Moonlight Rises

by Vincent Zandri

  Once more he checked his Blackberry, and judging by his now disappointed expression, once more he saw that nobody was looking for him. So once more he replaced it inside his jacket pocket.

  “Buck-fifty per day,” I said, getting to the business part of the conversation. “Plus expenses. I find your dad, dead or alive, I receive a ten percent bonus or a minimum of a thousand dollars. I take a thousand up front as a retainer.”

  Czech thought it over, nodded his head once or twice. “Agreed. Under one condition.”

  “That is?”

  “You let me buy you a drink right now.”

  I smiled. I didn’t like overly friendly clients. Rather, I didn’t trust them. But what the hell. I was dry, and it was the end of the day.

  “Agreed,” I said, taking his scrawny hand in mine. I released it as fast as I could without being impolite. It felt like a dead, overgrown chicken’s foot.

  He wheeled himself around and made his way to the bar. I went around to the cooler, uncapped another beer for Uncle Leo and one for me. Then I made a third drink for Czech with another new straw and handed it down to him.

  “So, what shall we drink to?” Czech announced, while retrieving his checkbook from one of his jacket pockets.

  “How’s about the Korean War!” Uncle Leo shouted. “We really gave it to those Commie bastards up on Pork Chop Hill all summer, the year of our Lord 19 and 53! The great Gregory Peck made a terrific motion picture about it.”

  I gave Czech a look like, don’t mind him. But he raised up his glass, anyway. “To the war,” he toasted. “And all things fair and not fair.”

  “To the war!” Uncle Leo shouted. “To Gregory Peck and to General MacArthur. If only we’d let him nuke those commie bastards when we had the chance!”

  “Yeah,” I said, tipping my beer bottle. “The war. MacArthur. Nuclear proliferation.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Uncle Leo that Gregory Peck was a lifelong pacifist.

  Taking a deep drink, I shifted my eyes back to Czech as he filled out my retainer check.

  “So, you decided to take the case,” Lola says, as she pulls up outside of Georgie Phillips’s townhouse, killing the engine. “For money, or out of curiosity?”

  “A little of both,” I say, pressing that blood-soaked towel tighter still against my side. “Even if I am convinced the guy is dead…Long dead. If he isn’t the Harvey Rose listed as alive, I have no doubt he’s the dead guy. It’s just that the poor Mr. Czech needs to be convinced of it. I hate to take his money just to hand him bad news, but if he wants to pay me, well then…”

  “You cashed his check?”

  “Cleared the next day.”

  Lola looks upset. Not upset over my ditching the hospital. But over something else. Like I’ve touched a nerve with the Czech story. Only I can’t imagine how.

  “You don’t think I should have taken the gig or his money, Lo?”

  She pulls the key from the starter.

  “It’s just that you have the bar now. You make OK money. Or, you will make OK money once business picks up, anyway. Why do you need to do PI work?” She peers down at her lap. “It’s dangerous, Richard.”

  So that’s it then. The danger element. Guns and bad guys. Three toughies in Obama masks holding synthesizers to their throats, kicking the living snot out of me, leaving me for dead inside a back alley. Next time I’ll be waiting for them along with my two good buddies, Smith and Wesson. I want to tell her this. But I know I can’t.

  “We have to go in,” I say, “before I bleed to death.”

  Lola smiles, runs her hand over my nearly bald scalp. “No one can kill you, Richard,” she says, “except yourself.”

  She gets out, starts up the walk toward Georgie’s front door. While she walks, I can’t help but notice her perfect, valentine-shaped ass. Just the sight of it takes my breath away. Then I picture Some Young Guy’s hand cupping it.

  The remembered sight of that makes my blood boil.

  What blood I have left over, that is.

  Chapter 8

  Back when I was a boy in Catholic grade school, the nuns used to conduct air raid drills once a month. It was the time of Red Scares and mutually-assured nuclear destruction. And it scared the living daylights out of me.

  The war against communist aggression in Vietnam was winding down, but that didn’t prevent the major news networks from broadcasting video footage of our GIs being blown to smithereens on a daily basis. Films of napalm-spewing jets scorching the green jungle and along with it, the Cong. Full color video feeds of whole villages being torched; video of little girls running down the road, the clothing burned off their backs. Walter Cronkite telling the world the war is lost. President Johnson wailing, “Once we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost the American people!”

  We were fighting there in order to stop the spread of communism but losing badly. Because after all, we were fighting the war with one hand tied behind our backs, the entire USA hippie contingent screaming about revolution and ending the madness.

  “Give peace a chance!” Or fucking die!

  But that still didn’t stop the nuns in my school from convincing us that not only were the communists our enemy but that they were out to nuke us, first chance they got. The Russians worked for the devil. The Russians rejected Jesus. Thus, the once-a-month duck-and-cover drills, where we stupidly assumed that by hiding under our school desks, our heads stuffed between our legs, we could somehow avoid total vaporization from a detonated nuclear bomb.

  Place your heads between your thighs kids and kiss your asses goodbye.

  The spread of communism was the last thing on Georgie Phillips’s mind when he volunteered to kill Commies on behalf of Uncle Sam. He’d been busy honing a teenage career of grand theft auto when the law finally caught up with him and a judge gave him a choice: five-to-seven in a maximum-security prison or volunteer for the war. Since Georgie found the thought of crawling through the jungle and firing off machine guns much more appealing than getting bent over inside a prison shower, he immediately, quote, “volunteered,” unquote. But what he saw over there and the things he was made to do in the name of democracy would have a dramatic effect on his life, not the least of which was eliminating his desire to jack any more cars. In fact, when he was discharged, Georgie used all of his GI bill to finish college and then entered med school.

  For Georgie, the system of crime and punishment in a free America had worked.

  That’s when I first met the young man who would eventually become the big brother I never had.

  He’d answered an ad my dad put in the local paper for a helper at the Moonlight Funeral Home. You know, somebody to help with the stiffs he’d drag down into the basement embalming room, somebody to pick them up from the morgue, someone to assist with the funerals both inside the parlor and inside the church, and later at the cemetery. For a would-be pathologist, it was the perfect part-time gig.

  Georgie’s motto then and now is “lean and fucking mean.” Meaning he still can’t weigh in at more a buck-seventy soaking wet. But between his wiry build and six-foot frame he’s not only one of the strongest men, pound for pound, I’ve ever known, he also possesses the endurance of a desert camel, even after a protracted bout with skin cancer. And he loved his work. Back in the day, he was such a good worker, he didn’t mind when, on one or two occasions, families requested that the already buried bodies of loved ones be disinterred. It was a dirty job that required as much muscle as it did skill, and I often acted as Georgie’s second in command when I approached my teenage years. In fact, for Georgie, digging up a casket during the nighttime hours was about as much fun as you could have with your clothes on, especially when you brought along a case of beer, or broke out a big fat bomber of a spliff.

  Maybe those were the good old days, and even though the communist threat is all but a memory and our asses are still intact, one thing remains true: Georgie still loves his weed. But the ongoing brain bud love affair no
longer has anything to do with getting “high, high, high, in the mid-day sun.” His painful on-again, off-again battle with melanoma makes pot-smoking a medical necessity.

  And the condition has assured him some of the best medically-approved brain bud around, which he is now rolling into one of his famous fatties. Meanwhile I take a place of honor on the stainless-steel table he’s got set up in his basement lab, while the suddenly squeamish Lola waits for us upstairs in the living room.

  Since Georgie is retired from the official pathology business and now spends his time working on private medical malpractice lawsuit cases for clients (mostly lawyers) who prefer to remain anonymous in exchange for cash-under-the-gurney projects, he doesn’t bother with the formality of scrubbing up in green overalls and bibs. But he does wear latex gloves when he rubs Betadine solution all over the re-opened laceration on my right side and injects me with enough Lidocaine to make my entire torso feel like it no longer exists.

  “Can you tell me what the hell is going on?” Georgie says, his long gray hair tied back into a tight ponytail, his ears sporting real diamond stud pieces, each pulled from his two ex-wives’ engagement rings after they threw them at him. Georgie never was the marrying kind.

  I proceed to tell him the story of the three strangely-voiced, Obama-masked thugs who killed me in the downtown back alley. Which leads me to something else.

  “Georgie,” I say, in between the painless, but still pin-poking-through-foam-rubber sensation of a needle and thread entering and exiting my skin, “do you believe in life after death?”

  The retired pathologist impales me with the final stitch, knots the thread, and cuts off the excess with a pair of stainless-steel scissors that he then tosses into a stainless-steel bowl. He takes some time to think about it while lighting up the new, medicinal-pot-filled fatty. Then he sucks in a huge hit of smoke and says, narrow-voiced, “I think all things are possible, especially when it comes to death.” Releasing some of the pot smoke through his nostrils, he politely holds the joint out for me. Like always, I decline. Politely. “Little known fact about death: there are different levels. Lots of people die, in the clinical sense of no brain and heart function, but then get revived and have absolutely zero recollection of the experience. Those are the ones we never hear about, because their experience reflects the possibility of nothing after we cash it all in. How did Hemingway put it? ‘Our Father who art in Nada.’

  “But then again, I believe that the body contains an energy in the form of metabolism which some people call ‘the soul.’” Now releasing the rest of the smoke, his voice returning to normal. “Doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s an energy that can be measured, and energy doesn’t disappear, it merely becomes transformed. So, in that sense, yeah, there’s some kind of life after death.”

  “I saw things when I was dead,” I reveal.

  He just looks at me. Blank stare.

  “I mean it. I was floating over the whole room Georgie, just like you see on TV. I could see myself dead in the bed. I could see Lola.”

  Georgie takes another toke, smiles. With each breath of medicinal weed his state of permanent pain eases up just enough to make life not only bearable again, but a joy to experience.

  “Lola was there for you. Warms the heart.”

  I lift myself from the table, straighten myself up, the blood rushing back into my legs.

  “Easy, Moon,” Georgie warns. “You’re gonna be a little wobbly.”

  My head feels light, but I’m feeling no pain. “Yeah, Lola being there was heartwarming,” I say. “’Cept for one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “There was a man with her.”

  He shakes his head like he doesn’t get it.

  “You know, a man. Some Young Guy. A total stranger. He came into the room after I was, well, deceased. He put his hand on her ass, Georgie.”

  Another toke off the joint. Harder this time. “Wait,” he exhales, “let me get this straight. You’re dead. Your soul is floating over your body, and it has eyes. You see your girlfriend standing by your corpse and suddenly some dude enters the picture and starts playing grab-ass with her.”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  He starts to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “First of all, Moon, even if it were really possible to see yourself dead, I doubt you’d be seeing reality. If you were experiencing anything it was probably some kind of whacked-out dream that occurred as the electrical system in your brain started to fade out, which thank God it didn’t entirely do or you’d either be dead right now, or at the very least brain dead.”

  I feel suddenly lighter inside as opposed to light-headed, like maybe Some Young Guy really is a figment of my neurotic imagination. “You think I was making the dude up?”

  “Moon, what kind of broad would be so heartless as to bring her new boyfriend to your deathbed? Unless…” He pauses mid-sentence, purses his lips. I hate it when Georgie pauses mid-sentence.

  “Unless what, Georgie?”

  He shakes his head, licks the pad of his index finger, pats out the joint. Then he turns his back on me, steps over to the counter, tosses the half-smoked joint into an empty Maxwell House coffee can, seals it with the plastic lid.

  “Come on! Unless what?”

  He turns back to me, a curious expression painting his face. “Unless she wanted to prove to the new squeeze that you were, in fact, a dead man.”

  OK, so Georgie’s comment about proving my death to Some Young Guy smacks me upside the head. But then in the next sentence he tries to convince me that we’re making mountains out of mud puddles and that the best thing to do is to simply forget about the whole thing and move on with my life. As shattered, fragile, and just plain messed up as it is.

  I decide he’s right, and as I’m slipping back into my blood-stained jeans as carefully as I can manage, I bring up the subject of Peter Czech. About the missing father, and the three Obama-masked thugs. I ask Georgie his opinion. Do I continue with the case? Or ditch it in the interest of preserving what life I have left? Or do I take a third course of action and go straight to the cops? Spill everything I know to Detective Clyne?

  “This guy Czech,” he says. “What’s he paying you?”

  I tell him. I also tell him that even though I cashed the check, I haven’t started working on anything yet. Which makes my beating and subsequent murder all the more frustrating.

  He purses his lips.

  “Not bad dough. Sure you wanna give it up over three big bullies with weird voices?”

  “They killed me once already, Georgie.” Patting my now re-bandaged side. “And tortured me.”

  “Oh yeah, that. You’ve been picked on before. Never stopped you then. ’Sides, be nice to get some revenge, wouldn’t it?”

  He’s got a point. I can get my hands on even one of those Obamas I’ll kick the living snot out of him. But first things first. I dig out the photo Czech gave to me, hand it to Georgie. I point out the tall guy with the devil eyebrows as Czech’s supposed biological father.

  “I was hoping you could indulge my curiosity sweet-tooth, big bro. I need to find out more info on contracted births and adoptions. How they work. If it’s common for the now-adult kids to go looking for their biological parents.”

  “You weren’t hired for that. Why waste your time?”

  “You know how I am. I’m a worse snoop than my ex-wife. I wanna know the why behind the who in Czech’s case.”

  He nods. “Fair enough,” he says. “But how do you know if the birth was contracted by a surrogate mother?”

  “Just a hunch, based on that photo. My built-in shit detector speaking to me. Why else would someone snap that picture of baby Peter with his new parents and his biological dad, but minus the mother?”

  “Good point, Moon. Maybe she was simply too upset to go on record as having ditched the kid, even though she was just a kid herself. You’re cooking wi
th Wesson despite that head of yours.”

  “Gee thanks. I also need to check into every accountant in Albany named Harvey Rose, maybe find an image and see if it even remotely matches Devil Brows.”

  “Sure he’s still alive?” Georgie asks, eyes still fixed on the pic.

  “Czech seems to think so, even if there is a Harvey Rose recorded as dead in the county records.”

  “Sounds pretty thin. Like he pulled the name from a phone book.”

  “Yeah, I get the same nagging pain in the gut and it’s got nothing to do with the incision or bruised kidneys. It tells me he’s not really hiring me for what he says he’s hiring me for.”

  Georgie tosses me a wink of his right eye. “You trying to hire me to assist you in this, ah, endeavor, Moon?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “Sounds dangerous. Could get me into some serious trouble with some killer Obamas.”

  “Only the brave die noble.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I think I made it up.”

  Moonlight the sage.

  I slide off the table, picture Lola waiting for me upstairs in the living room of Georgie’s townhouse. I know she’s got her smartphone with her. I wonder if she’s using it to text Some Young Guy. Or if, like Georgie suggested, dude’s just a figment of my once-dying brain. I’m still not ready for the truth either way. What if my soul really does exist? What if it did reveal Lola’s affair on its aborted road trip out of town? I’ve loved and lost once before to an affair, and it nearly killed me. Rather, I nearly killed me. I’m not sure how I’d react to another case of love gone sour over another man. But I know it wouldn’t be good.

  I hobble toward the door that leads to the staircase.

  “You look into the contract baby-selling business,” I say to Georgie. “Then meet me at my place later on tonight. Seven o’clock.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Surveillance mission.”

  “Lola?”

  I shake my head. “Peter Czech.”