He says, “You and Dr. Miner fled the scene at Joy’s condo. Stormville was still looking at you as an escaped murderer. What’d you do next?”
“Well, I did exactly what I should have done when I collected the bodies of evidence in the first place. I turned myself in.” Sliding a smoke from the pack. “But before all that, Miner insisted that we get our story straight, before we threw ourselves at the mercy of the court.”
“I thought Miner already had his story straight?”
“Like everybody else, he changed his mind. He refined his theory about Scarlet’s death based upon some new evidence. Only instead of going from suicide to murder, he switched from murder to something completely different.”
“The plot heats up.”
“The plot swelters.”
87
AS SOON AS THE single round hit him, Cain fell backwards, what was left of his head smacking against the bloody linoleum. The .38 caliber bullet had pierced his right eye. It told me he was already on his way to hell before he hit the floor.
I was still sitting on the floor not three feet away from him, back pressed up the refrigerator door when Dr. Miner handed me the revolver. He bent down, checked Lyons’ pulse, shook his head almost sadly. But when he came to George, he looked up at me with those piercing blue eyes.
It was a good look.
He said, “This one’s still alive.”
He then pulled a white hanky from his back pocket, wrapped it around his hand. He picked up the phone, dialed 911, told the dispatcher to hurry with an ambulance. Then he gave them the address. He hung up without giving them his name.
Next he grabbed the .38 back out of my hand and stuffed it into his pants pocket. Then he did something both strange and grotesque. Careful to step over the bodies and the blood, he reached down, stuck his fingers into the palm-sized section of Cain’s blown away skullcap. He dug around the brains for what seemed like a full minute until he stood up with what he wanted.
From where I was seated I could see it in his hand—a blunted cylindrical lump of .38 caliber slug. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. With that hanky once more wrapped around his hand, he pulled the 9 mm from Cain’s death grip and blew another round into the eye socket entry wound where the .38 had pierced it minutes before. The deed done, he replaced the piece back into Cain’s hand, only this time positioning the pistol barrel towards the dead man’s face, the right-hand thumb pressed against the trigger.
I sat there staring at him for a minute—the man who became my ex-wife’s husband, the stepfather to my kid.
Miner asked me if I was okay.
It was impossible to answer.
He stood there beside me for a beat, maybe two. He said nothing at first. Until he offered me his hand, told me it was time to get the hell out of there.
“How’s the gout, old man?” I asked as he wrenched my broken body up off the floor.
“Not nearly as bad as your headache,” he said. “And you just saw what happened to the last jerk who called me old man.”
This time I laughed despite the pain.
By the time we made it back out the sliding glass doors, we could already hear the sirens.
88
THE TEMPORARY PARALYSIS IN my right arm was just that.
Still, it required a maximum effort to follow Miner in his blue Volvo to a 7-Eleven located about a half mile up the road. Pulling into the lot, he parked it behind the dumpster. After grabbing a crowbar from out of his trunk, he told me to scoot over while he took the wheel of the El Camino—gout be damned. Six cop cars, a fire engine and an E.M.S. van blew by the store. They appeared to have no clue about us.
So we hoped.
Knowing that the dry ice might not be enough to keep the Montana bodies from decomposing beyond the point of viable physical evidence (Ryan was sealed in his casket), Miner bought up a whole lot of ice and packed the bodies well. To my surprise, he also bought up a handful of Snickers candy bars. We then drove across town to the banks of the Hudson River where he got out, hobbled over to the concrete dike wall and tossed the .38 revolver into the drink. From there we proceeded to the last place I thought we’d ever go.
My house on Hope Lane.
With a crowbar in hand, Miner led me around to the back door off the kitchen, where he pried off the lock-box the cops had installed some days before. He then jimmied the door lock and we were in.
In a word, the place was a wreck. The cops had ransacked it. Not a single drawer hadn’t been pulled out of the kitchen counters and overturned—spoons, knives and broken plates strewn about the floor. It was the same story with every room in the house. Just what the fuck could they have been looking for, I had no idea.
Ordering me to sit down, Miner packed a plastic sandwich bag with ice, told me to keep it pressed against the back of my head.
“Where do you keep your painkillers?” he asked.
“Codeine?” I said.
“Codeine will put you to sleep, son. Advil or aspirin.”
I told him he could find a bottle of what he was looking for in the cabinet above the lazy Susan, directly beside the prescription codeine.
He set the Advil on the table along with a glass of water. I swallowed two tablets while he went back out to his car, came back in with an old black leather bag. The same kind of leather bag doctors used to carry with them when they still made house calls. Opening it, he pulled out a blood pressure kit and another instrument that he said would measure my blood sugar levels.
“I thought you were a toxicologist?” I said.
He said, “I’m an M.D. first. Any more questions?”
I didn’t dare.
His examination completed, he put the stuff back into the leather bag. Stepping away from the table, he opened the refrigerator.
“Just what I thought,” he said.
I turned, gazed into the empty fridge. Well, not empty exactly. There was some beer in there, and some French’s mustard.
He asked, “When was the last time you ate a proper meal?”
I looked Norman in the eye.
I said, “I’m gonna plead the Fifth on that.”
“Have you ever thought about why exactly you might be experiencing these episodes of dizziness and passing out?”
“I have this condition,” I said.
“Maybe you have a bullet frag in your head and maybe it is directly responsible for your seizures, but it certainly does not help that you do not eat.”
His face turned stone cold when he pulled the Snicker bars from the right-hand pocket of his rain slicker, dropped them before me onto the table.
“Eat up, Tiger,” he ordered.
Tiger. It’s what my dad used to call me when I was still a kid. It felt kind of good inside, him calling me Tiger. It was sweet in a way, like the candy.
We sat there in the dark while I ate the candy bars.
Then I started telling him everything that had happened since I’d escaped. At least, I told him my first-hand version. About Joy’s death, about the exhumation, about the post-burial autopsy that revealed the illegally harvested organs. I told him everything.
When it was done, I looked into his gentle old face.
“How the hell did you find me?”
“You called me, remember? You gave me Joy’s address.”
I suddenly remembered.
“But that was two in the morning,” I said. “Your office line.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Not with what I was finding out about your case.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“First of all, you’re the closest thing I have to a son. Second of all, proof of suicide is the only thing that will save you.”
I sat back, let out a breath.
“You do believe I didn’t kill her, don’t you?”
He averted his eyes, got up from the table, reached inside his rain slicker once more, pulled out a transparent plastic evidence bag that contained a beer bottle. He pulled out his bl
oodstained handkerchief, then opened the bag, grabbed hold of the bottle, set it onto the table beside the bottle of Advil.
I just looked at the long-necked bottle, the tinted transparency of the opaque glass, the red, white, blue and gold label, the big cursive letters that spelled out Budweiser. I pictured the photograph of the bottle Prosecutor O’Connor produced at my hearing in place of the real thing. I knew then that it had to be the one.
I asked him how he managed to get it.
“It was sent to me,” he said, “from Montana himself. Probably after it had been processed at the fingerprint lab.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“There is no way Jake would have willingly turned that over to tox,” I said, “unless he meant to cooperate with us. Knowing our relationship, he never would have done it unless he was throwing in the towel on both Scarlet and his body parts operation.”
“I think it was the beginning of the end for Jake Montana,” Miner said. “First he hands this bottle over to me, knowing full well that you and Robb would also have requested a tox analysis of his wife’s poisoned blood. The action completed, he turns himself in to his own people, tells the whole truth about how and why Scarlet died. And as he reveals the whole truth, Cain goes down right along with him. At least, that’s how I think it was supposed to work.”
“You found something on the bottle besides my saliva,” I guessed.
“Zolpidem Tartrate,” he said. “What you and I know as common, everyday Ambien. It was mixed in with the small amount of backwash.”
“How much Ambien?”
“My guess is she must have crushed up three or four of her own ten milligram pills into a fine powder, slipped it in the beer after she opened it for you.” He paused a beat. “She did open it for you?”
I held that icepack against the back of my head. I recalled that night, lying in her bed while she made her way down to the kitchen, came back upstairs with a bottle of beer for me, a Stoli on the rocks for her. It’s what she always did after we made love. It was the routine. I never gave it a second thought until now.
“That would explain why I fell asleep so quickly,” I said. “Why I would always fall asleep.”
“The Ambien would perhaps trigger a seizure,” he suggested.
I set down the icepack, got up from the table. Reaching up to the cupboard above the sink, I pulled down the bottle of Jack, poured a shot into the water glass. Then I raised the bottle up, as if to offer some to Miner.
He shook his head.
“There was a time,” he lamented.
I took a sip of the warm whiskey, let it sit against the back of my throat before I swallowed it. The beer bottle explains a lot, I told myself. The reason why Cain killed Jake and burned the house down. Jake must have decided it was over as soon as I’d left his office on Monday afternoon. He must have realized the whole thing was about to crumble now that I’d revealed my intention to pursue the real truth behind Scarlet’s death. Sitting there at the table, I pictured Jake getting in his car, driving to the hospital, leaving a package outside the door to Toxicology. A package marked “Urgent,” with Miner’s name scribbled on it. Was it possible that Jake was through with the charade and Cain knew it? Did Cain have no choice but to kill the Captain?
But then when I rethought the equation, it came to me that it was equally possible that Jake could have torched his own house in order to cover his own ass. It was also possible that Cain could have caught him in the act, tossed him into the fire. But then, in the end, what difference did it make who burned what, who killed whom? The house was gone and so were Stormville’s two top cops.
“You have a new death theory,” I reiterated.
He sat back, focused his gaze on the empty beer bottle.
“A theory backed up by solid evidence,” he said, with a breath. “You ready to listen?”
I drank down what was left in my glass, poured another. Then I sat back in my chair, grabbed hold of my right hand with my left.
“Talk,” I said.
89
HE SPOKE IN SOFT tones from across the kitchen table of what once upon a time was my father’s home. As dad’s good friend, it was a home Miner would have been familiar with even before I was born. Maybe not in its present, ransacked state, but familiar all the same. He removed his fishing hat, set it on the table. His hair was thick and white. It seemed to make his blue eyes even more penetrating.
He transported me back to the night of nights—Sunday, May 5.
This was his professional opinion based upon what he called “the totality of the collected evidence”: that not long after I had left the house through her window, Scarlet began to drink heavily. He said, “Maybe she drank with Jake. Maybe she drank by herself. Maybe they argued and fought and drank. Who knows? Fact is, her binge drinking was not a symptom of some depression. That night it became a deliberate, calculated act. She binged herself to a point where she could begin to do some serious stabbing and cutting to her body and not feel all the pain.”
I sipped my drink and pictured Scarlet—her long hair, pale skin and deep dark eyes. It was easy picturing the knife in her hand. In my condition, it was easy to imagine things. But then, what didn’t come easy was imagining her performing the act of self-mutilation.
Miner said that at some point she began to ingest a mixture of speed and heroin. Not speed-balling, but snorting the stuff in lines. Alternating between the drugs and the drink. When she reached the point where courage and pain were no longer an issue, she began to stab at her torso, self-inflicting the surface wounds in a deliberate pattern to mimic a Y incision.
“The way she cut herself,” I said. “It was signal.”
Miner bit his lip, nodded.
“The Y incision. It’s as though she was begging us for autopsy. As though she knew her husband and Cain would initially refuse it.”
He said that she must have continued making the cuts for some time, alternating between the drugs and the drink. What’s even more fantastic, Miner noted, is how she would have had to maintain quiet during the entire procedure in order not to alert her sleeping giant of a husband.
I looked at him, listened to the steady, nearly clinical way he was explaining his theory.
“But is all this physically possible?” I asked, the all-too-familiar pressure knocking at the backs of my eyeballs.
“Given the right conditions,” he said, while once more standing, reaching for his jacket, retrieving a folded sheet of paper from an interior pocket, handing it to me. “Especially since her husband was passed out from too much drink.”
I glanced at the sheet as he sat back down.
It appeared to be Xeroxed from a medical textbook. Diagrams of human bodies with black Xs printed on their torsos where self-inflicted cuts would be found. The single sheet detailed eight “self-cutting or self-stabbing” suicides. Suicides who, much like Scarlet, had managed to cut themselves from navel to throat.
I said, “When do you think she made the fatal cut?”
“At one point,” Miner went on, “the booze and drugs would have become too much for her. She would have been bleeding heavily by now, she would have been growing weak despite the speed. I think it was then she took one final massive dose of the speed/heroin combination and then drank down as much vodka as possible along with a dose of the Curare.”
“But the Curare would have paralyzed her,” I said, recalling our conversation inside his office a few days ago.
He said it would have taken more than a full minute for it to kick in. In her toxic condition, perhaps even longer. She ingested the Curare, laid back down on her bed, then slashed her throat immediately after.
“Unlike the heroin, speed and alcohol,” he went on, “the Curare laid heavily in the blood. It hadn’t circulated though the major organs—the liver, the kidneys. In order for this to happen, she would have had to ingest it after she cut her throat. Since that is a physical and practical impossibility, she must have taken the stuff
only seconds before she cut her throat.”
“That is, unless Jake did it for her,” I said. “Or Cain.”
He shook his head.
“That was the whole point of the Curare,” he said. “To make it look like Jake or Cain or the whole goddamned S.P.D. was there, doing these horrible, mutilating acts to her while she was still awake. But I doubt that any of them were there at all. From what I saw in Robb’s report, the hesitation wounds were too precise, too consistent with self-stabbing.”
I looked at him, said, “The suicide … the very way she performed it … it was a call for an investigation.”
“A brilliantly executed suicide that would suggest homicide and would point directly to her husband and maybe to Cain and almost certainly the body parts op.”
As for Joy, he explained, he wasn’t the good little cop he appeared to be either.
“I called the academy in Stormville. Imagine what they told me? No Joy. I did some further investigating. Fact is, the kid flunked out of med school.”
“Med school,” I said. “He would at least know how to cut a body.”
“Looks like he was the surgeon who performed the illegal harvesting operations on the dead bodies. Or most of the more recent dead bodies anyway. And as for that condo, it wasn’t deeded in the kid’s name at all, but in Cain’s.”
“And Scarlet exposed it all at the expense of her life.”
Miner said, “This was her swan song. This was a way for her to flip the ultimate bird at the people who had been systematically ruining her life for a long, long time.”
I slow sipped my drink, ran it through my mind for a minute, contemplated all the nightmares Scarlet had been having. The ones Suma, the Psychic Fair woman, had told me about. The dark demons and figures that appeared in her vivid dreams. They were real, those demons. Maybe they had no faces, but they were Jake, Cain and Joy.
Christ, they were me!
Maybe by killing herself, she also killed her demons. In that way, she had exacted her just revenge against all of us.
“None of this still explains the disappearance of the blade,” I said. “It couldn’t have just disappeared like that. And wouldn’t there have been traces of heroin all over her bedsheets?”
Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls Page 28