Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  “Murderers don’t get obits when they’re killed during the getaway.”

  “A quick death was too good for him,” Martin growled. “We should have shut him in a concrete box for the rest of his life, with no hope, no contact with anyone, nothing except the very best medical care to make his sentence as long as possible.”

  Billy smiled and tried to lighten the mood. “I always thought you opposed the death penalty because you’re a flower child.”

  “I oppose it for premeditated murderers because I’ve seen inside the prisons, an hour or two at a time, with my clients. It’s like being locked in a gas station restroom, forever. States who poison their worst killers—or hang them, or shock them—are doing them a favor.” Martin laid a hand on his shiny bare forehead, as if checking himself for a fever. The hand holding the envelope dropped slowly to his side, as if he were overacting a death scene on daytime television. Was he acting? The anger seemed real. Martin swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bounced in his throat.

  “Martin,” Billy began, “I don’t know what you think you need from me—”

  “The judge was shot just once,” Martin said, interrupting. “Lawyers used to say Judge Harmony had an eye for when they were full of shit. Well, he was shot once through the eye.” He paused a few seconds, and then added a stray thought. “His wife’s name is June.”

  “I remember from the obituary.”

  “She’s an old friend of mine too. I have a vague recollection of their wedding, but I used to like tequila back then, so that decade is hazy.”

  “Marty—”

  “What I remember best is Gil’s advice when I split our partnership. ‘Marty,’ he told me, ‘you’re a goddamn fool for leaving this firm.’” Martin laughed; a twinkle of life stirred in his eyes. He imitated his former partner in a lockjawed aristocrat’s voice: “‘Don’t make the same mistakes I made—make different mistakes.’” Martin chuckled, gazed away, looked backward in time. “And though Gil was a crusty New England Yankee, as emotional as the average Vulcan, I could tell on the day I quit to join the public defender’s office that he respected what I had done.”

  “So you’re a vegan and a Trekkie,” Billy said. “I’d guess you didn’t date much.”

  “I’m a closet carnivore—don’t ever tell my wife. And I prefer Battlestar Galactica.”

  “You certainly made your own mistakes.”

  Martin smiled. “My mistakes,” he said, “are why Gil Harmony drove a custom BMW, and I drive a Ford Escort with two hundred thousand miles on it.”

  A gambler ten rows behind them barked profanity at televised dogs. Two crumpled betting slips sailed in high arcs, five seconds apart, far over Billy’s head, as if the angry bettor were shelling the front of the room with mortar fire.

  Billy inhaled deeply and meted the air out slowly. Lawyers around Rhode Island sarcastically referred to Martin Smothers as “the Saint.” Now in private practice, he was the patron saint of hopeless causes, the Saint Jude of legal services. A few rare attorneys devoted their practices to people stuck on America’s bottom rung; Martin’s clients were lower than that—they were the ones under the heel of the ladder. Martin had helped Billy once, and few things bothered Billy as much as an IOU. Unpaid debts had led him into many face-to-fist confrontations with bookmakers. His nose itched. He traced a finger over the bump where his sniffer had been broken on three occasions by collectors.

  Billy folded his arms. He knew he could not refuse Martin, but he tried to put up a fight: “Have I mentioned this isn’t a great time for me to take another case with you?”

  “I can’t investigate this myself,” Martin said. “I’m too close to it. Plus, I’m representing Gil’s wife”—he paused, grimaced, smacked the envelope on his knee—“I mean his widow, in probate court, as a favor. Her son is still battered from the car crash. June needs my help. I want to be ready when they open Gil’s will later this week.”

  “What’s left to investigate?” Billy asked, still hoping to get out of the job. “The killer died in the crash.”

  “Naw, that’s bullshit,” Martin said, not angrily, merely as a point of information. From the envelope he pulled a five-by-seven photograph—a police mug shot enlarged to the point it had just started to become fuzzy.

  The young guy in the picture looked lean and rugged. He was shirtless; the characters of a dark tattoo on his shoulder were too blurred to be legible. His triangular-shaped head pointed down through a sharp chin, to which clung a tuft of black goatee. His dark hair was long, unwashed, and stringy. He had obviously taken a beating: his nose and lip were swollen; the smear of a shiner glowered like a thumbprint under one eye.

  “They say that the night this picture was taken, he had resisted arrest,” Martin said.

  The man’s expression was grim and hollow in the picture, as if he had just witnessed something he’d prefer never to see again. Like maybe an extreme close-up of a police nightstick. Billy flipped over the picture. The name printed on the back read:

  RACKERS, Adam A.

  “The guy who shot the judge?” Billy asked.

  Martin nodded, as if he didn’t want to acknowledge the fact out loud. “That police mug was taken five years ago, after the cops grabbed Rackers in an electronics store, several hours after closing time. He was helping himself to a crate of iPods, and apparently never noticed that this store also sold silent alarms.”

  “So he was no genius.”

  “He pled out to robbery, did twenty months in medium security.”

  “Hmm—stiff time. Not a first offense, I assume.”

  Martin snorted with an ironic laugh. “His police record is longer than ‘Freebird.’”

  “The news reports on the shooting were sketchy. Do the cops know what happened to Judge Harmony?”

  Martin looked away for a moment, as if organizing the narrative in his mind. He explained, “The judge and his son, Brock, were spending the weekend at the family beach house, a big clapboard Mc-Mansion on a salt pond in South County.” He grinned. “I got invited there once, Gil barbecued two rabbits he and Brock had shot, and I thought my wife was going to divorce me—that woman won’t eat animal crackers.”

  A crumpled betting slip bounced off Martin’s scalp. He watched it land in the aisle, then continued as if nothing had happened.

  “Two weeks before the shooting, Rackers had cased the place,” Martin said. “A local cop ran his ID and warned him about loitering.”

  “This cop remembers Rackers? After that much time?”

  “An ex-con with six B&Es on his record? Hanging around the pricey beach houses? Yeah, they remembered him. Rackers got into Gil’s house through an unlocked window in the garage—his fingerprints were all over it. From there, he forced his way into a crawl space above the ceiling that led into the main house, between the rafters, above a little mudroom. The space he wiggled through is rough, unfinished, nails sticking out everywhere. He left a tiny wedge of his skin and a few hairs on the point of a tar-paper tack where he scraped over it.”

  “What was this supposed to be?” Billy asked. “A robbery?”

  “If you agree with the police investigation.”

  “Would we be talking if you did?”

  Martin ignored the question. He said, “The judge owned two dozen firearms, but they’re all accounted for, so Rackers must have brought his own gun, a forty-caliber semi. Cops found it near the wrecked car in the woods, one shot discharged.”

  “Where was June Harmony?” Billy asked.

  “Home—their condo on the East Side in Providence, a five-minute walk from superior court, where Gil sat on the bench. She had left the boys alone for a father-son weekend.” He sighed and hunted for a bright side. “Though it’s probably better that she wasn’t there.” He gave Billy a sad smile, not needing to explain any more. Then he rubbed the back of his own neck and seemed to lose energy, like a wind-up toy at the end of its spring. He closed his eyes and slumped. “I have an image in my head,” he said, a ha
nd waving lazily before his face, where this image might have hovered. “It’s Gil. He’s surprised in his study by a punk with a gun. I can see him slowly rise from behind his mahogany desk, like a thin column of steam. He sets a bookmark carefully into whatever law text he was studying for the classes he teaches, then tugs down the bottom of his suit vest, and thrusts his big chin toward the gunman. Gil would have called him a ruffian or maybe a scoundrel. In my vision, Gil knows he’s about to die, yet demands to know at once, in the name of God and the Constitution, what is the meaning of this.” Martin smiled, opened his eyes, looked off to the track. Billy said nothing. Martin turned to him and shrugged. “How do you fuckin’ shoot a man like Gil Harmony in cold blood?”

  Billy sat silently and felt the slow osmosis of hurt spreading from Martin’s heart into his own. He could see why Martin loved the judge. Gil Harmony was a father figure to Martin; in his memory a flawless giant with brains, wisdom, and guts. Billy’s thoughts drifted to his own father, sick and shrunken, betrayed by his kidneys, being poisoned by his own blood. Rancid on the inside. He shook the image from his head and brought his mind back to the moment.

  “Here’s another oddity for you,” Martin said. “Three days before the police spotted Rackers casing the judge’s beach house, somebody broke into the Harmony family’s condo in Providence. A real Spider-man, came in through the balcony around two o’clock in the morning. Brock Harmony was staying there alone that night. According to the police report, Brock heard a noise, grabbed one of his old man’s pistols from the gun locker, and ran into the hall. The intruder fled empty-handed.”

  “Good.”

  “But Brock couldn’t identify him. He only saw his shadow.”

  “Do you think this break-in was a failed attempt to kill the judge?”

  “Or a recon mission, to gather information for a strike in the future. It’s a hell of a coincidence, ain’t it?”

  “Have you seen Brock?” Billy asked.

  Martin pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and grimaced as if the spot were tender. “Can’t bear it yet,” he said. “What would I say?” His eyes widened with dread. “The cops interviewed Brock in the emergency room after the crash. I saw their report. The night of the shooting, Brock was asleep upstairs. The bang of the gun woke him. He thought his old man might have fired the shot by accident, and he rushed down to see if Gil was all right. He ran into Rackers in the hall. That punk mumbled something about a wall safe, which I’m reliably told the beach house doesn’t have. The Gil Harmony I knew kept his valuables in a bank. Except for June Harmony’s diamond earrings, which were in plain sight in a jewelry dish in the dining room. Four carats total. Insured for a hundred and fifty thousand, and Rackers left them right where they were.”

  “Jesus, did Rackers take anything?”

  “Just Brock,” Martin said. “He marched the kid out at the point of a gun, through the woods, to the road. Rackers carjacked the first Good Samaritan to drive along, a kid named Stu Tracy, some small-time musician—a philosopher-poet, the type who writes lyrics so obscure nobody gets them. Brock doesn’t remember the crash. The car rolled over nine times, all three were ejected. Rackers got the worst of it; he was pronounced dead at the scene.

  “Stu Tracy is still in the hospital,” Martin continued. “He’s out of intensive care, and expected to make it. But he’s rebuilt in stainless steel and needs three or four more surgeries to walk properly, as he gets stronger. This crash could cost him two years of his life, to heal and rehabilitate.”

  “And Brock?”

  “Thrown clear of the wreck. Grade-two concussion, lost consciousness. Somewhere around sixty stitches all over. Nothing broken. He’s lucky.” Martin paused, then corrected himself. “Lucky that he lived, though now he has to bury his father.”

  The dogs blew out of the gates for the next race, heads bobbing in high-speed unison. “Ooo,” Billy said, pointing. “I got half a nickel on this race. It’s my lock of the day.”

  Billy watched his dog fight to break out from a box-in on the first turn. But his pup tangled legs with another dog and went down in a rolling heap as the pack ran on after the rabbit. Martin gasped. Billy stared, mouth open, saying nothing. His dog righted itself, paused, violently shook the dust from its speckled white coat, and then trotted, unhurried, the wrong way around the track. “That probably just cost me a year of my life,” Billy said, finally.

  Martin chuckled and stroked his beard. “How much is half a nickel?”

  “Two hundred fifty.” Billy said absentmindedly. His attention was on the picture of Rackers. The photo was no longer accurate, of course; Rackers was in the morgue. His hard-scrubbed, wind-burned face would have been blue in the freezer.

  “I still don’t see the point,” Billy said. “It’s a tragedy that the judge is gone, and a crime that Stu Tracy got mangled. But the killer is dead. Not much else we can do to him.”

  Martin leaned in close. The intensity in his eyes pushed Billy backward as surely as a hand against his chest. “The break-in at the judge’s place was not a robbery that got out of hand,” Martin said in a low voice. “This was an execution.”

  Billy looked away. “You got proof?”

  Martin took the photo of Rackers and shook it gently in Billy’s face. “This cretin left behind June’s jewelry, the family silverware, the hundred bucks in Gil’s wallet—all he did was shoot my friend. And think about Rackers’s police record—no prior gun charges, not one! This guy didn’t go from unarmed burglar to point-blank assassin by chance. Somebody hired him for the job, to exterminate the judge.” He let the point sink in. Then he said, “Which means the killer, the one who really made it happen, is still free.”

  Yellow dots reflected from the ceiling lights swirled in Martin’s eyes. Billy messaged his temples. A theory built of one part conjecture and ten parts faith. Reluctantly, he said, “It’s a decent hunch, but, like I said, Marty, do you have any proof?”

  The patron saint of hopeless causes broke into a wide smile. “More proof than you had that Runnin’ for Bob would win that race.”

  Billy grinned. He had walked into that line. He said, “I’ll fish around and see what I can find out. I’ll do my best, but no guarantees.”

  “That’s the line I give my clients.”

  three

  The hospital smelled like disintegrating people and the chemicals invented to clean up after them. These were two odors, really, the primitive pong of unhealthy gases and flakes shed by bodies being cremated alive by disease, and the high-tech tang of cleaning compounds and lethal drugs prescribed to kill infection before the medicine poisoned the patient to death.

  “I hate this place,” the old man grumbled.

  “It’s keeping you alive,” Billy replied.

  “As I said …” The old man trailed off into mumbles. He melted, dejected, deeper into his wheelchair.

  They passed a humming red Coke machine, the only color along a long bone white hallway lit by fluorescent ceiling tubes. Bo pointed and said, “I want a Sprite.”

  “Let’s get Grandpa to his appointment first,” said Billy. “Do you want me to push?”

  “I’m driving,” Bo said. He clutched harder on the pistol-gripped handles at the back of the wheelchair and pushed a little faster. He could barely see over the back of his grandfather’s head. “Who’s got Albert?”

  The old man held up the kid’s Albert Einstein action figure, a soft doll about fifteen inches long, in a tiny white lab coat, with a shock of white hair and a bushy mustache. “Al’s riding up front with me,” the old man said.

  “He wants me to hold him,” Bo said.

  “What’s that, Mr. Einstein?” The old man pressed the doll’s face to his wrinkled ear. “He says it’s all relative to him.”

  “Hardy-har,” said Billy.

  “Get the boy a Sprite,” the old man said. “We got time.”

  “Once you’re hooked up,” Billy said.

  No detours until you’re hooked up.
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  The old man huffed. “You got time,” he said. He touched a quivering hand to his temple. Then he turned his time-ravaged face to Billy. The old man’s skin had a yellow tint, dotted with tiny blue bruises. He had not shaved in ten days and dry white whiskers lay flat along his cheeks like wheat stalks felled by a wind. His shoulders heaved and he said, “I’m tired.”

  “You’ll nap in the chair,” Billy said. He absentmindedly picked a cat hair off the old man’s sweater and flicked it away. Then he met the old man’s eyes; they were the same bright living blue as Bo’s peepers. Billy wondered, How could the old man and the boy, so near the opposite ends of life, have the same eyes?

  “You don’t understand—I’m tired,” the old man repeated.

  Billy understood. He looked away and retreated to humor. “Push him a little faster, Bo, but don’t crash him. There’s a five-hundred-dollar deductible on the wheelchair.”

  “That’s five hundred Sprites!” the boy cried.

  Billy massaged his chest over his heart, rubbing a spot of soreness he imagined was there. Though William Povich Sr. had never said it aloud, Billy had come to understand that his father wanted to stop dialysis.

  The old man was tired of being old.

  A grotesque, involuntary smile spread over Billy’s face.

  Goddamn it …

  He could not suppress the grin. The smile was a lifelong curse, he had come to think, which hijacked his lips whenever death made a near pass. Self-defense from deep within his psyche, he thought, a smile to ward off the cloaked figure of death should it come too close to Billy Povich. It first appeared after high school, when the girl voted most likely to succeed shot herself through the forehead three months into their college freshman year. He had poisoned the smile with vodka that night, in a cold autumn drizzle, around a smoky campfire made with gasoline and wet pine, with ten other teenagers feeling death for the first time. He had fought the smile again when his mother, who never smoked or touched a drink, silently handed Billy an X-ray with an egg-shaped shadow over the lung. She had not removed her necklace for the X-ray; the silver crucifix had glowed white over her heart. The smile appeared again last year, when the police sergeant had rung his bell, and Billy had padded downstairs in moth-bitten boxers and bare feet to find the man in a crisp blue uniform holding Bo’s hand and speaking nonsense about a crash and a motherless little boy who would be moving in with his divorced father.