The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  “I have a few hundred in the bank. All we have to do is wait for it to open.”

  “We’ll need more than that.” Phil shook his head, as if banishing some inner question. “I’ll have to go back.”

  “To the Moonlight?”

  “Yes.”

  It was almost morning. In two hours Millie would be off the graveyard shift at the Grand Union. The power lines were etched black against a dull gray sky that looked like more rain. Perhaps the sun would never shine again.

  “Don’t do it, Phil. Don’t go back there.”

  “I have to.” He gave her a strained smile that, under the circumstances, was almost heroic. “I left my wallet behind—even my underwear is soaked through.”

  And then the smile collapsed.

  “There’s a lot of money at the Moonlight,” he said, as if confessing to some shameful weakness. “My Uncle George squirreled away a fortune that nobody knew about. I found it, and it’s mine. I don’t plan to leave without it.”

  “Then why didn’t you bring it last night?”

  “I wasn’t thinking very clearly last thing. All I knew last night was that I wanted to be with you.”

  From the way he looked at her, Beth knew it was the simple truth. Last night, probably, he had been running on instinct.

  “We don’t need it.”

  “Yes we do. I need it.”

  “Then we’ll go together.”

  “No.” He said it as a fact, nothing more. She wasn’t coming. “No, you’re staying here. I won’t risk you in that house.”

  He stood up and took his shirt from the back of a chair. It was almost dry, so he put it on.

  “I won’t be long—just a few hours to collect what’s mine. Maybe I’ll be able to get the car started.”

  It was hopeless. She could see that, and it filled her with dread. She knew somehow that she was about to lose him forever.

  Her housecoat was held together in the front by a row of little snaps, and she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She took the two lapels in her hands and pulled them apart.

  “At least wait until daylight,” she said.

  Chapter 31

  As usual when he had to work through the night, Lieutenant Spolino had a headache—nothing blinding, just enough to be a nuisance. And no amount of coffee or aspirin seemed to have the slightest effect. He suspected it was just nerves.

  By four in the morning Vito Carboni’s corpse had been removed to the morgue, the technicians were just about finished with their work on the scene and all the preliminary interviews had concluded and were in the process of being typed up. By dawn the Windermere Nursing Home would be back to normal operation and the only obvious sign of what had taken place last night would be the orange police seal over the door to Room 127. Spolino was back at his desk at the station, sorting through the incoming paperwork, trying to convince himself that any of it could make the slightest difference.

  His conversation with Sonny Galatina had depressed and frightened him. He was, after all, a policeman. He dealt in facts, and his basic assumption was that the experience of life in this world, no matter how chaotic and brutal, was at last intelligible. You gathered your evidence, and you drew your conclusions and finally, sometimes, if your luck held, you made an arrest. Things were supposed to make sense—or at least there was supposed to exist the possibility of their making sense. But this time it wasn’t working out that way.

  He could accept the idea that the murderer of Vito Carboni, Sal Grazzi and Leo Galatina would finally escape justice. After all, it would not be the first time that the bad guys won. In the old days, back at Manhattan South, it had practically been routine. What he could not accept was the idea that these three men had died in a vendetta carried on by someone who had been dead for fifty years. The whole thing had remained tolerable as long as he had been able to believe that Charlie Brush might be alive somewhere, back in business, the directing hand behind his own revenge.

  But that was no longer possible. Charlie Brush was dead, buried underneath the cement dance floor at the old Moonlight Roadhouse. There was no doubt. And if that was true, then the whole process of investigating these murders became a futile embarrassment. The police, after all, were not equipped to go beyond the surface of things. Metaphysics was a little out of their line.

  So Tom Spolino could only try to soothe his aching head and comfort himself with the rituals of paperwork and deduction.

  As expected, the statements taken on the scene were useless. The last person known to have seen Vito Carboni alive was the nurse who brought him back to his room after dinner. She noticed nothing unusual. No one saw any strangers on or near the premises anytime that afternoon or evening. Conclusion: Vito Carboni was simply wheeled back to Room 127, where he was expected to wait until someone came to put him to bed, and there he died, without attracting the least attention.

  Suicide could be ruled out as a possibility, because a man does not cut his own throat and then calmly fold up the razor and put it into his shirt pocket.

  It was at least possible that the murder was committed by some member of the nursing home staff, but with what motive? And a staff member would have every motive for concealment. A staff member would have smothered the old boy with a pillow or given him an injection of the wrong drug—something which might pass for a natural death or, at worst, a mistake.

  But this was a murder that announced itself as a murder. The razor in the shirt pocket was almost a signed confession.

  On an impulse, and because he could no longer stand sitting at his desk, Lieutenant Spolino gathered up his files on the Galatina and Grazzi killing and went down to the labs, which were housed in the basement. As expected, he found Julius Berger working there alone.

  Julius was a small, dark, birdlike man of about fifty, unmarried and unattached, with no known interests that didn’t relate to his work. He was on cordial terms with everyone, but he had no friends and didn’t seem to feel their absence. He had been the Greenley Police Department’s chief forensics technician for almost the whole of his adult life, and these basement labs were the center of his world, his real home. He probably had an apartment somewhere, but no one had ever seen it and he apparently never went there expect to sleep and bathe and change his shirt. But whatever his limitations as a human being, he knew his work with the intimacy of total absorption. He was the most perfect example you could ask for of the man who has disappeared into his profession.

  At that moment he was hunched over a little work table, his attention absorbed by a stack of fingerprint cards.

  “Have you got anything for me, Julius?”

  It was a moment before he could extract his attention from the cards, and when he straightened up it was with the stiff, disjointed movement of someone who has held himself in the same position for a long time. When he saw Lieutenant Spolino he managed a quick nod and a smile that vanished almost instantaneously.

  “God’s own plenty,” he said, clearing his throat to show his disgust with the task at hand. “It’ll take me two weeks to sort through this mess and just find the matches with the corpse and the specimens we took from the nursing staff.”

  “Get some help. You’ve got assistants—put them on it.”

  “Are you kidding? They’re all idiots. Half the time they can’t even find their car keys.”

  Julius managed another smile, this one of slightly longer duration. His one relaxation in life was pointing out the inadequacies of his staff.

  “I’ve got your killer, however.” He slid two cards across the table toward Spolino, as if their existence were of only marginal interest. “A thumb and two partials from the handle of the razor and all five on the right hand, plus a full palm print, from the inside of the window. The thumbs match up. Careless of him, wasn’t it.”

  Spolino looked at the cards. He was no expert, but in this instance he didn’t need to be—the index finger of the right hand showed a tiny, right-angled scar. Charlie Brush’s prints showed t
he same scar in the same location. Just to be sure, Spolino took the old Rikers Island ID sheet from his file folder and slid it in front of Julius.

  “Is this him?”

  Julius took about fifteen seconds before he handed the sheet back.

  “That’s him. You do fast work, Tom.”

  But Spolino didn’t seem to have heard. He put the sheet back in his folder and frowned like a disappointed man.

  “Let me ask you something, Julius. Is there any way that the prints you lifted tonight could be faked?”

  “Faked?” The question seemed initially to offend and then to intrigue him. “It’s a theoretical possibility.”

  “How theoretical?”

  The chief forensics technician cocked his head a little to one side and then rolled the hairs of his right eyebrow between middle finger and thumb, as if testing their strength.

  “It’s possible to lift a set of prints from, say, a glass and transfer them to some other surface—it’s the sort of thing you could do with an ordinary piece of scotch tape.”

  “Could you take prints like that from a corpse?”

  “The ones on the window could have been managed like that.”

  “And what about the ones on the razor.”

  “No chance.” Julius shook his head and grinned, giving the impression such an idea was too ridiculous to have occurred to him. “At least, no realistic chance. Those prints were in the victim’s own blood, and you don’t make fingerprints in blood with a piece of scotch tape. I can more or less guarantee you that your suspect—or at least his right hand—was in that room tonight and held the razor that killed your victim.”

  “Or at least his right hand.” Spolino’s head was destroying him and he could feel his pulse beating in his ears. “How fresh would the corpse have to be if the killer just brought the hand?”

  It was one of Julius’s great virtues as a technician that nothing shocked him. To Julius all crime was a theoretical abstraction, so he was perfectly prepared to consider the idea of a murderer walking into his victim’s room carrying a severed hand with him.

  “Not so very fresh,” he said. “In Vietnam, after the war, there was a very lively trade in the fingerprints of MIAs. Somebody would find a corpse, inject fluid into the fingertips to pump them up for a recognizable set of prints, and then try to sell them to the family as proof the guy was alive and still being held by the Communists. The human body is really wonderfully durable.”

  “Durable enough to be printed after fifty years?”

  “Could be—if we’re talking about Lenin. I hear they’ve got him rigged up with spigots and change his embalming fluid every three months, just like the oil in a car.”

  “What if it’s not Lenin. What if it’s somebody who’s been buried under a cement floor for fifty years?”

  “Buried in the ground?”

  “Yes.”

  “Around here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry, Tom. There’s too much acid in the soil. After fifty years, he’d be right down to the bone.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  . . . . .

  Lieutenant Thomas Spolino managed to get home that morning before his children woke up. Alice was in the kitchen, wearing the red silk bathrobe he had given her last Christmas, and she had coffee ready.

  “Do you want some breakfast?” she asked, but he shook his head.

  “No. All I need is to see the kids before they go to school, and to get a couple of hours’ sleep.”

  “Maybe you’ll be hungry after you wake up.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Eat something now anyway. It’ll help your head.”

  Spolino felt so profoundly grateful that he had to smile. He hadn’t said anything about having a headache, but Alice had known anyway. Alice always knew.

  “Okay, maybe something.”

  Before he knew what he was doing, he had finished off half a plate of scrambled eggs and toast and he could hear his kids on the stairs.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  Randy, who would be ten in September, was his father’s son. He was a big and blond and good at games, and he wanted to be a cop when he grew up. He was sweet natured and without secrets. He threw himself into a kitchen chair and, while he waited for his mother to serve him breakfast, adjusted the laces on his tennis shoes.

  Patricia, destined to be a femme fatal, did not sit down at once but came over to her father to be kissed. She was small and had her mother’s eyes. She was intense and moody, very Sicilian in her way, and reminded Tom of his grandmother Spolino.

  Breakfast was not something to be lingered over, a matter of twenty hurried minutes in the busy fabric of the day. Tom listened to his children’s conversation and began to feel better. By the time they were out the back door his headache was gone.

  Their absence, however, served to remind him of the real reason he had come home.

  “Call your sister this morning,” he told his wife. “Ask her to put you and the kids up for a few days. You can go to the beach.”

  He smiled, as if it were just a pleasant idea that had occurred to him, but he wasn’t fooling anyone.

  “We have a beach here,” Alice replied as she cleared away the dishes. It was as close to a refusal as anything he had ever heard from her, and it surprised him.

  “Phone anyway. I want you out of the house for a while.”

  She didn’t say anything. She merely stood next to the sink, waiting for an explanation. And Tom realized, with a slight shock, that he was going to have to give her one.

  “There was another murder last night,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. “An old man in a nursing home has had his throat cut and these crimes have taken on a certain pattern . . .”

  He really didn’t know how to go on. What could he tell her that would make sense? He really didn’t have any idea.

  “Was the old man some friend of your grandfather’s?”

  “Yes.”

  Once again he experienced a surge of gratitude toward this woman, who somehow always managed to understand. He stood up and went to her, taking her in his arms.

  “First Leo Galatina,” he went on, his lips just touching her hair. “Then Eduardo Grazzi’s grandson, and now Vito Carboni. Someone is getting even, and there are only two of us left—there’s Bob Galatina and there’s me. Until this is settled, I don’t want you and the kids around.”

  “I don’t want to leave you,” she said. He could feel the way she pressed her cheek against his chest, and it didn’t make life any easier.

  “I’ll be better, and safer, if I don’t have to worry about any of you. Do me a favor, Alice, and don’t give me a hard time about this.”

  “Okay—tomorrow morning then.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  . . . . .

  When Tom Spolino woke up, he realized he had been dreaming about his grandfather. He couldn’t remember the dream. He sat up in bed and tried to bring it back, but it only dropped further and further away. Finally he got out of bed.

  He took a shower, brushed his teeth and shaved, and then he got dressed again. It was a few minutes after ten in the morning.

  Tom had been very young when his grandfather walked into a bullet, so he hardly remembered him. Yet he had heard so many stories from his father and from other people that these took the place of memory, and “the old man” had been a real presence in his early life. Everyone always told him he was like his grandfather, and he had always been proud of this. He thought he must have been about twelve by the time he figured out that Lucio had been one of the bad guys.

  Lucio had punched a hole in Charlie Brush’s ear with an ice pick—that and, without doubt, many worse things. His son had become a baker and his grandson was a cop, and now Charlie Brush, dead for half a century, wanted to settle up. Tom Spolino half suspected that his grandfather would have had less trouble understanding it all than he did.

  His bedroom window looked out on the back yard, which was just
an oblong patch of lawn surrounded by a dilapidated wooden fence. The grass needed cutting, he noticed. Well, there was precious little chance he would get to it anytime soon.

  It all looked so comfortingly ordinary in the bright summer sunlight, a world in which the greatest dangers were from ragweed pollen and crabgrass. It made you half believe that the wild impulse which was existence had at last been domesticated and made safe.

  All at once his dream came back to him—except that he couldn’t be sure if it was dream or memory or some mingling of the two.

  He saw Lucio, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up over his forearms, sitting on the cement steps that led up to the back door of a house he did not recognize but which was not unlike his own. Lucio was holding a glass of iced tea, his thick fingers grasping the rim like the talons of a bird. He was laughing and talking to a child, almost a baby, with hair as blond as his own, who looked up at him with serious, questioning eyes. He stroked the child’s face with the back of his broad, powerful hand.

  Lucio had been speaking Italian, the clipped, sharp-edged Sicilian that mixed so strangely with his laughter, and then suddenly his voice dropped and he said, in English, “Remember, Little Tomas, that the man who dies betrayed will never rest.”

  Chapter 32

  Phil left the apartment just before six in the morning. The streetlights were still on, but their yellow light had already faded to nothing in the pale gray dawn. Old River Road was deserted. The loudest sound was the rattle from the air conditioning unit at the Grand Union, two blocks away.

  “Don’t go back,” Beth had said. “Forget about the money. We’ll get by.” She had kissed his face, guiding his hands to her breasts, letting him feel the urgency of her body. They had made love right there on the living room floor, because they couldn’t help themselves—because for those few moments there was nothing else that mattered except their need for each other.

  But with sunrise the rest of the world came back, the world into which they would have to make their escape and which was so very unforgiving. They would need money, and the few thousand Phil had in his checking account wouldn’t carry them very far.