Murder by Moonlight

by Vincent Zandri

  A big smile planted on my face, I roll down the passenger-side window, shout out her name.

  She turns, startled. I’m driving a hearse, after all. But she’s close enough to see it’s me. She shoots me this frightened, bugeyed look, turns, and makes a full-court run for it.

  WTF.

  I pull the Caddy over to the side of the road, jump out. I’m wearing relatively comfortable lace-up combat boots for footwear, but I have never been known for my speed. She’s got some legs, this one.

  “Wait!” I shout. No choice but to shout. I’m never going to catch up to her.

  I’m thinking, So much for that.

  But then she slows. Looks back.

  I jog three miles most days. Jog being the key word here. I’ve quit smoking. I hit the weights in the gym four to five times per week. I keep my weight down, all because of doctor’s orders. Get out of shape and risk that bullet in my brain shifting due to high blood pressure. But I’m sprinting and I’m sucking air. Blasts of cold, lamp-lit gray air spewing from my lungs.

  She stops. Doesn’t seem the least bit winded. Young people suck.

  I stop and stagger up to her. “Come…on,” I spit out between breaths. “Let me…at least…buy you…a cup of coffee.”

  She’s silent for a minute while she thinks about it.

  And then something shifts in my head, and I pass out.

  When I come to maybe thirty seconds later, she’s on her knees, staring down at me. Bug-eyed.

  “I’ve finally died and made it to heaven,” I say. “Are you my first vestal virgin?”

  She laughs. “Hardly. You OK? I’ve never seen a man faint before.”

  I sit up. “Happens to me all the time.” Shaking my head, trying to regain my equilibrium. “I have this brain condition.”

  “You mean like epilepsy?”

  I think about explaining about the bullet, but it’s just too complicated. Plus, it’s cold out.

  “Something like that. Now how’s about that cup of coffee?”

  “Thought you promised me a real drink,” she says, getting back up onto her feet.

  I peel myself off the pavement enough to sit up, feel for any bruises, breaks, or lacerations. Only when I’m confident about my relative health and balance do I hold out my hand for her. She takes it, grips it, helps pull me up off the ground.

  “Much obliged,” I offer, feeling a bit unsteady.

  “You must be really sweet in the sack,” she giggles.

  “Maybe you’d like to try to find out.”

  “A drink would be mad good for now.”

  “Our first date.”

  “Get a hold of yourself, Moonlight. Or maybe I should start calling you ‘Dad.’ ”

  “Funny. Got a place in mind? Money’s no object.”

  “Bowling alley is a half mile down the road.”

  “Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

  She looks one way, then the other. “OK,” she says. “Guess I can trust you. Even if you do drive a creepy car.”

  “The hearse?” I smile. “People are dying to ride in that thing!”

  She doesn’t laugh.

  When we get inside the hearse, I start it up, toss in an eight-track of the Beatles’ “Red” album. The greatest hits double album they put out in 1973, just when everyone was getting used to no more Beatles. I pull back out onto the road.

  “Why’d you run away like that?”

  “I heard what you did to Dr. Robinson.”

  I’d almost forgotten about our little scuffle. “He pulled a knife on me…Well, a scalpel.” Moonlight, the precise.

  She turns to me as the bowling alley comes into view. On the eight-track, John Lennon is singing, “Help me if you can, I’m feeling down!” STABLE LANES appears in big, light-up neon. I get it. Bethlehem. Baby Jesus. Stable Lanes. In a town that’s anything but these days.

  “He didn’t call the cops, did he?” I push.

  She thinks about it for a minute. “Guess you got a point.”

  She brushes back long black hair with open hands. I park the hearse in a spot not far from the front glass doors and the two or three cigarette-smoking bowlers standing outside them.

  “Nice place,” I say. “But I don’t bowl.”

  “Help me get my feet back on the ground,” sings John.

  “Who says we got to bowl?” she says, getting out. “The bar is much more fun.”

  “I agree. And after today, I could really use a drink.”

  “Seems like you could always use a drink, Moonlight,” she says, slamming the door closed.

  “Won’t you please, please, please, help me!”

  The bar is empty. Aside from a pair of men sitting at a table in the far corner, that is. They have thick, jet-black hair, big paunches, and look like they haven’t showered in days. They’re sharing a bottle of cheap ouzo and speaking Greek. They both look like late-era Elvis, without the white jumpsuit.

  Erin and I grab a couple of stools at the bar.

  The bartender looks a little like the Greek guys sitting in the corner. Same Elvis ducktail dye job, but his belly is flat. He’s wearing a yellow bowling shirt that has “Stable Lanes” printed in purple stitching over his heart. When he turns I can see that printed on the back of the shirt is a scene with a baby Jesus lying in a manger, flanked by a Mary and Joseph, who are dressed in Stable Lanes bowling shirts and holding bowling balls, a buck-toothed donkey poking its head out from in between them. I swear the donkey is smiling. Or do they call the animal an ass? I’m not sure the Roman Catholic Church would approve of the bowling shirt design, but it cracks me up anyway.

  When the bartender approaches us, asks us for our order, his English is accented with Greek.

  I order a Bud.

  Erin orders a Sea Breeze.

  The Greek looks at her for minute, sizes her up. “You got ID, miss?”

  “Come on, Nicky, you see me in here all the time.”

  He smiles. “OK, all right, Miss Erin,” he says, cocking his head in my direction. “But he looks like police to me.”

  “Not anymore,” I tell him. “Pretty sweet, huh?”

  He shoots me a look and then he’s off to retrieve the drinks.

  “So what is it you’d like to talk to me about, Mr. Moonlight, besides the fact that you have a crush on a woman half your age?”

  “Oh, besides that? How’s about your boss, for one. Why’d he give me a hard time the other night?”

  “He doesn’t trust you and he doesn’t like you and he thinks you’re on the make. He likes Christopher very much. He believes he’s been railroaded by the police.”

  “I’m working for Chris’s mother.”

  “But you don’t seem genuine in your belief in Chris’s innocence.”

  “I’m only after the truth, and I don’t have to believe in Chris’s innocence or guilt in order to work for his mother.”

  Beyond the bar is a jukebox. The old-fashioned kind that plays CDs, instead of some wireless electronic selection. It’s lit up like a Christmas tree like everything else in this Baby Jesus–, Great Society–obsessed town. But there’s no music coming from it. The soundtrack du jour is twenty lanes of bowling balls colliding with white pins, and gangs of fat, middle-aged men high on cheap beer and cigarettes shouting and high-fiving one another. Work, eat, bowl, sleep, work…

  “How much money did the doc put up for Chris’s bail?”

  “Twenty thousand. I put up two hundred bucks of my own.”

  Plus Okey’s ten.

  “You guys really believe.”

  “We do.” Peering down at the bar. “I do.”

  “You heard about Detective Bowman?”

  “Serves the bastard right. Lot of people in this town would have been happy to pull the trigger for him. Especially Chris.”

  “Speaking of the devil, how long you been sleeping with him?”

  She raises her head up quick. I get the feeling she’s about to spit at me, but just then Nicky the Greek brings our dri
nks. Saved by alcohol. I pull out a twenty, set in on the bar. He takes it.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Let me rephrase it. How long have you been seeing Christopher?”

  She picks up her drink, takes a long slow drink from it, sets it back down on the bar. Half full. Moonlight, the optimist.

  “A little more than a year. Long enough to know him pretty good.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “What do you wanna know? How long his dick is? If it curves to one side?”

  One big gulp and she’s already on her way to Souse Land.

  I sip my beer, slap it down. Resist the urge to elbow her in that pretty little mouth.

  “Cut it out, kiddo. I’m not playing games. A cop died tonight pretty much at the exact moment Chris was released. What’s Chris like, is all I’m asking.”

  She drinks some more of her Sea Breeze, sets the glass down empty. She asks Nicky for another. He pulls his eyes away from the bowling action outside the bar just long enough to make it and slap it down beside the empty. Wrapping her tongue around the straw, Erin draws another long, slow sip.

  “Chris is a mad sweet person,” she begins to tell me. “One of the most shy boys I’ve ever met. Also the most complicated.”

  “Elaborate.”

  “Huh?”

  “In what ways might he be complicated yet shy?”

  “He’s very handsome. And he has this allure about him. He’s quiet, but he has presence, you know?”

  Me, drinking some more beer, listening to the hard balls slam the hard pins, the Greeks at the corner table talking over it in a language I cannot begin to understand.

  “Dr. Robinson is divorced,” she goes on. “He’s lonely. He and Chris spent a lot of time together. And for a time, I thought maybe…”

  She leaves her statement unfinished while she drinks down the rest of her Sea Breeze.

  “What are you trying to tell me, Erin? Dr. Robinson and Chris…together?”

  She suddenly lowers her head, combs back her hair, exhales. Her face has changed. It’s gone from healthy peach to pale. “I don’t feel too good. Can we go?”

  I slide off my stool. “Sure.” I collect my change, leave a tip.

  Erin is already halfway out the door before I’m able to follow.

  I catch her standing out front with the smokers. She’s bummed a cig off one of them and is smoking the crap out of it.

  I tell her I’ll meet her in the hearse when she’s done.

  “Don’t wait up,” she says.

  When she gets back in she reeks of smoke. But she’s still beautiful. And still half my age.

  “Chris and Dr. Robinson. You needed a cig to tell me about it.”

  She nods. “I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s possible they might have…you know.” Cocking her head. “God, Moonlight, do I have to spell it out for you?”

  She doesn’t. And now I think it’s me who’s gonna be sick. But what I am sure about now is that I have stumbled onto something that is far deeper than one kid going ape shit on his parents with an axe. “Any evidence of this, ah, alternative relationship?”

  “Only the way the doctor would look into Chris’s eyes, or the way he would positively light up in Chris’s presence. And they were always touching. I even saw them hugging once. And Chris’s hand was on the doctor’s ass. I swear it. We had a major blowout that night, let me tell you.”

  “Chris denied anything going on.” A question.

  “Of course, but I knew better. It was as if he were leading the doctor along somehow.”

  I start the hearse, kill the eight-track player. I’ve heard enough from both Erin and The Beatles for tonight. I pull out of the lot, head back in the direction of her home. “I’ll drop you off,” I tell her.

  “You can just leave me on the corner of my street. I live with my folks. They’re always looking out the window for me. They might ask a few questions if I show up in the driveway in a hearse with a strange older man behind the wheel, don’t you think?”

  “Gotcha.”

  On the way past the police station, Bowman’s car is still lit up. Cops are still mingling about the place. So are a couple of reporters. I wonder if Ferrance has been there. Almost certainly. I also wonder if Bowman’s half brother, Chief Daly of the APD, made an appearance.

  “Bye-bye, asshole,” Erin says, peering out the window at the station.

  “Wow, you really hated that cop.”

  “Chris had every reason to hate Bowman, even before Mr. Super Cop put him in jail.”

  “That so.”

  She turns to me. “Let me ask you something. You faithful to your wife?”

  “I was faithful to her, yeah. Up to a point.”

  “What point?”

  “Until she started cheating on me with my partner.”

  “You think the Parkers had a mad great marriage, don’t you? You think they are nothing but the victims here? People like you, whose marriages fell apart, are envious of the Parkers, right?”

  She points at the cross street ahead, and I pull over at the street sign, let the engine run idle.

  “Seems like they loved one another. Who wouldn’t envy that?”

  “God, Moonlight, for an old dude, you are so naïve.” She’s got her hand on the door handle. “Bowman wasn’t just wrecked over some payoff shit. That what you think? You call yourself a master detective and you can’t put two and two together, can you.” Shaking her head. “Bowman blows his brains out and Mrs. Parker barely clings to life these days with one eye and a metal plate in her head where skull used to be. She was a beautiful woman once. Sensual, sexy, lovely. Or so our fine detective thought.”

  The imaginary lightbulb flashes on above my head. “Bowman,” I say, “and Joan Parker, sitting in a tree.”

  She gets out, smiles at me. I can tell she’s still a little drunk. Because she’s stumbling a bit. “What do we have for our winner, Johnny?”

  “Now that is definitely some useful information, Erin. Glad I ran into you. Even if this wasn’t the mad sweetest bestest date you’ve ever had.” I toss her a wink. Moonlight, the charming.

  “You’re cute, you know. For an old guy. I think I’d fuck you.”

  “That is perhaps one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. Really, I’m choked up here.”

  She raises her hand, plants a kiss on it, and blows it at me.

  I pretend to catch it.

  “See ya, and thanks,” I tell her.

  “Be careful in the little town of Bethlehem, Moonlight. You never know what might jump up and bite you in the ass. We all belong to the Great Society here, if you didn’t already know.”

  “Says so on the sign on the way in here. You can’t miss it.”

  “Oh and by the way, not that it matters much anymore, but Chris’s yellow Jeep is impounded at Fogg’s just down the road some. You wanna, you can look at it through the fence.”

  She closes the door. I pull away, take her advice, and head in the direction of Fogg’s. Something I should have done when I first started looking into this shit storm. I turn the Beatles back on. The song “I’m a Loser” starts up.

  Makes me feel right at home.

  Fogg’s automotive graveyard appears for me up on the right just like Erin said it would. I pull over onto the soft shoulder, in front of the padlocked chain-link fence, and get out. I walk along the fence past impounded cars and trucks of all makes, years, colors, and models, until sure as shit, there it is…a bright yellow Jeep.

  I press myself up against the chain links as if this will give me a better look. From where I’m standing, I can see that it’s rather clean looking in the beam of spotlight that shines down on it. But I’m not here to gaze at the paint job. What I want to see instead is that mud stain. I also want to see if there’s any blood staining the seats.

  But I can’t see stains of any kind from where I’m standing.

  I look left. I look right.

 
All clear.

  I start to climb.

  When I get to the top I put one foot over and then the other and jump down into the yard, breaking my fall by rolling onto my side, just like they taught us in the marines.

  I make for the Jeep.

  When I come to it, I look inside, try to determine if there’s blood on of the seats. The black leather appears clean, even in the white spotlight. At least to the naked eye. I open the door, look at the floor mats. They seem clean, too. I check the carpet flooring in back. Same story. I check the long black bench seat. All clean, as if the vehicle’s been washed since the night of the axe attacks. But then, I know it hasn’t been, because that mud stain is still visible on the rear driver’s-side fender.

  I bend down to get a closer look at the stain when I make out the galloping of four feet. Dog feet.

  Pit bull!

  I make an all-out sprint for the fence, jump up, and grab a hand and foothold as the barking dog thrusts its fang-filled jaws at me. He manages to miss flesh and bone but connects with the left leg of my jeans.

  I love dogs, but this one is out to kill me. Supporting myself with only my two hands, I raise my free leg and come down hard on the dog’s head with my boot heel. The pit bull yelps and opens its jaws enough to release my pant leg. It also makes him wild with anger and he plunges himself into the fence like a runaway locomotive.

  I climb hand over foot until I reach the top. Then, like a pole-vaulter, I thrust myself over the chain link and down onto the soft shoulder. I limp my way to the hearse, fire her up, and bolt the scene.

  Driving, trying to get my breath back.

  The Jeep was clean. That’s for sure.

  With all the blood that spilled throughout the house, I don’t see how it was possible that Chris didn’t get at least some amount of blood, no matter how miniscule, on himself and on the Jeep’s driver seat, even if the blood had come from the garden apron he wore while attempting to kill both his parents.

  Maybe attempting to kill both his parents, that is.