Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

  From that point on, he didn’t remember a thing other than waking up in his own bed some two hours later to a silence best described as deadly. With a throbbing head, he pulled off his blanket, made the short trek from his bedroom, out into the hall to Scarlet’s bedroom. He opened the door only to find that the bedside lamp was still on. The lamp, it was illuminating the cut-up body of his wife.

  Everything came up on him then. He barely made it to the bathroom where he dropped to his knees, retched his guts.

  After, when he was able to get back up to his feet, he prayed to God that what he witnessed inside Scarlet’s bedroom was just some nightmare that he had only now awoken from. But when he made his way back to her … when he saw the blood and the terrible gashes, slices and cuts, he knew that her death was reality. He knew that not only had it been possible that he killed her, he knew that he had almost certainly done the job.

  But then, he had no memory it.

  Taking a sip from the glass, he took a quick look around the dark, mostly empty bar. Just a wall length mirror, shelves and shelves of booze, a bald-headed bartender with a huge beer gut, his perpetually burning cigarette set in a tin ashtray on the bar. Seated in the corner opposite his own, an old gray-haired man dressed in a suit and tie, slow sipping what looked like ginger brandy.

  If only I could remember, thought Jake.

  But then, what if he didn’t kill his wife? What if somehow Divine killed her? Was it possible the former cop/failed suicide could have returned to the house later that evening, pulled a B & E, snuck his way upstairs, killed Scarlet in her bed?

  But then, Jake checked the doors and windows. No evidence of a break-in.

  Perhaps Divine had a key to the place. Maybe Scarlet had made him one? There was no way to tell.

  Did Divine have motive, opportunity and means?

  He did.

  But was he capable of pulling off a psychotic killing?

  He had tried once to kill himself and failed. So wasn’t that evidence alone of somebody just short of a full deck? Someone obsessed with violence?

  But then, there did remain one further possibility: Scarlet may very well have committed suicide. If she did commit suicide however, she must have been out-of-her-mind crazy to have pulled off that violent a hack job.

  Downing the rest of his drink, Jake felt the good, warm feel of the booze entering his system. It calmed him just enough to think; to form a plan.

  If he killed his wife, he would cover up any evidence of it by having her body destroyed. He would satisfy I.A. by having Special Investigator Divine come up with a conclusion of suicide.

  If Divine did the job, then somehow his involvement would come out in the wash. When it did, Jake would take care of the head case in his own way, in his own time.

  If Scarlet committed suicide, then that was that. There was nothing more that could be done other than to forget her.

  “You want another?”

  The bartender, standing over him, bourbon bottle in hand.

  Sliding off the stool, Jake reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a ten, laid it down on the bar.

  The suited guy from the other bar corner squinted his eyes.

  “Say, ain’t you the guy who’s wife got murdered last night?”

  Jake said nothing. Not a word.

  “Yeah, you’re that big-time cop.”

  Lowering his head, Jake turned for the door.

  “There must be some mistake,” he mumbled.

  “Hey, buddy, don’t forget your change,” barked the bartender.

  “Keep it,” Jake said as he stepped out onto the cold cracked concrete of Stormville, New York.

  33

  SCARLET’S AUTOPSY WAS NOW official pathological history—all Polaroid and digital photos developed and downloaded, the proper “Opinion Form” filled out by longhand (Robb would provide a typed version for me to add to my official case synopsis later), the place more or less cleaned up and hosed down, the tissue, blood and stomach content samples tagged, bagged and sent down to Tox for processing.

  Robb was sticking his neck out for me on this one.

  More than usual.

  If I went down with the tanker, he was going to drown right along with me.

  The simple fact of the matter was this: some questions had been answered while others remained agonizingly out of reach.

  In Robb’s official opinion, the mechanism of death constituted traumatic laceration of the throat, which was derived initially from asphyxiation and secondarily from massive hemorrhage. The cause of death was a sharp instrument—a razor or a well-sharpened carving knife.

  Manner of death, however, was a different story.

  While the hesitation scars on her upper body (cuts to the epidermal and upper-epidermal skin layers) and the absence of clothing injuries (she was naked) might point to suicide, they could just as easily point to homicide.

  The blanching on her chest, arms and legs, plus the moderate scrapes and scratches he found along the wrists and ankles, were thus far the best proof that she might have put up a struggle against a would-be attacker. But then, it was also conceivable that the scratches and bruises could have come from the E.M.T.s who handled her during transport between the house and the morgue.

  The exact time of death?

  Twelve A.M. or thereabouts.

  How long did Scarlet live after her throat had been cut open?

  No more than a few seconds. She hadn’t suffered for very long.

  Had she been under the influence of drugs and alcohol?

  Almost certainly. Still, that was for Toxicology to determine.

  Aside from the hesitation scars, bruises and light scratches, there was no evidence of skin under her fingernails or behind her teeth. No foreign flesh that you might naturally associate with a person struggling for their life. In that sense, with Scarlet acting in the manner of a specific body of evidence, the autopsy served to back up Cain’s and Montana’s suicide theory. Because if she had been murdered, then by all appearances it looked as though she’d asked for it.

  I looked down at my hands.

  No flesh beneath her fingernails … no sign of putting up a struggle with a would-be attacker. Good news for me.

  But then, what did all this analysis mean? What conclusion could be drawn from the pathological examination?

  What it meant was the autopsy I so badly wanted revealed evidence that moved me as close to suicide as it did homicide. Which also meant I wasn’t about to jump on the horn with Brendan Lyons, lay the scoop of the decade on him. Not yet. Not until I had definitive, irrefutable proof concerning the precise manner of death.

  As requested and as required.

  - - -

  The physics question had been gnawing away at me since I’d first laid eyes on the newly deceased Scarlet Montana.

  “How many pounds of pressure per square inch do you suppose it would take to inflict that kind of wound on a human neck?”

  We were sitting around George’s metal desk inside the small office that adjoined the autopsy room. A rectangular white cement block room with no windows. The long haired Pathologist was looking directly at me, contemplatively, gray matter heating up, gears and belts grinding.

  “I once heard about a man who cut himself up pretty bad after ingesting potassium hydroxide, and another guy who stabbed himself to death after drinking an alkaline detergent solution. But in those cases, the poison probably killed them before the hemorrhaging did.”

  “But we agree that it would take a hell of a lot of strength.”

  “Abnormal strength. More than a healthy thirty-eight-year-old woman fired up on pills and vodka could work up.” George took a toke off a pharmaceutically rolled and distributed marijuana cigarette, held the smoke in even while conversing. “I mean, if you’re that interested, it wouldn’t take much to pull one of the unclaimed stiffs in cold storage, run a blade through its neck, somehow measure the pressure.” Eyes as wide as a kid’s on Christmas morning, he shot up. “
Come on, it’ll be fun!”

  Fuckin’ Georgie.

  “My God, George, I’ve had enough blood and guts for one day and night,” I said as I sat back on the wood chair, stared at the plain block wall behind his desk—a wall that might have proudly displayed his diplomas if he actually cared. “Besides,” I went on, “I think the answer I’m looking for is obvious enough.”

  I thought George was turning blue.

  Finally he released the painkilling smoke from overinflated lungs.

  “I guess you’d never get an accurate reading anyway, Divine,” he said through a series of coughs and nose farts.

  “Unless someone were willing to demonstrate by cutting their own neck open for us.”

  “Totally harsh scenario to duplicate.”

  I said, “Listen, George, we both know that self-cutting and self-stabbing is just about the most uncommon method of suicide there is.”

  He nodded, sat back down.

  “Something like five percent of all suicides occur from a blade. In almost every case the victim is either schizophrenic or psychotic or drugged up. Usually, all three.”

  “All the more reason for me to make the irrefutable differentiation between suicide and homicide. Tell me, what basic criteria do you have to establish to prove suicide by knife?”

  Robb shifted the cigarette into his left hand. Then he raised his right hand, extended the index finger.

  He said, “To prove it, you gotta first be able to establish at least several possible sites of damage on the front torso for self-inflicted cuts.”

  “Chest, stomach and neck in this case,” I agreed. “Nothing on her back where naturally she can’t reach.”

  Now a second finger raised.

  “Hesitation scars have got to be present.”

  “Everything but the neck is a surface cut,” I confirmed.

  A third and last finger raised.

  “No clothing injuries.”

  “She was buck naked,” I said. “Shit.”

  The good but cancer ailing Pathologist took another toke from the medical joint.

  “So then Jake may have his suicide after all.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Because satisfying those three criteria doesn’t mean a goddamned thing if it turns out she was too messed up to even hold a blade in her hand, much less run it across her neck.”

  “Also don’t forget, suicide weapons do not have a nasty habit of walking away.”

  “Homicide made to look like a suicide,” I said. “That’s what I still say.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest, slipped my hands inside my pits to hide the scratched-up palms.

  “Maybe … almost definitely,” George said, blowing out the smoke.

  Staring at the white wall, I thought about what might have been the easier alternative, how I might have simply written up the report that Jake and Cain wanted in the first place. The report stating that Scarlet Montana did indeed commit suicide. Christ, I could have collected my money and been on my merry way.

  But I chose to go a different route.

  The part noble, part save-my-own-ass route.

  Still, I had been the one sleeping with the victim. Let’s face it, as a part-timer brought in to assist a supposedly overextended S.I.U., Montana and Cain never would have banked on my giving them a hard time about anything. Especially something as sudden and so very violent as Scarlet’s death. But now that I was involved—now that it was public—they had no choice but to go with me.

  Maybe my reasons for doing what I was doing were so personal, so ingrained, so motivated out of fear, that not even I understood them entirely. Maybe my reasons had something to do with not thinking straight—with once again making all the wrong decisions. But then, I was thinking straight. I had to believe that. My instincts and thought process had to be in good working order. After all, why else would I pose such a threat to Cain if I wasn’t in my right mind?

  Still, the law was clear in the matter of both homicide and suicide: victims must go under the knife. So at least I had that going for me in my defense should I require one in the end.

  What I did not have going for me was the irrefutable evidence I thought I would have had by now. Some shred of forensic proof that shifted the burden of guilt away from myself and that I could use against both Cain and Montana (i.e. latent prints on the murder weapon, D.N.A. samples separate from Scarlet’s, hair follicle samples, clothing fiber samples) to establish a murder cover-up while using my case synopsis as a smoke screen. Because even though by the looks of things I could make it appear that Scarlet had been murdered, the evidence was still circumstantial at best. Conjecture based upon the interpretation of some weak physical evidence.

  Emphasis on “some” and “weak.”

  “I’ll wait for the Tox report,” I said. “They tell me she was comatose, then I take you up on your offer to examine the physics implied in suicide by the knife.”

  Robb licked his index finger, padded out what was left of the cigarette, returned the roach to his coat pocket. I didn’t like the look on his face. He was gaunt, grimacing in pain. I knew that he smoked as much for the calming effect as he did the medicinal effect. George wasn’t well. Although I said nothing about it to his face, I knew that he was not long for this world.

  I added, “They tell me she was only mildly drunk with enough speed inside her system to light up the city, I go another route. Which one, I have no idea.”

  “What about looking into the bruises and scratches?” George asked after a beat.

  “Could be something there,” I said. “For all I know, they could be the leftovers from some sex game Jake made her play with him.”

  “That is, if they had sex at all.”

  “Maybe he liked to force it on her, in her own bedroom, using his cuffs as an aid.”

  George perked up.

  He said, “Now you’re cooking with Wesson. Coming up with a solid theory, Divine old boy. Motive, opportunity … “

  “Nothing solid about it,” I said. “Just another guess in a pile of guesses. There is one thing that’s true: if Jake was the one to slice her up, it would have made sense to cuff her limbs to the bedposts.”

  “Her bed have posts on it?”

  It felt kind of funny, him asking me about her bed.

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  “If he did kill her and he did cuff her up, then those scratches would look a hell of a lot more like gouges. And I sure as shit don’t recall observing any gouges in my autopsy.”

  “Looks like I may have to pay another visit to the Montana estate.” George made a scrunched up, pain-filled facial expression.

  “Captain Montana is not going to like that,” he said. “Move like that kind of goes against his swift conclusion objective.”

  I stood up.

  I said, “I don’t think he has much choice in the matter.”

  “While you’re at it,” George added, “you might search the house for a life insurance policy.”

  “Suicide doesn’t pay, remember?”

  I pulled my leather coat off the chair back, slipped it on. Then I reached into the interior pocket, pulled out the cash envelope. I counted out six fifties, handed them over.

  George stuffed the bills into the side pocket of his smock without bothering to count it.

  Together we stepped back out into the autopsy room. We took one more good look at Scarlet’s body on the slab. I’m not sure I understood why, but I was beginning to get used to looking at her in the death state. The pressure in my head—the pressure behind my eyes, it had moderated a bit; and as for my right arm and hand, all feeling and sensation present and accounted for.

  “They send over instructions for burial?” I asked, recalling my conversation with Cain that afternoon regarding the very same thing.

  “This morning,” he said, stepping back into his office, rummaging through his file cabinet until he came out with a manila envelope. He pulled out a thin pile of papers, which he scanned. “
Surprise, surprise,” he said. “Cremation.”

  He handed me the requests.

  Nothing fishy about them. Standard requests for burial, signed by both Jake and Scarlet Montana back in ‘97. I handed the papers back to George.

  “They say how soon?”

  “Word I got from Fitzgerald’s Funeral Home is tomorrow afternoon, four o’clock,” he said. “No calling hours, just the bonfire.”

  “Jesus, George,” I said, my blood beginning to simmer. “When were you planning on letting me in on this little tidbit of information?”

  He threw his hands up in the air like, Oops!

  “I’ve got less then twenty-four hours,” I thought out loud.

  “What for?” George said.

  “Before they torch our body of evidence.”

  “Listen, as the M.E. I can have it postponed pending your investigation.”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t want you getting in over your head until I have the definite proof I need to nail their asses for a cover-up.”

  “They’re gonna destroy the evidence, Divine,” he pointed out. “That one cadaver just might be the most important proof you’re ever going to get—your body of evidence.”

  “We have the law and procedure on our side,” I said. “You have the Polaroids and the floppy disks. Keep them locked up. Do the same with the Tox report once it arrives.” I nodded in the direction of Scarlet. “She gets incinerated, that stuff will become as precious as gold.”

  George walked me out into the dark, empty corridor.

  “One thing,” he said, eyes not focused on me, but on the concrete floor. “I collected seminal fluid during her internal.”

  Of course, I knew exactly what he was getting at.

  “She definitely slept with somebody within a few hours of her death.”

  I hesitated.

  “You gonna make slides of the samples?” I asked, a little under my breath. Actually, a lot under my breath.

  He shook his head.

  “Wasn’t enough material there to get a good read,” he said.

  “Not enough?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Yeah, not enough,” he said, wide-eyed and convincing. “I decided just to toss the shit.”