Why was it that every time a despairing Scarlet Montana called me over to her lonely home I could not be content with concentrating on my new career while she elaborated upon the horrors of being married to the top cop in Stormville?
Why couldn’t I just ignore the bittersweet laugh she would make when I was touching her? As though her insides were being tickled by demons rather than her outside being massaged by a part-time masseur/private investigator?
So here’s how it happened with Scarlet inside the living room of my former department superior: our eyes connected, sort of like two deer that hopelessly lock horns. We jumped up from the floor, and by the time we made it up to her second floor bedroom not a stitch of clothing was left on our backs.
That’s exactly how it happened that night, only with one further significant fuck up added to the mix.
Rather, a series of fuck ups I should say.
The first being my incessant need to get down with Scarlet just because she rang the dinner bell. The second was my having consumed one of her husband’s tall-necked Budweisers prior to falling into a post-sex deep sleep on her queen-sized Serta. The third being the very sudden and unexplained homecoming of said husband. The fourth being Scarlet’s failure to wake me before I was jarred awake to the rattle and hum of an abruptly triggered mechanical garage door.
Here’s what I did: I jumped out of bed, scrambled about the dark room in search of my shorts and sneakers. All the time I’m doing this crazy one-legged dance while trying to step into my shorts mouthing “Shit, shit, shit” in this sort of screaming whisper voice.
Then comes the back door off the kitchen opening and slamming closed.
“This is bad,” I remember saying. “Why’d you let me fall asleep?”
“Relax,” was all Scarlet could say. “What’s he going to do? Shoot you in the head?”
I swear, even from behind closed doors I could see Jake’s tight-mustached face, big beefy arms, barrel chest and sausage-thick fingers already reaching for my neck. He didn’t have to shoot me. A stranglehold around my neck would suffice.
And get this: while my life and death were flashing before my eyes, Scarlet was calmly lying on her side, the sweetest smile you ever saw plastered on her face, the white bedsheet covering only her legs, leaving those lovely white breasts exposed. I swear, even with the old man marching up those stairs, I almost laid back down with her, started kissing her sweet mouth, pressing her beautiful body tightly, tenderly against mine.
My right mind: it’s not always right.
“Where are you going … Dick Divine?” she asked, while casually firing up another Virginia Slim.
“Divine will do,” I said, pulling up my gym shorts.
She laughed but I had no idea what the hell was so funny. Especially with the telltale footsteps just outside the door—one heavy heartbeat-like clump after the other.
This is what I did: I climbed out the second floor window with my Nike Airs balled up inside my left arm; jumped down onto the back porch roof, bare feet sliding out from under me so that I landed flat on my ass just a second before dropping down into the backyard.
No time to check for broken bones, no time to feel the pain, no time to consider the sudden stiffness in my right arm.
No time like the present to avoid a seizure!
I just bounded back up, caught my breath and, like my fellow Marines drilled me in the first Gulf War, selected a direct line of retreat, made the split-second decision to commit myself.
But before I started to run … just in that instant it takes your gray matter to shift from Stop to all-out Go, I took one last peek up at Scarlet’s bedroom. Through the driving rain I made out her face, her blue eyes and auburn hair made all the redder and richer when the bedroom light was suddenly flicked on behind her.
In that quick second I could tell that she was no longer laughing.
From where I stood in the rain and the quick flashes of lightning, I saw that she was simply smiling. A sad, lonely kind of smile that I knew in my heart had nothing whatsoever to do with happiness.
That’s when I turned, made my swift and stealthy exit from the Scarlet Montana homestead, such as it was, praying that a damn good lesson had finally been learned—that I would never more be led astray by my other head.
2
WHY DID SHE HAVE to call me on that particular night of nights?
Or …
… Why did I make the wrong decision by answering it?
I would have been better off just letting the answering machine do its job while I kept on pumping out repetition after repetition on my incline bench, filling my muscles and veins with the precious over-oxygenated blood that my body (and brain) now required.
Call it the head injury, call it plain bad luck. But one thing is for certain, the Gods were not with me that night anymore than they were with Scarlet. But then, maybe the Gods had nothing to do with it at all. Maybe none of this had to do with a damaged cerebral cortex for that matter. Maybe it was just a man thing.
I mean, what is it about the deceptive face of lust that taunts us, tests us, attracts us? The monster disguised as the prettiest little package you ever saw topped off in delicious red hair?
Such were the rapid-fire deliberations that immediately shot through my brain when later that night, I was startled out of a restless sleep by a fist pounding on my door.
My temporal lobe immediately went to work.
I pictured Scarlet standing outside my front door, the rainwater dripping off her long hair onto chiseled cheekbones and succulent lips. She would have had a knock-down drag-out with Jake. He came home drunk, entirely pissed off. He would have landed into her, blackened one of her teardrop eyes.
So I imagined.
But it wasn’t until I dragged myself out of bed, slid into a pair of jeans, hobbled on down the stairs to the front door, that I realized how false an imagination—never mind my own—could be.
He was a far cry from Scarlet Montana. The middle-of-the-night caller, I mean.
He was just a police officer. The kind of cop you might call “kid” if you were, say, in your mid to late forties. Anything beyond that and you might not notice him at all.
But I recognized him for exactly who he was.
A rookie with barely one year’s experience under his utility belt—a twenty-something cop with a degree in Criminology from Providence College who went by the name of Joy.
Officer Nicky Joy. I remembered him all right.
Just this wiry nervous little guy with a better-than-regulation buzz and snug fitting uniform blues, sized thirty-eight short at the max. Actually, a boy/man kind of cop—pink cheeked where most men his age were bearded. If he didn’t look studious enough already, he wore round granny specs over baby blue eyes.
I’d been running into Joy all year long on those occasions when my old partner, Detective Mitchell Cain, called me in on a situation requiring a still medically inactive cop who might be willing to work part-time with an overtaxed, or should I say, non-existent S.I.U. (Special Independent Unit).
That night, the blue-eyed Joy stood four square on the small front portico of my Hope Lane home, the rainwater dripping off the transparent plastic that protected his headpiece and clothing. It didn’t take a genius or part-time detective with a constant headache to see that he was breathing unusually hard, bottom lip shaking to the point of trembling.
Gripped in his right hand, a heavy black utility flashlight—the same kind of tubular job cops always carry around with them day and night more for protection than illumination. As for the palm of his left hand, it rested securely on the butt of his service sidearm.
Looking over the kid’s shoulder, I made out the Stormville blue-and-white parked up against the opposite curb, a beam of sodium streetlight shining down upon it, the still heavy rain strafing the metal trunk and hood. From where I stood inside the open door, I couldn’t help but make out the man who was sitting inside the back seat, round mustached face looking out onto a
n empty, rain-soaked neighborhood street.
Jake Montana.
No doubt about it, something terrible had happened.
I caught my reflection in the door light—at my two-day stubble, bald head and brown eyes. My face said, I need sleep. But sleep suddenly seemed out of the question.
I told Joy to step inside.
He did.
The rainwater dripped off his transparent plastic raincoat.
“Jake wants you to come with us, Divine,” he said, the tone of his voice beyond tragic.
I began to feel the familiar tightness starting in the back of my head, already working its way towards the middle.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Jake would rather tell you himself.”
I stood there, bare chested and stone stiff, the cool May mist soaking my skin.
What choice did I have but to go along for the ride? Didn’t matter that I was trying to separate myself from policework; reinvent myself as a masseuse and maybe even a personal trainer down the road. I was still a detective … rather, a private detective still collecting a Council 82 Law Enforcement Union disability pension. Technically speaking, that meant the cops still owned my ass—private license or no private license. By law and by all that was morally right under God and country, I had no choice but to heed the call whenever the mighty trumpet sounded.
I said, “Wait for me in the cruiser while I put on a shirt.”
But Joy just stood there stiff as a plank, not saying a word, but somehow shouting volumes.
Why, oh, why had I answered that phone call?
I said, “Let me guess. You think I’m gonna forget you’re even here.”
“You shot yourself in the head,” he said, just as I began heading up the stairs. “People say you’re not the same.”
“It was an accident,” I explained on my way down the hall. “And it’s not memory that’s the problem.”
“Hey, Dick,” he jumped in. “Maybe you should explain it to somebody who understands.”
“The name’s Divine,” I said, as I slammed the bedroom door behind me.
3
LIKE A CHAUFFER, JOY opened the cruiser’s rear door for me.
I slipped inside, sat myself down beside Jake, my part-time superior in the Stormville P.D. I held my breath, tried to remain as calm and collected as possible. But how far away did I wish myself?
The first thing I noticed besides his sheer mass, was that he would not look at me. From the moment I sat down onto the springy back seat, he turned away, focused his solemn gaze outside onto the rain-soaked blacktop.
The cruiser smelled bad. A cross between worms and old tuna fish gone south.
Jake was dressed in gray slacks with matching suit jacket, white shirt underneath.
No tie.
The suit was wrinkled, as if he had just picked it up off the bedroom floor, threw it on. Maybe he had. His once jet black hair had developed some significant gray across the temples over recent years. It blended naturally with the metallic gray that sprinkled his mustache.
Nicky Joy sat up in the driver’s seat, blue eyes front, but on occasion sneaking their way into the rear view.
I had no idea what was thicker: the humidity or the tension. Until both were broken with the sound of the Police Captain’s baritone.
“They almost never leave notes,” he uttered in a voice that, like his size forty-five shoulders, seemed to bear the weight of the world. “Something like ten percent leave notes. That’s all.”
I swallowed my breath hoping that somehow it would slow my heart, relieve me of the incessant vibration that was growing louder and louder, like an orchestra warming up inside my brain.
In my mind, it dawned on me that maybe Scarlet had finally left him. That her walking out on him, once and for all, might be the reason behind all this. In my mind I saw my easy lover with suitcase in hand, closing the back door behind her, stepping out into the night …
I said, “She’ll contact you. Just give her a little time to get her head together.”
Jake grunted, like he’d been stabbed in the stomach.
He said, “At this point contact would be a miracle.”
I turned to him.
“What’s happened?”
“She’s dead,” he said. “And that’s all.”
Off in the near distance a streak of lightning followed by a slow, rolling thunder.
Me, picturing the light going on in Scarlet’s bedroom not seconds after I’d bolted the scene.
Had Jake seen me standing outside on the back lawn in the rain?
I repeated, “Tell me what happened.”
He told me to say nothing more. “Not a fucking word.”
Up front, Joy put the car in drive. As he pulled away from the curb, I crossed one hand over the other and for the first time felt the tacky, sticky, bloody residue that covered my palms and the underside of my fingers.
4
THE TEN MINUTE RIDE from my uptown home past the Stormville Airport and the brightly lit concrete walls of Green Haven Prison to the downtown precinct felt as though it lasted an entire hour—a day. The whole time I was rubbing my palms together as if to erase the thin layer of dried blood that covered them.
Holy Christ, where did blood come from?
Had something happened in the night that I could not recall?
I felt dizzy, so lightheaded I had to take slow, deep breaths. Do it without Jake being the wiser.
When Joy pulled up in front of the South Pearl Street precinct, not thirty feet away from the old stone and glass monstrosity that I once referred to as my home away from home, I thought for sure I would break out in tears.
The big Captain turned to me.
He said, “Consider yourself back on the clock. I want you to assist Cain and S.I.U. with this investigation. For the record, you’ll report directly to Cain. You’ll take his lead, corroborate Scarlet’s suicide. When it’s all over and your report is filed, I want you to forget that any of this ever happened. Which shouldn’t be too difficult for you.”
Memory is not exactly the problem, I wanted to say.
Instead I pictured Scarlet’s face. Even in her death the S.O.B. was still dismissing her, not even giving her the benefit of a proper investigation. He was supposed to be her husband; her life and death partner.
I looked into his round brown eyes. I couldn’t help but recall the incident that resulted in my forced leave of absence from the cops. Not my attempted suicide, but the incident that occurred not long after my “recovery”—when after passing out on an eight-man drug stakeout, I suddenly regained consciousness only to order the raid of the wrong house. Imagine, if you will, eight cops barging into a cozy suburban home during the late night, drawing service side-arms, handcuffing a husband and wife and two teenaged daughters suspected of growing marijuana plants in their backyard when, in fact, they were harvesting elderberry bushes. Imagine the seven-figure false arrest lawsuit that followed.
“Since when do you ask me in on something this important?” I said. “I’ve been relegated to the nobodies that nobody will miss, remember? That is, when I’m working at all. Scarlet is a somebody. You should know that better than anyone.”
“She committed suicide, Divine,” he said. “She’s my wife. I want the case shut before it’s even opened. That’s why you’re here.”
But what if it’s not suicide? I wanted to ask him.
In the end I decided not to. I was the fuck up who made all the wrong moves, took all the wrong turns. He was the Captain. Where the hell would I get with him in his present condition anyway?
I asked, “Am I back on the clock?”
He made a sour face.
“I just told you that.”
He was right. He had. The simplest things get by me sometimes.
Joy got out of the car, opened the door for me.
I could tell it wasn’t the night for long goodbyes.
I got out of the cruiser just as Joy got back in and
pulled out into the rainy darkness of Stormville—the home of New York State’s only lethal injection machine. I lifted the collar on my leather coat, started up the stone stairs. Maybe I didn’t feel the need to empty my bladder. But as soon as I was through the glass doors, I headed directly for the men’s room.
5
AS SOON AS I was certain that no one else occupied the bathroom, I locked the door behind me. I took my place at the sink, positioned my hands beneath the faucet, allowed the hot water to pour down over them. Didn’t matter how hot the water was, how much it stung the skin. Bloody water was pouring into the bowl, disappearing down the drain.
Clean hands.
That’s all that counted.
I turned off the water, dried myself with the paper towels from the wall-mounted dispenser, discarded them into the trash bin. It was only then that I noticed how much I was sweating. My shirt underneath my jacket was wringing wet. Beads of sweat covered my brow. Turning the water back on, I splashed it onto my face and repeated the drying process.
Then I did something I dreaded.
I looked down at my hands. To my relief there were no cuts on the tops of them. No scratches, no abrasions. Nothing that could be construed as defensive wounds.
But then I turned them over.
My palms and finger-pads had seen better days. The cuts weren’t deep necessarily. Nor were they bleeding any longer. Still, they had been cut up pretty badly.
I swear you could have heard my heart beating inside the empty echo chamber of a men’s room.
Why couldn’t I recall having done that kind of damage to my hands?
What had happened between the time I arrived home from Scarlet’s house earlier and the arrival of Joy to my Stormville split-level at two-thirty in the morning? Had I slept-walked, stumbled and tripped? Had I fallen onto my face and not remembered a single detail about the mishap?
Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls Page 2