Do Not Enter This Driveway Unless You Have Called First! This Means You!
For a brief moment, I sit behind the wheel of the idling hearse, and contemplate the sign. In Walls’s defense, I can’t imagine the horror he must feel when he’s trying hard to concentrate on a new book or a new batch of poems only to be unexpectedly interrupted by an uninvited guest. Or worse, one of his angry ex-wives.
On the other hand, the words on the sign are menacing enough to give me pause. I mean, what if Roger’s suddenly returned home and is now standing at the top of the drive, an automatic rifle gripped in his hands? He’s already shot somebody once before for having trespassed on his property. Who’s to say he wouldn’t do it again, even if it means jail time?
But then, the whole point to this little exercise is that Roger is in fact, not home. Roger is off on one of his benders. Roger isn’t home to stop intruders from coming up the drive uninvited any more than he’s around to put a stop to a nosy head-case private dick like myself.
Tossing the hearse back in drive, I start up the driveway, and head on through the gate.
The driveway isn’t paved. The gradual incline is about a half mile long, both sides lined with oak trees that won’t be blossoming for another week or two. At the end of the road is the house. It’s a typical two-story white farmhouse with a painted metal roof, single-paned, double-hung windows, and a wraparound porch. Near the steps that lead up to the porch, a two-person swing hangs down from the rafters by means of four chains. The swing is empty, even on a warm, early spring day like this one.
I stop the hearse and get out. I’m not halfway to the porch steps when the front door opens.
“Who the fuck are you?” a woman shouts.
I stop in my tracks. It’s got to be Walls’s wife. And if it’s Walls’s wife and she’s as crazy as he is, she might just be carrying a gun.
“I’m sorry,” I offer from down on the narrow, slate-covered path. “I know the sign says to call. But I didn’t think you’d mind.”
The woman is standing inside the open door. From what I can see, she’s a small but nicely curved woman, with thick red hair and greenish blue eyes that laser into me even from where’s she’s perched inside the open door. I’m not entirely sure, but from where I’m standing, it looks like she’s holding a beer bottle in her left hand.
“My name is Richard Moonlight,” I say. “I understand Roger has gone missing. His agent, Suzanne Bonchance, has hired me to look for him.”
Silence.
“I thought I would start by visiting his home first.”
More silence.
“You’re his wife, Sissy, am I right? The actress? You might be able to shed some light on where he went. Plus, you must be really worried.”
Even more silence. I stand there on the path looking dumb and feeling even dumber.
She lifts her left hand, takes a swig of beer. “She sent you here, did she?”
Referring to someone as Bonchance in in the third person instead of using her real name is never a good sign. But then, what the hell do I know? I’m just the hired hand trying to do my job. It only makes sense that I interview the old ball and chain. Ball and chain number eight, or so I’m told.
“All right, come on up,” she says, after a time.
I make it up the rest of the path and climb the stairs onto the porch.
“You want a beer?” she asks, not cordially, but not impolite, either.
“Might as well,” I say, watching her turn and head for the interior of the house. “Seems to be the thing to do today.”
“Around here, it’s the thing to do every day,” she says, as I step into the house, my eyes glued to her heart-shaped ass, which happens to be nicely packaged in a pair of tight and pricey, Lucky Brand Jeans. “Night time, too.”
“Sounds fun,” I say closing the door behind me.
“Fun?” she laughs. “You obviously haven’t met Roger.”
“Not officially, no.” I think about telling her about his visit to my college campus years ago. But then she’ll get an idea of how old I am and she’ll figure out that she was probably a babe in swaddling clothes back then.
“Well, then, you have no idea just how much fun you’re missing, Mr. Moonlight.”
“Call me Dick,” I say.
She bursts out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” she says through a snort-filled chuckle. “It just sounded funny the way you said it . . . Call. Me. Dick.”
Turns out Mrs. Walls is younger than I thought. Young enough to still be into dick jokes, anyway.
I follow her into the kitchen at the end of the corridor. Laid out on the counter beside the coffee maker and the microwave is a mirror. It’s got cocaine on it, cut into the cutest little white lines you ever did see. An American Express credit card and a rolled up dollar bill are set on the mirror glass beside them.
“Want a blast?” she offers. “Dick.” More laughing.
“Usually people offer me tea or coffee when I first enter into their household.”
She leans over the mirror, shoves the dollar up into her nostril with the index finger and opposing thumb on her right hand, and snorts up a line like a human vacuum cleaner.
“Tea and coffee is for fairies,” she says, lifting some of the coke off the mirror with the pad of her right index finger, rubbing it onto her gums. “Coke is more fun.”
She goes to hand me the dollar bill. The hollow-point bullet rattling around inside my brain . . . the last thing I should be doing is snorting coke and getting my synapses into a pulsating turmoil. I am however, working. Imbibing a little might loosen up Mrs. Walls’s lips. The lips on her mouth, that is. The things one has to do in the name of good detecting. Moonlight the Mercenary.
As usual, Richard Moonlight, is about to make the wrong decision. In the line of duty. I take the dollar bill, head on over to the mirror, and dig right the fuck in.
Chapter 10
BACK WHEN I WAS just a kid—a teenager—my dad used to insist on smelling my breath whenever I came home from a night out with my friends. It’s not that he didn’t expect me to have a good time and do those things boys and girls will do when they are coming of age. He didn’t mind if I drank a beer or two, so long as I wasn’t driving and so long as I wasn’t getting in the car with any of my friends who might be drinking and driving. But he wasn’t looking for the smell of beer so much as he was looking for pot. Dad was a single parent, and a conservative one at that. Smoking pot, he used to say, was a wrong that would inevitably lead to other wrongs. All it would take was one toke and I’d be heading down that dark, slippery-sloped, heroin-LSD-crystal meth tunnel from which there was no return other than inside one of the Moonlight Funeral Parlor pine boxes. Whether or not dad was way off base about the effects of recreational drugs leading to hard-core narcotics, I never lost sight of the true meaning behind his paranoia. Once you take the leap and make that first wrong decision, it can often lead to other, even more wrong decisions.
Case in point.
Snorting an innocent line or two, and washing it down with a couple of cold beers, with Sissy Walls may sound innocent enough, in relative terms. After all, I’m here to get information about the secret hide out location of her husband. And if she’s in the middle of partying, the last thing I want to be is a party pooper. Partiers like it when other people party with them. They enjoy forming a bond with like-minded people. In doing so, they form loose lips. They talk. A lot. And that’s exactly what I wanted from Sissy Walls. Loose lips.
Problem is, those few innocent lines and beers quickly turned into a bunch of lines and a bunch of beers and the next thing you know, we’re tearing one another’s clothes off on the way to her bedroom.
An hour later, I’m lying naked beside the equally naked Mrs. Walls, in her king-sized marriage bed, wondering how the hell I got here but knowing full well it has to do with making that first wrong decision by snorting that first skinny, delicious line.
“Was it good for you,
too, cowboy?” she asks, while firing up a post-sex cigarette.
“It was all my pleasure,” I tell her. “Believe me. You’re a little spitfire. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I don’t mind your saying so,” she says, setting the lighter back down on the night stand, exhaling that initial nicotine-laced hit of blue smoke. “As you no doubt already know, Roger is getting on in years, and his bedroom performances aren’t exactly what they used to be.”
“Viagra,” I say, not without a chuckle.
“Viagra only works if you’re not drunk. It’s powerless against whiskey dick.”
I turn to get a look at her then. She’s lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, smoking. An unhappy and extremely attractive young woman who no doubt was caught up in the fever of Roger’s charm, only to realize a short time later that infatuation is not spelled the same as love. Not even close.
“We’ve partied and done the wild thing,” I say after a time. “And it’s been lovely. But I eventually have to get around to the reason for my visit.”
She smokes, exhales.
“Do I have any idea where my husband could have gone?” she sighs, posing the question for me.
“That’s a good question to start with.”
“And his hotshot Manhattan agent just can’t rest until she finds him.”
“Formerly from Manhattan agent. But yes, she can’t rest.”
She turns to look at me over her shoulder. “How much is she paying you to lasso him?”
“Enough. Does it matter?”
“Well, I were you, I’d get some of that money upfront. She tell you why she wants you to find him?”
“She doesn’t have to. Nor is it my business. But she did tell me she’s run into trouble as of late and Roger is pretty much her only client these days. She doesn’t get him back behind a typewriter, she doesn’t eat. Or something along those lines.”
She laughed. Snorted out her snowflake-chilled nostrils, is more like it.
“Mr. Moonlight,” she says, “Suzanne Bonchance has some money. Some. Money. But not all of it from the sales of her client’s books. Never mind Roger Walls.”
I roll over, plant my elbow on the bed, rest the side of my head on my fisted hand. Using my free hand, I snatch the cigarette away from her, steal a slow drag, hand it back. Why is it that everyone smokes when you’re trying to quit? Moonlight the Hopelessly Addicted.
“I’m all ears,” I say, placing the cigarette back in her hand.
“Let me ask you a question,” she says. “Did you like that coke we just did?”
I’m not sure if I could tell the difference between good coke and bad coke. But I’m not about to let her know that.
“Primo,” I say, taking a shot at getting it right. “The best.”
“Yup, not bad, right? You know where Roger gets his shit?”
“You mean, who he buys it from?”
The invisible light bulb flashes on over my head.
“His agent,” I say.
“Hey, New York’s top agent has not only fallen from glory with her literary stealing act, but she’s been forced to resort to some alternative, bottom-feeding ways of making a living. She tell you about the FBI investigation?”
I picture the Suzanne Bonchance I had lunch with just a few short hours ago. Done up perfectly in a dark suit, not a strand of hair out of place. Maybe she was sucking down the martinis but she didn’t appear to be getting drunk. Despite the slurring of certain words, she seemed pretty much in control. But then, she did hardly touch her food. If there’s one substance on earth that will kill an appetite, it’s blow.
“She hasn’t mentioned it,” I admit, remembering how the agent spoke about prank phone calls. Somebody who was out to get her for what she’d done. That someone most likely being the man whose manuscript she stole. Ian Brando.
Sissy stamps out her spent cigarette, rolls over to face me, pulling the covers up over her shoulders like she’s only seconds away from closing her eyes and going to sleep. And maybe she is.
“From what Roger has told me, she’s been accused of cashing some of her former client’s royalty statements, and keeping the money for herself. That’s a no-no.”
“I haven’t heard anything about extortion. I didn’t see anything about it when I researched her.”
“It’s still an ongoing investigation. It isn’t public yet.”
If what Sissy’s telling me is the truth, then either Bonchance is going to have a bit more explaining to do about her past or I’m going to give some serious thought about, first, withdrawing my book from her consideration and, second, quitting my quest to find Roger Walls. For now I’ll give my client the benefit of the doubt and chalk up Sissy Walls as a more or less drunk, jilted, and just plain bored young housewife looking to piss on Suzanne while she’s down. After all, Suzanne thought it would be a good idea for me to talk with her. If she thought for a split second Sissy would paint the lit agent as a drug running loser, two steps ahead of the cops, she would have insisted I stay away from Old Chatham altogether.
“I’ll look more into it when I have the chance.”
“She pay you yet? Give you an advance for your services, Moonlight?”
Sissy has a point.
“No. But I rarely ask for one.”
“Well, far be it from me to give you advice. You being a professional private dick and all.” She shifts her hand under the covers, grabs hold of my now sleeping manhood. “But I’d ask for some upfront money before you waste another second trying to find my drunk husband . . . cash.”
I gently take hold of her hand, move it away from my golden jewels.
“I can take a hint,” she says. “Party’s over.”
“I gotta' get to work at some point,” I say, sliding out of bed, bending over, gathering up my clothes. The few pieces of clothing that made it up to her room, that is. “So, you gonna' tell me where you think I should start looking for your husband?”
She rolls her eyes. “Jesus, do you really have to find him, Moonlight?”
“He’s your sig other, Sissy. Don’t you want him back, safe and sound?”
A grin forms on her delicate and all too inviting mouth. “I hate the man’s guts, if you want to know the truth. It’s peaceful not having him around. Roger is what you call a heavy. It’s all about him and him alone. He’s my biggest mistake.”
I look into her eyes. Eyes that aren’t afraid to look away from mine. Sissy is most definitely telling the truth when she says she hates her husband. Excuse me . . . her missing husband.
“He’s a writer,” I say after a long, heavy pause. “Writer’s live in their own selfish world. So I’m told.”
“Roger’s world is one hell of a place to live in, believe me. It’s as vast as it is close-minded, and it is hell on earth.”
“So where should I start, Sissy?”
“I were you, I’d head back over to Albany, Google ‘Seedy Joints, Grills, and Tittie Bars.’ Then begin with the A’s. With a little luck, you’ll catch up to him by the time you make it to the P’s.”
“That’s not a whole lot to go on.”
“Hey, you’re the investigator. You’ll think of something, Mr. Rockford.”
“You’re too young to remember The Rockford Files.”
“But not too young for Hulu.com. I get to watch every episode for free.”
I slip into my underwear and jeans. My socks and boots are downstairs. “Let me ask you one last question. If Roger is aware of the shit Suzanne could be pulling, why does he stick with her? He’s a big, famous writer. He could have any agent he wants. Why not fire her like everyone else has?”
“If I had a dime for every time I’ve asked him that same question, I would have my own place by now . . . In the deep fucking blue sea, the Caribbean, far away from him.”
Looks like it’s not only Suzanne who’s leading a secret life, separate from the literary life. Or maybe she and Roger are in cahoots together, partnering up on some
serious drug running. But why would a rich and famous man of words take a chance like that? I could press Sissy more about the true nature of Walls’s and Bonchance’s relationship, both personal and professional, but I decide to let it go for now. I just want to get the hell out of that bedroom and out of Walls’s house. I slip my unbuttoned button-down work shirt over my head, let it hang out untucked.
“Don’t bother getting up,” I insist. “I’ll let myself out.”
“I had a nice afternoon, Detective Dick.”
“It was rather swell. I’ll be seeing you in all the unfamiliar places.”
I remove a card from my pocket, leave it on her dresser.
“How poetic. You should think about becoming a writer.”
“Thanks, I’ll take your advice into consideration. In the meantime, you think of something else besides good old Google, give me a call. Day or night.”
“Maybe I’ll call just to call,” she says, that grin growing into a full-blown smile. “You look like the phone-sex type.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” I say, reciting one of Dad’s famous lines.
“What the hell does that mean?” she demands.
I exit the bedroom at a half-jog, without explaining.
Chapter 11
MY SOCKS AND BOOTS back on my feet, I fire up Dad’s hearse, and leave the Wall's house behind. With my luck, the literary hothead will be heading up the driveway while I’m heading out. I imagine his gray head and thick beard, the exposed skin on his round face turning red-hot with anger. Maybe he’ll slam the brakes on his ride, fishtail it in the middle of the drive, making it impossible for me to pass. Then he’ll get out, cradling a loaded rifle in his hands. A rifle barrel as deep and black as eternity itself will be the last thing I remember as he blasts me to Kingdom Come. Next thing I’d know, I’d either be riding that wormhole to heaven or to hell or, at the very least, waking up in the recovery room of the Albany Medical Center, what’s left of my respiratory system hooked up to some life support machine.
Moonlight Sonata: (A Dick Moonlight PI Thriller No. 7) Page 6