Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  “You’ll see your wife, soon, I guess,” Billy offered.

  “Naw, not me; I’ll not see heaven,” he said, sounding matter-of-fact about it. “Not after the life I’ve lived.”

  “What about redemption? You’ve got six months to repent. You’re lucky, in a way. Most people have no idea when the end will be.”

  “It’s too late,” Glanz said. “To plead for forgiveness now, as cancer eats me from the inside out, would be disrespectful.” He shut his eyes for a moment and seemed suddenly exhausted. “I’d be embarrassed to ask. No, Povich, I’ll take what’s coming. It’s what I deserve.” A crow hopped near his feet. Glanz drew a few more seeds from his pocket and scattered them on the road.

  Then he pulled up his sleeve and checked his wristwatch. “You were truthful about keeping Robbie busy,” he said. “Smart on your part—Robbie would shoot you where you sit.” His eyes narrowed. “He better damn well be okay.”

  “We’re not murderers, sir.”

  Glanz looked at him with tight lips, and seemed to accept the explanation. “Don’t judge Robbie too harshly,” he advised. “What he did to you in that sandpit, he did to protect me. Are you a father, Povich?”

  “I have a son.”

  “Do you know what’s the strongest and most complicated bond in the universe, by my experience?”

  “Tell me.”

  “The bond between father and son. No other relationship provokes such intense loyalty and pride. Or disappointment, competition, and even rage.”

  “Rage?” Billy challenged.

  “At a failure or a betrayal—rage, absolutely,” Glanz said. He tapped the back of his head against his own tombstone. “These feelings are larger than any individual. They go back a long way, not to our births—but to the birth of mankind. They are complicated feelings. Men don’t talk about them; we speak through action.” He pointed at Billy. “Would you kill to save your son?”

  “Of course,” Billy said. He surprised himself by how reflexively he had answered, and added, “If he were threatened.”

  Glanz smiled. “You didn’t even think about it. By instinct you know the relationship may require a moral man to kill.”

  Billy picked at some grass and tossed the blades away. “My father is trying to kill himself.”

  Did I just say that out loud?

  “How so?”

  “He’s skipping his blood treatments. He’s bored with his life, and with being too old and too sick to chase women in short skirts.”

  “He’s not bored with life,” Glanz said. “He is convinced of his own uselessness. Convince him otherwise and he will claw the earth to live.”

  They sat together a few more minutes, watching the crows pick at the ground.

  “I believe you,” Billy admitted.

  “Who cares?” Glanz said weakly.

  “But that leaves me further from the truth. I have no idea who paid Adam Rackers to kill the judge.”

  “Reassess your assumptions,” Glanz advised. “One of them is wrong. When you find out which one, the truth will be obvious.”

  twenty-seven

  The kitchen floor felt tacky under Billy’s bare feet. “Somebody spilled something and didn’t wipe it up,” he complained, though he had no mind to do anything about it at the moment. The cabinet had no clean mugs. Neither did the drying rack in the sink. He poured himself coffee in an old mason jar.

  “You slept in,” the old man said. He had parked his wheelchair at his traditional place at the table. The newspaper comics lay spread before him.

  “I’ve been awake in bed for a while, thinking about things.” Billy slurped ancient coffee and grimaced at the bitterness. At Bo’s place on the table, disintegrating cornflakes floated in a bowl of milk.

  “Bo at school?”

  “I got him out the door, but that don’t guarantee he got on the bus.”

  “Thanks, Pop.”

  The old man looked up in surprise from the funnies. “You’re welcome.”

  Billy pulled a chair from under the table, and found it occupied by Mr. Albert Einstein. “Good morning, Al,” he said to the doll. “You had an IQ of a hundred eighty-five, but it’s not smart to hide where you might get sat on.”

  “We should talk about the doll,” the old man said.

  Billy tossed Albert on the table and plopped down. “The way Bo was speaking, I thought we’d never see old Albert again,” he said. “I figured the kid had graduated to some new security blanket. Where’d you find Mr. Einstein?”

  “Charlie Metts brought him up this morning after Bo left for school.”

  “Hmm?”

  The old man dithered with the newspaper for a few moments. He said, “Uh … Metts wanted to know how the twentieth century’s greatest scientist wound up inside the casket of a nine-year-old boy who died of leukemia.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Bo,” Billy whispered. He grabbed his own head … before it could explode.

  “Charlie found the doll tucked shoulder to shoulder with the body, as if little Mr. Einstein here was keeping the dead boy company. Charlie loves Bo—as you know. So he ain’t mad. But I’d say he’s worried.”

  This was Mr. Einstein’s new mission. Top secret. Keep a dead boy company in a cold, dark grave.

  Billy smeared tears on his palm. The kid’s gesture was more giving to a family obliterated by disease than anything Billy could have done, despite Billy’s grown-up mind and grown-up paycheck. He turned away from his father. “When’s the funeral?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Call Metts,” Billy directed. “Ask him to put the doll back in the casket, if the family doesn’t mind. Tell him Mr. Einstein was a gift, from one lonely little boy to another.”

  “Fine, Billy.”

  “I have to meet Martin,” Billy said. “I’ve struck out on this case. I followed a one-way street to a dead end, and now there’s no place to go. Rhubarb Glanz didn’t pay to kill the judge.” He threw his head back, let out a long breath, and wrestled control of his tears. “It’s over. Some truths are just unknowable. Harmony was Martin’s friend. He won’t be happy.”

  “I’m taking the senior van to the hospital today,” the old man said. “Not for treatment—I’m done with that shit.”

  Billy lacked the spirit to argue.

  The old man explained, “But I thought, you know, I should say good-bye to Stu Tracy. I like the kid, and he’s had a rough go of it. But he gets the bandages off his eyes in a few days … . At least he has a chance to get better and have a normal life, unlike some of us.”

  The old man was trying to draw Billy into a conversation about speeding his death.

  Suicide by inaction and procrastination.

  “Not now,” Billy said. He left the table, adding ruefully on his way to the shower, “Stu’s the one guy in this mess who can’t see that I failed. But he’s getting better, so even that’s about to change.”

  twenty-eight

  The restaurant on the first floor of a triple-decker house in a remote corner of Providence was smaller than the kitchens being installed in the new McMansions all over the southern half of the state. The diner mostly fed people who smelled like hard work and cigarettes. With just a lunch counter and two tables, no more than eight or ten could eat here at one time, yet over his years of sneaking here for long home-cooked lunches, Martin never had to wait for a table. The place sent him back in time to his grandmother’s kitchen: he loved the faint odor of cooking gas, the clang of indestructible iron pans seasoned black by a million meals, the lack of any printed menu—you ate what was on the stove; the choice was take it, or leave it—and the fawning service that reminded a nostalgic middle-aged lawyer of love.

  “I’m meeting somebody today, Phyllis,” Martin told the cook. “He’ll probably want coffee.”

  “I’ll make a fresh pot,” she said. “Something while you wait?”

  “I’ll grab myself a soda. There’s nothing like sugar-free root beer and the obituaries on a sunny day.”
r />   “Help yourself, young man.”

  Martin smiled. This was the only restaurant in town where Martin could still be called young, though Phyllis was probably no more than ten years older than he. He grabbed a root beer from the cooler and settled into a chrome and vinyl kitchen chair near the window. Billy Povich had sounded distraught on the phone, and it would be up to Martin to absolve him.

  Povich arrived ten minutes late, after Martin had already eaten his fried eggplant.

  Billy dropped into the chair. “Sorry,” he said. “I walked and got lost. Been doing a lot of that lately.”

  Martin forgave him with a smile and called to Phyllis. “Can my friend have some coffee and some of this terrific eggplant?”

  “Mm-hm!”

  Phyllis set Billy up with the day’s first course. They watched her step back behind the counter and then dip chicken breast in egg batter and bread crumbs. “Thank God,” Martin whispered. “She’s making meat today. My secret inner carnivore is hungry.”

  “Nice to see that the vegan Mrs. Smothers doesn’t have you as whipped as you seem,” Billy joked. “Maybe she should use a leather whip, not a substitute made of soybeans and seaweed.”

  “What she don’t know won’t kill me.”

  Billy watched traffic pass slowly outside the window. “I’m dead-ended,” he confessed.

  “I know that.”

  “I was sure the trail would lead to Rhubarb Glanz, but he didn’t contract for the hit on the judge. Glanz is dying. He’s not interested in revenge. He wasn’t even put out with me when the ambulance took his kid to the hospital as a precaution.”

  Martin covered his ears. “I don’t want to know any more. I feel guilty enough for bamboozling you into investigating this case. For me, it was personal. And my obsession got you beaten up, and nearly buried alive. Now I learn you sent the son of a mob boss to the hospital?”

  “Just for observation.”

  “You did far more for me than you should have. You still have that reporter’s instinct for the truth … .” His cell phone buzzed in his coat pocket. He checked the caller ID and said, “It’s Carol. Don’t you despise people who answer their phones in restaurants?”

  “Yes.”

  Martin answered: “Carol? I’m with Billy Povich, in a meeting, with the scent of sautéed chicken wafting over us.”

  “I’ll keep it short,” she said in his ear. “A kayaker scratched his expensive carbon surf ski on the roof of Gary Gleason’s car early this morning.”

  Martin pulled his fountain pen from his pocket, checked for leaks on his shirt, and then jotted notes on the paper placemat, repeating as he wrote: “On the roof of Gary Gleason’s car? How’d he pull that trick?”

  “You talking about Scratch?” Billy asked.

  Martin nodded and held up the pen to ask for patience.

  “The car was off the coast of Portsmouth, underwater at the end of an old industrial pier,” she continued.

  “Wow. Did he drive into the bay?”

  “Excuse me?” Povich said.

  “Not unless he steered it from the trunk,” said Carol.

  “Holy mother of … when did they find him?”

  “Damn it, Marty, what’s going on?” Povich demanded.

  Carol reported, “Twenty minutes ago. It’s on the news now, with no details, just video of the winch pulling out the car. My source on the police dive team says he was strangled. I’ll call when I get more.”

  “Do it.”

  They hung up.

  Martin paused a second, downed a sip of root beer without tasting it, then summed up for Povich: “Scratch is dead. Murdered. Fuck.”

  Billy banged a fist on the table and splashed coffee from his mug. Through gritted teeth he growled, “He was our last connection to Adam Rackers.”

  “Whoever paid Rackers to kill the judge is cutting the links to him,” Martin agreed. He thought for a second and added, “Or to her.”

  A feverish sweat gathered on Billy’s forehead. “This means I was close,” he said. “I was going the wrong goddamn way, but I passed close to the truth.” He rubbed two days’ worth of whiskers on his chin and gazed out the window again. “Why didn’t I recognize it? What did I miss?”

  “I think you were thorough,” Martin said, but Povich wasn’t listening.

  Billy stared at a column of traffic at a standstill. His expressive brown eyes slowly shrank; his thumb turned absentminded little circles in the stubble on his neck. Only at the very point of his chin did Billy’s whiskers show any gray. His lips parted, and then shaped silent words, like the physical echo of his thoughts. Martin followed Billy’s eyes. What was he staring at? Outside the window, a blue-eyed man with spiked hair, stuck in traffic in a gray Saab convertible, spoke into a cell phone.

  Billy’s silent thoughts had become a whisper; “Challenge your assumptions … .” His head cocked and he looked away a moment. He gestured at the man in the Saab. “His lips move but we can’t hear what he says.”

  “Right … the window is closed.”

  Then Billy’s eyes passed over the table with a look of detached terror, and a creepy smile broke across his face. He clamped his hand over his mouth. “What was our biggest assumption? So fucking big it could not be challenged?”

  “Wha—?”

  “That Rackers shot the judge, right?”

  Billy slipped from his chair and nearly fell to the floor. He caught himself on the rickety table. His mug toppled and cast a wave of coffee over the place mats. Martin jumped from his chair to grab Billy by the arm. “Are you taking a heart?”

  “I’m not having a coronary, Marty. Jesus Christ, he never said a word … .”

  “Who? Billy!”

  “In the hospital, we never heard him speak! Holy shit, Martin, nobody paid Rackers to shoot the judge. He just took the fall!”

  twenty-nine

  The hospital reminded him of a submarine, with its narrow, windowless halls cluttered with exposed pipes that carried steam to the ancient heating system ringing with clangs and pings.

  Ugh, would a submarine stink like this?

  He hit the button for the elevator, then changed his mind and decided to walk up the fire stairs. He did not want to run into someone he recognized.

  This is it. The last one.

  With Scratch Gleason dead, this was the last link between him and Adam Rackers.

  Once the link was severed, he would be free.

  He thought of Scratch, dead in his car, underwater. Some sick part of him—not the pragmatic part that had no choice but to kill in self-defense, to protect himself from being discovered, but some twisted sliver of himself deep inside—pushed a little tune into his head to the music of Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay.”

  Dead in my trunk in the bay …

  Feeling the tide roll my way …

  Dead in my trunk in the bay, cov’red in slime.

  The words repeated in his head. His feet knocked the stairs in time with the music. He began to whistle. There was something grotesquely funny about the little tune, though he felt guilt over the pleasure it brought him.

  But what could he have done? He could not have let Scratch live. That little thief was too dangerous. Who knew what Rackers had told him about the plan?

  The final threat, to be eliminated in this hospital, was infinitely more dangerous than Scratch Gleason. He put a hand to the knife in his waistband, under his shirt.

  He left the stairwell at the trauma recovery unit, put his head down, and marched the halls.

  At the door, he hesitated. What if somebody he knew was inside? He made sure the hall was clear, then placed an ear to the door. Nothing but the hum of machines. He’s more machine than man right now. He’s not even a human being.

  The door closed behind him.

  “Hello?” said Stu Tracy from the bed.

  A ghastly bruise, like a purple wave, had spread across Tracy’s neck since the last time he had seen him.

  He chuckled in reply wi
thout opening his mouth.

  “Are you on the staff?”

  “Mm-hm.” He stepped toward him. From his jacket he pulled a black ski mask. No plastic bag this time. This was the mask he wore when he helped Scratch’s car into the drink. When he had finished with this task, he would burn the mask and get back to his life. What he had done would fade from his memory—maybe not completely, but he was confident that the events of the past several weeks would soon seem like the color-washed recollections of a childhood nightmare.

  “You a nurse?”

  “Mm-hm.” He pulled on the mask.

  “You have leather-soled shoes,” said Stu Tracy. “The nurses on the day staff wear rubber soles because they’re on their feet so much.”

  At the bedside, he discreetly shoved the emergency call button aside. He felt the knife and looked at the shield of bandages and tubes over Stu Tracy. No, he decided, the knife might be noisy.

  “Why won’t you say anything to me? Are you really a nurse?”

  “Yes,” he said. He pulled a pillow from under Stu Tracy’s head. “Let me fluff this for you.”

  “That voice,” Stu said.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  Stu stammered and tried to sit up. “That’s not … not possible! You’re dead!” He grabbed blindly for the alarm.

  When he inhaled to scream, the pillow came down over his face. Stu Tracy writhed weakly under him. He held the pillow in his fists and pressed down with his forearms, channeling all his weight into the task. One of Tracy’s arms slapped pathetically against him.

  Just three minutes and it’s over.

  He thought ahead, three minutes into the future. He would toss the pillow in the closet, smooth the sheets, and put everything back as he had found it. Stu Tracy was already so mangled … might take them hours to figure out he was dead.

  He never heard the door open. He thought he imagined the sound of an electric wheelchair, and then he howled in shock and pain when something crashed into his legs.

  thirty