Moonchasers & Other Stories

by Ed Gorman

  Of course, on my last trip out here I learned why he looks this way. Byerly was out and the maid answered the door and we started talking and then she told me all about it, in whispers of course, because Byerly's wife was upstairs and would not have appreciated being discussed this way.

  Four years ago, Mrs. Byerly gave birth to their only child, a son. The family physician said that he had never seen a deformity of this magnitude. The child had a head only slightly larger than an apple and no eyes and no arms whatsoever. And it made noises that sickened even the most doctorly of doctors. . . .

  The physician even hinted that the baby might be destroyed, for the sake of the entire family. . . .

  Mrs. Byerly had a nervous breakdown and went into a mental hospital for nearly a year. She refused to let her baby be taken to a state institution. Mr. Byerly and three shifts of nurses took care of the boy.

  When Mrs. Byerly got out of the hospital everybody pretended that she was doing just fine and wasn't really crazy at all. But then Mrs. Byerly got her husband to hire me to take pictures of deformed babies for her. She seemed to draw courage from knowing that she and her son were not alone in their terrible grief. . . .

  All I could think of was those signals we send deep into outer space to see if some other species will hear them and let us know that we're not alone, that this isn't just some frigging joke, this nowhere planet spinning in the darkness. . . .

  When the maid told me all this, it broke my heart for Mrs. Byerly and then I didn't feel so awkward about taking the pictures anymore. Her husband had his personal physician check out the area for the kind of babies we were looking for and Byerly would call the mother and offer to pay her a lot of money . . . and then I'd go over, there and take the pictures of the kid. . . .

  Now, just as I was about to turn around and walk off the porch, Byerly said, "I understand that you spent some time here two weeks ago talking to one of the maids."

  "Yes."

  "I'd prefer that you never do that again. My wife is very uncomfortable about our personal affairs being made public."

  He sounded as I had sounded with Merle earlier today. Right on the verge of being very angry. The thing was, I didn't blame him. I wouldn't want people whispering about me and my wife, either.

  "I apologize, Mr. Byerly. I shouldn't have done that."

  "My wife has suffered enough." The anger had left him. He sounded drained. "She's suffered way too much, in fact."

  And with that, I heard a child cry out from upstairs.

  A child—yet not a child—a strangled, mournful cry that shook me to hear.

  "Good night," he said.

  He shut the door very quickly, leaving me to the wind and rain and night.

  After awhile, I walked down the wide steps to my car and got inside and drove straight home.

  As soon as I was inside, I kissed my wife and then took her by the hand and led her upstairs to the room our two little girls share.

  We stood in the doorway, looking at Jenny and Sara. They were asleep.

  Each was possessed of two eyes, two arms, two legs; and each was possessed of song and delight and wonderment and tenderness and glee.

  And I held my wife tighter than I ever had, and felt an almost giddy gratitude for the health of our little family.

  Not until much later, near midnight it was, my wife asleep next to me in the warmth of our bed—not until much later did I think again of Mrs. Byerly and her photos in the upstairs bedroom of that dark and shunned Victorian house, up there with her child trying to make frantic sense of the silent and eternal universe that makes no sense at all.

  FRIENDS

  i

  I saw a small child twisted with cerebral palsy. I saw an even smaller child, stomach-bloated with malnutrition, flies walking his face. And a man who had ruined his life with cocaine. And a forlorn, whispery woman dying of AIDS.

  I almost couldn't finish the late-night dinner I'd brought back to my motel room from a nearby McDonald's.

  I don't mean to be sarcastic. I felt all the things those television commercials begged me to feel—guilt, sadness, rage at injustice, and utter helplessness. You know the commercials I mean and you know the time I mean—late-night TV in between commercials for Boxcar Willie and Slim Whitman albums and forthcoming professional wrestling matches.

  The trouble is, being a sixty-plus retired sheriff's deputy, I don't exactly have a lot of money to contribute to charities, worthy or not, and even if I did have money, I'd be confused as to which one needed my funding most. How do you decide between a kid with cerebral palsy and a kid with Down's syndrome?

  Finishing my cheeseburger that was by now cold, finishing my Coke that was by now warm, I rolled up the grease-stained sack and hook-shot it for two points into a tiny brown plastic wastebasket next to the bureau. The wastebasket was one of the few things not chained down in this small motel room right on the edge of a Chicago ghetto. I'd been here three days. It seemed more like sixty.

  I was starting to think about Faith and Hoyt again—Faith being my thirty-one-year-old lady-friend and Hoyt the child we inadvertently produced—when the phone rang.

  I had hopes, of course, that it would be Faith herself, even though I'd given her all sorts of stern reasons not to phone me and run up the bill, reasons that seemed inane this lonely time of night.

  I grabbed the phone.

  "Mr. Parnell?"

  The voice was young, black.

  "We probably should talk."

  "I'm listening."

  "You was in the neighborhood today."

  "Yes."

  "Looking for somebody who knows somethin' about a certain woman."

  "Right."

  "You still interested?"

  "Very much."

  "You was lookin' in the wrong places. Ask for Charlene."

  "Charlene."

  "She works at a restaurant called Charlie's. She's cashier there."

  "Okay. You mind if I ask who I'm speaking with?"

  "Why you want to know?"

  I looked at my Bulova. "It's nearly midnight. You wouldn't be suspicious about a call like this?"

  "I guess."

  "Plus, if this leads somewhere, there might be some money in it."

  "I'll call you tomorrow night. If there's some money in it, tell me then."

  Even though I was alone, I shrugged. "Maybe we could accomplish more if we could sit down and talk. Face to face."

  "No reason for that."

  "Up to you."

  "Charlene can tell you some things."

  "I appreciate the advice."

  "Tomorrow night, then."

  He hung up.

  I replaced the receiver, stretched my legs and set them between the cigarette burns somebody had decorously put in the bedspread, and leaned back to watch an episode of "Andy Griffith," the one where Gomer proves to be a better singer than Barney.

  About halfway through the show, two men in the room next door came back from some sort of close and prolonged association with alcohol and turned on their TV to some kind of country-western hoedown that lead them to stomp their feet and say every few minutes, "Lookit the pair on that babe, will ya?" and then giggle and giggle.

  About the time Andy was figuring out a solution to Barney's dilemma (if you watch the show often enough, you'll see how Andy evolved over the years into a genuinely wise and compassionate man) and about the time I was sneaking my fifth cigarette for the day (but sneaking from whom? I was alone), the phone rang.

  I decided to be bold and not even say hello. "I'm sure glad you don't do what old farts tell you to."

  Faith laughed. "I'm glad I don't, either. Otherwise I never would have called tonight."

  "How's Hoyt's cold?"

  "A lot better."

  "How're you?"

  "Feeling wonderful. I took Hoyt to Immaculate Conception tonight. I've always liked Lenten services for some reason. Maybe it's the bare altar and all the incense and the monks chanting." A little more than
a year ago, Faith had had a mastectomy. You sure wouldn't know it now.

  I laughed. "There were monks there tonight?"

  "No, but when I was a girl they'd come up from New Mallory, the monks, and the Gregorian chant was beautiful. Really. You still depressed?"

  "It's just the weather. You know how November is. Rainy and damp."

  "Anything turn up on Carla DiMonte yet?"

  "Maybe. Just had a phone call about twenty minutes ago."

  "I miss you."

  "I miss you," I said. I hesitated.

  "You're doing it, aren't you?"

  "What?"

  "Looking at your wristwatch."

  "Clairvoyance."

  "No; it's just something I've picked up on since you've been in Chicago. How you start noting the minutes."

  "We're coming up on three minutes."

  She laughed. "God, I wish you were here."

  "Kiss Hoyt for me."

  Ten minutes later, I lay in bed afraid I'd have to go and confront the guests next door. But there was a crash, leaden weight smashing into an end table it sounded like, and then a male voice laughing said, "Man, you're really soused. You better lay down." Then the TV went off and then later there was just the sound of the toilet flushing.

  Then there was just the darkness of the room and the way the bloodred light of the neon outside climbed along the edge of the curtain like a luminous snake.

  Always late at night, and particularly when I was alone, the fear came about Faith. Everything seemed to be all right. Seemed to.

  I fell asleep saying earnest grade school Hail Marys. I woke up twice, the second time to hear one of the men next door barfing on the other side of the wall.

  ii

  I came to Chicago at the request of Sal Carlucci, a Brooklyn private investigator with whom I served in WWII. Sal had been hired by no less a mobster than Don DiMonte to check into the activities of Carla DiMonte, the mobster's twenty-one-year-old daughter who had a penchant for trouble. At sixteen, for example, DiMonte had had to ease her out of a murder charge. A few weeks ago DiMonte had received a blackmail letter saying that his daughter had killed somebody else—and that if one million dollars wasn't turned over to the letter writer, said letter writer would go to the police with evidence that would convict Carla.

  As if Mr. DiMonte's troubles weren't already plentiful, there was yet one more problem. A private detective he'd hired showed him that over the past year Carla had traveled with a rock band, spending decent amounts of time in five major cities. The murder, if it had actually taken place, most likely occurred in one of these cities.

  Now, as good a private investigator as Sal Carlucci is, there's no way he could visit five cities in a week—the amount of time DiMonte figures he had to hold the blackmailer off. So Carlucci hired four other private investigators, including me, to help. Since I'm closest to Chicago, and since Carla spent time there, that's where I headed.

  I spent the first day in the new library on North Franklin, checking out all the local murders for the past twelve months. It was Carlucci's idea that we first try to ascertain if the blackmailer really had something on Carla—was there an unsolved murder that sounded as if Carla might have been involved?

  I found nothing that looked even promising until late in the day when I found an item about the slaying of a prominent drug dealer near a housing project. Several witnesses said that he had been shot dead by a white woman who seemed to resemble very much the description I'd been given of Carla DiMonte.

  I spent yesterday walking off the blocks around the development where the killing had taken place. I had interviewed a few dozen people but learned precisely nothing. Nobody, it seemed, had ever heard of John Wade, the drug dealer who'd been murdered, nor had anybody seen a well-dressed white woman down here. "She wouldn't'a stayed white for long, man," one man told me around a silver-toothed grin.

  Around nine the next morning I walked into "Charlie's," the restaurant I'd been told about by my mysterious late-night caller.

  Neither black nor white faces looked up at me as I came inside out of the raw gray cold and stood in the entranceway watching a chunky black cashier in a pink uniform stab out numbers on a cash register with deadly efficiency. Presumably, this was Charlene.

  I stood there ten minutes. It took that long for the line to disperse. Then I went inside.

  "Charlene," I said over the Phil Collins record assaulting the smoke-hazed air.

  She looked up at me from under aqua eyebrows that seemed to be the texture of lizard skin. "Yes."

  "My name's Parnell."

  "So?"

  "I just wondered if I could ask you some questions?"

  "You law?"

  "Indirectly. I'm a private investigator."

  "Then I don't have to answer?"

  "Right. You don't have to answer."

  She shrugged meaty shoulders. "Then get lost."

  "You mind?" a white guy said to me. "Jesus." He pushed into place at the cash register and handed over a green ticket. He only glared at me maybe three times while Charlene did her killer routine with his receipt. "You have a nice day, Charlene," he said to her when she handed him back his change but he was staring at me. He was no more than thirty and obviously he could see that I was about twice his age. He had the energy of a pit bull. Energy wasn't something I had in plentiful supply these days. He made sure to push against me as he went out the door.

  Two more guys came up and handed her tickets. During her business, she glanced up at me twice and scowled.

  When the guys were gone. I said, "Did you know a man named John Wade?"

  Her eyes revealed nothing but her full, sensuous mouth gave an unpleasant little tug. She was maybe forty and twenty pounds overweight but she was an appealing woman nonetheless, one of those women of fleshy charms men seem to appreciate the older they get, when the ideal of femininity has given way to simple need. You no longer worry about physical beauty so much; you want companionship in and out of bed. Charlene looked as if she'd be a pretty good companion. "You know what I do when I get off this ten-hour shift?"

  "No. What?"

  "I go home and take care of my two kids."

  "Hard work?"

  "Real hard."

  "But I'm afraid I don't get your point."

  A black guy came over. He was little and seemed nervous. He kept coughing as if an invisible doctor were giving him an invisible hernia checkup.

  "You have a nice day, Benny," Charlene said to the little man as he pushed out the door. She looked at me again. "What I'm saying is that I'm too busy for trouble. I work here and then I go home. I don't have time to get involved in whatever it is you're pushing."

  "You get a break?"

  She sighed. "Nine forty-five Belinda comes out from the bookkeeping office and spells me for fifteen minutes."

  I nodded to the long row of red-covered seats that ran along the counter. But it was a booth I wanted. "I'll go have some breakfast over there. By nine forty-five I should have gotten us a booth. All right?"

  "I get anything for this?"

  "Fifty dollars if you tell me anything useful."

  She shrugged again. It was the gesture of a weary woman who had long ago been beaten past pain into sullen submission. "Guess that'll pay a few doctor bills."

  The food—bacon, two eggs over easy, a big piece of wheat toast spread with something that managed to taste neither like butter nor margarine—was better than I had expected.

  Afterward, I read the Tribune, all about Richard Daley Jr.'s new administration, and drank three cups of hot coffee and was naughty and smoked two cigarettes.

  Charlene appeared right on time.

  She had brought a black plastic purse the size of a shopping bag with her. She slipped into the other side of the booth and said, "He's been dead several months. Why're you interested in him now?"

  "You knew him?"

  "You're not going to answer my question?"

  "Not now. ButI need you to tell me about
him."

  She tamped a cigarette from a black-and-white generic pack and said, "What's to know? In this neighborhood, he was an important man."

  "A pusher."

  Anger filled her chocolate eyes. "Maybe, being a black man, that's the only thing he knew how to do."

  "You really believe that?"

  She cooled down, exhaled smoke, looked out the window. "No."

  She looked back at me. "He was the father of my two boys."

  "Did you live with him?"

  "A long time ago. Not since the youngest was born." She smiled her full, erotic smile. "That's the funny thing about some men. You have a kid for them and all of a sudden they start to treat you like you're some kind of old lady. Right after Ornette was born, John started up with very young girls. Nineteen seemed to be the right age for him."

  "Was he pushing then?"

  "Not so much. Actually, he still had his job at the A&P as an assistant manager. Then he started doing drugs himself and—" The shrug again. "It changed him. He'd always had a good mind, one of the best in the neighborhood. He decided to put it to use, I guess."

  "Pushing?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "The newspaper accounts said that several eyewitnesses saw him being shot to death by a white woman. You know anything about that?"

  She hesitated. "I was one of the eyewitnesses."

  "You saw him being shot?"

  "Right."

  "He was getting out of his car—"

  "He was getting out of his car when this other car pulled up and a white woman got out and said something to him and then shot him. She got back in the car and took off before any of us could do anything about it."

  "Would you describe the woman?"

  The description she gave matched that in the newspaper. While it could fit a lot of women, it could also fit Carla DiMonte.

  "You'd never seen her before?" I asked.

  "No."

  "So you wouldn't have any idea why she shot him?"

  "No."

  "How'd your boys deal with it?"

  "I don't want to talk about my boys."

  "They don't know he was their father?"

  "Why is that important?"