Suzanne answers the door as if she were expecting me for dinner some eight hours ago. She’s dressed in a sheer, white, satin nightgown, which supports her substantial cleavage. Her hair is dark, lush, and parted neatly over her right eye. In one hand she holds a glass of champagne, and in the other, a lit cigarette—the butt end of which has been fitted into a long, black, plastic filter device. Add to this her fire engine-red lipstick, black eye shadow, and a perfect strand of white pearls wrapped around her neck, and I might confuse her for the return of Yvonne Dicarlo.
“Moonlight, darling,” she says, just a hint of slur marring her words, “whatever took you so long?”
Without a word, I step inside the door, slam it closed behind me, making her eyes go wide. I grab the glass of champagne from her hand, drink down what’s left in it. Then I toss the glass to the floor, shattering it.
“Yes, Moonlight,” she says, “you may have a drink.”
That’s when I take hold of her arm, gently force her into the living room, and toss her down on the couch.
“You are hurting me!” she shouts.
“Tell me what the hell is going on!”
“What do you mean?” She goes for the cell phone set on the coffee table. “I’m calling the police.”
I step forward, snatch the phone from her hand, toss it to the opposite end of the couch.
“You’ve been hiding the truth from me from the start,” I say, holding tight to her wrist with my right hand. “Now the police think I had something to do with Sissy’s death.”
“How do you know?”
“Where do you think I’ve been for the past hour? Partying until the wee hours with your star literary client? I was being interrogated by the APD. Detective Miller, to be precise.”
“Was Sissy murdered?”
“It’s possible somebody tried to kiss her a permanent goodnight by stuffing a pillow in her mouth. And if Albany’s finest arrest me for it, you can bet I’m going to let them in on your cocaine scam. The same cocaine Sissy was doing when her heart stopped.”
Her face goes pale. She tries to pull away.
“Please let go of my arm,” she insists.
I do it.
Her cigarette has burned down to nothing—a gray, worm-like length of ash about to drop onto the white shag carpet. “Who told you about the coke?”
“I just told you. Sissy.”
“So you were with her today.”
“Yes, I paid her a visit to see if she had any idea where her husband might have run off to. Nothing unusual about that. In fact, I recall telling you I was going to interview her. We ended up partying together, since by the time I got there she was already on her way to blotto. Nothing unusual about that, either, if it gets her to loosen up her lips.”
Bonchance grows a sly smile as the ash falls to the carpet.
“Would you be a darling, Moonlight, and get me another drink?”
There’s a bottle of opened champagne set in a silver ice bucket on the table by the fireplace. I make my way over to it while she lights another cigarette. I pour her a drink in a fresh glass.
“Get one for yourself,” she says, ever the congenial host. “We need to calm down, think this through.”
“I’m good,” I say, carrying the champagne to where she’s seated on the couch.
She takes the glass in her hand by its stem, brings her red lips to it, drains half of it. “Tell me, Moonlight, did you sleep with Roger’s wife?”
I don’t answer her. I don’t have to. She’s smart enough to read my face. She’s the Iron Lady, after all. The master literary agent. Never mind that she’s fallen from grace or drunk as a skunk. She’s still as sharp as a dagger.
She laughs. “Now I see why you must be worried,” she says with a nod. “If the police should happen to suspect you of foul play in Sissy’s death and they find nothing but your signature all over the house and, ah, not to mention, Sissy’s cute little pink pussy, you just might be heading to Sing Sing. Now isn’t that right, Mr. Moonlight?”
“So, if the cops come calling to arrest me, you’re going to provide them with the alibi I need.”
“Which is?”
“That you sent me to her place in order to gather information in the hope of finding her lost husband. Then you will confirm that I left Sissy Walls while she was still very much alive and kicking.”
“How do I know that?
“You don’t, but you can lie. You’re good at lying. You’re a literary agent.”
“And now, you’re a writer. A euphemism for professional liar. Which means, in the end, the police won’t really know who to believe, now will they?”
I take a step back, knowing I’m going to get nowhere fast with this conversation. It’s then I notice the manuscript taking up space on the coffee table. My manuscript. The pages are dog-eared and mussed up, like she’s been reading it all night. My heart speeds up. She must see I’m looking at my book, because she downs her drink and asks me to get her another. Which I do. Moonlight the Gentleman.
I pour another glass of champagne, which I drink in one gulp. Then I pour another for her. Bring it to her.
“Well,” I say.
“Well what, Moonlight?” she says, looking up at me with those big eyes.
“Come on, don’t play coy with me, Good Luck. What did you think of the book?”
“Come closer,” she says, her eyelids falling to half-mast.
She sets her cigarette down in the ceramic ashtray on the table. Taking a quick drink of the champagne, she sets that down, too. Then she sits herself back on the couch, running her hands through her thick hair.
I take a step forward.
“Closer,” she says.
I step around the coffee table. One more step and I will be kneeling on her.
She raises her right hand, and begins to rub me where it counts.
“Does this mean you liked my book?” I say, feeling myself grow instantly hard.
“You might say that, Moonlight,” she answers, slowly unbuckling my belt, then unbuttoning my button-fly jeans, slowly tugging them down.
“I still want some answers, Suzanne. I. Need. Answers.”
“Shhhh, Dick, shhhhh.”
She pulls me out and takes me into her mouth, stroking me gently and working me with her tongue and lips. It doesn’t take the inevitable very long, and, when it happens, Suzanne Bonchance doesn’t shy away. She goes for the no mess, easy clean-up version of a perfectly executed blow job. She swallows all of me, hook, line, and DNA sinker. You might think that’s when I would take my leave. But she’s only getting started. When she stands and slips out of her silk nightgown, the morning sun is just beginning to poke its bright morning radiant beams into the living room. Her cue to take me by the hand and lead me to the staircase.
“My bed will be much cozier than the couch,” she says, starting up the stairs.
I watch her naked loveliness climb the stairs and, like Pavlov’s dog reacting to the chiming dinner bell, I hopelessly follow.
Chapter 24
THE FRONT DOOR SLAMS. Footsteps pounding up the stairs.
“Where the fuck is he?!” shouts the voice.
Roger Walls.
I jump out of bed. Naked. Trembling. Suzanne pops up, covering her naked breasts with the white comforter.
He enters the bedroom, double-barrel shotgun gripped in both hands. A weapon he must store in the trunk of his beat-up Porsche. He’s dressed in the same clothing I left him in at Ralph’s. Blue jeans, brown cowboy boots, button-down shirt under a ratty bush jacket with the sleeves rolled up. His thick gray hair is mussed and the facial skin beneath his gray beard is beet-red from anger and skyrocketing blood pressure. His brown eyes are wide and, even from where I’m standing halfway across the room, I can see beads of sweat dripping off his brow.
“Down on your knees, evil murderer!” he screams, setting the shotgun stock against his right shoulder, planting
a bead on me. If he triggers both barrels at me from this distance, he will evaporate my head. I also know that if for some reason the shotgun jams, he’s still got that six-gun hidden under his bush jacket. If it isn’t loaded, he’ll crush my head with it.
“Roger, please,” I say, as I lower my naked body down on my knees, my hands raised up in surrender. “I can explain.”
“You went to my house. You got drunk and coked-up with my wife. You raped her and then you killed her.”
“Why would I do a thing like that, Roger?”
“Roger, stop it now!” Suzanne finally chimes on. “Put that gun down at once. This is your agent speaking.”
He shifts his aim from me to Suzanne. “Why should I listen to you? You hired this evil murdering scoundrel to chase me down. To defoul my wife. To kill her.”
“I did no such thing, you jerk. I hired him to find you before you end up killing yourself behind the wheel of that Porsche. You are the only client I’ve got and I want you healthy and writing. What happened to Sissy was bound to happen anyway. You know what she was like, Roger. You know how she felt about you. Now put that gun down.”
He’s back to taking aim at me, his chest heaving in and out in deep breaths. The sweat pouring into his eyes.
“Suzanne’s right, Roger. I would never harm a hair on your wife’s body. I went to the Chatham house yesterday afternoon in order to talk with her about places you might have run off to. Where else am I going to get firsthand information like that?”
“You would have done the same thing, Roger,” Suzanne says, backing me up. “You would have interviewed Sissy.”
Roger remains silent, those shotgun barrels staring me down like the opaque, bottomless pit eyes of the devil himself.
“Did you drink and do drugs with my wife?” Roger spits after a time.
“Yes, Roger. I did drink with her. She offered it up. She also graciously offered me a few blasts. In fact, she insisted on it.”
I see the Adam’s apple inside his substantial neck bob up and down. The shotgun barrels begin to slowly drop. “Did you have sex with my wife?”
The oxygen in the room seems to turn to poison, making it hard to breath. Or maybe it’s the effects of my pounding heart and my now aching arms raised up over my head. I know I could lie and pray that I can get away with it. But if my semen is discovered inside Sissy during the internal that’s sure to be a part of her autopsy, the police will have cause to arrest me, and Roger will find out the ugly truth.
“Roger,” I say, “I’m so sorry.”
I lower my head, squeeze my eyes closed, await the explosion that will send me on my way to an eternity beside my old man.
But that doesn’t happen.
Instead of a shotgun blast, I hear the sound of tears. Soft at first, but then more intense until the sound of crying becomes the sound of weeping. I open my eyes to see the barrels of the shotgun now pointing to the floor while big Roger Walls, tough guy novelist, begins to cry like a girl.
He lumbers his way to Suzanne’s bed, plops down on the end of it, and lowers his head in defeat. I lower my arms and maneuver myself, still on all fours, to the shotgun, which I manage to slide out of the writer’s sausage-thick fingers without a struggle.
Standing, I open the breaches and pull out the shells, plopping them onto the bed. Then, setting the shotgun back down onto the floor, I slip into my jeans.
“So,” I say, turning to the shocked Suzanne and the weeping Roger, “who’s up for some breakfast?”
Chapter 25
SUZANNE HAD A CUSTOM outdoor fireplace and stone-cooking hearth built prior to her moving into the downtown townhouse for the purpose of entertaining future clients and party guests. I guess I would now constitute both a future client and party guest, even if the party is slightly spoiled. We do, however have eggs and sausage cooking in a black skillet over a roaring fire made from dry pinewood logs.
While Suzanne cooks, Roger and I sit across from one another at a black metal table that’s shielded from the warm morning sun by a big umbrella. The burly, macho writer has managed to stop crying for now and pull himself together.
“Truth is, Moonlight,” he says, while sipping on a very red and very large Bloody Mary, “Sissy and I didn’t have much of a marriage. None, in fact. She was screwing everything in sight, as if to spite me.”
“There must have been something that brought you two together,” I say.
“We had sex on our wedding night, and we had lots of sex before that. But from the wedding night on, nothing. Nada.”
I take a drink of my coffee from the same kind of thick white mug you might get at a roadside diner.
“How long ago did you marry?”
“Two years ago.”
“Why did she marry you if she didn’t want to be with you?”
He rolls his eyes. “The usual story. You happen to meet an attractive young woman in a bar who has aspirations to be an actress. So what do I do? I promise her the part of the leading lady in a movie being made based on one of my novels. On top of that, I promise to introduce her to my agent who has tons of Hollywood contacts and can get her parts in TV shows. Shit like that. Next thing you know she’s going down on me in the car outside the bar.” He sports a shit-eating grin. “Works like a charm every time.”
“Next thing you know, you’re married,” interjects Suzanne, setting a plate of eggs, sausage, and thick rye toast in front of me, followed by another for Roger and one for her. “And the little woman owns half your estate, which she keeps diminishing daily by blowing it up her nose.”
I cut some of the sunny-side up egg and a small piece of the sausage, set it on a wedge of the rye toast, and place it in my mouth. I’m not sure if it’s because Suzanne cooked the food outside, but it tastes good. Really good.
“That one of the reasons you went off on a bender, Roger? Because of Sissy?”
He shakes his head, takes a glance over his shoulder at Suzanne.
“Moonlight’s in pretty deep, Suze,” he says. “Have you told him everything?”
I’m reminded of my having demanded she tell me everything about this shit storm just before we got slightly sidetracked and decided to try out her bed. She doesn’t answer Roger. Rather, she slowly continues to eat her breakfast. Until she stops, gets up, says, “I’ll retrieve the pot of coffee. We’re going to need it.”
“Grab the pitcher of bloodies while you’re at it,” Roger barks. “I’m gonna’ need those.”
I pick up the pace of my eating, knowing that the pleasantness of the breakfast is going to be short lived.
Chapter 26
WE FINISH BREAKFAST. ROGER pours himself another Bloody Mary, and Suzanne and I freshen up our coffees. She sits back in her chair like she’s trying to catch some serious rays.
“Here’s the short and long of it, Moonlight,” she exhales after a time. “Roger and I are in trouble. Big trouble. Perhaps even the type of trouble you might consider life threatening. And trust me when I say it has absolutely nothing to do with a few prank phone calls. That, my friend, is child’s play compared to what you’re about to hear.”
I sip my coffee, listen.
“You see, Moonlight,” Suzanne goes on, “after the trouble I had in New York, when I was more or less run out of town, I nearly went mad. The literary industry was my life, and I was considered a rock star amongst agents.”
“You’re still a rock star,” Roger breaks in. “The greediest, most ruthless, iron-fisted woman I know.”
She smiles.
“Thank you, Roger,” she says, kissing him on his bearded cheek. Then her eyes back on me. “I would have done anything to get back in the game, in a big way. That’s when I did something I never thought I would have done in a million years.”
“She contacted the mob,” inserts Walls.
The hair on the back of my neck begins to itch.
“The mob,” I repeat. “Italians, I presume.”
“Irish? Jewish? Chinese?”
“No, no, and no.”
Now the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.
“Russian.” I swallow.
“Exactly,” she says.
“Oh fuck,” I say.
Chapter 27
SUZANNE PAINTS AN EXQUISITE picture of how a Russian ex-patriot by the name of Alexander Stalin, a supposed lost great grandson of Uncle Joe Stalin, sent her an idea for a “true crime” manuscript about living with the Russian Mob. He wanted to call it Russian Reign of Death or something intensely clever like that. While Suzanne thought the idea had potential, it would need the hand of a professional ghostwriter. That in mind, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to take the project on. Therefore she set the manuscript idea and Alex’s contact information in the “maybe” pile. That’s when the shit hit the fan over the manuscript title she borrowed from Ian Brando and she was run out of town like a recurrence of the plague.
Some months later, after she settled with Brando out of court and knew she had no choice but to move out of the city up to Albany, she met up with Roger to discuss the future of their position in the publishing world. Which, it turns out, wasn’t entirely optimistic for either one of them. Suzanne was suddenly without a client list and Roger was still without a manuscript, even after ten years of trying to write something. Anything.
What was left of his fortune was being swallowed up by his ex-wives’ support payments, coupled with a new wife who had a taste for cocaine, booze, and other men. To make matters even worse, not only did Roger not have much in the way of ideas for a new novel, but also existing sales of his backlist had faded to almost nothing, causing many of his former publishers to pull the plug on any future contracts. In a word, it would take a miracle for them both to fight their way back to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Or the Amazon.com list, anyway.
“Enter the Russian mob,” I say.
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