew that he wasn’t going to give up and go away just because I said the Work was scary. Hell, that probably heightened his interest, because this was a macho, action-oriented guy. But the factor that made me decide to take him on was his devout Catholic faith. I felt he might have the makings of a good investigator.

Once I accepted him as a student, I let him know exactly what I expected. “On this investigation, your job is to watch my back. If you have questions during the interview, go ahead and ask them. I’ll do most of the talking, but feel free to jump in if something’s not clear. However, if this man is possessed, and you assist with his exorcism, you’re not to open your mouth and speak to him during the ritual—no matter what. And if things get rough, no slugging it out with the possessed! Just take him down if you have to, but no punches. Those are my rules—and if you break them, it’s the last exorcism you’ll ever be at!”

Keith promised to follow these rules, so we arranged to meet the couple at their Brooklyn condo the following Thursday. As I drove there, I thought about a conversation I’d had with my kids a few days earlier. Knowing that I had a new case and my wife had a new job, nine-year-old Christina announced that she had career plans too. “I want to help people—and punish demons, just like you, Daddy!”

Four-year-old Daniella was quick to agree. “Your work is scary, Daddy, but I want to do it when I grow up. I’m brave: I like to watch scary movies on TV, except when it’s dark. I can do it, I know I can do it. You just have to be brave, right?”

As a father, it troubles me to hear my little girls say they’d like to grow up to be demonologists—and to think about how much they’ve already been frightened in their young lives. One night, while I was holding my class in the basement, Christina and Jen were folding laundry in the bedroom when they had a horrible fright. A dreadful black shape hovered over the end table by the bed, moved across the room, and then went right through the wall! One of my students happened to look out into the basement hallway directly below that wall—and guess what? She saw the same swirling shape my wife and daughter had seen! It was incredibly eerie.

Even little Daniella has had a few encounters with the demonic. She’s heard strange knocking on her bedroom walls and was extremely frightened one night, while I was working on this book, when a picture suddenly fell off the living room wall with a loud crash. Writing about the demonic—or even thinking about them—gives evil spirits recognition, which can provoke phenomena. Having a picture flung around is low-level harassment that no longer bothers me, except when it upsets my kids. Daniella was so alarmed that she jumped into bed with Christina, scaring the wits out of my older daughter, who was sound asleep. There was such an uproar that night that Jen had to sleep in the children’s room, to calm them.

Most troubling of all were a series of supernatural incidents connected with a case I was involved in a few years ago. The first was quite minor. One night I received a call from a woman whose daughter was dabbling in the occult—as a member of a Santeria cult—and who feared the girl had become possessed. Santeria is an Afro-Caribbean religion that arose during the era of slavery. Since the slaveowners didn’t approve of what they considered pagan practices, they forced their slaves to convert to Christianity. In order to preserve their own religion, these men and women connected their deities—the seven African powers—to seven Catholic saints. Santeria is mainly used for “white magic,” but it also can have a dark side. If it’s used to influence someone to go against the free will God gave us, then it becomes “black magic,” since that violates the divine plan.

Through patrolling public housing projects where Caribbean immigrants live and my reading on the occult, I’ve become very familiar with Santeria. Its priests, or
santeros,
are well versed in herbal lore, which they draw on in conjuring up spells to cure illness and misfortune, create good luck talismans, or curse one’s enemies. Should practitioners of this religion become victims of
bilongos,
as curses are called, they can go to their own
santero
to have the curse lifted with an
ebbo,
or ritual cleansing. What it all comes down to is a battle of
santeros,
as the curses and counter-curses are hurled back and forth until the most powerful Santeria priest wins.

I remember once responding to a 911 call for a domestic dispute. When I got to the location, I noticed an “altar,” with a statue of St. Barbara, the Catholic saint that represents the Orisha “Chango,” one of the seven African powers. I’ve seen these shrines in many tenement apartments: They’re typically surrounded by objects like railroad spikes, coins, or bread, all of which are offered to appease the gods. I said to the woman who answered the door, “Santeria?” She spoke very little English but shook her head violently and said, “No, no Santeria!” with a heavy Spanish accent. I told my partner not to touch the things on the altar while we got the argument under control. After everyone had cooled off, the woman walked us to the hall. Just as she was about to close her door, she gave me a mischievous grin and said, “You know Santeria?” I smiled back and nodded. She looked surprised and must have been asking herself, “What could an Italian cop know about Santeria?”

Well, this Italian cop knew enough to suspect that the daughter of the woman who called me wasn’t practicing Santeria at all but something much more sinister. From what this woman described, it sounded like the girl was actually involved with Palo Mayombe. I felt frightened for the woman’s daughter, who was only about twenty, but had already fallen under the sway of the black arts. Since her mother lived in the area where I patrol, I arranged to stop by and do a formal interview the following week.

After talking to this woman on the phone for about an hour, I went to my office to write up my notes about her case before my midnight shift. After I was done, I went into the living room and found my wife and Christina very shaken up. They both told me they’d heard a male voice—not mine—calling Jen’s name. I told them it might be connected to this case, but didn’t sound too serious. I hated to leave them in this agitated state, so I used blessed salt and ordered the spirit to leave, in the name of Jesus Christ. I left Jen with a bottle of holy water by her side and told her to call me at work if there was any further trouble. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was just the opening move of this particular demon.

The following Wednesday, after stopping off for the two crucial nutrients cops need for a long night on patrol—coffee and doughnuts—my police partner and I went to the woman’s home, in uniform, so I could do a quick interview. She lived in a typical ghetto apartment, dark, dirty, and extremely cluttered. It looked like the perfect dwelling place for evil, but when I checked for signs of Santeria or Palo Mayombe worship, I found none. Despite her forbidding residence, the woman was very pleasant and sincere.

In a low, pained voice, she told us that her daughter had been committed to Bellevue the previous day. As a cop, I’ve been at that well-known New York hospital hundreds of times with suspects who need psychiatric evaluation or medical treatment. I was there with a deranged perp the night Hedda Nussbaum was brought in and got the fright of my life when I saw her face so horribly beaten up and scarred. It was around Halloween and I couldn’t imagine a worse mask than the one she was already wearing. Two female cops told me that Hedda and her boyfriend had beaten their adopted six-year-old daughter, Lisa, to death, an atrocity that made headlines all over the country the next morning. At Central Booking, where I dropped my suspect off, I saw the child’s father and killer, Joel Steinberg, sitting on the floor of his cell. I told him I hoped he rotted in Hell, because if there was ever someone who truly deserved the most hideous torments of the damned, it was he. I don’t like to pass judgment on people, but it was a good thing Steinberg was behind bars, because I wanted to choke the life out of that depraved monster.

With a touch of embarrassment, as if she felt I’d be disappointed, the woman then explained that she’d decided to take her daughter to a Catholic priest after the girl was released from the psych ward. She apologized profusely for having taken up my time and for having decided to go to the priest. I assured her I wasn’t the least bit upset and wished her the best. I was
glad
a priest wanted to get involved—that was his job. I’ve always felt that if more priests were open to this work and were staunchly against the Devil, instead of taking the wishy-washy tone some of them do on the pulpit these days, there would be no need for me to do this Work. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, but I’d much rather have the Church and clergy handle these matters. Feeling that this woman was in good hands, I left.

Although I thought this was the end of this case, it wasn’t. A few months later, rather late in the evening, the phone rang. My wife was pregnant with Daniella and was having some problems with bleeding. The doctor had done all sorts of tests but couldn’t find the cause. Jen was lying on the sofa resting, terrified that she might miscarry. To protect her and the fragile, unbaptized child in her womb, I’d decided to take a break from the Work. Thinking the call might be about a case, I let the machine answer it.

It was the same woman who had called before: The priest hadn’t resolved the problem, and her daughter was still possessed. I stood there, listening to her say that she wanted me to investigate, but didn’t pick up the receiver. I was in a quandary: I knew I must protect Jen and our unborn child, but as the night wore on, I kept thinking about it. The woman’s pleading voice was tugging at my heart, but I also felt I should go with my gut and leave the case alone. I went into the bathroom to shave and get ready for work, thinking maybe I should give the bishop a call and drop the whole thing in his lap.

Just as I finished this thought, I heard something hit my dog, Max, out in the living room. He started barking and growling like crazy. I ran into the room and saw Jen staring at the dog. Every hair on his back was standing up as he stared into the dining room, growling louder than he’d ever growled before.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jen said. “He was walking into the dining room and it looked like he suddenly ran into a brick wall. I could see his whole body knocked to the side, and then he started that awful growling.” I calmed the dog and checked him all over, but he wasn’t hurt, just shaken up. That was the answer to my question—I should stay far away from this case. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do: I’m not one to run from helping people, but if I can’t give it 100 percent, I won’t take a case. I never heard from that woman again, but I pray she got the help she needed.