Moonlight Sonata

by Vincent Zandri

  Then I feel it.

  The bump.

  They ram into my backside, and hit the horn. They’re so far up my ass I can practically see the black chewing tobacco juice drooling from their filthy mouths. I’m not about to trade paint with a couple of country bumpkins. This is Dad’s special ride. His pride and joy. He entrusted its care to me, and I’m not about to allow any harm to come to this black baby.

  Speeding down the narrow country road, I yank out my .38, tuck it under my right thigh. Then, bracing myself, I hit the brakes while quickly spinning the wheel to the right. The hearse does a complete rubber-burning, one-eighty, fishtailing in the middle of the road, the front now facing a pickup turned so hard and abruptly to the left, the entire truck tips up on the right passenger-side wheels. The truck nearly flips onto its side before slapping back down hard on all four wheels.

  The rednecks have come to a dead stop, the truck having stalled out.

  I slide my foot off the brake and slowly draw up next to them, now gripping the .38 in my right shooting hand. Rolling down the window, I cock the hammer while keeping it hidden.

  “Looks like we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot, boys,” I say.

  “You stupid motherfucker,” says the driver. The bearded one. Harlan.

  Over his right shoulder, I see the clean-shaven one slowly reaching for the hunting rifle racked over the seat.

  “I wouldn’t do that I were you, slick,” I say, raising up the .38 and planting a bead on them.

  He lowers his hand.

  “You come snooping around here again, Moonlight,” says the bearded one, “we’ll shoot you for real. You got that?”

  “If I didn’t know any better, Mr. Redneck,” I say, “I’d interpret your words as downright unfriendly and non-country-folk-like.”

  “You just stay away from Mr. Roger Walls, you hear?”

  And then it dawns on me. “You two clowns work for him, don’t you? You work for Roger.”

  “What of it? We’re his bodyguards. We keep an eye out for him, and he pays us real good.”

  “Redneck bodyguards. How quaint.”

  “Fuck you, Moonlight.”

  “Easy, chief. We more or less work for the same dude. At the very least, we both have the literary geniuses’ well-being in mind.” Fishing for a card in my pants pocket with my free hand. When I find one, I slide it out, and toss it into the street. “You boys happen to hear anything about Roger and his whereabouts, I should hope you’ll give me a call. Day or night. Your future employment might depend upon it.”

  “And what if we don’t, jerk?”

  “I’m not sure Roger would like that. Chances are he might shoot ya’.”

  “I’m not so sure he’d like to know about you balling his wife, neither.”

  Maybe it’s the effects of the coke wearing off, but his words hit me harder than the grill on that truck.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Redneck.” Pulling back the .38, I hit the gas and pull forward. Making a three-point turn in the road, I head back in the direction of Albany, burning rubber as I speed past the pickup.

  Taking one last look at it from the rearview, I see the bearded redneck standing in the middle of the road, bending over to grab hold of the business card. I see something else, too. A third head. Specifically, a bald head that belongs to another man who’s popped up out of his hiding place inside the pickup’s cab.

  I don’t let up on the gas until I make it to the highway. Speed traps be damned.

  Chapter 13

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER I’m back in Albany, inside my first-floor riverside loft. Since it’s going on five in the afternoon and I’m still shaking from coke withdrawal, and from having been assaulted by two rednecks and their pickup, I decide to crack a beer. Maybe it’ll help calm me down. I’ve been drinking all day, so I’ll make it my last before meeting up with writing prof Gregor Oatczuk. Moonlight the Optimist.

  Setting the cold beer down on the butcher-block counter, I try to make some sense out of this case. It was only this morning that I was officially hired to find Roger Walls, but instead of having spent the day on his trail, no matter how vague a trail is it, I’ve spent my time uncovering evidence that tells me my client, the fallen uber-literary agent, Suzanne Bonchance, is a liar and a cheat. Which doesn’t bode well for my placing any significant trust in her, not to mention establishing any confidence that I’m going to be paid on time and in full.

  I drink some beer. It tastes good.

  “So then, Moon,” I say out loud to myself in the empty loft. “What have you got?”

  I’ve got a famous writer who left town a week or so ago without leaving a single word to anyone about where he was going or what he was doing. Which in itself doesn’t seem to be of great concern to anyone close to him since he’s been known to go off on drinking binges for up to two weeks at a time, only to return to his hometown of Chatham broke, filthy, and exhausted. It also further explains why no one has called the police, aside from the fact that Walls shot someone who was trespassing on his property once upon a time and even though he was never convicted and sent downriver, his angry disposition—for lack of a better term—is still fresh in the minds of the boys in blue.

  While Wall’s wife Sissy clearly hates her husband and is willing to cheat on him at any given opportunity, there is one person in this whole thing who is concerned about Walls, and that’s the aforementioned criminal literary agent. Which is where this whole thing begins to stink in the first place. Said agent has fallen from her former glory and fallen hard. Someone who was once one of the most respected and famous agents in the industry has now become a woman scorned. A woman who used to pride herself on an iron fist who could demand the highest bid on any book she was peddling, but who now has been abandoned not only by her entire client list, but by New York City itself—the mecca of literary success. What’s more, it’s possible she has the FBI after her, along with her plagiarism victim Brando.

  I might feel a little sorry for Bonchance, but the iron lady has no one to blame but herself. In an uncharacteristic lapse of good judgment, she went and stole a manuscript she had initially rejected and then sold it to Hollywood for six hundred thousand dollars. Even though, she claimed to have simply borrowed the title and some of the ideas, it was determined in a court of civil law that she pretty much ripped the whole thing off. But it’s not Bonchance’s mistake or lapse of judgment that’s so bothersome. What I have trouble with is her not having leveled with me from the beginning. And now I find out from Wall’s wife that she might be dealing dope in order to make up for lost revenues, and that federal agents are on her trail for having cashed royalty checks from some of her former clients.

  Okay, I know what you’re thinking.

  None of this should be any of your business, Moonlight. You’ve been hired to find Walls and that should be your only concern. Your client’s history has nothing to do whatsoever with your objective. Or does it? From what Bonchance claims, Walls is the only client she has left. The major question raised is this: why would someone of his status and world-wide fame decide to stick it out with a known cheat? Why, when everyone else has jumped ship, including the Association of Authors’ Representatives, would he decide to stay aboard when the vessel is clearly sinking, if not already sunk?

  Bonchance claims Walls hasn’t written anything of significance in ten years. Anything but some poems, that is. Makes me wonder if the word “rich” still applies to this famous writer. Money doesn’t grow on trees and even the largest bank accounts can dwindle down to nothing if there isn’t anything filling it back up from time to time. Something tells me Bonchance’s and Wall’s relationship is more than just literary, and that the common denominator might have something to do with two book pros who have known what it is to be on top and now are experiencing the bottom together. Take it from someone who knows, life at the bottom can be a desperate and black experience. The dime-sized scar and the metal
in my cerebral cortex is evidence of that.

  I drink some more beer, feel the cold, sudsy liquid coat the back of my throat.

  I have to wonder if Roger Walls is simply on one of his typical benders, or if he’s run off for a different reason. And if that reason has more to do with Suzanne Bonchance than it does his need to skip town for a while in an alcohol-soaked haze.

  Maybe his buddy Gregor Oatczuk will be able to shed some light on the subject. If he claims to know Roger Walls well, then maybe he can at least point me in the right direction as to the writer’s whereabouts. In theory, at least. As I down the rest of my beer, I begin to feel a slight sickness in my stomach. Maybe it’s the effects of a big lunch and a dessert of cocaine, sex, and more beer, but the sickness tells me I might not like what I find when, and if, I finally uncover Walls’s location. It tells me that I might indeed find the writer but that the writer might not be alive.

  I make a time check.

  Five fifteen in the late afternoon. Time to meet up with Erica and Professor Oatczuk. Crushing the beer can in my hand, I toss it onto the wooden counter like Joe Muscles and exit the loft.

  Chapter 14

  IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I’ve driven through the state university campus at Albany. Whoever designed the place back in the late sixties must have had a grudge against anyone who enjoys knowing where they are going. In a word, the place is a confusing maze of parking lots, white, post-modern concrete, and glass and steel buildings that look like they were constructed more for the set of a Star Wars movie than on behalf of educating the youth of the world. The campus wouldn’t be so confusingly intimidating if it were made up of only one type of each building. But instead, the planners decided to create four sets of identical buildings laid out in identical fashion on four identically sized flat-land parcels which, when combined, form a perfect giant square. It’s confusing because you can park your ride in one parking lot and then, later on, mistakenly find yourself searching for it in an entirely different lot that looks exactly the same as the lot you originally parked in. You following me here? You won’t realize you’re looking in the wrong place until a half-hour or so has passed because the lot and its layout is identical to the three other lots beside it.

  In order to avoid the problem of getting lost, I don’t park in the campus parking lot, but inside the lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts, which is located directly across the street from the campus’s main entrance. Crossing over the double-laned Washington Avenue, I pat my chest for my .38, which is concealed under my leather coat. I already know it’s there, but somehow it feels good just to touch it. Not that I expected any kind of shootout to happen inside the state university campus. But a man has got to be prepared these days. Who knows what a frustrated writer like Gregor Oatczuk is capable of when push comes to severe shoving?

  Once on the main campus, I shoot across the main green until I come to a campus directory that’s housed inside a glass case mounted to a concrete balustrade. It tells me the big, white, four-story, concrete-paneled structure set before me is the English Department. Not a very inspiring building for writing new poems and prose. But, then, what the hell do I know? I was groomed for the funeral business. I grew up looking at stiffs day in and day out. Maybe death is not the most inspiring thing in the world for a young kid, but it seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. Maybe it explains why I had no trouble making the transition to cop and witnessing my fair share of violent deaths while on my twenty-year watch. Including my own near death.

  I cross an inner campus road, approach the building, and make a right around its far corner and onto the main campus quad, which abuts one of the many university student parking lots. As promised, my liaison, MFA candidate and young poet, Erica, is waiting for me at our appointed time in her little red convertible which is parked in the far most interior space in the lot. She spots me, smiles sweetly, and gets out of the car.

  “Hope I’m not stealing you away from your poetry,” I tell her as she approaches me. She’s dressed in the same short skirt as earlier, knee high socks under a pair of brown leather boots. Her sandy brown hair is blowing in the wind and her brown eyes are lit up in the bright sun beaming onto the open-air quad.

  “Not at all,” she smiles. “I only write at night, when the cool, calm silence makes everything grow still and all right.”

  “You’re a poet and you know it, Erica.”

  “No lie that I try.”

  Reaching out, she takes hold of my hand. The feel of her hand wrapped around mine gives my heart a bit of a pleasant start. Moonlight the Romantic. Or Moonlight the Dirty Old Man.

  “Come on,” she insists. “Oatczuk doesn’t like it when people run late for an appointed meeting.”

  “God forbid,” I say. “We might make him late for a faculty meeting or something.”

  Together we head inside the building, take the stairs to the second floor where we enter through a pair of double doors. Erica leads me down a narrow corridor that accesses classrooms and faculty offices. We make it about midway down the corridor until we come to a closed door, a metal nameplate screwed into it bearing the name Gregor Oatczuk.

  Oatczuk. Poor bastard must have had a rough time in grammar and high school with a name like that.

  Erica knocks.

  “Come,” exclaims a deep voice from behind the door.

  Erica opens the door, steps inside. I follow.

  The writing professor is seated behind a big, antique, wooden desk. He’s heavyset, in his late thirties or early forties, and sporting horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He’s got a four- or five-day beard going, and this long, dark hair that’s parted over his left eye and draped over narrow shoulders. You can tell he’s proud of his hair and the fleeting youth it represents because I’m not through the door for three seconds and he’s running both his open hands through it, brushing it back like it’s a nuisance. But I can tell he’s showing off in front of his student.

  “This the man you spoke of, Erica?”

  “True dat, Professor Oatczuk. This is Dick Moonlight, honest-to-goodness private detective.”

  He smiles, stands, points to the free chair set before the desk. “This is certainly a first for this office, Mr. Moonlight.” He tells me to have a seat.

  “I’ll stand, thanks,” I insist.

  “I like that,” he says, settling himself back down in his chair. “A man who is always at the ready. Tell me something, do you carry a gun?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I can see his cheeks flushing under his scruff. He’s not used to people answering his questions with a question. He’s a professor after all, the master of his fenced-in kingdom. I don’t only represent the outside world and reality. As a former cop and now a PI, I am an object of both interest and curiosity to him.

  “When I think of private detectives, the ones made famous in genre fiction and the pulp magazines of yesteryear, I can’t help but think of guns, illicit sex, and sleaze galore.” He shifts his gaze from me to out the window onto the confusing campus. “Mediocre fiction for simpletons, and certainly lacking in contemporary progressive political correctness.”

  “No shit,” I say. “And to think I still have friends who refer to Chinese takeout as chink food.”

  Erica clears her throat. “Mr. Moonlight just wrote his first novel, Professor.”

  He turns back to me, runs his hand back through his hair. Nervously. As if the private detective has suddenly become competition instead of curiosity. “You’re a multi-talented individual, Mr. Moonlight. What’s the title of your opus?”

  I glance at Erica. She issues a me a confident smile that screams, don’t be shy. Tell him.

  “Moonlight Falls,” I say. “Sort of autobiographical fiction. Or, if you will, Professor, detective fiction meets memoir.”

  His eyes light up under those horn-rims.

  “How interesting. False truths and true falses. A pioneering effort on your maiden literary voyage. How ni
ce for you.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it literary, Mr. Oatczuk. More like a mystery novel. Something Dan Brown or Robert B. Parker might write.” Feigning a grin. “You know, a book for simpletons. Nothing Roger Walls or maybe yourself might waste your time with.” I’m blowing smoke up his ass here and he either knows it and likes it, or he’s just so used to being creamed on by his students that he’s entirely used to the praise and in fact, expects it.

  He nods.

  “Let me tell you something,” he says, once more gazing out the window. “The other day I had to take the train into Manhattan for a day-long conference along with some of my colleagues here at the university. Something happened that took me by complete surprise. The train was full of readers. Young, old, middle-aged. They were all reading, or so it seemed. Instead of the clatter of text messages being typed, or cell phones chiming, or video games spitting and spurting, people were reading.” He sighs as though suddenly deflated. “But then something else happened that undermined my new-found optimism.”

  I glance at Erica. She catches my gaze and offers me a tight-lipped nod. It tells me she’s more than familiar with the good professor’s pontifications and ruminations.

  “I can hardly wait to hear,” I say.

  “I made a point of trying to find out what the people were reading,” Oatczuk goes on. “I actually physically climbed out of my seat and walked up and down the aisle gazing upon the titles of the paperback books. And in doing so, I was sorely disappointed. Because instead of seeing the names of the greats like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Melville, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner, I saw only Stieg Larsson, Dan Brown, and even some new writer who used to sell insurance but wrote a romance novel in his spare time and sold a million e-books. A man who now owns a fucking villa in the Tuscan mountains and a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue in New York.” Yet another gaze out the window. “E-books. Can you imagine a world in which books are not printed on paper?”