Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  Blue velvet ropes protect the ten-foot state seal in the rotunda floor, which is surrounded by ornamental brass streetlamps, each supporting ten frosted-glass globes of light. At a podium next to the seal, a retired senator mumbled at eighty decibels through a PA system that splashed his voice monstrously against the marble.

  “ … my goooood friend-d-d and colleeegggg …”

  Martin wiggled his toes inside the glorious leather and asked Carol, “Did you see June Harmony?”

  “Front row, protecting her territory,” Carol replied.

  A dozen metal folding chairs had been set up in three rows before the podium. June Harmony was conspicuous in a long black dress. She sat at attention, yet gazed off as if she had not noticed the crowds, the podium, and the speaker. Her spectacular diamond earrings twinkled in the light.

  “So you told her about Nelida?” Carol asked, gently prying for information.

  “I felt like a little boy confessing to my mother that I had broken a family heirloom,” Martin admitted. “She didn’t flinch.”

  “Of course not. She knew. At some level, the wife always knows.”

  Martin glanced at Carol and was relieved that she did not look back at him. Carol was a generous soul—she would not force Martin to acknowledge that June Harmony may have had the world’s oldest motive to kill her husband: jealousy.

  “June didn’t try to bar Nelida from this event,” Martin said.

  “To take action against the mistress would affirm that June considered Nelida a threat, and June Harmony is too proud for that,” Carol said. “Have they met eyes?”

  “I fear for this building when they do.”

  “Do you see where Nelida is standing?”

  Martin could not miss her. “Behind the great seal,” he said.

  The judge’s mistress wore a navy blue pantsuit and a yellow shirt so bright a hunter might wear it to avoid getting shot in the woods. “She’s certainly not in hiding.”

  “She staked out territory as close to the podium as possible,” Carol said. “It’s her first public claim on the judge’s life. She waits just off to the side like a gathering army before an invasion. Is that her bodyguard with her?”

  “That’s her son, Jerod,” Martin said, feeling a squirt of embarrassment at the memory of meeting Jerod in New York while Martin was in a robe, briefly out of his briefs. Jerod looked impressive in an athletically tapered gray suit coat. “Nelida says Gil treated her son like his own blood.”

  “I noticed Jerod when I was mingling earlier,” Carol said. “His eyes darted everywhere. He feels out of his element.”

  “How was Brock?” Martin asked. He picked the kid out of the crowd, at his mother’s side and mimicking her posture.

  “Zombified.”

  Martin’s eyes drifted to a slender woman in a swishy black skirt: Kit Bass, the judge’s clerk, carrying a legal pad and hurrying among the attendees like a worker bee in a crowded hive. She approached Gil Harmony’s old friends one by one, landing with a whisper into her hand cupped to their ears, probably telling each of them when they would speak. With a scratch on the legal pad, she would fly off again.

  “Povich says that woman, Kit Bass, loved the judge too,” Martin said, more to himself than to Carol.

  “Which one? There? The clerk?”

  “Too young for him.”

  Carol laughed. “From his perspective there was no ‘too young.’ And from hers, nothing smooths wrinkles like money and power.”

  Martin sighed. “I’m stuck with these wrinkles, and the oatmeal masks my wife wants me to wear.”

  “Do you good, maybe.” She smiled and did the sexy little hair flip she liked to do when she teased him about his age.

  He scoffed, “Oatmeal masks. Cucumbers on the eyes. She has a skin cream with carrots in it. Why do women put food on their faces? And why can’t anybody make a shampoo that doesn’t smell like dessert? With a beard like this, do you think I want it stinkin’ like witch hazel and huckleberries?”

  Martin spotted Lincoln Harmony. The judge’s brother looked down on the memorial from the second-floor balcony. He leaned against a pillar, arms crossed, occasionally nodding to people to accept the condolences of politicians and lawyers who had caught his eye.

  “Is the brother drunk?” Martin asked.

  “He’s anxious,” Carol said. “See the leg bouncing? Read that as impatient. Hmmm. And with his flat mouth-line and crossed arms, I’d say he’s waiting for something.”

  “Maybe he’s just nervous about speaking to this crowd. No shame in that. I should head down there.”

  They walked together down a side hall painted butterscotch and cluttered with the serious portraits of men who had served as Rhode Island governor. Each governor in history had a portrait somewhere in the State House, regardless of whether his administration ended in success, failure, or incarceration.

  Carol slipped Martin two typewritten pages. “Your speech,” she said. “Don’t read it too fast. Breathe now and then. Pause at the spots I’ve indicated, and make sure you look up and make eye contact with somebody.”

  Martin read the first line:

  Long ago, as a young attorney, my friend Gil Harmony taught me that lawyers save as many lives as doctors, by serving the truth.

  He sighed, folded the speech, and tucked it into his pocket. “A beautiful opening,” he said. “But I’m going to feel like a liar, knowing what I know about Gil.”

  “He was a complicated man,” Carol said. “Pick the truth about him you loved, and serve that one.” Her hand, resting lightly on his shoulder, felt like an iron guyline that steadied him inside a hurricane.

  They passed an oil portrait of former governor Ambrose Burnside, known for wearing a beard over his cheeks with a clean-shaven chin. The Civil War general didn’t want to command the Army of the Potomac—he warned President Lincoln he was no good for the job. But Burnside got stuck with the command anyway, nearly lost the war at Fredericksburg, and had to be talked out of a suicide charge at Confederate troops. Though a disaster on horseback as a general, he gave the world a new hairstyle, known as burnsides. Somehow, the dyslexia of history mangled the name into sideburns.

  Martin was suddenly struck with new respect for Burnside. At least the general knew his limitations. Do I know mine? Martin’s drive to find Gil Harmony’s killer had succeeded only in killing the judge’s reputation. Rumors of an out-of-town mistress bubbled through the legal community, and they carried the ugly, unspoken suggestion that Gil’s behavior might have been responsible for his murder. Martin felt he had strangled the judge in the grave. Plus he had nearly got Povich buried alive.

  At the floor of the rotunda, Martin left Carol in the crowd and took the seat reserved for him behind June Harmony. He tried not to look at Nelida but could not resist. She stared back and lifted her chin an inch in a greeting nobody else would notice. Her son, Jerod, leaned in front of his mother, which Martin interpreted as a gesture of protection, as if he were ready to take a bullet for her.

  The speaking program of earsplitting echoes continued. Martin read over his speech. With his leaky fountain pen, he edited a word here and there. Carol was brilliant and Martin dreaded her graduation from law school. She’d ace the bar, of course, and he’d immediately offer to make her his partner. But then they’d have to hire a new assistant, and they’d never find someone as good as she.

  A man brushed roughly past Martin’s elbow, dragging the scent of cigars. Martin looked up to see Lincoln Harmony leaning over June. She glared up at him. He smiled sweetly and handed her a white envelope, which she reluctantly accepted as she would a dead rat. He clapped her twice lightly on the shoulder, and then grinned at Martin and shot him with a finger gun. Then Linc staggered off into the crowd.

  He’s got to be fucking hammered!

  June gripped the envelope in the middle, as if to tear it in half, but then changed her mind, slid a pinkie under the flap, and took out a document. Martin leaned forward and read over her sh
oulder.

  A subpoena.

  Linc Harmony was contesting his brother’s will.

  seventeen

  The close-up photos of a dead man’s body were like a morbid Frankenstein puzzle. A bicep, part of a shoulder, left pectoral above the nipple, right shoulder blade. The autopsy photos had been printed in black and white, and Billy knew the dark spots on the colorless skin were bloodstains. The pictures of Adam Rackers on a slab in the morgue purported to show identifying marks such as moles and scars, but only the inscrutable tattoo seemed to have belonged to an individual. The Old English letters spelled dismas23 in a curved frown on Rackers’s shoulder. What the hell did that mean? Some kind of gang name?

  Billy laid out six pictures before him, roughly re-creating Rackers’s dead body on the kitchen table. He sat on his father’s foam doughnut to protect a bruise on his tailbone. His wrists were loosely wrapped in gauze. Six ibuprofens had drawn a thin cushion over the pain throughout his body. He felt like an abused tackling dummy at the end of Patriots training camp. Worse than the physical pain, he felt a pressing anxiety. He had done no better than the police in tracing Rackers’s movements the weeks before he shot the judge. The cops had been thorough. They had checked Rackers’s last known address, a Pawtucket duplex on an island of residential streets jammed among industrial buildings, in a neighborhood no outsider could find without a map. Rackers had skipped out on his lease three months before he died in the wreck. Nobody in the old neighborhood had ever seen him again. Rackers’s residential fingerprints stopped there. No change of address through a cell provider, no credit applications in the Internet databases, no contact with government or the utilities, other than the cop who spotted Rackers casing the judge’s neighborhood shortly before the killing.

  Where the hell had he been hiding?

  Billy’s street contacts had reported rumors that Rackers and a partner had been feeding discount loot to local fences, but nothing specific. And nobody could provide an address for Billy to track down.

  A low murmur floated down the hall.

  Billy stared toward the source and listened. That was his father’s voice, though Billy couldn’t make out what he was saying. The old man was talking to himself again. And not just a stray thought subconsciously expressed by the lips—his father was having monologues in his bedroom. This was not the first time. He tried to remember when the old man started giving speeches to himself. Maybe a few weeks ago? Two months?

  Need to ask him about that …

  The laptop computer on the table suddenly shouted: “Missed it by THAT much!”

  Billy had no clue how Bo programmed the computer to quote Get Smart whenever e-mail arrived. He glanced at the clock: 2:45 a.m. Who the hell was e-mailing at this hour? He turned the volume down so not to wake Bo.

  The old man’s wheelchair glided into the kitchen. Mr. Einstein lay across his lap. “That’s my e-mail,” he said.

  “You better give that doll back to Bo,” Billy said. “If he wakes up without Einstein, he’ll be scared. What were you doing with that thing?”

  “Talking with him,” the old man said dismissively. “Open that e-mail! It’s a reminder to bid on my world’s fair item.”

  “Don’t you have enough useless trinkets?”

  “Not nearly. Lemme at that machine. Just takes a second.” He held up a palsied hand and waved for Billy to get out of the way.

  “Can you do this without Bo?” Billy asked. “This is a computer, not a butter churn. Never mind. I’ll do it for you. Why do you always wait till the last possible second to bid?”

  “So nobody can come in after me and steal my items. Quicker!”

  Billy followed a link to an online auction site. He scoffed, “Is this what you’re buying? What the hell is this thing? A piece of paper? You’re bidding on old paper?”

  “It’s an invitation,” the old man said, sounding anxious. “There’s three minutes left! We gotta bid!”

  “An invitation to what?”

  “To the opening ceremonies of the world’s fair. An original invitation! FDR was there, you know. He spoke to a huge crowd about the world of tomorrow—that was the theme for the fair.” His fingers slashed the air for emphasis. “April thirtieth, nineteen thirty-nine. That was also the anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington. One hundred fifty years to the day, General Washington took the first presidential oath of office in front of a huuuuuge crowd.”

  “Did you have good seats for the inauguration, old man?”

  “What—? Seats to who?”

  “How was George’s speech?”

  “Eh?” The old man’s mouth dropped open and he squinted at his son from behind thick eyeglasses.

  Billy sighed. Sarcasm was completely wasted on his father. “How much are you bidding?”

  “Thirty dollars. No, thirty-five!”

  “For a piece of paper?”

  “We’re gonna lose it!”

  “Fine then, thirty-five dollars.”

  “Log me in,” the old man commanded. “The log-in name is g-r-o-v-e-r-w-h-a-l-e-n. Uh-huh. And then two. Uh-huh. No, the number two, don’t spell it out. Jesus on a skateboard! Where’d you learn to type? Okay, okay. The password is Ziggs.”

  “What the hell kind of log-in is that?” Billy asked as he typed a bid of thirty-five dollars and clicked to confirm. “Okay, you’re the high bidder.”

  The old man relaxed. He wiped his palms on his long flannel nightshirt and explained, “I named myself for Grover Whalen. He was the New York City police commissioner who said, ‘There’s plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.’ Heh-heh. They don’t talk like that today. Then he was president of the world’s fair of thirty-nine. I’m saluting him for what he did for the fair. Don’t you understand how these auction places work? Nobody uses their real name. It’s like a nickname. Christ, I shouldn’t have to explain this … ain’t you younger than me?”

  “Not feeling that way right now,” Billy said. He refreshed the Web page. “Hey, you won. Congratulations on your new piece of paper.”

  The old man smiled. His wrinkles looked like contour lines for a very bumpy life. Then suddenly he wheezed and grimaced in pain and Billy instinctively reached for him. The old man waved him back, banged a fist on his own chest, coughed three times, sputtered weakly as if he were about to die in the chair. Then he pulled himself clear of the cough and took a loud, deep breath. He moaned, grumbled about the indignities of old age, spat into his hand, inspected the clear foam, and then wiped the mess on the tail of his nightshirt.

  “Copy down the seller’s address,” the old man commanded, sounding hoarse. “So I can send him a money order.”

  Billy wrote down the address. “Why do you buy all this crap?” he asked.

  “I’m leaving it to Bo,” the old man said.

  “You’re leaving the kid this invitation? And the ashtrays, and the dinner plates you won’t let anybody use, and the salt and pepper shakers—”

  “Those shakers are in the original box,” the old man interrupted. “And they’re only going up in value. The giant world’s fair mechanical pencil writes perfectly fine, and the jackknife has a mother-of-pearl handle.”

  “What’s the kid supposed to do with this junk?”

  The old man paused. “Bo’s going to remember me,” he said. He frowned and looked away, then scraped a fingernail over some crusty stain on the arm of his wheelchair. “The more stuff I have to give him, the more he’ll have to remind him. I don’t believe in hell, and if there’s a heaven I can’t be sure I’m going. But I’ll have my immortality through that kid. He knows me through the world’s fair, see? It’s my only hobby, the only passion I got left, and the only thing I know more about than his father, okay?”

  Billy confirmed gently, “You’re the encyclopedia of this fair, Pa.”

  “You’re goddamned right I am. Did you know that the centerpiece of the fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere exhibits, inspired the magic castle in Disneyland? See, someday when Bo
takes your grandkids to Disney, no matter how old he’s gonna be, he’ll think of the fair, and he’ll think of me. Might even tell his kids a story or two they can pass along to their kids.” He looked at Billy. “This invitation is the last piece of the collection. We end with the beginning … . You wanna have that discussion about my treatment now?”

  A python flexed around Billy’s throat. He gestured vaguely to the spread of pictures and notes on the table. “Pa, I gotta work … . This case I’m on is, ah, a real bitch.”

  The old man slowly spun 180 degrees in the chair. As he rolled out, he warned without looking back, “Don’t put me off till it’s too late. Never think of the future—it comes soon enough.”

  Billy gave him a double take.

  The old man read his mind. He shook the doll and said, “Yeah, I’m quotin’ Einstein.”

  “Missed it by THAT much!”

  Billy woke with a start and lifted his head from the table.

  I’m half blind!

  He blinked his eyes. No, he wasn’t blind—he had fallen asleep on his notes, and a photograph had stuck to his face. He peeled it off, then winced at the pain in his back, which sizzled down his hamstrings.

  The photograph reminded him of his minor breakthrough in identifying Adam Rackers’s tattoo: dismas23.

  Not that the discovery had helped at all.

  He tapped the computer’s space bar and dispelled the screen saver. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he read the clock in the bottom corner of the display.

  Oh, shit, 6:33 a.m. He had slept the night at the kitchen table. No wonder his back hurt.

  The Web page he had studied a few hours before was still on the screen. The page listed Catholic saints throughout history. It was there Billy had found Saint Dismas. He was the “good thief,” who had asked for a blessing while being crucified next to Christ. Dismas was the patron saint of criminals. Billy had never known criminals had their own saint. The numeral 23 he had not been able to decipher for sure. Maybe it had to do with the mention of the good thief in chapter 23 of the Gospel According to Luke, or maybe that was a coincidence.