When I felt sufficiently calmed, I popped another anti-inflammatory as a precaution and a couple Advil for the inevitable headache that was sure to set in. While doing my best to remove the white pink-eyed image of the albino man from my head, I poured myself a coffee at an hour of the day when I might have been having my first beer.
First I pushed away the mail that had been piling up for some days now. Overdue bills, circulars, catalogs, credit card applications. I spread the Albany Times Union newspaper onto the counter between the sink and the telephone and searched for a headline.
I didn’t find one. The one I wanted, that is. Big surprise.
What I did find as I freshened my coffee was a small quarter- column that appeared just below the police blotter on page three of local section B, immediately above the five-day weather outlook (rain for the duration). A little sidebar piece penned by crime reporter Brendan Lyons that described what looked to be an apparent suicide by A.P.D. Captain Jake Montana’s wife, Scarlet. The captain discovered the deceased early this morning, said the piece.
I drank some coffee and sighed out loud inside the empty kitchen.
Naturally I couldn’t help but feel cheated by the lack of attention and accuracy given to the matter. But like I already pointed out, I wasn’t the least bit surprised by it either. What’s more, I knew that the story’s lack of accuracy or prominent placement had nothing to do with Mr. Lyons. Almost certainly it had to do with an editorial staff who took their orders from much higher service sidearm-toting A.P.D. authorities.
Didn’t matter how much dough the publisher was worth; how much political pull he had. Freedom of the press was not necessarily free in these matters. Not when the cops were your friends.
The article went on to state how thirty-eight-year-old Montana was pronounced dead on the scene as the result of self-inflicted lacerations. No mention that the lacerating weapon in question had not been recovered as if there were no mystery to the fact that a dead woman is pretty much incapable of hiding the knife she used to kill herself.
The piece closed by quoting the officer in charge of what looked to be—you guessed it —an “open and shut investigation,” Senior Detective Mitchell Cain.
“What a tragic loss Mrs. Montana means not only to the chief,” he eulogized, “but also to the entire A.P.D. family of law enforcement personnel.”
So that was it then.
No mention of my independent investigation. No mention of suspicious circumstances. No mention of a potentially white-washed crime scene or that not a soul other than a few select cops had laid eyes on Jake in the past twelve hours.
Nothing.
Other than what they wanted you to know.
I folded up the newspaper and set it down on the kitchen table next to the Browning.
I turned my attention to the answering machine beside the coffee pot and the little red numeral 3 that blinked on and off.
Raising the machine’s volume, I hit the PLAY button. The digital recorder beeped, then spat out the first message. Just another friendly collection agency under employ by my lawyer threatening legal action if I didn’t start doing something about my divorce debt.
I punched DELETE.
Next caller. Cain requesting that I meet him downtown at the South Pearl Street precinct in one hour.
“Here’s your chance to interview Jake, old partner,” were his exact words. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should proceed a little more carefully on this one.”
I deleted Cain. But I had to wonder if he was up to something now that Scarlet’s body had been tagged, bagged and shipped to Albany Pathology; now that the press had issued their take.
Caller number three. Like the first two, this message had been recorded while I was either still asleep, in the shower, chasing a smiling albino freak in my bath towel, or lying on the roadside in the same ridiculous getup. It was crime reporter Brendan Lyons. With a soft- spoken, almost monotone voice, Lyons asked if I might spare him a minute or two regarding Scarlet’s death. He’d heard through a confidential source that I’d been ordered to assist an over-burdened S.I.U. with the investigation. That said, would it be too much trouble if I met him inside the Skybar on the second floor of the Albany International Airport main terminal at five o’clock that afternoon?
Then Lyons read off his cell number.
I grabbed a pen out of the drawer, jotted it down on the Post-a-Note pad as he read each digit off slowly, clearly, the sound of city traffic flying by in the background.
Punching DELETE for the last time, I stood there for a beat and listened to the newly restarted rain as it strafed the kitchen windows above the sink. I wondered what exactly Lyons wanted to discuss with me if he’d already concluded, along with the rest of them, that Scarlet had committed suicide. I wondered who might have revealed my involvement in the investigation.
Definitely not Cain.
The fact that there was even the suggestion of an investigation would have completely contradicted his earlier statement to the press about this case being open and shut. Considering that cops have written as well as unwritten laws that limit freedom of the press, I knew for sure that someone had to have blown a whistle. That is, someone thought the situation important enough to blow a whistle. Anonymous or not.
Either way I knew that, like me, Lyons had to be smelling a rain-soaked rat.
Then I thought about it from another angle.
I was taking a stand; investigating Scarlet’s death for real. A purple-scarred foreign albino man was making threatening gestures. So talking to Lyons might not be a bad idea. Having the press on your side was a distinct advantage, because crime reporters were investigators, too. Investigators who reported their unbiased findings directly to the public. I knew that despite his report, Lyons more than likely hadn’t concluded anything. In fact, he must have been working on a theory, or theories, regarding Scarlet’s death. Theories that more than likely contradicted his own published story. As the independent field dick, I might have been in a position to substantiate those theories, maybe even expose a murderer or murderers.
I folded the little slip of paper in half, slid it into my wallet.
It was 2:30 in the afternoon. If I got dressed quickly, I could make it to the doctor and to the A.P.D. in a matter of an hour. Just like Cain wanted.
18
I was driving the old man’s Mercedes funeral coach. The big, black gas hog was all that remained of the mortician business he’d moved out of the Hope Lane house when I was still a teenager. It was a shiny black twenty-year-old station wagon sedan that to this day has logged in less than twelve-thousand miles on the odometer. The black monster was the only prize possession he couldn’t bear to part with when eventually he retired and sold the downtown shop along with all the caskets, gurneys, pumps, stainless steel instruments, cabinets, scales and foldable carts. A move he made when he realized that the Harold Moonlight and Son Funeral Service operation he’d so envisioned in his head and heart was not about to happen soon, or any time at all, for that matter.
I still smile when I picture the stocky man with his carefully groomed salt-and-pepper hair and meticulously pressed black suits, black leather shoes sparkling from the nightly polishing. I recall the days when the funeral parlor was still housed inside the Hope Lane home and the way the old man politely greeted the mourners at the front door with a solemn but consoling handshake.
How could I forget the gentle piped-in Muzak and the thick, sweet scent of all those colorful flowers that at times covered the entire back wall from floor to ceiling in the viewing room? At night I’d go to bed knowing full well there was a dead body laid out in a casket just a few feet below me. There were no nightmares, no traumas of any kind. I slept soundly, unaware of ghosts and goblins. If there was a thing that went bump in the night, it was just that—a thing that went bump in the night
I recall dad bent over at the waist, frantically ridding the viewing room of my toys only minutes prior to a viewing—say an army of
four dozen green plastic soldiers scattered directly below the steel underbelly of an open casket.
“Richard,” he’d bark, while stuffing the army men into his jacket pockets, “we have a family on their way.”
The work that took place in the embalming room just off the downstairs on the first level of the split-level home never bothered me. I even got a kick out of accompanying my father to the hospital morgue on the occasional Saturday morning when a body required retrieval.
You might say that living with the dead became a way of life for me from the moment I was born, which made it something I did not fear. But when it came time to decide on a career, I insisted on going my own way.
Around the time I entered the police training academy in Albany, my father sold the Harold Moonlight Funeral Home to another family operation by the name of Fitzgerald. What I never knew at the time was that Dad’s sudden weight loss was attributable to pancreatic cancer. When Fitzgerald prepared my father for burial, they dressed him in one of his black pinstriped suits and his famous polished leather shoes. They did his hair and then planted a white carnation on his lapel, just like he wore when hosting a viewing. When I was granted a moment alone with him, I knelt at the velvet-covered kneeler and looked upon his formerly stocky body, now skinny and gaunt, his old suit now too large for his ravaged frame.
I was reminded of one of the old man’s favorite sayings— something he referred to as the Harold Moonlight Funeral Home motto: “We all owe God a life.”
With that in mind, I remember smiling sadly as I stood up from the kneeler, leaned into the casket, and kissed my father’s forehead for the very last time. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled one the few remaining little green soldiers left over from when I was a little boy. I placed it into the pocket of his suit jacket. Then, stepping away, I closed the lid and screwed the casket bolts secure. Just like he’d taught me.
I pulled into the parking lot outside the brand new offices of Albany District Physicians for my scheduled checkup. On top of having to head out to New York City for a biannual one-day intensive M.R.I. scanning procedure, I also visited my G.P., Mary Ellen Lane, M.D. every other month for a less comprehensive examination.
Inside her private office, the brown-haired, forty-something doctor made me sit up on the paper-covered examining table while she checked my vitals.
“You’re a little thin,” she commented. “Have you been eating?”
“Exercising and eating,” I said. “Per the good doctor’s orders.”
“Increase your caloric intake,” she said. “And that doesn’t mean extra beer or Jack.”
The women in my life were as different and individual as snowflakes, but in many ways, just as beautiful. If Lola was the cautious one, Scarlet the passionate one, Lynn the spiteful one, then Dr. Lane was the clinical one.
She proved it by asking all the serious questions.
Did I feel any pain, any nausea?
Did I feel exceptionally tired or dizzy?
Had I experienced any bouts of temporary paralysis? The loss of feeling in my extremities? Slurred speech?
How was my appetite?
Was I sleeping?
As for my answers: deny the bad, stress the good, as though my present and future health had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with my skill at fooling my doctor. As you might imagine, my condition was not the exactly the easiest one in the world to trust. That early afternoon’s confrontation with a strange albino man was proof of that. I’d passed out trying to chase him down. Not that I was about to reveal anything about it to Dr. Lane.
But it was for that reason that I required constant observation, even if I appeared perfectly normal. Since the condition was inoperable, there existed the constant and overriding possibility that the bullet frag could shift at any time, especially under times of stress when the blood pumped at supersonic speeds through gray matter veins and capillaries.
So you might say that Lane’s job was not an easy one.
Because it wasn’t easy, she demanded that I toe the line, maintain my health regimen at all costs. If I just happened to slip into a coma, it would have affected her on a personal level. Not because she would consider it a mistake on her part as an M.D., but because she genuinely cared about me and the relatively fragile state I was in.
I can’t say I was the most agreeable patient for her, but I did my best to follow the program. According to Dr. Lane, however, sometimes my best just wasn’t good enough. Not if I wanted to go on living, that is.
She looked into my eyes with a laser-guided scope and finished by making me follow her index finger from left to right to left again. Nothing difficult about this procedure.
Dr. Lane didn’t just limit her examination to the body. She asked other important questions too. Stuff that had to do with the state of my head and heart. For instance, she always asked about my son. Had I been spending enough time with him?
Never enough.
Was I still driving that big black monster around?
Sure, why not?
Didn’t driving a funeral coach make me feel morbid?
No, it made me feel like Luke Skywalker: at one with my destiny!
Changing the subject: was I working?
I told her I was still hoping to get my masseur license soon, and then my personal training certificate. Until then, I was back to working part time for the A.P.D.
Was I working on anything interesting?
I swallowed something hard and bitter when the name Scarlet Montana fell off my lips.
“I read about that this morning,” she said while placing a cold stethoscope to my chest. “Breathe.”
I drew in a breath, felt pressure building behind my eyeballs.
She said, “Not a very common occurrence. Death by self-mutilation. Have you any idea if she was prone to suicidal depression?”
“Her marriage was pretty bad,” I revealed.
“Had she been seeing a doctor, a psychologist. . .? Breathe.”
In with the good air, out with the bad. The pressure behind my eyes, it was causing big tears to build.
She removed the scope, jotted something down in her notes.
I thought about her question, thought about the many late-night conversations Scarlet and I had shared at her kitchen table over drinks or in her bed, our heads resting side by side on her white satin-covered pillows. I wiped my eyes, doing it matter-of-factly so that Lane didn’t notice.
“I don’t know about any doctors,” I said. “But I do know she was part of a group of Psychic Fair people. Meet at the St. Pious school gym every Monday.”
Backing up a little. . .
The Psychic Fair group.
I never really gave them much of a thought until Dr. Lane sparked the connection in my brain. I knew that Scarlet met with the group of mystics once a week. She never did a whole lot of talking about them, other than the occasional snippet of information here or revelation there. Like the previous night when I snuck out of her bedroom and she told me “No one dies.”
That was the essence of psychic or mystic theory. The body was simply a vehicle for the soul, which remained alive forever. The mystics did not believe in death and neither did Scarlet. I also knew she was without religion, formal or otherwise. That despite a porcelain statue of the blessed Virgin Mary prominently displayed inside her doll case in the front vestibule of the Green Meadows home, she might not have believed in God at all. Or maybe she’d been religious once upon a time, but somewhere along the way had lost her faith. Maybe if I had suffered the loss of a son and a significant other in the same car crash, I too might have chucked God altogether. But it was possible that mystic theory had taken the place of God in Scarlet’s life—filled the spiritual void, as it were. That all those aging hippies with their long hair, dangling beads and wide eyes peering up at the starry cosmic infinity was her attempt at finding some sort of meaning in a life that had become full of daytime/nighttime suffering.
I peered into Lane�
�s clinical face. Maybe it was just my imagination—an oversensitive cerebral cortex, but I sensed without asking that Lane was suggesting I dig deeper into Scarlet’s death. Apparently, without offering her official opinion, she was not buying the publicly reported suicide theory either. Without openly acknowledging it, she had handed me a lead.
The Psychic Fair group.
Scarlet met with the group on Mondays at six. Today was Monday. I could meet Lyons and then take a ride on over there. Maybe grab some free coffee and a doughnut while I was at it.
With a straight, expressionless face, Lane told me I appeared okay.
“Keep up the exercise regimen,” she added. “Plus your vitamins and anti-inflammatories. No smoking and limit the Jack and no more than six codeine a day for headaches. Try Advil instead.”
I smiled. She knew I liked my Jack almost as much as I missed cigarettes.
“You’ve been lucky thus far,” she said, sliding my file back into the metal cabinet. “Let’s keep it lucky.”
I knew exactly what she meant. Anyone who takes a bullet to the brainpan, point blank, should be dead.
Well, it hadn’t exactly been point blank.
When I changed my mind about taking my life and the pistol began to drop from my hand, the snub-nosed barrel pointed upwards, the discharged round deflecting and shattering against my skull. In that manner, I not only botched the suicide attempt, a small piece of the hollow-point bullet still managed to enter into my head and brain.
I got up off the table, slipped on my pants and strapped my shoulder holster around my chest. I pulled out the Browning, slid back the bolt, made sure the safety was engaged. Then I re-holstered the weapon.
Lane shook her head, throwing me a gaze that would have iced over a popsicle. “You’re not supposed to be carrying that thing.”
What could I say to that? She was balls-on correct.
She shook her head, opened the office door. “See you in two months,” she added.
“Not unless I come to you first.”
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