The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  Chapter 25

  It was after nine in the morning before Beth woke up, which surprised her because they had gone to bed early. She felt groggy, almost as if she had been drugged, and there was a terrible taste in her mouth. Phil didn’t seem to be anywhere around.

  She brushed her teeth and then took a long shower, letting the warm water pour over her until it brought her back to life. It was only in the shower that she remembered her dream.

  She got dressed and went downstairs, expecting to find Phil in the kitchen. He wasn’t there. There were no signs he had made himself any breakfast and the sink was still dry.

  Even in broad daylight the house still gave her the creeps, and she didn’t like to venture into the other rooms. She put a pot of water on the stove for some coffee and thought about calling out, but she didn’t like to do that either.

  She found him out on the patio. He was wearing nothing but his trousers—even his feet were bare—he hadn’t shaved and he was sitting on one of the lawn chairs, smoking a cigarette. The concrete around him was littered with butts, as if he had been at it for hours. At first he didn’t seem to notice her.

  “Phil?”

  She went up to him and put her hand on his shoulder, which was surprisingly cold, and he actually started.

  “How long have you been out here?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, “I’m making some coffee. You want me to bring you some?”

  “I’ll come inside,” he said, in a flat, tired voice, and got up from the chair.

  He went upstairs and didn’t come down again for about three quarters of an hour. At one point Beth could hear the water running, so he must have been taking a shower.

  When he came into the kitchen he had changed into a pair of tan wash pants and pale blue sport shirt with long sleeves. He had shaved and his hair was wet, but he still looked worn and sleepless. When he sat down at the table he almost fell into his chair.

  “You want some breakfast?”

  “Just coffee,” he answered, shaking his head.

  Beth let him get through about half a cup and then slid a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of him. He didn’t say anything. He just picked up his fork and started eating. When she saw he was making good progress, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with him.

  “I had the weirdest dream last night,” she said. “Somebody came into our room and . . .”

  She stopped talking when she saw the expression on his face. He looked as if he had just seen a ghost.

  “I don’t want to hear about your damn dream,” he shouted. “I don’t—I just don’t want to hear.”

  “Okay. Forget it.”

  He tried another forkful of the scrambled eggs, but they didn’t seem to agree with him anymore and he rinsed the taste out of his mouth with coffee before getting up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not quite looking at her. “I had a rotten night. Couldn’t sleep.”

  “That’s okay. Don’t mention it.”

  He looked at her with a miserable, pleading expression. “You want to go back to bed—just for a little bit?”

  “Would it make you feel better?”

  Phil couldn’t seem to answer. He just moved his shoulders in a pitiful shrug, as if he had given up on feeling better. He looked like he was about to break down and start sobbing.

  “Then let’s go upstairs,” Beth murmured, putting her arms around him. “You can just sleep if you want to. We’ll be together—you don’t have to do anything.”

  They got undressed and crawled into bed, and for a long time they just held each other as gradually this strange grief which afflicted him began to subside. Then, at last, she could feel that he was getting an erection. She let her hand slide down until her fingers closed around the shaft.

  “You want to?” she asked. “I promise I won’t tell my mother.”

  But he still needed some babying, so she climbed on top and guided him into her. He didn’t have to do a thing if he didn’t want to—he didn’t even have to move. She crouched low over him, so that her nipples brushed against his chest every time she moved.

  She was nice to him, kissing his face so that he could feel her excitement, being careful how she moved so he wouldn’t build too fast and they could have it together. She came just a few seconds after he did, and when it was all over they were still making greedy love with hands, breasts, lips—she pressed herself against him as if she wanted to hold him inside her forever.

  “Tell me about your dream,” he said. His voice was hollow, almost desolate.

  “We don’t have to talk.” Beth dragged her mouth across his lips. He was still reasonably firm inside her. She could still move a little bit and feel him. His hands were cupped around her buttocks, and she liked that.

  “Tell me about your dream.”

  “Not yet.”

  But the moment was gone. Sometimes, if she could keep him concentrated on it, Phil would come right back to life and they could start all over again. She would have liked that—take her time up there, let him watch her getting all pink and flushed as she came again, him not having to move a muscle. Give him that little present so he could feel like Mr. Sweetprick. Make everything all right again. But it wasn’t going to happen, because he was somewhere else now.

  She slid off him and nestled against his arm.

  “It was just a dream,” she said. “Some guy came in here while we were sleeping—gave me an awful smack on the tail. I could still feel it when I woke up this morning.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Charlie.”

  She hadn’t even known it until he asked her. It just popped into her head, but that was it. She could feel Phil stiffen against her.

  “Why?” she asked, trying to make it sound as if it didn’t matter at all. “You know a Charlie?”

  “I must know half a hundred Charlies. Don’t you?”

  But she knew he was lying. All she had to do was listen to the strained way he was breathing.

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  “It was probably something we ate.”

  “You insulting my lasagna?”

  He laughed, but he was distant again. A million miles from her. “I had nightmares too, but not about anybody named Charlie.”

  “What, then?”

  “God knows. You know what nightmares are like. You wake up, scared as hell, and then they’re gone.”

  “But you stayed scared.”

  Even as she said it, she knew she had made a mistake. He was shutting her out—it was something she could almost feel.

  “I just had a bad stomach. I went outside, where it was cool, to wait it out.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t believe me?” he asked, almost fiercely.

  “What’s not to believe, Phil?”

  After five minutes, most of it passed in silence, she got up to take another shower. When she came back to the bedroom, Phil was downstairs. She could hear that old radio of his, which since he had finished painting the house he kept in the kitchen, blasting out swing music loud enough to shake the windows.

  He switched it off when she came into the room, and then glared at her as if that too constituted an offense against him.

  “I have to go into Port Chester today,” he said, glancing away.

  “Okay. You want some company?”

  “It’s just some business.”

  “Fine—whatever. I’ll stay here. I’ll do some laundry.”

  He started to say something and then, apparently, thought better of it. Even for Phil, not everything could be a declaration of war.

  “What’s the trouble, sweetie?” she said finally. “You got the blues? Something eating you?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know why you say that.”

  “Yes you do.”

  So here they were back to square one again. Half an hour ago they had everything all fixed up and were screwing like rabbits, and now this. The sulks.

  “I don’t want
to talk about it. I can’t—I can’t talk about it. Okay?”

  He turned away with a fretful wave of his hand, as if he were fending off a swarm of gnats.

  “Okay, baby. Fine.”

  And then, when he turned back to her again, she could see the pain in his eyes. He looked exhausted by his own suffering.

  In another minute he would have told her what it was, this great trouble. And she was sure it was to prevent himself from doing just that that he pushed his way out the kitchen door and walked off toward the garage.

  A couple of minutes later she heard the car start, and then she watched him drive off. Maybe there was no errand in Port Chester. Maybe he just wanted to be alone for a while. Well, that was okay too.

  The laundry had been a tactical evasion, consisting of three pairs of nylon panties that could be washed and rinsed out in about as many minutes. When they were hanging over a towel in the bathroom, Beth had to think of something else to do.

  She would have liked to give Maggie a call, just to hear a human voice, but Maggie would have been about an hour and a half off the night shift and fast asleep.

  God, she hated being alone in this dump!

  Because that was the problem—she never really did feel alone. There was always some presence here with her, an edgy sense of grievance, like some old wrong never righted. A stain of anger that had gotten into everything.

  It was like the house was full of wrath, and sometimes some of that found its way into Phil.

  But houses didn’t hold grudges, not even the Moonlight. The anger was in the house, like another occupant. That was why you never felt alone.

  She went out to the patio, taking a brush and dust pan with her to clean up the cigarette butts Phil had left after sitting up half the night with his bad stomach.

  They made a tight little circle by the side of his chair, and she had them nicely swept up when she noticed two or three others a little distance away. Beth cursed all men in her heart and was about to pick up these few strays when it occurred to her that Phil’s chair, the one in which she had found him that morning, was half facing another only a foot or so away, as if the two of them were huddled in conversation.

  The uncollected cigarette butts would have been an awkward throw from Phil’s chair. Perhaps to begin with he had been sitting in the other and then switched. Then why had he started dropping the butts rather than pitching them away? That was what he had done—either that, or . . .

  Or someone had been sitting out here with him.

  Had he had a visitor last night? Was that what had upset him?

  Could the visitor’s name have been Charlie?

  It seemed so grotesquely impossible that she forced herself to dismiss it from her mind. Beth cleaned up the butts and carried them back into the house, where she dumped them into the paper trash bag under the kitchen sink, sweeping the dusk pan clean after them. She performed the whole operation with such vicious efficiency that she ended up tearing the bag.

  By three thirty Beth had changed into her waitress uniform, but Phil hadn’t come back yet. The Lobster Pot was only a mile down the road, hardly even a twenty-minute walk, so it was no big deal. She just would have liked to be sure he was all right. He was usually so prompt about things like that, and had gone off in such a distracted state of mind, that she was a little worried.

  She gave him another ten minutes and then set off by foot. She made it just as Mr. Gleason, the owner, was unlocking the glass front doors from the inside. He glanced up and seemed surprised to see her.

  Tuesday was never a busy night, so you spent a lot of time standing around. This somehow was more tiring than running back and forth chasing plates, and Beth was left alone more with her own thoughts, which were not very entertaining. This made her irritable—she almost snapped Sally Barbini in two and then had to apologize. It was a black day when she found herself apologizing to Sally Barbini.

  She felt better when, a minute or two before closing time, with the restaurant already empty and the girls emptying their tip money into their purses, she saw Phil’s wine red Lincoln nose into a parking spot right out in front. She waved through the window, but there was a sheet of glare across his windshield from the overhead lights and she couldn’t tell whether or not he had even seen her.

  She made herself a little promise that she would make a fresh start. This morning had never happened, and she wouldn’t say a word about his not picking her up for work.

  When she left the restaurant she was smiling. The smile froze in place when she opened the door on the passenger side and saw his face.

  “Hi.”

  He glanced away, as if ashamed of her, and appeared not to have heard. Beth never let her smile falter, but she already knew what was going to happen.

  “I’ve got your suitcase in the trunk,” he said. “I think it would be better if we spent a little time apart.”

  “Just like that? You want to tell me what this is about?”

  For a moment he didn’t say anything. It was as if he couldn’t say anything, as if he had made his little set speech and didn’t know how to go on. For some reason it occurred to Beth to think, “probably he’s never done anything like this in his life.”

  But it was more than that—more than simple embarrassment, or even shame. He was afraid.

  In an instant, just looking at him, she understood. It was there in his face. He was afraid of throwing her out like this the way anyone else would be afraid of losing a hand. It was not his own will he was obeying, but something else. She saw all of this, and a great pitying tenderness welled up in her.

  “Oh, baby,” she murmured, “don’t do this.”

  “It’s for the best,” he said, his voice a little too loud and the words rushed, as if to cut her off.

  He turned the ignition key and, as soon as the engine turned over, threw it into reverse so fast they almost backed out into a passing car. The seventy or eighty yards up the street and around and into the parking lot behind Feenie’s Hardware was like an obstacle course.

  “I’ll give you a hand with the bag,” he said, pushing his way through the door on the driver’s side with the engine was still running. Beth got out just as the trunk hood popped open and came around her see him dragging her bag out onto the pavement.

  “It’s all right,” she shouted. “Just leave it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He looked at her with an expression that was almost cringing, as if he would have given anything not to be doing this. He seemed on the verge of saying something, or offering some kind of explanation, and it was only then that Beth realized the futility of words.

  “Just go home, Phil,” she said.

  And so he left her there, in the parking lot beneath her apartment window, and she watched as his red tail lights pulled around the corner and out of sight, leaving her there in the darkness. And only then did the tears begin streaming silently down her face.

  Chapter 26

  When Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino arrived at work Wednesday morning, there was a message to call Stamford.

  “The lab work is in,” Jerry Reilly told him as soon as he got on the phone, “and some of it is pretty weird.”

  “I can imagine,” Spolino thought, before saying “Go on.”

  “Well, for one thing we found a couple of brown fibers we guess probably came from the guy’s suit—thank God they had just vacuumed a couple of hours earlier, because you can imagine the fun we’d have trying to sort out the take from a whorehouse’s carpet. Anyway, the dye lot matches nothing from any known manufacturer of men’s clothing, foreign or domestic. How’s that? You think our boy buys his suits on Mars?”

  “How far back do your samples go, Jerry?”

  “Twenty years. We’re sending it to Washington to see if they can do any better.”

  Spolino thought of the box down in Mrs. Pickart’s basement and made a bet with himself that he would find a match there.

&nbs
p; “What else?” he asked.

  “You remember the prints on the gun? There was dust mixed in with the oil from the guy’s fingers. At first we thought the slob just hadn’t washed his hands in a while, but that doesn’t seem to have been the problem. It was grave dust, Tom—dried, pulverized human tissue, the stuff you’d find on a corpse that has mummified and is beginning to crumble.”

  The second face could have belonged to a corpse. The Devere woman’s precise words.

  “Did you find any other prints?”

  “Nothing. He carried the shotgun in a leather briefcase, but it was clean—wiped clean. You know what I think, Tom? I think he meant for us to find the prints on the gun. I think he’s playing around with us.

  “By the way, the madame told us she ID’d the guy for you.”

  “Twice. Two different pictures. What does that tell you?”

  “She’s screwy.”

  “You still got her at the hospital?”

  “She checked out last night. We have her home address.”

  Except that by now she was probably on her way to Cleveland or Memphis or God knows where.

  “Tom, you think maybe it’s time you told me what’s going on?”

  Spolino allowed himself perhaps a second of warning laughter.

  “Why? Are you eager to hear that my chief suspect is a man who’s supposed to have disappeared without a trace fifty years ago?”

  “Forget I asked.”

  When the conversation was over, and he had hung up the phone, Spolino braced himself for the next necessary step. It was time for a talk with his captain.

  Ed Monser was the effective head of all police operations in the Greenley department. There was a chief, but he worried about budgets and public relations. Monser ran the shop.

  And he was good at it. He had moved here five years before from Philadelphia, where he put in eleven years in the criminal division. He had a degree in criminology, painstakingly earned in night courses from the University of Pennsylvania, which perhaps made him take himself a little too seriously, but he was a good cop. Spolino respected him, although the two men had never really become friends.