“Thought you were playing the Marriott?”
“Cancelled,” he sighs. “Not enough interest, they tell me. Tomorrow night is canceled, too. Only gig I still got is the Albany Academy afternoon mixer.”
“Buck up, Elvis,” I say. “You just gotta believe in yourself and work your fat ass off.”
“Don’t push me. I’m a grease monkey that won’t slide so easily.”
I rack my brain for a moment.
“Kid Galahad,” I recall.
“You’re good, Moonlight. Didn’t know you were an Elvis fan.”
“I’m not. I’m a fan of bad movies,” I say. Then I hang up.
Setting down the phone, I go to the fridge and open it up. Nothing but beer and condiments. I check my watch. It’s eleven thirty. Oh well, it’s noon somewhere in the world. I pull out a beer, pop the top, take a deep, cold drink. Wiping the foam from my lips with the back of my hand, I try and assemble the puzzle pieces in my mind.
I’ve got a manic brain surgeon who’s suffered his third DWI. He’s got a relationship with his juvenile delinquent kid that doesn’t even qualify as destructive enablement so much as it does FUBAR . . . Fucked Up Beyond All Reality. He carries a Glock .36 in his glove box, maintains a private office away from the hospital, and he’s apparently meeting some people tonight in the parking lot of the St. Pious Church — people from another country, judging by the way he asked them how they were liking America these days. I wonder if he’ll have me drive him to the rendezvous. Or maybe, he will take the chance and drive himself.
Doesn’t matter.
Either way, I’m planning on being there.
Chapter 10
Two beers later it’s already going on half passed noon. The late afternoon gig at the school won’t start until 4 PM. But Elvis will probably get there early to set up and to start snooping. In the meantime, I have some important business to take care of.
Personal business.
I’m going to make a pilgrimage to Lola’s grave for the first time ever.
Schroder’s BMW is a pleasant ride, but I’m not about to take a chance on driving it during off hours, so to speak. I decide, instead, to drive Dad’s hearse to the Albany Rural Cemetery. The old back Cadillac is a fitting choice for what it is I’m about to do. My nerves feel frayed at even the thought of coming face to face with Lola’s tombstone. But, what if there is no tomb to begin with? What if she survived the highway crash? What if she survived and, worse, never thought enough of me and what we once shared together to pick up the phone to tell me she’s alive? Maybe I should skip the cemetery altogether and head on over to the Albany County Hall of Records and search for a death certificate?
It all sounds too impossible to contemplate and somehow making a visit to the cemetery seems the simplest of solutions. Moonlight the distraught.
I pull up to the open, metal-gated entrance to the two-hundred-year-old cemetery and come to a complete stop. I inhale a deep breath, feel my heart pounding not inside my chest, but in my throat. Releasing the brake, I touch the gas and drive on in. From what Lola told me years ago, I know that her father had purchased several family plots located along the entry road, not more than a half-mile inside the cemetery’s south entrance.
I take it slow, feeling the adrenalin fill my brain, the buzz-saw-like noise that accompanies it deafening. On my right, I pass by a three-story brick structure built in the old Dutch manner with a steep gabled roof and French windows. On my left is nothing but green lawn which abuts a thick wood. The empty lawns are waiting until they, too, are filled with dead bodies memorialized by headstones. I’m not a stranger to this cemetery. I used to work here as a kid doing night-time exhumations at the behest of my funeral director dad. Why did we do them at night? So that the general public didn’t have to face the reality of putrid human death, dirt, rotted out caskets, and the worms that feed on it all.
Soon, the flat plains of empty grass are replaced with a field of headstones that must stretch for half a mile. I’m having trouble breathing. I’m sitting on the leather seat, but I feel as though I am floating in the air, as if I’m undergoing an out of body experience. Up ahead in the distance, I spot a group of maybe four headstones I’ve never before laid eyes upon since they have been placed here so recently. I immediately recognize them from Lola’s description. Four plain white stones with the last name Ross chiseled into each one of them as though, even if the women of the family were to marry, they would nonetheless die only with their God given names. Such was the insistent and unrepentant nature of the ever controlling Ross patriarch. God rest his sorry soul.
I pull the hearse off to the left side of the road, cut the engine. Sucking in one last deep breath, I exhale it. Then opening the door, I push myself out of the car. Planting one black, combat booted foot before the other, I head up the grass-covered incline to the four white marble headstones. The grass is smooth and undisturbed, so I have no way of telling which plot belongs to Lola and if she is truly buried there. No choice but to keep walking.
When I come to the stones, I find that I am stricken with a kind of tunnel vision. It means I’m pushing things. Pushing my fragile, damaged brain to its max. The tunnel vision allows me only to read one stone at a time. I read the one on my right first.
It reads: Arthur Ross, b. June 5, 1939 — d. November 15, 2012.
I eye the one to its direct left.
It reads: Martha Ross, b. December 5, 1940 — d. September 30, 1980.
Then I eye the one to the left of that.
It reads: Claudia Ross, b. September 10, 1969 — d. November 26, 2012.
Finally, one more stone. I shift my gaze until it is focused on the inscribed name and dates.
It reads: Lola Ross b. July 8, 1967 —.
The death date is not there. There’s no inscription that bears the name of my true love. Nothing to indicate that she died at all. My heart pounds and my head buzzes. I begin to feel dizzy. The bullet inside my brain is shifting. It must be. It’s the pressure. The kind of pressure I’m supposed to avoid. It’s precisely why I have avoided this place for so long. Is it possible she could be buried somewhere else? Not a chance. This was to be the site. It said so in her Will. A Will I witnessed and executed at her request. Maybe she hated her father, but for some reason, she wished to be buried here beside him. Beside her mother and sister.
But then, she isn’t buried here. Not yet.
“Lola is alive,” I whisper with a dry mouth. “Lola. Alive.”
I turn and attempt a wobbly step back to the hearse.
But that’s when I pass out.
Chapter 11
I awaken to the sound of weeping.
As I attempt to refocus my eyes and clear my head, I find that a funeral procession is making its way slowly into the depths of the Albany Rural Cemetery. I give my head a shake and manage to raise myself up onto one knee as the lead car, a dark gray funeral hearse, not much different from Dad’s, passes me by. There’s a matching gray stretch limousine with tinted windows behind it. No doubt it houses the family of the deceased. Behind that is a long row of cars. Some of them are small and compact, like something a high school or college student might afford. It’s a nice day so the windows are open on the small cars, allowing the sounds of crying and mourning to fill the cemetery.
One of the cars has been spray painted with the words, “AAG will Never Forget You, Amanda.” Below the words is a poster-sized photo of a young lady. A brunette with a long, lush hair, bright eyes and beautiful, alive smile. For a split second, I think I’m seeing the face of Lola as she might have looked back in high school, long before I knew her. But as my grip on reality grows tighter, I begin to deduce that the person now taking her final ride in the hearse is a young woman named, Amanda. Maybe Lola was cut down in her prime, but it hurts my heart to think so beautiful a young lady can have her life snatched right out from under her just when it was beginning.
I raise myself up onto two feet and eye the rest of the procession.
Two more cars spray painted with the same green paint, bearing the same AAG moniker.
“A.A.G.,” I whisper. “Albany Academy for Girls.” The school located directly across from its brother school, The Albany Academy for Boys.
I recall the flags that were flying at half-mast when I picked up Stephen just this morning. The flags made me sad then, and, now, as I stand on the green grass of Lola Ross’s grave, they make me even sadder. What they also make me is suspicious. I feel my built-in shit detector heating up, gears grinding. As I eye the last of the procession pass me by . . . a procession filled almost entirely with teary-eyed and crying teenagers . . . I can’t help but wonder how the beautiful Amanda died.
Did she die far too early due to natural causes or a fatal accident?
Or was she, in fact, murdered?
Chapter 12
It’s going on mid-afternoon by the time I leave the cemetery. If I’m to go with my hunch about a murder having occurred to a student at The Albany Academy for Girls, and that news of it somehow got by me, then it’s probably a good idea to go straight to the source. Now seated back behind the wheel of Dad’s hearse, I speed-dial detective Nick Miller at the Albany Police Department.
When the switchboard operator comes on, I ask for the veteran detective by name, picturing the tall, gray-haired, well-dressed man sitting behind his desk, maybe changing out the bullets on the nine-round clip of his Smith & Wesson department-issued 9 mm. But, instead, all I get is an answering machine. “This is Chief Homicide Detective Nick Miller. I’m either not at my desk or out of the building. Please leave a detailed message along with your name and phone number at the beep and I’ll get back to you A-S-A-P.”
ASAP.
That’s cop talk for “When I damn well feel like it.”
I leave a message simply telling him to call me along with my name and number, even though he already knows the number. I was an Albany cop once upon a time. My vitals are still present and accounted for in the database. Hanging up, I then speed-dial Miller’s cell phone. Same song and dance. A message tells me to leave a message. I hang up knowing that for him not to answer at least one of his phones means that he is indeed tied up somewhere. Tied up being metaphorical in this instance. Moonlight the former English major.
Setting the cell down onto the empty passenger seat, I head for the cemetery gates. I’m not fifty feet of the old stone and black wrought iron gates when I see the gang of reporters gathered outside of them. Both print and televised news are represented while a team of APD blue and whites stand guard, making sure no one gets through the gates. Parked behind the gang of reporters are two squad cars, the engines idle, but the rooftop LED flashers shining brightly even in the daylight.
I pull up to the gate and stop. Because I’m driving a hearse, the reporters point their camera and shoot, the flashes blinding. The video cameras are filming as the entire group rushes the gate. The cops physically try and hold the gang back with their arms and batons.
What the hell is going on?
My gut tells me that whoever died wasn’t just a young attractive teen caught up in an unfortunate circumstance. But that she was the daughter of some very important person or persons. And now her death is becoming a media event, if not a media circus.
I get out of the car and approach the police. One of them turns to me. A beefy man of about thirty who stands almost a head taller than me.
“You with the funeral?” he asks.
“Not at all,” I say, pulling my PI license, showing it to him. “I’m here on different business.”
“Moonlight,” he says, while pushing a cameraman back with his baton. “You’re the crazy man with the bullet in his brain. Tried to bring down the department once. My fucking department.”
He’s smiling at me, but I can see the anger seething in his red, donut fed, Genesee Crème Ale- infused face. The bringing down of the house he’s referring to is the APD Union Pension sponsored cash-for-illegal-body-parts harvesting operation I exposed some years back. Nearly half the APD was investing their hard-earned payment deductions in the scheme a handful of Russian mobsters, along with some police elite, cooked up. That is until I stumbled upon it and exposed it. My actions not only caused a few top cops to lose their jobs, but it also resulted in the then Chief of Detectives crashing and burning, somewhat literally. Since then, my relationship with the Albany cops has been less than cordial, and that’s putting it major league light.
“What’s happening here?” I say. “This all about the girl being buried here today?”
“Wow,” the cop says. “You really are a private detective. Nice ride by the way. You live inside the cemetery, too?”
“Why the press?”
“Amanda Bates just happens to be the daughter of state senator, Jeffrey Bates.” He shakes his head. “Don’t you read the papers, Moonlight?”
I cock my head. “I’m a busy guy.”
“Well, some little teenage son of a brain surgeon tried to have sex with her, and when she said no, he stuffed a sock in her mouth and date raped her anyway. Then, he took pictures of her naked body and posted them on Facebook. She was so humiliated she hanged herself in the basement of her father’s house that very night. She died and now said teenage prick is gonna get busted one way or another.”
I feel the earth shifting under my feet at the news. In my head, I picture those flags flying at half-mast at both the boys’ and girls’ schools.
“I thought it was suicide?” I say.
“Maybe technically, yes. But assisted suicide if you ask me. Whatever you wanna call it, we’re gonna bust his sorry fat ass soon as we get word down from the D.A.”
My heart skips a beat while my built-in shit detector revs up.
Stephen Schroder. It has to be him.
“The young lady in question attended The Albany Academy for Girls?” I ask.
“You’re on a roll, Sherlock. But I’ve been ordered not to talk about it until an arrest is made. So fuck off and be gone.”
“I’ll need you to open the gate for that, Officer.”
“My pleasure, Moonglow.”
“It’s Moonlight.”
“Enough with the banter, asshole. Thanks to you my pension is cut in half.”
I turn, slip back behind the wheel of Dad’s hearse.
“Everybody back!” the cop yells. “Crazy man coming our way.”
The gates open.
I tap the gas and slowly pull on through. Out the corner of my left eye, I catch the big cop rolling an extended index finger around his right temple as if to indicate my head-caseness to the local media. Out my other eye, I catch a few local journalists breaking out in laughter as they get a look at me driving away in a Moonlight Funeral Home hearse.
“So long head-case,” the big cop shouts as the crowd breaks out in laughter.
Scarface comes immediately to mind, his machine guns ablazin’. He wouldn’t put up with this shit.
“You know what?” I say in my best imitation Tony Montana as I pull away from the cemetery. “Fuck you! How about that?”
Chapter 13
I pop the Beatles White Album 8-track cassette into the dash-mounted player.
The Beatles blare.
At the same time, my heart pounds, breathing shallow. The face of the young woman, Amanda Bates, is suddenly imprinted on my brain like the scar from the .22 caliber bullet that penetrated it only a few short years ago. I see her face, and I see the fat face of Stephen Schroder, and I can’t help but place both teenagers in the same bedroom of the same North Albany mansion this past Saturday night.
I listen to Sir Paul singing about being back in the USSR while I punch in Dr. Schroder’s cell phone number with the thumb on my right hand. Pressing the phone to my ear, I wait for him to pick up. After six long rings, he does.
“Guy with your means can’t afford a secretary?” I say, turning down the volume on the music.
“Cut to the chase, Moonlight,” he barks. “I’m on the other line with a
very important call.”
“What happened to calling me Bruce? Or Mr. Willis?”
“Did something happen to my car?”
“Not at all. Something happened to a nice young lady at The Albany Academy for Girls. I just witnessed her funeral procession.”
Coming over the cellular airwaves, a distinct deflating sigh that doesn’t mix all that well with the sound of my pulse pounding in my temples.
“Let me get rid of this call, Moonlight, and then I’ll call you back.”
“I’ll hang on.”
“Suit yourself,” he says, putting me on hold.
A few second later, he comes back on the line.
“Now, what’s this all about?” he says through an exhale so profound I can smell his horrid halitosis through the receiver.
“Your boy, Stephen, have anything to do with the death of a young lady who attended The Albany Academy for Girls, Doc?”
The connection falls silent. Until Schroder breaks it by clearing his throat.
“What exactly are you insinuating, Mr. Moonlight?”
“An Albany cop just told me about a date rape that occurred this past weekend at a house party thrown by a brain surgeon. Being the cunning, but slightly brain damaged, private investigator that I am, I put two and two together.”
“Bravo for you,” he says. “You get a prize.”
“Really,” I say. “What exactly do you have in mind?”
“How’s about: You’re fired?”
“So, I was right. It is your gem of a son we’re talking about. That means you must know all about young Amanda Bates hanging herself after Stephen posted naked pictures of her on Facebook. Christ, Doc, high school is tough enough without having to worry about rape and public humility, don’t you think?”
I feel my hands shaking as if they’re coming unhinged from my arms. What the hell is happening with me? Schroder’s my one and only employer at present and I’m accusing his son of some pretty serious crimes. It’s got to have something to do with seeing Amanda’s face on the car in the funeral procession. A face that seems like it could have belonged to Lola a long time ago.
Moonlight Weeps: (A Dick Moonlight PI Thriller Book 8) Page 4