Murder by Moonlight

by Vincent Zandri

  “It’s ‘Your fucking Honor’!”

  “Naturally…Your honorable Honor.”

  We don’t speak for a while. There’s only the dust that rises and falls in the rays of sunlight that leak in through the big windows.

  After a time, he sits back up. “Peter was never sick. Not once. So when he doesn’t show up and he doesn’t call, I know there’s got to be a problem. Understand?”

  “I do. Were you aware that some strange people have been hanging around out front of the Parker household over the past few months?”

  “I’m aware of it. Peter told me. I was concerned.”

  “And that some laptops were stolen from the house.”

  “You know, of course, that those laptops were fenced by Christopher himself?”

  “Fenced. Can’t remember the last time I heard that one. And yes, I’m already aware of Chris’s little garage sale.”

  “Well, I’m no spring chicken. And you only got one minute, wiseass.”

  “Why do you think Mitchell Hart called you first and not the police?”

  Even in the semidark room, I can see his white, baggy face turning red.

  “My people are loyal, Moonlight. Mitch called me first, out of instinct.”

  “I see. Do you know who Freddie ‘the Fireman’ Parker is?”

  He swallows something. Looks like his tongue. “How can I not know him? I helped send him to prison.”

  “Along with Peter and Joan’s help.”

  “So fucking what, Moonlight?”

  “So their help might have gotten them killed. To what did they testify? That Freddie is a bad egg?”

  “You want the court transcripts, I’ll send word to one of my clerks to get them out to the rock you crawled out from under in order to ask me these stupid questions. Now what else?”

  “Yes, thank you, your Excellence, I’d like that. And the rock thing, now that’s funny. One last question: Do you think it’s possible that Peter’s murder and Joan’s attack were the result of their having testified against Freddie?”

  “I think their son did it. Case closed.”

  “You too, huh?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Do you know Jim O’Connor?”

  “I know quite a few Jim O’Connors. Which one?”

  “Teaches law. Albany Law School?”

  He nods. “Professor O’Connor regularly asks me to sit in to observe torts.”

  “How nice for you. Sounds like a baking class. Pies, cakes…torts.”

  He stands up fast like, Gout suddenly all gone. “This is so fucking over,” he says and exhales. “There’s the door.”

  I stand up, set my still full coffee on his desk. “You’re welcome,” I say on the way out.

  “What for, Moonlight?”

  “For nothing, your honorable Honor.”

  Driving, my brain is fixated on Freddie the Fireman incarcerated down in Green Haven only forty-five minutes from here by car, but my gut keeps telling me to have a Come-to-Jesus with law prof O’Connor first.

  I knew it might not have been a good idea to shake up Judge Cross the way I did. But on the other hand, I knew that if I pressed his buttons a little, he might give something away. There’s no better way to get a reading on my built-in shit detector than by catching a stiff, self-righteous prick like Cross off guard. And personally, this PI suspects that the honorable and really excellent Judge Cross is hiding just a few facts concerning Peter Parker’s death and Joan’s near death. And I think that something has just a little bit to do with Fireman Freddie. So while Freddie is definitely on my list of face-to-faces, I know that he’s going nowhere anytime soon while surrounded by concrete and razor wire. Now the professor, he’s a different story. He might not be so easy to nail down, especially if things start heating up in the matter of Chris being wrongly accused after all. I need to make an executive Moonlight decision and I decide to speak with the professor first.

  ____

  It’s going on lunchtime when I pull into the Albany Law School parking lot. The main building is a massive stone structure probably built right before World War II. Any school designed and built after that looks like an institution for the mentally insane. But this place looks more like a castle than a college. I enter through the front doors into a large rotunda where a scattering of young law students hang around idly or sit on the stone benches around the perimeter.

  I eye an attractive young lady who’s cradling a stack of heavy books in her arms. They’re so heavy looking they might as well be cordwood. She’s talking to an equally attractive young lady who’s sitting on one of the stone benches.

  “Excuse me.” Flashing a killer smile.

  The standing girl turns quickly, a little startled. “Me?”

  “Intuitive. You will definitely go far.”

  She shoots a roll of her eyes down at her friend.

  “I was wondering where I might find the office of Professor Jim O’Connor?”

  “Second floor,” she says, eyes back on me. “To the left at the top of the stairs.”

  “Thanks. Good luck with the bar, ladies.”

  I approach the stairwell.

  Once inside I make it to the top of the interior marble steps and, like the attractive young lady directed, hook a left. I find O’Connor’s door the third one down on the right. His name has been stenciled in white paint directly onto the glass of one of those opaque-glass-and-wood doors you see in all the old detective movies.

  Jim O’Connor

  No “Dr.” before the name, or PhD after it, unlike most lawyers and professors I know. O’Connor must be in tune with the common working man.

  I open the door onto a small secretarial office that leads into a larger office. There’s a middle-aged woman seated at a desk. She’s got a couple of stacks of papers sitting out on the desktop. Papers to be graded by O’Connor, would be my master detective guess. There’s also a good old-fashioned electric typewriter like my dad used for making out funeral service bills, a flat-screen computer monitor that’s not even plugged in, and a telephone with multiple lines. One of which is lit up.

  “Can I help you?” she says, looking up from her typewriter.

  I put my smile back on. “I am here to see Herr Doctor,” I say in my best imitation Gestapo.

  She smirks. “Excuse me?”

  I reach into my pocket, pull out a card, set in down flat on her desk. “I’m Moonlight,” I say with a smile. “And as you can no doubt plainly see, I’m positively waxing today.”

  She removes her cat-eye reading glasses, allows them to hang down on her chest by means of a hair-thin gold chain that’s attached to the two earpieces. She reads the business card. “A real private detective,” she mumbles, setting the card back down.

  “Everybody says that.”

  “Dr. O’Connor is busy at the moment.”

  “Would you mind checking on precisely how busy?”

  Glaring at me. And me at her.

  She gets up, makes her way around her desk, opens O’Connor’s solid wood office door, steps in, closing it behind her.

  I look around the office while I wait. There are paintings on the walls that have probably been hanging here since Dr. O’Connor was a just a regular proletariat O’Connor. One horrible oil-based job depicting summer in Central Park in New York City. A bad watercolor rendering of the Albany Law School campus, back when it was surrounded by trees instead of a Rite-Aid pharmacy on one side and a strip mall on the other. Looks like one of those paint-by-the-numbers jobs you can buy in any of the junk shops down in Hudson that try to sell themselves as a vintage-furniture stores. I wonder if you can make a good buck running a vintage-furniture store. I wonder if it pays better than the PI business. I’m still wondering when the office door opens.

  The secretary emerges. She still has those glasses hanging off her neck, resting against her tight-sweatered chest. “Dr. O’Connor offers his regrets, but he’s going to be tied up for the rest of the afternoon. If you’d care
to make an appointment…”

  On go the cat-eyes as she makes her way back around to her desk.

  “No thanks.” Shuffling past her desk to O’Connor’s door. “Now will be just fine.”

  “Hey!” she shouts.

  I open the door. The doc is seated at his dark wood desk, heels up on the desktop, a phone pressed to his ear. He peers at me through a pair of wireless glasses that make him look smart. He scowls at me while the secretary shoves her way between me and the door.

  “I told you he wasn’t available!” She’s not shouting now, but somehow she’s still screaming.

  O’Connor regretfully instructs whoever he’s speaking to that he’ll have to call him back. Pardon me, that’s whomever he’s speaking to. “It’s OK, Martha,” he assures, removing his feet from his desk, sitting up straight.

  “It’s OK, Martha,” I repeat.

  She bites her lip, mumbles something under her breath that sounds like “asshole,” walks back to her desk.

  “Please come in, Mr. Moonlight,” O’Connor says, standing thin and tall and professorial looking. “It is mister, I presume.”

  Why do college professors always use the word “presume”?

  “Jack of all trades. Master of one.”

  “How interesting. Now what one thing might you be the master of, hmmm?”

  Don’t you hate people who do the “hmmm” thing at the end of a sentence?

  “Seeing through the bullshit, so to speak.”

  “How delightful.” He fake smiles. “Now, how can I be of service, hmmm?”

  His face is clean-shaven, thinning brown hair slicked back on his head with Brylcreem. Or what do they call it nowadays? “Product.” Kindler has him pegged for fifty, but I put him more at the forty-five or forty-six range. Somewhere in there. Mature, at any rate. But still attractive to the female student body. And loving every minute of it.

  He sits back down while motioning with an open hand in the standard Please take a seat gesture. But I’ve been sitting in front of too many desks over the past few days. And since it’s still a mostly free country, I choose to stand.

  “I understand you’re the Bethlehem police and the prosecution’s star legal witness…hmmmm?”

  His eyes light up. He likes being called a star. I can tell. “I’m doing my part,” he says, issuing a furtive glance out the window.

  “You ever practice law, Doc O’Connor?”

  He stares down at his desk, picks up a yellow Ticonderoga No. 2, begins twisting it between forefinger and thumb. “I’m not certain of the relevance of the question.”

  “This ain’t torts, doc, and I’m not one of your cute little pert-tittie push-up-bra students. I’m asking you if you’ve ever been out in the real world.”

  He stands, makes his way to a window that looks onto the inner-city campus. He stares out the window…professorially. I look at the back of his head, his four-square, almost scripted-for-drama’s sake stance and my gut screams, “Faker!” “Liar!” too. It’s a gift us Moonlights have. Being able to make a pretty accurate read on people just by looking into their faces, or getting a read of their body language and even taking stock of the way they dress. My dad was so good, he could stare down a newly arrived stiff and make a pretty good guess about his or her occupation, martial status, legal record, music choices, favorite vacation destinations, you name it. Dad wasn’t always right, of course. But in the end, he was more right than wrong.

  “I resent your tone,” he says at last, softly, into his translucent reflection, hands stuffed into the pockets of his tweed trousers…reflectively.

  Just like Dad staring down into a newly unzipped body bag, I take a minute to get a real good look at the guy. At his expensive clothing, his cordovan shoes that alone are worth more than my entire wardrobe of jeans and black turtleneck sweaters. There’s a gold signet ring on his pinky finger and I can just bet the guy drives a BMW convertible. Or maybe even a Mercedes. And yet he doesn’t practice law but only teaches and, when legal serendipity rears its stuffy head, acts as a star witness for the cops. In this case, cops being accused of making a rash decision in their quest to burn Christopher Parker at the Great Societal stake.

  But that’s when a great realization hits me like a gavel to the skull. “How much did Bowman pay you to lie for him?”

  Turning fast, he stares me down. Anything but reflectively, professorially. “Now I resent both your tone and your accusations.”

  “Let me guess. When this is all said and done, you’re gonna write a book about Christopher Parker being a psychopath who harbored not an ounce of guilt in the murder of his father and the attempted murder of his mother. You got an agent yet?”

  “I should have known better than to be kind to the likes of you,” he insists. “Please! Leave!”

  “How much is lying worth to you? Ten, fifteen grand? Hmmm?”

  He walks to his desk, picks up the phone, punches in a free extension. “Security please,” he says, eyes not on the phone but on me. After a beat: “This is Dr. Jim O’Connor. I have some trouble brewing up here in my office. Presently I require the services of a security guard.”

  He hangs up. “Your ass is grass now, Mr. Moonlight,” he beams triumphantly.

  I almost fall over laughing. Trouble brewing…your ass is grass…

  “You’re a poet, Doc, and you know it.”

  I dig into my jeans pocket for a business card.

  “I can let myself out. But tell you what.” Setting the card on his desk. “I’m gonna make myself gone and then I’m gonna place a call to the New York State Department of Taxation to make sure they sniff around for Bowman’s little payoff.” Raising my right hand, making like a pistol at his face. “Oh, and then I’m gonna give Steve Ferrance a call at the TU, give him a heads-up about it also. I presume you report all your earnings to the IRS, don’t you, Doc?”

  He stands there red-faced. Stewing. Reflectively. Professorially. But not so triumphantly anymore.

  I walk out, shuffle past Martha the secretary. Just as I’m about to open the wood-and-glass door, it opens for me. A uniformed security guard stumbles in. Judging by his belly, I’d say he’s about a half dozen Dunkin’ jelly donuts short of three hundred pounds. His brow is sweating under his gray uniform cap, and it’s only twenty-five degrees outside.

  “Oh, thank God you’re here,” I say and exhale, pointing with my thumb cocked over my right shoulder. “There’s a rabid rat loose in that office.”

  “Huh?” he barks, chubby face suddenly ghost white. “They don’t pay me enough to capture no freakin’ rodents.”

  “I presume there ought to be a law, hmmmmm?” I exclaim, stepping out into the hall.

  Back behind the wheel of Dad’s car, I dial Ferrance. Get his answering service. I leave a message about my built-in shit detector hunch: that O’Connor took money from Bowman in order to back up the cop’s theory that Joan Parker was in her right mind when she fingered her kid, even though said “right mind” was scrambled worse than an egg at the time.

  I hang up. Then call Bowman’s private line.

  The detective answers after three rings. “Bowman,” he spits. Tough-guy cop.

  “It took me a minute or two to get to it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a 92.3 percent chance you paid O’Connor to lie for you.”

  No response. Just breathing oozing over the connection.

  “The TU knows all about my probability assessment,” I add, upping the pot. “Gonna make front-page news if we can prove it. Print and website…You know, website, where it will posted forever and ever and ever.”

  More breathing. Pretty soon I’ll hear ticking, and the time bomb will explode. Moonlight, the destroyer!

  “I see you around here, Moonlight.” Bowman exhales after a time. “I’m going to make you regret—”

  “The day I survived my suicide. Good one. You gotta do better than that, Detective. Remember, I already carry lead in my brain and I can die at any time. Fuck I got
to lose, right? Your threats are about as mediocre as your police work.”

  Hang up.

  Remember before cell phones, when a hang-up meant a phone slammed down in your ear? I miss the good old days.

  I start the Caddy. I’m about to pull out when I catch the reflection of Doc O’Connor making a beeline for me.

  “Oh fuck. Here we go!”

  He stands tight-as-a-tick outside the driver’s-side window, wrapping skinny knuckles on the glass.

  I roll the window down. “If you’re pissed off about the rat thing—”

  I don’t get the words out before he has both hands through the open window and his fingers around my neck, choking me.

  A couple of students are passing by. One of them grabs hold of the doc, pulls him off me. He’s a big student. Maybe a former college football linebacker.

  O’Connor drops to the pavement like a sack of used textbooks.

  “You all right, mister?” linebacker poses.

  I try to swallow. Fucking hurts to swallow. I rub my neck with both hands. “I’m OK,” I say, raspy. “Thanks, dude.”

  “Jeez, whad’ya do to piss off Dr. O’Connor like that?”

  “I called him a dirty rat.”

  The big kid laughs. But then, realizing where he is, what he wants to be when he grows up, and who might be overhearing him, he reins himself in, switches his attention to O’Connor.

  “Hey, Doctor, let me help—”

  O’Connor slaps the kid’s hand away. “I’m perfectly capable of helping myself, young man!”

  The academic stands up. Slow, awkward, beaten. Clearly, the good doc isn’t used to being physical.

  “Leave this campus, Moonlight! Or this time I will call the Albany Police Department.”

  “You on their payroll, too?”

  “Leave! Now!”

  “Guess that means I’m expelled,” I say, shooting linebacker a grin. “I didn’t want to be a fucking lawyer anyway.”

  Foot on the gas, I back the hearse out, strike a course in my brain for Green Haven Prison.