The Righteous Path

by James D F Hannah

  It’s only January 4, but already I’m beginning to feel like the state capital will never know warmth again. What did Shakespeare call it? The winter of our discontent? I wonder if anyone ever experienced a contented winter up in Albany. Skiers, maybe. Snowboarders. People with the money to hop a flight to Palm Beach.

  I’m mouthing the whiskey glass once more when the footsteps stop. The door opens, and she walks into my office without knocking.

  “Mr. Moonlight,” she says to my back. “I hope I’m not too early.”

  The voice is noticeably slurred and delayed, which I also expected. But then, the woman has been through one hell of a painful ordeal. I chug down what’s left of my whiskey, run the fingers of my free hand down my face, wishing I’d shaved. Ah, what the hell.

  I turn.

  Setting the now empty glass and whiskey bottle inside the open desk drawer, I attempt to smile warmly, but give up trying almost immediately. I close the drawer without slamming it.

  “You’re right on time, Mrs. Parker.” Holding my hand out toward an empty wooden chair. “Please, have a seat.”

  “Do you always drink alone?”

  “Only when I am alone.” I force a second smile for effect, but it’s no use. Then, “Hope it won’t be a problem.”

  “Has it been for you? In the past, I mean?”

  My second smile dissolves like freshly fallen snow on a puddle of warm blood. Do I tell her now about my failed suicide attempt, or do I leave it for later? Maybe she already knows. This is SmAlbany, after all. She closes the wooden door behind her, painstakingly makes her way into the office, gingerly sits herself down. Life is no easy task for this zombie-like woman.

  In truth, she should be dead.

  “I understand if this…my appearance…is difficult for you,” she comments, peering into my face and then lowering her head. She feels ugly. Somehow proud, too, but ugly. She’s badly scarred and to be honest, it makes my back teeth hurt and my throat constrict just to look at her.

  I take a load off in the old swivel chair behind the desk, nod.

  “I’m not fully healed,” she explains. “I may never fully heal.”

  She’s a small, thin, fragile woman. A woman who’s lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. But that doesn’t prevent her from taking pride in putting herself together. She wears an expensive, matching tan jacket and skirt, black leather boots that rise up to her knees. There’s also something that at first appears to be a scarf wrapped around the upper portion of her bird-like neck. But only when you look closer can you see that it’s actually a man’s necktie. A blue and scarlet striped rep tie. No doubt, one of her recently murdered husband’s mementos.

  A snow-white patch covers the empty socket where her right eye used to be before a fireman’s axe chopped through it. The other one is wide open, deep blue, and fully functional. But it’s lost all sign of life.

  Her dirty blonde hair is coming back in places. Patches mostly, like clumps of grass that grow through the cracks in the sidewalk during springtime. Since the peach-fuzz hair is newly sprouted, it does little to hide the edge of the curved plate that’s been inserted in the place where the skull was split and shattered in the axe attack. I’m no expert, but I can’t imagine hair ever growing back there.

  A scar the width of a vein runs from her lower lip up through the upper lip and travels like the jagged line on a roadmap until it meets the damaged eye. Even though four months have passed since the September morning when the attacks occurred, the scar is still thick, purple, and tender looking. Like it formed an hour ago. When her facial muscles constrict and contract, it appears to be throbbing like a live electric cable.

  “I would have met you at your home,” I offer, after a beat. “You had to make the stairs.”

  “I’m not a cripple, Mr. Moonlight,” she insists, her words still slow but direct. “I bear the scars and injuries of a killer who still roams the streets of Albany.”

  “Which is why you are here.” A third attempt at smiling. But I can’t do it. Three and out.

  She inhales a breath and then leans forward. Reaching down, she lifts her bone-colored purse, sets it on her lap. Stuffing her hand inside, she comes back out with a compact disc housed inside a transparent plastic case. She tries to hand it to me from across the desk. But even this simple act seems to take a great effort. And of course, her injuries prevent her from reaching across it, anyway.

  I shoot up fast, hold my hand out for her.

  “Photographs of my son, Christopher. I thought you’d like to see them. See how we raised him.”

  I take the case in my hand. The plastic feels as cold and dead as she looks.

  “This isn’t necessary, Mrs. Parker.”

  I sit back down, stare at the generic CD. It’s got “Chris’s Life” scrawled on the silver metallic side in thoughtful, if not feminine, Sharpie script. She’s even added a little smiley face beneath the name, “Chris.”

  “Call me Joan…please.” The pseudo-drunk way she pronounces her name makes it sound like “Shoan.”

  “Joan,” I repeat, setting the case on the desk. “Makes no difference to me if he was raised by a pack of wolves in the woods.”

  She shoots me a hard look. Something I wouldn’t have thought possible a few seconds before. Despite her crippling injuries, the woman still sports some spunk.

  “My bad,” I say. “I was reaching for a little humor.”

  “I’m not sure I can laugh anymore,” she says.

  I look into her good eye and view a world of pain and anger so profound my heart skips a beat. “Understood,” I say. “Let’s get down to it then, shall we?”

  “Time is of the essence,” she agrees.

  I open the top drawer; pull out a fresh yellow legal pad. I set the pad on the desk beside the CD and close the drawer back up. Fingering a pen, I write down, “Joan Parker, axe attack survivor, wife of Peter Parker, law clerk and murder victim, mother of twenty-two-year-old Chris Parker, the accused.” I finish by scrawling a long line under my notes.

  “Mr. Moonlight, I would like you to show this city that my son, Christopher, is not guilty.”

  “He’s already been charged by Bethlehem’s finest. Murder and attempted murder in the first degree based on the evidence. Based on eyewitness testimony that came directly from you, Joan.”

  “Mr. Moonlight, I have no recollection whatsoever of telling the Bethlehem police, who are most definitely not fine, that my son, Christopher, took an axe to me and his father. My skull was caved in. I was nearly entirely bled out.” Pausing to breathe. Then, “I simply have no recollection of the event.”

  She tries sitting up straighter in the chair, as if adding conviction to a statement she must have delivered a thousand times over the past few months. I know she’s in pain. And for a fleeting moment, I consider offering her a shot of whiskey. But when I picture myself having to carry her back down the stairs, I think better of it.

  What we do, instead, is sit in uncomfortable silence for a short while. But the silence isn’t complete. Outside the window, you can’t help but hear the faint squeal of gulls as they swoop up and down over the river.

  At last, I clear my throat. “Do you feel that you were coerced into pointing the finger at Christopher, Joan?”

  She cups her right hand, brings it to her mouth, coughs into it. “I told you, I don’t recall a thing.”

  I pretend to write down a notation, but in reality, I’m only just scribbling some Xs and Os. When I’m through, I scrawl a line under the scribbles. Moonlight, the detail man.

  “Christopher was two hundred miles away at college in Rochester when Peter and I were horribly attacked. My oldest son, Jonathan, was out to sea with the Navy.” Slamming a now fisted right hand against her stick of a thigh. “There’s a killer out there! He killed my husband! He tried to kill me!”

  I nod. “Have you entertained the thought that your son might be found guilty in a court of law
regardless of my opinion?”

  “Not for a second.”

  “Who’s his lawyer?”

  “Mr. Terry Franklin Kindler.”

  I know the name. Crusty old defense lawyer from across the river in Troy. Type of guy who can afford to hop a flight to Palm Beach when it gets too cold for the wife. I write the name down, anyway, scrawl a line under it. Gives me something to distract myself from Joan’s tragic face.

  “What’s Kindler’s take?”

  Her throat rattles when she clears it, as if it’s still full of arterial blood. “You don’t read the papers, I take it?”

  “I need to hear it from you.”

  “Bethlehem police were too narrow in their search. They set their sights on Christopher and never took their eyes off him.”

  I nod again, as though agreeing. Like it’s about time I stopped disputing her theories. She is a potential client after all, and I don’t have them lining up outside my door. Work ain’t always easy to come by for a head case with a piece of .22-caliber hollow point lodged inside his brain.

  “Will Kindler speak with me?”

  “He’s been instructed to do so.”

  “As I understand it, Christopher is still being held inside the Albany County Correctional Facility?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll need to speak with him also.”

  “It would be in his best interest. Did you know it was his idea to hire you?” She attempts to raise a smile on her pale, hard face. But it has the same appeal as a jagged crack in a concrete sidewalk.

  “Christopher doesn’t know me.”

  “He knows you, Mr. Moonlight. Knows you almost died yourself.” Raising her right hand, touching the side of her head. “Must have taken a great deal of strength to come back from that kind of low point.”

  That answers that. Like I said, SmAlbany. Outside the window, more gulls, more squeals. My botched suicide has made me the subject of local curiosity. Or in Joan’s case, and her son’s, the object of pity. And, interestingly, recommended me to them as a real good fit for their cause.

  Best for me to change the subject.

  “You do realize, Joan, that I may not be able to prove your son’s innocence.”

  I set the legal pad down on the desk, set the pen on top of it.

  “It’s a moot point,” she insists, raising her right hand slowly, touching an extended index finger to the thick purple scar. “You just find the truth, and he will be freed. My son didn’t do this!”

  “Loud and clear. Any idea who might have wanted to kill you? You got any enemies?”

  The question isn’t lifted from the Moonlight private detective boilerplate questionnaire. It’s me trying to act like a real investigator.

  I don’t read the papers every day, but I recall her husband, Peter, got mixed up in testifying against his mob-connected cousin a few years ago. Guy by the name of Freddie “the Fireman” Parker. Methinks old Freddie would most definitely fall into the “enemy” category, especially since he wakes up inside a concrete cell every day thanks to Peter Parker. God rest his soul.

  She grabs hold of her purse strap, stands up as a woman not far from the grave would stand.

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for an enemy who would do such a thing, Mr. Moonlight. That’s precisely why I’m here.”

  No mention of Freddie as a candidate. Maybe her head injuries have caused her to forget all about the family mob connection. I scrawl one last scribble on the notepad before standing, coming around the desk.

  “Guess I should have thought of that,” I say.

  “I’ll allow that one to slide,” she says.

  I show the axe-attack victim to the door.

  Click here to learn more about Murder by Moonlight by Vincent Zandri.

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  1

  By now she knew her father slept hardest in the hour before sunrise and that by the depth of his snoring she could move through the house to pack up her shit without worrying about waking him to face the hairy scene he’d make about trying to get her to stay.

  She crossed into his room and took his wallet from the dresser, behind his snoring and down out the window in the wasted riverbed the coyotes yelping and bawling for food in the dark and remembering the sound of his voice, tired but gentle, she winced as she pulled five twenties out. If there had been more she would have taken it. She knew she’d need more, much more, and soon. Two days soon. A worry that lasted as long as a breath.

  Darkness crawled into every window and covered her feet like sludge. And then the dim green light in the kitchen from the clock on the stove, a signal at the bottom of a black water lake. She looked in some drawers for the phone book and the freezer kicked on and she went stiff and the Percocet drained from her face and the needles of pain in her split lips and swollen eyes and the stitches in her brow pulsed in waves so radiant it was like the Mexican girls were beating her up all over again. She wavered and braced herself against the sink when she felt her stomach gurgle and brought her fist to her mouth until the sickness passed and then padded to her room for two more pills she swallowed without water.

  She found the phone book and sat cross-legged on the plastic floor and read by the flame of her cigarette lighter: Blood Banks, Garbage Collection, Lumber, Optical, Oil Change, Ready Mixed Concrete, Tire Dealers, Tool Repair. Then back a few pages to Taxi Companies When she stood again the dial tone sounded like a woman humming a love gospel, a woman in a barn or an empty church. She almost sang along and a point of light in the center of her head shone through her voice, her whisper like passionate orgasm and the taxi lady on the other end said, “I’m sorry?”

  “For what?” she breathed back. “Wait, wait,” she said. “I mean four twenty-six Cajalco Road. Cajalco Road in Hufford.”

  “No, sweetie, I got that already. I need to know where you’re headed.”

  “Where I’m headed?”

  “Where do you want the cab to take you when the driver arrives?”

  “When’s he coming? When’s he going to get here?”

  Now she was nervous that speaking through split lips made her sound stupid. When she blinked fast the swell in her eyes tightened and stung. She couldn’t stop herself from touching the stitches, still tender and a little damp. And it wasn’t until the taxi lady said, “You still there, dear?” that she remembered she was even on the phone at all.

  “Is he here yet?” she whispered. “Is he here yet, the taxi?”

  “Hufford’s way out. Probably take him twenty, maybe thirty more minutes.”

  Then she thought about staying, putting the money back into his wallet instead of sneaking off like an ingrate shit snake skanky little barn garbage Okie.

  “Honey, I’ve got to know where you want the driver to take you when he gets there. Where it is you’re headed. The driver needs to know that when he picks you up.”

  “The beach.”

  “The beach? You know how much a cab ride is from Hufford all the way out to the beach? That’s about eighty miles. Good lord, sweetie, do you really know where you’re going?”

  The last dose had disappeared entirely and every cell in her face turned into a shard of glass and sliced. Her father coughed and tossed. He cleared his throat.

  “Anywhere,” she said. “I got a hundred bucks, honest to God. A hundred bucks. Wherever that will get me. Just send him. I’ll show him the money as soon as he gets here. Please. Just send him. Please. Just send him. I’ll go wherever he can take me. But I don’t have much time. I have to go now. Now. You know what I mean?”

  After a week he finally admitted that his missing dog King was dead. He sat in his truck out front of his house, sweating through the hazy sun hot through the windshield, the motor off
and the windows up. A brushfire had started over in Wild Horse Canyon earlier that day and the whole truck shook against the violence of the winds storming down from the high desert and down through the Cajon Pass and battering the glass with splintered twigs and grit. Distant hillsides burned with rivers of flames that blew tumbleweeds into feedlots and stables and barns like wheels of wrath sent down from a mountain of punishing judgement.

  For the last six nights he had called for King over the back fence and had beamed a Maglite below only to find a vicious snarl of mesquite and scrub oak and buckbrush growing in aimless arrangement along a stretch of dried-out riverbed dense with a flora of spines. One night he stood calling for three hours straight, his voice finally falling to a rasping reverberation that returned an extra man crawling aged up the bluff until neither his strained gullet nor ringing ears could tell the difference between what was hollered and what was heard, King, King, King, King, King, an aftersound that played in his brain a lunatic preoccupation long after he left the fence and lay awake slack with defeat. He lived alone and had no neighbors to disturb. Next to his house was a wasted space of overgrown mustard brush that spread to another squat house that looked a lot like his. Bare white stucco with a door and a few little windows and beyond that some property a few acres away with a fifth-wheeler and two rusted sheds. Then down the road where it ended at a rise of malformed boulders a house that some nights hosted a ragged traffic of slurring beer drunk laughter in the driveway where black shapes of men swayed and drank in the yellow light that glowed from the garage.

  There was still an hour before sunset. He loaded up two blankets and a carton of black plastic bags into the flatbed and drove to a spot east of the interstate and parked behind a stand of smoke trees and carried the blankets to a rocky switchback that angled down into the riverbed. When he got to the bottom he wavered in the hot gusts. He stood for a while under the shade of a cottonwood and wiped his forehead. Sand blew up into his eyes and when he closed his mouth, he tasted smoke and dirt and ash.