The Fall Moon

by Blake Banner

  “It’s too soon to say that.”

  She offered me a small, quiet snort, with a small smile on the left side of her face. It was an expression of amused defeatism.

  “Let’s say,” she said, “that the lab can extract enough DNA to make a profile. What are we going to compare it to? There is nothing left of the Redferns, and the chances of Pamela having kept anything with Charlie’s…”

  I interrupted her. “We can run comparisons with Ingrid and with Pamela.”

  She made a face and nodded for a bit. “OK, so in the very unlikely event that we can get a DNA sample from the bones, maybe we can prove that the skeletons were related to Ingrid and Pamela, and were probably Amy and Charlie…” She shook her head. “Where do we go from there? What is our next move after that? This is as far as we go.”

  “We can’t know that until we get all the results back.”

  She leaned forward with her elbows on the table. “But we already know, Stone, what those results are going to be. They will get squat from the car. You know that. There is not enough left of the jaws to get reliable dental record IDs, and there will be no DNA left after that fire anyway.”

  I shrugged, feeling unreasonably irritated. I knew she was right, but something inside told me you don’t give up just because you can’t win. You don’t fight just because you can win. I shrugged. “You’re ready to give up…?”

  Her face contracted with anger for a second. Then she sighed. “I’m not saying that.” She spread her hands, her eyebrows arched with exasperation. “But where do we go from here?”

  I looked around, searching the dark, crowded bar for answers. “Feliciano and Julio are nervous.” She made a ‘that’s true’ face. I sipped my beer. “Nervous people do stupid things. They don’t know what we know. They know we know something, but they don’t know what or how much. We still have a couple of plays left before we need to give up.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know! Like maybe worrying them enough so they make that mistake.”

  “Right…” She gestured at me with her right hand open, palm up. “See? That’s more like it.” She made a face like a sulking kid and mimicked me: “Well, if you wanna give up…!”

  “You’re an ass, Dehan.”

  “I know. But I’m fun when you get to know me.” She grinned with very white teeth and started to laugh. That made me laugh. She pointed at me. “You cheer me up. Most of the time I’m up, you know? But I burn a lot of energy. Did you notice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So sometimes I get this sudden slump, especially if I eat too many carbohydrates, and I feel everything is hopeless. You’re good…” She pointed at me again with her finger like a gun. “You stay cool, calm, focused, and you say,” she mimicked a deep, masculine voice, “nervous people make mistakes, we still have a few plays, stay cool, kid…” She laughed again. “I like that. It’s good.”

  “You like that?”

  “You complement me.”

  I shrugged. “What can I say, you look good in jeans. Maybe we should get married.”

  “Asshole. Complement, not compliment.”

  “You could compliment me sometimes.”

  “Yeah, you’d look swell in a tweed jacket, with a pipe and slippers and Schrödinger on your lap.”

  “Oh, you’re the young, beautiful dynamo and I’m the wise old man?”

  This time it was an English accent, like Batman’s Alfred. “So, Schrödinger, my old friend, whom do we think is the perpetrator of this heinous crime?”

  “As, I said before, Dehan, you’re an ass.”

  I was spared her comeback by the arrival of the bright-eyed waitress with our food.

  After that, our conversation rambled. She did a lot of talking: everything from conspiracy theories to Freudian psychoanalysis, mega-politics, Budo and Buddhism to criminology and socio-economics. They were all connected in her mind, and she admitted freely and repeatedly: “I do not know a lot about this, it’s a profound subject—and who has the time, right? Aside from a PhD student!—but you have to ask yourself…” And then she would launch into the question she thought you had to ask yourself. It was fun, and she was interesting to listen to.

  “It’s like reading books.”

  “What is?”

  She licked her fingers and wagged one of them at me. “How things pass from being information to becoming knowledge.”

  I chewed and frowned. “From information to knowledge?”

  “Sure, like Schrödinger’s cat again. Suppose you are looking at the box where the poor damn cat is. Is it dead or is it alive? According to the theory, it is both dead and alive.” She laughed. “To a cop that isn’t so convincing, but let’s say somebody tells you, ‘No, that cat is dead.’ That is information. Let’s say somebody else tells you, ‘No, I heard it meow, it’s alive.’ That is still information. Until you open the box and take the cat out, and hold it and have it claw you, you don’t know the cat is alive.”

  “So you’re saying knowledge is personal experience.”

  “No. Personal experience, which is more than just seeing something, or hearing it, you have to feel it somehow: taste it, smell it, hold it, use it.” I drew breath, but she was off again. “You know? Somebody can explain to you how to use a screwdriver: ‘You hold it with the fat bit in the heel of your hand, find the cut in the head of the screw, fit it in… yadda yadda.’ It’s just information. But pick up a screwdriver and use it, and that becomes knowledge. I think knowledge is when you experience information and it becomes a part of you.”

  I watched her while she folded the potato skin on her plate and stuffed it in her mouth. “You’re very intense, Dehan.”

  She nodded. “Mm-hm.” She swallowed and reached for her beer. “Is that a problem?”

  “No. On the contrary. It’s probably why I married you.”

  “Oh, you married me?” She didn’t give me time to answer. She was off again. “Life is too short not to be intense, Stone. That’s why I don’t waste my time on ninety-nine out of a hundred people I meet. They are moonshine, like those glimmers of moonlight you get on the sea at night. They might be pretty, real alluring sometimes, but they wink and they are gone because they were never real.”

  “They were just information, not knowable.”

  “Right.” She thought about it a moment, then said again, “Right.” She raised her glass and saw it was empty. “Goddamit. How’s a girl supposed to toast?”

  She hailed the bright-eyed waitress.

  “Let’s have two more beers, and when slowcoach decides he’s ready to finish eating, let’s have a bottle of tequila.”

  “You got it!”

  I set to work on the chicken, thinking about what she’d said. I had a funny twist in my belly which I couldn’t identify. It might have been anger at the injustice of Amy and Charlie’s death, it might have been anticipation at the prospect of tackling the Camachos. When I thought about the two boys back at the hotel, I felt the adrenaline burn in my gut. But there was something else too, something I couldn’t identify; something like fear.

  The tequila arrived, with salt and lemon.

  “You know, I am not a big tequila guy…”

  “You are tonight, amigo.” I felt her boot on my chair again and realized the feeling was fear: fear of why she was so passionate about this case—fear of losing her. She poured and smiled and said, “Another night we’ll do whiskey. Salud!”

  We walked back at two AM, through a town that had few sidewalks but many green verges. The sky was vast, the stars beyond counting, and a cool breeze came out of the north and whispered about the impending fall.

  She took my left arm with both of hers and leaned on me as we walked down the quiet path, under the vast sky. She gave my arm a small squeeze and asked, “So you’re going to meet my family, Stone? You got nobody left I can meet?”

  We were walking west and I glanced back over my shoulder. A great glob of molten orange light was bulging over the tr
ee line behind us. I shrugged and smiled. “The fall moon.” I said it half to myself. Then, when she tried to read my face, I said, “Nope. Nobody left but you.”

  “You never talk much about them.”

  I was quiet, listening to the dark echo of our footsteps. “My gran, that’s what I called her, grew up in London during the blitz.”

  “Your grandmother was British?”

  “English. My granddad was a GI. Spent the war over there. Met my gran. They fell in love and married and he brought her back here. She could never get used to how we express our emotions so openly all the time. From as far back as I can remember, she used to sit me on her knee and say,” I did a passable cockney accent, as I remembered it from my gran, “‘John, you just remember, it ain’t necessary for the ’ole bleedin’ world to know what you’re feelin’. You can always have a good ol’ cry when your on your own. But when there’s people abaht, you keep a grip. Chances are,’ she used to say, ‘you’ll have to be the strong one, and if you go to pieces, the ’ole fahkin’ thing will go to pieces wiv’yah!’”

  She was smiling up at me and giggling as we walked. “Fahkin’? She used to say that?”

  “The Brits are a foul-mouthed lot. She used to swear like a trooper. If I fell over and cried she’d say, ‘You’re not dead! Get up and stop fahkin’ snivelin’!’”

  “Wow, that’s hard.”

  “Not at all. We adored each other. She was what you would call ‘knowledge’. Tough as old boot leather, and the heart of a lion. She was irreverent, atheist, no time for bullshit, and at the same time human, humane, compassionate and loving. A hard act to follow.”

  “I hear you.”

  “She was my dad’s mother. He inherited her values, but he was gentler, perhaps weaker. My mother was sweet and kind, all apple pie. I was a happy child. But somehow I guess I just never felt I was part of what was going on. My gran was the only person I really identified with, who really understood me. It seemed to me she had it nailed. Life is tough. You have to be tough to get through it. Where she was special was that she realized that being tough meant also having the capacity to love.” I laughed. “I don’t talk like this, Dehan. Stop making me drink tequila.”

  “Nah. It’s good to let off steam sometimes. Don’t worry, I’ll still respect you in the morning. I promise.”

  We had just turned into the parking lot at the hotel. I could see the Jaguar gleaming under a lamp, and a little beyond it the ugly shape of the Audi Q7. Then, as we moved toward the main doors of the hotel, I saw a figure leaning against one of the columns on the porch. He was smoking and I saw the red glow of his cigarette move to his mouth, burn bright, and then drop down by his side again.

  Dehan released my arm. “He’s waiting for us. The bar is closed by now. You armed?”

  “It’s in the car.”

  “Don’t do that again. Keep it with you.”

  “OK, boss.”

  “I’m serious.”

  We were close enough now to see his eyes. It was Einstein. He released a trail of smoke from his nose. “You been out on the town?”

  I smiled amiably and before Dehan could say anything, I asked, “Cigarette before bed?”

  He shook his head. “We’re having a drink with el jefe. They kept the bar open specially for him. He has that kind of pull, you know? He told me to wait for you, and bring you in for a drink.”

  “Tell him thank you from us, but we’re on our way up. Thanks all the same.”

  We went to move past him. He dropped his cigarette and his right hand went behind his back. He was still staring at the butt on the ground as he crushed it with his toe. “Detective Stone, Detective Dehan, I think you will want to talk to Mr. Camacho.”

  He looked up from the crushed cigarette into my face, like he was hoping I’d make an issue of it. I knew Dehan had her Glock in her hand, though he couldn’t see her just behind me. I smiled at him again. “Mr. Camacho? Julio Camacho?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “Well, gee, why didn’t you say so?” I turned to Dehan. “We’d love to talk to Julio Camacho, wouldn’t we, darling?”

  “Nothing I’d rather do.”

  I saw the way she was looking at Einstein and preempted her. One thing we did not need that night was a killing. I turned back to him, still smiling amiably. “Oh, by the way, just one small thing.” He jerked his chin at me. “Next time you go to pull a gun on me, be sure and shoot me. Because if you don’t, I will shove it so far up your ass I’ll blow your brains out with it. Now, lead the way to your jefe, Einstein.”

  He shouldered past me to try and regain some of his dignity, but I was about six inches taller and forty pounds heavier, so it didn’t really work out for him. As we followed him past a scared-looking receptionist, Dehan made a face and said, “Eight out of ten. It made up in feeling for what it lacked in originality.”

  I said, loud enough for the jerk to hear, “When I kill him, I’ll try and make it original.”

  She grinned. As we stepped into the short passage to the bar, she said, “I’m going to the can. Don’t start without me,” and ran back toward reception.

  Einstein turned and shouted after her. “Hey!”

  “Be patient, Einstein. She’ll be back.”

  He scowled at me. “You guys give me a pain in the ass, you know that? And stop calling me Einstein.”

  “And I thought we were getting on so well.”

  Five minutes later, Dehan came back. We moved to the bar and he opened the door for us. Dehan went in ahead, and as I passed him, Einstein said, “You got a big mouth, pendejo.”

  I thought that lacked both feeling and originality, but I didn’t have time to tell him so. Two tables had been drawn together. Sitting at them were five men, all in suits. They had a bottle of tequila on the table, with a saucer of lemon and a salt cellar. I counted four weapons on the table: three Glock automatics and one Smith & Wesson 29 revolver.

  One of the men sitting was Einstein’s friend, Godzilla. I figured the Smith & Wesson was his. Besides him, there was a short, fat guy with a moustache. Even his thousand dollar suit couldn’t make him look like anything but a thug. Next to him was a guy in his late thirties with skin like damaged tree bark. He had a ponytail and a Winston cigarette hanging from his mouth. In the middle of this group there were two men whose suits had cost more than a thousand bucks and more than two. They looked groomed. They were not visibly scarred and something about them said that occasionally they used their brains for something other than killing, screwing and getting stoned.

  The one on the right was younger and had ‘crown prince’ written all over him. The one on the left had olive skin and blue-black hair oiled slick, but his eyes were an unsettling shade of pale blue. He gestured with both hands at the chairs opposite him.

  “Detective John Stone, Detective Carmen Dehan, the 43rd’s cold case unit. Sit. Please don’t worry. I do not intend to kill you tonight. We will just have a drink and talk things over. I am Julio Camacho.”

  THIRTEEN

  Einstein stepped toward Dehan to frisk her. Her voice was quiet, but there was no mistaking her conviction.

  “Put your hand on me…” He stopped, hesitated and glanced at Camacho. She said, “Go ahead, just put your hand on me once…”

  Camacho sighed and shook his head briefly. “Déjelo, Gustavo, guarde la puerta, que no entre nadie. Néstor, vaya con el.”

  Godzilla got up and he and Einstein, aka Nestor and Gustavo, went off to guard the door. Dehan and I sat. Camacho poured tequila and I said, “You may be interested to know that we found the car.”

  He let out a soft grunt as he punched the cork back in the bottle. “The car,” he said, then pulled down the corners of his mouth and hunched his shoulders. “The car. You say this like it is gonna mean something to me. What car are you talkin’ about, Detective Stone?”

  I nodded a few times and looked at the glass of tequila in front of me. “Oh.” I said it like he’d just told me something. Then I sh
ifted my eyes to look into his. “We’re going to play this game? OK. So, what do you want, Julio? I’m tired and I have a long day tomorrow.”

  Again the little, impatient shake of the head. “No, we are not playing games. What I want,” he turned to look at Dehan, “is to know why the fock you investigatin’ me and my brother. You go to my brother’s house, you ask questions about what he was doin’ six years ago, who he knew…” He shrugged, spread his hands and narrowed his eyes, looking around the room like maybe somebody could explain all this craziness to him. “What the fock, man?”

  Dehan echoed the shake of his head. “Explain to me how that is any of your goddamn business.”

  “How is it my business? How is it my business? It’s my business because I busted my balls dragging my brother and me out of the fockin’ sewer so we could live like respectable citizens. We left all that shit behind, you understand me? But hijos de puta like you ain’t about to let us move on and live in peace. No! You keep hunting us down like dogs, framin’ us for every fockin’ deal and murder you can’t solve, hanging your fockin’ crimes on us. You got a cold case you can’t solve? That’s OK, hang it on the fockin’ Camacho brothers! You got a dead body you can’t explain, because your cops are too fockin’ stupid? Don’t worry, hang it on the Camacho boys. Huh?”

  “Stop,” I said. “You’re breaking my heart. They were good boys. They never disemboweled anyone unless they really had to. Give me a break, Julio. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to, Little Red Riding Hood? I’ve seen what happens to guys who upset you and your brother, so quit the big victim act!”

  Dehan leaned back in her chair and rested her ankle on her knee. “You want to know why we were talking to Feliciano? I’ll tell you. Because we connected you and your brother to the Redferns, and to the kids. You spent twenty years dodging the bullet, Julio. But it’s catching up with you, and Amy and Charlie were two kills too many.”