Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

  The end of the five-minute film ran through the projector causing it to flap with every spin of the top reel. George killed the power, hit the lights.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  He folded down the screen, took a look outside.

  Still all clear in Stormville, he reassured. As luck would have it, the town house had belonged to his mother. It was still registered in her name. As for the telephone directory, George was conveniently unlisted. But the safety cushion, such as it was, wouldn’t last very long.

  “What now?” he asked turning back to me.

  I told him about my little talk with Lynn, about how she led me to the Swiss bank account, how the bank statement was on its way to the FBI.

  “She did that for you?” he said, as if surprised.

  “Scarlet and Mitch,” I said. “It appears they’d been bedding down.”

  He pursed his lips, shook his head.

  He said, “It’s official. Detective Cain is now our primary suspect in the murders of Scarlet and Jake Montana. Hands fucking down, Divine old boy.”

  I ejected the mini cassette tape from the recorder, put it with the film, my copy of the Swiss bank statement and the case file I pulled from George’s office earlier. I told him that if we had half a brain between us, we would lay low until dark. That would be the safe thing to do, I said. But then, we couldn’t afford the convenience of safety.

  George went back into the kitchen, grabbed a Diet Coke, sat down with it on the chair across from the couch. He made a tight-lipped grimace with his lips. Maybe he didn’t say a word about it, but the expression told me he was experiencing pain.

  “There’s one more job we have to pull off before I decide to end this thing,” I said.

  He pulled a half-smoked marijuana cigarette from his shirt pocket, lit it with his Bic lighter, took three or four tap-tap drags on it, careful not to burn his lips on the fiery nub.

  During the trip up to Woodstock, he had tied his long hair back into a ponytail. His face was covered in gray-black stubble. He looked older than fifty-one or fifty-two. But then I also knew how much pain George had to endure day in and day out; how he didn’t have much time left for this world.

  “What’s on your mind?” he exhaled.

  I stood up, pocketed my 9 mm in the waist of my jeans.

  “I’ll explain as best I can during the ride to the Home Depot.”

  The plan, as I relayed it to George, went something like this: time was short. Which meant we’d have to back-door the operation. Rather than confront the body part buyers (or what was left of them) up in Woodstock (and who knew where else), we’d go after the product itself. Or in this case, the “host” of the product—the dead and buried victims.

  More specifically, my theory revolved around locating just one of the mutilated bodies, attaching it to Cain and Montana either by means of procedural association (the police report) or, better yet, by physical contact.

  “The point is,” I said to George as he drove us towards the Washington Avenue Home Depot in his El Camino, “I don’t really have to prove anything. All I need to do is prove that a conspiracy exists.”

  Eyes on the rain-soaked road, George shrugged his shoulders.

  I told him that the mere suggestion of a conspiracy would naturally lead the F.B.I. to believe that a cover-up was in the works. The cover-up would lead them to the frame-job Cain and Montana had been pulling on me for all these months and years. I told him that Cain, acting in the position as the Chief Investigating Officer on the unnatural deaths he called me in on, never recorded the fact that he pulled organs from the bodies. That deception alone, if it could be proven, was definitely going to raise the attention not only of Prosecutor O’Connor, but also the victims’ surviving families.

  “But what’s to prevent Cain from denying everything?” George asked. “He’ll just say he had no contact with the bodies once they left the scene of the crime or accident.”

  I said, “No way he can deny everything.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “Because a police report that requests either partial or no autopsy, by its very definition, must already be thorough and conclusive as to the cause, manner and mechanism of death. Gonna look a little suspicious if he overlooked a missing set of kidneys. If there was no autopsy, how’s a set of kidneys missing?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s the can of worms trick,” he said. “Poke a hole through the tin lid, get the prosecutor to peek inside.”

  “I’m gonna do better than that. I’m gonna shove a fist-full of night crawlers down his throat.”

  The El Camino cruised west along the long stretch of highway.

  After a long beat, George said, “Let me get this straight. You want to dig up one of the bodies Cain chopped up for spare parts.”

  I turned to him.

  I said, “The last thing he wants is for one of those chop jobs to suddenly show up, six feet over-ground.”

  George shot me a look.

  “The last thing he wants is a postmortem evaluation,” he added.

  “That’s where you come in,” I said. “You perform a postmortem from caudal to clavicle. We do it in front of a video camera, prove without a doubt that the body was cut after it was pronounced dead.”

  I could tell Robb was thinking about it.

  “The cadavers all gave consent for organ donation,” he pointed out. “What if the court just assumes the bodies were cut up in the interest of science or medicine?”

  “You and I both know that anybody under the age of twenty-one must have their family notified prior to going under the knife. Regardless of driver’s license permission. If the family had been notified there would have been a clear paper trail leading up to the recipient.” I picked up the manila folder I took from his office file cabinet earlier, thumbed through it to exaggerate its thinness. “Look,” I said. “No paper trail.”

  “Not the first time I’ve laid eyes on those folders,” George said. “Just the first time I’ve realized how stupid they are. If you’re gonna cut up bodies for spare parts, you might as well fill out the false paperwork to cover your corrupt ass.”

  I said, “What Cain and Jake must have been counting on was the reactions of the families involved. As far as the families are concerned, the bodies of their loved ones were buried just the way they looked in life. You know how funny people can be about death—”

  “—Hermetically sealed caskets,” George jumped in. “Stainless steel-lined concrete burial vaults. Nonsensical when you really stop and think about it.”

  “Ah yes, but it makes people feel real calm and collected inside to know that their beloved dead and buried are protected from the worms.”

  “I see where you’re headed, Divine,” he said. “Any of those families get word their little boy or girl’s body has been messed with and select members of the S.P.D. may be responsible, they’ll create a shit storm so thick even a slick operator like Cain won’t escape it.”

  “Exactamundo,” I said.

  “Exactamundo?” George asked with a sour face.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But you know what I’m like when I get excited.”

  71

  THE FOUR POLICE BLUE-and-whites pulled up to the back doors of the Stormville Medical Arts Center. Two on one side of the glass and aluminum entrance, two on the other. With weapons drawn they slipped out of their cruisers and awaited further instructions from their department supervisor, Mitchell Cain.

  A brand new 9 mm in hand (and a bruise on his right temple from the dark man’s silenced pistol barrel) the lieutenant/acting Captain approached the double doors that serviced Pathology. Pausing, he turned back to his team of uniformed men and waved them on. When the wall-mounted electronic sensor device detected his presence, it automatically opened the sliding glass doors. Without hesitation, he charged in, the supporting cast of cops right on his tail.

  “George Robb,” he shouted inside the narr
ow basement corridor. “George Robb, you are so fucking under arrest!”

  72

  WE DROVE IN SILENCE while the afternoon wore on and the rain came down heavier. Soon the Home Depot loomed on the horizon like the giant metal-sided neon-lit hardware and home supply Oz that it was.

  “There’s just one thing that bothers me,” George said as we passed signs that directed us towards the parking area. “We go digging up a body illegally, they’ll not only add that to our laundry list of crimes, they’ll toss any evidence we come up with out of court.”

  I gazed at George’s profile—the gaunt nose, the long pony-tailed hair, the worn jean jacket that replaced the white smock just before we left the morgue.

  “We’re not doing anything illegal,” I said.

  “Unauthorized exhumation is not punishable by law in New York State?” he needlessly asked.

  He pulled into the massive parking lot, made a beeline for an empty spot up close to the glass entry doors. He threw the transmission into park, killed the engine.

  “We’re gonna get permission,” I said, lifting the file folder once more, then setting it back down on my lap. “From the family.”

  My voice sounded muffled and thick with the engine off and the windows shut against the rain. Taking his hand off the keys, George left them dangling in the ignition.

  “We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “I didn’t say when we’d get it. I just said we’d get it. Sooner or later.”

  “You’re counting on this sooner or later permission,” he said like a question.

  “When the family sees what we’ve done for them,” I said, “they’ll be sending us roses.”

  “What about getting caught?” he asked. “You can’t just expect to drive into a cemetery, start digging away.”

  “The body we’re going to take is buried in the center of a ten square mile, heavily wooded cemetery,” I pointed out. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Risk,” George said with a shake of the head. “There’s some serious risk in what we’re doing.”

  “Risk is our middle name,” I said, pulling out a small list of items I needed him to pick up.

  “I thought it was Stupid,” he said, snatching the list from my fingers.

  My reason for choosing the teenaged body of Kevin Ryan was not indiscriminate.

  His official manner of death had been listed on the thin D.C. as “suicide.” I was aware of that fact without having to consult the D.C. itself. After all, I was the one who filled the form out (which George, at my request, later co-signed as the county M.E.).

  But I also knew for a fact that Ryan’s death had actually resulted from an accidental hanging inside the walk-in attic of his parent’s suburban home. So did Cain at the time. But while I wanted to list “accidental death” instead of suicide in order to avoid any investigation at all, Cain insisted I go with the latter.

  Maybe the general public isn’t aware of it, but many so-called “child suicides” are really just accidents. The “suicides” are almost always young boys who have hanged themselves while thoughtlessly enhancing their solitary sexual experience. They realize that by hanging themselves from the neck while masturbating, they can achieve one powerful orgasm. Ugly to contemplate. But a fact all the same.

  I guess it all starts somewhere in the adolescent experience. Kids somehow discover that by applying a pressure to the carotid artery you severely diminish the oxygen supply to the brain. The more the oxygen is cut off, the better the climax. Which is exactly why so many of these kids end up dead. The grief-stricken parents, not wanting to live with the pain and stigma attached to “death by experimental self gratification” almost always opt for the no less tragic, but more understanding suicide. Some are even willing to pay a cop like Cain for the slight change in manner of death.

  Suburbanites have their reputations to think about.

  Which, as far as I was concerned, is exactly what Cain had been counting on when he called me on the job back in March of this year. I remember looking at the eighteen-year-old’s body which had been hanging from an attic rafter for more than five hours. Cain insisted I call it a suicide, despite the evidence—his entire lower body was naked, his right hand raised high overhead, clutching the Gucci belt he’d wrapped around his neck and buckled to the overhead rafter.

  “Fuck the autopsy,” is how he put it. “Just get George to sign away.”

  But when I asked him why the presiding S.P.D. officer on duty didn’t sign it himself, he said he had his reasons. In the end he simply insisted on utilizing my part-time “expertise” on this one, backed up by the M.E.’s signature as well as a comprehensive C.S. for which he was prepared to pay handsomely in cold, hard scratch. The department was crazy backed-up with pending cases.

  The usual Cain-Montana police story.

  I took a look around the lot to make sure we weren’t being followed.

  But that’s when a strange feeling began to swim over me.

  A cold, up and down my backbone sensation that told me maybe we hadn’t been careful enough; that it would only be a matter of time until I was connected with George; until somebody discovered that he hadn’t shown up for work today; that the now missing bodies of the Montanas hadn’t made it to the Fitzgerald funeral home after all.

  As strange as it sounded, I had to wonder what the hell Cain was doing with his time? Why hadn’t he picked up on me yet? Stormville wasn’t big. Maybe forty or fifty thousand people. Maybe he was so busy reassuring his body part buyers that he wasn’t paying attention to the chase, the re-apprehension of Stormville’s “most wanted.”

  The rush of ice cold anxiety was so bad, I couldn’t feel my feet.

  I locked the car doors. Turning the keyed ignition, I powered up the dash.

  It was the top of the four o’clock hour.

  It didn’t take a lot of searching to find an A.M. station that played only news.

  After a commercial for a place called the Tire Warehouse, they flashed the lead story.

  “The search for escaped S.P.D. officer turned capital murderer, Richard Divine, has intensified late this afternoon. State Police, in cooperation with U.S. Marshals and F.B.I., have set up perimeter checkpoints within a fifteen-mile radius of Stormville city limits. Traffic along the Thruway and Interstate 90 has begun to back up in all directions while choppers are combing the rural and outlying areas for any signs of the forty-year-old detective officially charged in the gruesome killing of local socialite and police wife, Scarlet Montana.

  “Speaking from outside the doors to the Stormville Medical Arts Center autopsy room, which only moments ago was sealed off by Stormville P.D., Senior Detective, Mitchell Cain was quoted as saying, ‘We are closing in on Mr. Divine. We know he was here in this hospital within the past hour and we now suspect that Dr. George Robb, hospital pathologist and county M.E., may in fact be aiding and abetting him.’

  “This afternoon a shocked Stormville remains on full alert while a man accused of first degree homicide roams the streets and byways of this once peaceful Catskill town.

  “This is Belinda—”

  I turned off the radio, killed the ignition. So that’s what Cain was doing. He hadn’t been bluffing when he told George that the Montana bodies better make it to Fitzgerald’s funeral home by noon, or else face the consequences.

  My brain was buzzing.

  Too much adrenaline, too much blood.

  Synapses and nerve endings overheating, glowing. I made a fist with my right hand, then released it.

  I knew then that we had to go back and get the Montana bodies before the police obtained the warrant necessary to raid George’s home. We’d have to grab up the bodies, exhume Ryan, then get the hell out of Stormville. That is, we’d have to leave town long enough to put our case together. When that was done, I was fully prepared to turn myself in, not as the State’s number one suspect, but as the State’s number one witness.

  I wiped the steam off the windshield, looked for Geor
ge.

  What was taking him so long?

  For a split second, I pictured his cuffed and shackled body being yanked out the front double doors of the Home Depot, a pair of gun-toting cops on either side of him. But it was my imagination playing tricks on me again.

  Lola … I had to talk with Lola.

  We had no cell phone. That meant getting out of the car, exposing myself in broad daylight. It was raining again. I had that advantage. There was a payphone mounted to the side of the building. I could see it from where I was sitting. No one was standing near it. In fact, no one was standing outside the building at all.

  Only head cases don’t know enough to get out of the rain.

  I opened the door, exited the car, felt the cool, hard spray on my face.

  73

  I SLIPPED THE QUARTER into the slot, waited for the dial tone. Then I dialed the university neurology lab. Lola answered almost immediately.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  No voice, just breathing, the sound of chairs and furniture sliding around in the background. Like her laboratory office was being ransacked.

  “Not now,” she said, low, stern.

  “Cain,” I said. “Cain is there, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” is all she said.

  “Did he present a formal warrant?”

  “Yes,” she said again.

  I turned away from the wall, gazed out upon the parking lot. Just scattered trucks and cars pulling in and out. People running, not walking towards the doors, jacket collars pulled up over their heads.

  Nature’s wrath; Cain’s rage.

  The senior detective (and now South Pearl Street Captain by default), producing the warrants he needed in record time. But then, who knew what judges he had stuffed in his hip pocket? Maybe even Hughes.

  I said, “Don’t tell him anything. Call Stanley, tell him what’s happened; what they’re doing to you.”

  “Richard,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  Lola, always thinking of me, my health. Not thinking of herself, her well being.