Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

  I didn’t find one. The one I wanted, that is.

  Big surprise, right?

  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 S.P.D. Captain Jake Montana’s wife, Scarlet. The Captain discovered the deceased early this morning, said the piece.

  I drank some coffee, 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, but almost certainly with the editorial staff who, no doubt, took their orders from much higher service sidearm-toting authorities in and around Stormville proper.

  Didn’t matter how much dough the publisher was worth; how much political pull he had. Freedom of the press was subjective in these matters.

  The article went on to state how the 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’s used to kill herself with.

  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 Scarlet Montana means not only to the Captain,” he eulogized, “but also to the entire S.P.D. family of law enforcement personnel.”

  So that was it then.

  No mention of my investigation.

  No mention of suspicious circumstances.

  No mention of a potentially whitewashed 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, set it down on the kitchen table next to the Browning 9 mm.

  I turned my attention to the answering machine set beside the coffee pot and the little Scarlet numeral “3” that blinked on and off inside the small, square-shaped electronic readout.

  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 of my lawyer, of all people, threatening legal action if I didn’t begin taking action on my divorce debt.

  Delete.

  Next caller.

  Cain requesting that I meet him downtown at the South Pearl Street precinct in one hour’s time.

  “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. I had to wonder if he was up to something now that Scarlet’s body had been tagged, bagged and shipped to Stormville Pathology.

  Number three.

  Like the first two, this message had been recorded while I was either still asleep, in the shower, chasing a smiling Albino man in my bath towel, or lying on the roadside in the same ridiculous getup. It was Brendan Lyons, the crime reporter responsible for the small piece on Scarlet’s apparent suicide. 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 overburdened S.I.U. with the investigation. That said, would it be too much trouble if I met him inside the bar at Gate B of the Stormville Airport at five o’clock that afternoon. Since I would need an official ticket in order to get past the gate, he told me to visit the U.S. Air information booth, first cubby. There was a woman there by the name of Bea.

  “Tell her I sent you,” he said. “She’ll do the rest.”

  Then Lyons read off the seven-digit number for his cell phone.

  I grabbed a pen out of the drawer, jotted it down on the Post-it note pad as he read each digit off slowly, clearly, the sound of city traffic flying by in the background.

  Pressing delete one last time, I stood there for a moment and listened to the newly restarted rain as it strafed the kitchen windows above the sink. I wondered what exactly did Lyons want 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 crazy, white bellied, 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, in essence, investigators too. Public investigators. 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 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 two-thirty in the afternoon. If I got dressed quickly I could make it to the doctor and to the Stormville P.D. in a matter of an hour. Just like Cain wanted.

  20

  I WAS DRIVING MY father’s Mercedes funeral coach.

  The big, black gas guzzler was all that remained of the mortician business he’d moved out of the Hope Lane house when I was still a kid, to its downtown location. It was a shiny black four-door, twenty-year-old gas hound that to this day has logged in less than eight-thousand miles on the odometer. 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 DIVINE AND SON FUNERAL SERVICES” 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 pulled into the parking lot outside the brand new offices of Stormville District Physicians for my scheduled checkup. On top of having to head out to Boston for a biannual one-day intensive M.R.I. scanning procedure, I also visited my G.P., Mary Ellen Lane, 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. “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.”

  Mary Ellen was a serious but likeable-enough doctor and she proved it by asking all the right 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.

  She then 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 mortician car around?

  Sure, why not?

  Didn’t it make me feel strange?

  No, it made me feel like Luke Skywalker: at one with my destiny!

  Changing the subject:

  Was I working, and if so, 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 the 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. I wiped my eyes, did it fast, matter-of-factly, so that Mary Ellen didn’t notice.

  “I don’t know about any doctors,” I said. “But I do know she was part of a group of mystic theory people. Meet at the church every Monday.”

  Maybe it was just my imagination—an oversensitive cerebral cortex. But I sensed without asking that Mary Ellen 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.

  I remembered Scarlet having told me that she met with her group at the St. Pious church just around the corner from my own house on Mondays at six. I remember not thinking a whole lot about it until now. 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, clinical face, Mary Ellen told me I looked thin, but 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.”

  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.

  I got up off the table, slipped on my pants, 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-pocketed the weapon.

  Mary Ellen shook her head, threw me a gaze that would have iced-over a Popsicle.

  “You’re not supposed to be carrying.”

  She shook her head, opened the office door.

  “See you in two months,” she added.

  “Not unless I come to you first.”

  “Come to me in one piece,” she said. “Oh, and next time, leave the hand cannon at home.”

  21

  PARKING HIS CADILLAC AT the far end of the Home Depot parking lot, Montana got out.

  Walking across the lot towards the sliding glass doors of the big box lumber and home supply store, he felt nothing. Not a thing. His extra-large body was so numb he felt he was gliding as opposed to walking. The world around him—the passing cars, trucks, the people, young and old—they seemed to be completely unaware of his presence, as if he were nothing more than a ghost.

  Entering the building, however, he was overcome with a blood-rushing anxiety.

  The enormous building and all those rows upon rows of lumber, plumbing, electrical and finishing supplies felt as though they were about to fall on him. He wasted no time. He knew what he had come here for. The sooner he accomplished the mission the easier it would be for him to move on—not only with Scarlet’s burial and the investigation into her death. But also his life.

  He spotted a thin man of medium height three aisles down. A clean-shaven black-haired man dressed in chinos, white button-down shirt, a bright orange smock tied around his neck and waist. He had a nameplate pinned to his smock, in the area that covered his heart. The name Jimmy was embossed into the nameplate. Vines was smiling ear to ear, happy to be doing his job.

  Jake approached him.

  “I need help,” he said.

  “Abso-positivo-lutely,” happy Jimmy exclaimed. “How can I be of assistance?”

  “I need to know where I can find the kerosene,” Jake said.

  22

  DRIVING.

  Making my way through the burbs due south, in the direction of Montana’s office on South Pearl Street. Per direct order. Running fifteen minutes late. But that still didn’t stop me from making a slight detour.

  I thought maybe, if I timed it right, I might catch my boy as he got off the school bus.

  As it turned out, I could not have timed it any better.

  The yellow school bus was pulling up in the opposite direction, slowly coming to a stop at the edge of the uphill drive, just as I made the curve past the tall pines that surrounded Mitch Cain’s property directly to my left.

  I’m not sure exactly why I did it, or why I took the chance even, but I pulled the Mercedes over to the side of the road, a good one-hundred feet away from the house so that I would remain hidden in the trees.

  Heart beating, I located the vaguest image of my son’s head and shoulders through the bus’s slightly tinted windshield. My kid, awkwardly making his way towards the front, his little hand waving goodbye to the other kids who were still belted into their seats, a wide smile planted between a pair of rosy red cheeks.

  Happy, not-a-care-on-earth cheeks.

  Christ, my heart was pounding.

  I gripped the steering wheel while I watched my boy make it to the front of the bus where he offered a wave to the driver, just as the old man opened up the door. I kept a steady eye on him as he descended carefully down the school bus steps, until he landed with both feet onto the dusty soft shoulder of the road. For just a couple of seconds I lost him while he made his way around the front of the yellow vehicle in baggy blue jeans and a hooded navy blue GAP sweatshirt.

  He looked so small to me.

  Lynn appeared then at the top of the drive, dressed up in her hospital whites.

  She shouted out for the kid to look both ways before crossing.

  With backpack sliding all the way down his left arm, he came to the edge of the bus, looked both ways, heaved the pack back up on his shoulder and jogged his way across the road into his mother’s arms. I tried to get a good look at his face, but it wasn’t easy at that distance.

  I threw the transmission back into drive. At exactly the same moment the bus flashers stopped and the miniature octagonal side-mounted STOP sign mechanically folded back against the yellow side panels of the school bus.

  Would I ever learn?

  I could feel the tears building up again behind my eyeballs just as the school bus passed me by and my son skipped his way down the driveway to his home without me.

  I waited there for a full minute or
two, frozen beneath the cloud cover. Until I shifted the Mercedes transmission into reverse and backed the car around so that it faced in the opposite direction.

  If Lola were to analyze me, she would say that there was a distinct pattern inherent in my actions. A kind of Pavlovian action and reaction. Every time I went to visit Mary Ellen Lane for my checkups, I inevitably made the trip back to this house to see my son get off the school bus.

  And every time I came here, I vowed never to do it again.

  23

  THE MOOD INSIDE THE S.P.D. South Pearl Street station was somber.

  Downright black and blue.

  As usual, uniformed cops filled the wide-open booking room while ceiling-mounted fans blew stale air down at the tile floor. Also as usual, the cops were busy filling out reports, answering phones, questioning the newly arrested, fielding complaints. Maybe it was me, but the place seemed a lot quieter that afternoon, a lot more subdued.

  Even the Green Street hookers they brought in through the back door and detained inside the Plexiglas cage seemed to be behaving themselves while the entire department tried to make sense of Scarlet Montana’s brutal departure from this earth. Or so I imagined.

  Montana’s second floor office was no different.

  With the wood door closed behind me, the square-shaped corner room screamed silence. The only sign of life was the slight guttural noise Jake made with his throat when he breathed in and out, as if the action were no longer involuntary but somehow forced.

  Only three of us occupied the office.

  Jake, Cain, me. In descending order of importance.

  Jake sat behind his wood desk, leaning back in his wood swivel chair at an angle that allowed him to stare out the window onto South Pearl Street two stories down. Glaring at his profile I could plainly see how entirely exhausted he was—haggard, his thick gray-streaked hair slicked back against his head like he’d only just woken up.