The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  If he had something to give to Tom, to help him off whatever hook he was on over this business, he knew he would feel better.

  And, besides, it didn’t hurt to drop by a listed property every so often, because even if you didn’t have any buyers it at least gave the owner the illusion of forward movement. He had been neglecting Owings, and he knew it. The whole thing, you see, Owings and the Moonlight both, had inspired Jack Matheny with an uneasiness that made neglect seem almost a virtue.

  He had his car window open, so he could hear the music even as he turned into the driveway—big band stuff, with lots of trombones. He was surprised, because he wouldn’t have thought that sort of thing would be much to Owings’ taste. But it was easy to be wrong about people.

  He parked in front of the garage, which was unlocked. He opened the double doors about six inches, just because all real estate people were born nosey, and saw the front end of a brand new Lincoln Town Car in a kind of dark burgundy red. Very sharp. Somehow it went with the trombones.

  Except that the left headlight was broken and the fender had gotten crumpled. Maybe Owings wasn’t much of a driver.

  Jack knocked, but nobody answered the front door. So he just followed the music around to the rear, noting with approval along the way that somebody had been busy with a scraping knife and sandpaper. It looked like Owings was getting ready to do some painting.

  Except that “getting ready” didn’t quite express it. Jack found him in the back, on the old outdoor dance floor, up on a ladder. He was barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts and a tee shirt, which was understandable considering the temperature was in the eighties, even here in the shade. There were plastic dropcloths all around, and he had about half the wall finished.

  “I admire your industry,” Jack shouted over the music, which was coming from an old wooden radio propped up on a lawn chair. He must have startled him, because Owings almost fell off his ladder. “A little fresh paint won’t hurt when I start bringing people around.”

  Owings scrambled down and turned off the radio—you might have supposed he had been caught in the practice of some secret vice—and then he came over to offer Jack his hand, smiling a little foolishly.

  “It’s for myself, really,” he said, as if the matter required an apology. “I’ve never owned a home before and I figured, as long as I’m here . . .”

  As the sentence trailed off, he let his eyes sweep over the side of the building with something like a lover’s fondness. It was odd, and somehow a little disconcerting, to hear anyone refer to the old Moonlight as “home,” but then for Owings, probably, its past had only begun the day Jack had picked him up from the train station.

  “Well, it’s good for business,” Jack said, and stepped back to admire his work.

  “You finding it hard to get around out here?”

  Owings looked at him a little strangely, like he was wondering if he had peeked into the garage. And then he grinned, like a man with nothing to hide.

  And what could he possibly have to hide?

  “Solved that problem yesterday.” He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his tee shirt, although he hadn’t appeared to be sweating. “Like to see my new car?”

  “Sure. I always like a new car.”

  “Except it isn’t quite new,” he said as they started walking back toward the garage. Jack noticed Owings was being a little careful on the gravel driveway, which probably hurt if you weren’t wearing shoes. “It’s a rental company sell-off, but it’s still got a few months on its warranty. I just wish that covered body work.”

  He swung open the garage door and made a flat-handed gesture at the headlight, as if to say, see what I mean?

  “I have the car about three hours, and this happens—some idiot in a parking lot, just bashed me and took off. Didn’t even leave a note.”

  On closer inspection, it wasn’t bad. The metal wasn’t torn, the way it usually was in these rear-enders. There was just a nice, soft dent. And of course the headlamp.

  “A couple of hundred,” Jack told him, running his fingers along the inside of the dent—around a car, it seemed, every man had to pretend he was an expert. “They can just pound this out.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh sure.”

  He walked all the way around, opening a door to look at the upholstery, making a production out of admiring the hell out of it. People didn’t show you their cars if they didn’t expect you to like them. At least, most people didn’t.

  “Nice,” Jack said, meaning it. “Looks like they took good care of it.”

  While they walked back, Jack told him about the newspaper ad and the inquiries he had had so far.

  “It takes time with commercial property,” he said. “You don’t have buyers coming at you from every side, but at least you don’t have to put up with the housewives who just want to kill an afternoon looking at other people’s houses.”

  He laughed, and then Owings laughed, perhaps to cover the sound of a window being opened somewhere. Very faintly, Jack could hear the noise of water running—perhaps a shower, up on the second floor.

  Looked like Owings had himself a house guest, which might explain why he hadn’t invited his broker inside. Jack wondered who she was, and if she was anyone he might have recognized. It didn’t figure he was going to find out.

  Why had Owings shown him the car, he wondered. Because of her? It didn’t figure. Pride of ownership, perhaps? Maybe, since that seemed to be why he was fixing up the Moonlight. Or because he figured he had seen it already? But a car wasn’t exactly a state secret.

  “Well, I’d better be running along,” he said—one thing you learn in the real estate business is not to overstay your welcome.

  “I wish you’d come and paint my house sometime.” The smile was to let Owings know that he was just joking. “You do nice work.”

  Owings shrugged his shoulders, which somehow, under his tee shirt, looked impossibly weighed down.

  “That’s the great advantage of white. When you get sick of it, it covers so nicely.”

  “And you’ve chosen a good color,” Jack went on, turning away with a little wave of hsi hand—thinking to himself what a waste of time it had been coming out here. “That’s a nice shade of gray. It goes well with the house.”

  And it was the simple truth, too.

  He was all the way out to his car before it hit him. No wonder that color seemed so perfect—he remembered from when he was a kid, right after the war, when things were still under George Patchmore’s management and operation.

  It was the restaurant people who had painted the place white. In George’s time, the Moonlight had always been just that gray.

  Chapter 9

  Detective Lieutenant Spolino had left a stenographer on duty in Leo Galatina’s hospital room, and she had taken down every word the old man said while he drifted in and out of consciousness. He seemed to have a lot of say, if one only knew how to interpret it. The transcript made for very interesting reading.

  As the brain dies it appears to lose control over time, so that as it relives the events leading to its final few snatches of memory the past and present grow jumbled together. Sometimes Leo was an old man, walking his dog as he had every evening for the past ten years, and sometimes he was a young hoodlum on the rise. It was a tangled skein. None of it was admissible in court and a lot of it was nearly unintelligible—which was probably just as well for certain people’s peace of mind, because Leo’s confession would have been enough to hang a dozen bad guys.

  Spolino sat at his desk in the day room at the Greenley police station, eating the chicken salad sandwich his wife had made for his lunch and sipping absent-mindedly at a diet Coke as he reread he old thug’s last earthly testament.

  Leo Galatina had named his murderer and had cried down vengeance on his former partner, George Patchmore, for having sometime or other bungled something. The two were somehow related in his wounded and moribund mind, but George Patchmore wa
s dead and nobody—not police records clerks, not the FBI, nobody—knew anything about or had ever even heard of a “Charlie Brush.”

  So, in the end the only thing Spolino knew for certain so far was that he hated this case.

  It was the sort of case every policeman hates, where the odds of making a collar decrease with every passing hour and everyone is screaming to have the perpetrator locked up two days ago.

  If it had been a simple hit-and-run the chances would have been better—the driver would probably be local, probably some kid out with his parents’ car and a bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, so you waited for the lab work to give you a fix on the car and then you started ringing doorbells. It was a good bet the guy would probably walk into the station within a few days, after he’d seen a lawyer and gotten his story straight, and that would be that.

  But this particular time it wasn’t going to go down so easy, because what we had here was Murder One.

  To begin with, Leo Galatina had not been the sort of man who dies by accident. He does not drown while out swimming in Long Island Sound, he is not struck by lightning, he does not get run over by some drunken teenager out in the family car. These things do not happen to him. Either he dies in his bed after a long illness or he is murdered. There is no third possibility. Leo Galatina had probably made his bones before Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino was even born. Leo Galatina had been one hard-assed son-of-a-bitch, a righteous villain of the old school, the kind of man who is immune to chance.

  So somebody put the touch on him. It didn’t matter that for the past fifteen years he hadn’t been involved in anything shadier than forgetting now and then to put money in the downtown parking meters, somebody had wanted him dead. And murderers in that league were hardly ever caught.

  So who needed all this shit? Why hadn’t whoever did it just bundle the old guy into the trunk of his car and arrange for him to disappear somewhere? If it was Family business, why make work for the police? Where was consideration? Whatever happened to professional pride? If there was anything Tom Spolino hated it was a sloppy hit man.

  And Tom Spolino was in a position to judge, because his grandfather had been one of the best.

  It was one of the little amenities of being a cop in Greenley that he had the day room practically to himself—at Manhattan South there would have been fifty guys at fifty desks, and the floor would have been a litter of crumpled paper and spilled coffee. Police work in Greenley was mainly traffic control and visiting the schools to lecture all those upwardly mobile kids about keeping their noses clean. There was a smaller than average drug problem in town, mostly cocaine, because the users made most of their buys in New York. There was plenty of burglary, but if there was more than one homicide a year it was a crime wave. Spolino was the senior detective, although business was so slow that he had never been promoted above lieutenant, and he got all the hairy stuff, which was just the way he liked it. There wasn’t much hairy stuff.

  There was a refrigerator in the day room—unheard of luxury—and when he brought to work one of the lunches his wife packed for him he could be sure, come twelve o’clock, that it would be right there waiting for him. Nobody was going to steal it. And the odds were that nobody was going to shoot him before he reached retirement age. Small town police work had a lot to recommend it.

  Until somebody knocked off one of the old Dons.

  So Detective Lieutenant Spolino drank his diet Coke and ate his sandwich and reviewed the transcripts of Leo Galatina’s last few hours on earth, feeling like a weasel trapped in a cage.

  “George, you goddam fuck! You useless, chiseling tavern keeper!”

  The old man’s words came right off the page for him. He didn’t need tape recordings, he didn’t need anything. He could hear it all, as if Leo Galatina were talking into his ear.

  “I thought we fixed that guy.”

  He had been maybe seven or eight the first time he heard that growling voice, like the guy had little pieces of broken stone in his larynx. It was organized crime’s version of a company picnic, in the back yard of the Don’s house in Stamford—only the Don was Leo’s older brother Enrico, and Grandpa had been his bodyguard and Number One Trigger, dead since 1946, when he had walked into a bullet that was meant for the Boss.

  The son, who worked in a bakery to please his wife, had been invited with his family, just for old time’s sake—as a tribute to Lucio Spolino, who had been killed doing his job, and as a reminder that the Family looks after its own, even when they try to turn their backs. Tom Spolino could remember his father’s nervousness, the way all afternoon he seemed to be trying to disappear, and it was such a good party too.

  And Leo, Enrico’s underboss, had caught little Tom stealing from the cannoli tray.

  “You want some?” he had asked, holding the kid up by his coat collar until his feet were no longer even touching the ground. A small, angry-looking man in a blue suit that seemed too tight for him, he didn’t talk so much as snarl. “Then have some—here, I give it to you. One for now, one for later. But take it like a man, and don’t snitch. Now go find your mamma.”

  And little Tom had gone running off, a stick of canniloni in each hand, more scared than he had ever been in his life, or ever would be again.

  And it had worked, that single warning. It had scotched forever any inclination towards a career in crime. That Tom Spolino was a cop today was probably Leo Galatina’s fault.

  “I told Enrico not to trust no fuckin’ Yankee Doodle. I said, ‘he turns on his own, he’ll turn on us. Use him, but don’t trust him.’”

  Was George Patchmore the “fuckin’ Yankee Doodle”? Or was it “that guy”? Or was “that guy” George?

  The rest, for a couple of hours—the entries were marked by time, with a note in the margin every half hour or so—was a series of complaints about his wife, who had been dead for ten years.

  And then: “Charlie, you shit—you dead shit. Get out o’ the fuckin’ car. I kill you, Brush. You fuck.”

  So who was Charlie Brush?

  If Galatina’s assailant was known to him, it figured he was local talent. As far as anybody knew, Leo hadn’t even been outside Fairfield County in the past thirty years, not even to go into New York for a show. Yet the name “Brush, Charles, alias Charlie” was showing up on nobody’s computer screen, not here, not in Stamford, not in Hartford, not even in Washington.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. Washington had actually found twelve Charles Brushes: one was a C.P.A. in California; one was a librarian in Oklahoma; one was (no kidding) a records clerk with the FBI; one was an unemployed alcoholic living out of garbage cans in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; one was the sheriff of Darwin County, Colorado; two were on active military service, one stationed in Arnheim, Germany and the other aboard an aircraft carrier somewhere between Japan and the Philippines; one was the federal government’s permanent guest in Leavenworth, Kansas; four were still in high school. None of them had the slightest connection with Leo Galatina or with organized crime in the Northeastern United States. All of them were under investigation as to their movements over the past three days and all of them, doubtless, were going to turn out to have unimpeachable alibis. Lieutenant Spolino knew that his Charlie Brush was not one of these.

  So what kind of a hit man is it who has never been fingerprinted, does not have a driver’s license, a passport or a Social Security card, has never signed an income tax form or registered for the military draft? Is he the master assassin of all time, the man who leaves no loose ends and disappears without a trace? Then why had this artist made such a botch of killing Leo—who, after all, survived for over nine hours? And where did Leo know him from, outer space?

  And what did Charlie Brush, whoever he was, have to do with George Patchmore?

  Maybe nothing. Maybe the “useless, chiseling tavern keeper” who was also the “Yankee Doodle” against whom Leo had warned his brother Enrico, was some other George. Maybe old Leo had just gotten his wires tangled.


  Spolino didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Leo Galatina, George Patchmore, and an unknown quantity who went under the name of “Charlie Brush”—this was the holy trinity Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino had to work with. It was the best he was likely to get.

  Alice, neat as always, packed his chicken salad sandwich in a square of saran wrap which was now spread out on his desk with hardly a wrinkle. She was a tryer, was Alice. By the time he came along, it seemed, she had given up any serious hope of snagging a husband, so she would have been grateful to have anyone, and Tom Spolino was not anyone. She kept the house in perfect order, she never nagged him or asked questions about his work, she was a wonderful mother to their two children and, like a lot of women without obvious personal attractions, she was a good fuck.

  Alice was one decision he had never regretted. He could have married lots of prettier women and done much worse.

  It was one of the advantages of his job that the police station was only about a ten-minute walk from his front door. In the summer he always walked to work and sometimes, when things weren’t busy, would go home for lunch. On those occasions he would sit at the kitchen table with Alice and then, sometimes, if the kids were safely out of the house and he happened to feel like it, they would go upstairs for a quickie. Alice could get a man up and over the top faster than any woman he had ever known—when called upon, she was the McDonald’s of sex, except you never had to wait in line.

  And when they were finished, she would zip up his trousers for him, looking all flushed and happy, like he had done her the biggest favor ever. Then he would walk back to work, carrying his little secret into the day room with him, feeling like King Kong.