Salvatore "Sal" Caruso is a newspaper reporter in the middle of his career. He's worked at the Arkham Advertiser for 9 years and occupies a solid middle rung in the newsroom hierarchy. He started at the Advertiser after the war. He had been in the Signal Corps stationed in Libya early in the North Africa campaign, then transferred to Naples in '43 handling field transmissions during the liberation and finally slogged his way north into the Po Valley in Northern Italy until the end of the war in '45 where he saw just enough action to never romanticize it. The war didn't break him, but it aged him. He came back thinner and quieter.
His thick floppy black hair, impossible to fully tame, tends to fall into his eyes when he's leaning over his notepad. He prefers to wear a dark wool suit jacket, single breasted, with a narrow lapel over a white dress shirt with a skinny black tie and pleated high-waisted slacks with suspenders rather than a belt, an old-fashioned touch he never quite let go of. He wears well-polished leather oxfords and a gray trilby with his press card tucked in the band.
Sal lives alone in a modest one bedroom apartment in the Oak Terrace apartments, a faded red brick complex on West Pickman, a block from the ivy-lined campus on the south side of the river. His place is neat, if spartan: a well-worn couch, a stack of old newspapers tied with string, a desk cluttered with notes and press clippings, and a dusty portable typewriter he prefers to the office Underwood. He's a confirmed bachelor, though not by declaration. Most nights, he falls asleep listening to the late jazz broadcast on WAZR, he loves Bird and Dizzy, with a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.
At the Advertiser, Sal reports to Gary Moore, a gruff, chain-smoking editor with the temperament of a man who's been married too long to deadlines. Gary knows he has hotter talents in the bullpen, hungry young reporters who turn in flashy copy, but Gary keeps Sal around because Sal knows how the town works, and more importantly, where its skeletons are buried. He doesn't scoop often, but when he does, it sticks.
Sal rides his Schwinn across the river to the Advertiser on the north side each day. Now and then, he strolls a block over to the Arkham Train Station for a shoe shine from Skip Kennedy and a dose of street talk or to The Classic Cut barber shop, also on High Lane, to talk to Frank Russo, a bookie. Often he can be found at The Velvet Bean, a bohemian cafe on East Armitage Street near Liberty Square
Sal is a practicing Catholic. His focus is more on tradition than doctrine. He participates in feasts, saints' days, baptisms, weddings and goes to mass and to confession regularly. He has a small shrine to the Virgin Mary in his apartment. When he was a child he'd thought about becoming a priest, but his interest changed as he grew older, or perhaps the weight of what he saw and felt around him in Arkham, and the things no catechism could quite explain, diverted him. Still, he clings to his faith. Not because it always makes sense, but because it is a wall, however thin, against the nameless dread that sometimes presses in at night. When he prays the rosary, it is not just for the souls of the departed, but for the strength to hold back something older, something unspeakable.
Sal's mother Carmela is very dear to him. She lives in Florida and he tries to visit as often as he can. Sal never knew his father and he credits his success in life with his mother bringing him up.
The Velvet Bean is an important haven for Sal, a place in Arkham where he can be himself. Maintaining a facade in life is exhausting and being able to relax at the cafe is very important to him. St Mary-Annunciation Church is also an important location to Sal, who goes there to find solace from the horror that seems to lurk under the surface of life in Arkham.
His Rheinmetall Borsig KST Portable Typewriter
Sal is loyal to the bone. Once he gives his word, it’s iron, unshaken by fear or threat. He stands by his friends in silence or in fire, never walking away when things turn dark. Promises, to him, are sacred, like oaths spoken at the altar, and he’d rather bleed than break one.
- Gary Moore, editor in chief of the Arkham Advertiser
- Garth Wagner, a reporter at the Arkham Gazette
- Skip Kennedy, shoe shine boy who works at the Arkham Train Station north of the river
- Clarence Lewis, Arkham City Health Officer and active member in the Arkham chapter of the National Negro Business League
- Dick Becker, Vice President of the Arkham Chamber of Commerce on Gedney Street and Secretary of the Essex County Trap & Skeet Club
- Lieutenant Bernie Greenberg of the Arkham police department
- Frank Russo, a Bookie that operates out of the The Classic Cut barber shop on High Lane across from the train station. Frank operates under the auspices of the Patriarca crime family.
- Margaret McCarthy, president of The Larkin Garden Club, major donor of the Essex County Welfare League and member of the board of directors of the Arkham chapter of The Daughters of the American Revolution
- Dale Redmond, employee of The Velvet Bean, a bohemian cafe on East Armitage Street near Liberty Square
