Moonlight Sonata

by Vincent Zandri

  “Who knows?” Georgie says. “Maybe you’ll get a new book out of this.”

  “That is your pal, Moonlight, doesn’t write it first.”

  Suzanne turns, shoots me a smile and a wink. Suddenly, she’s back to her old confident self.

  “Maybe we can both take a shot at writing it,” I say. “But let’s hope we’re not doing it from a prison cell.”

  “A prison cell might be optimistic,” Roger says. “I don’t locate that money, I just might find myself not writing anything, from six feet under.”

  We make it to the Albany Medical Center in five minutes flat. Because we need to drive around the back in order to access the morgue, we’re required to enter the campus through the delivery entrance, which is manned by a guard shack. Obviously, security at the AMC isn’t exactly paramount, judging by the overweight attendee who barely fits inside the glass booth. But that doesn’t stop Georgie from insisting we make ourselves invisible. Without argument, Roger and I crawl into the empty backbay, with Suzanne following on our tails.

  The former pathologist stops the van outside the shack.

  “Nice to see you again, Doctor Phillips,” says the large man behind the glass. “You coming back to work?”

  “Good to see you too, Brian,” Georgie says, as he’s handed a laminated clip-on badge. “Just doing a little freelance work. Helps pay the bills.” He signs his name to a sheet of paper stuck to a clipboard, then hands it back to the guard.

  “Enjoy the morgue,” the guard says.

  “Seems like everyone is dying to get there,” Georgie says, with a laugh. Tapping the gas, Georgie drives into the heart of the campus, past the main hospital, then the medical college building, and past the physical plant on our left. Soon we come to a series of concrete docks, the last one of which is set beside a pair of extra wide, electronic double-doors. Georgie makes a three-point turn, then backs up slowly to the doors. Attaching his laminated badge to his jean jacket, he opens the door to the van, and slips on out.

  “How much money you got?” he says.

  “Which one of us?” I say.

  “All of you?”

  I shovel through my pockets, come up with three crumpled twenties, some dollar bills, and some loose coinage.

  “Seventy-three and change,” I say.

  “Come on,” Georgie presses. “Who’s got some real money?”

  “Maybe we should have hit a cash machine on the way over,” I say.

  Both Roger and Suzanne are going through their respective pockets.

  “Nothing,” the literary agent says. “Not a dime.”

  But then Roger raises his right hand, high, while lying on his side on the van’s metal floor. The hand is squeezing a folded stack of bills. “Five hundred plus,” he spits.

  “Jesus,” I say. “Leave it to the broke bestseller.”

  “That should last Roger a couple of days at the bars of his choosing,” Suzanne chimes in.

  “I might have more in the other pocket,” adds Roger.

  “Just slip me two hundred,” Georgie insists. “Now. Please.”

  I take the money from Roger, tug out two of the one-hundred-dollar bills and hand them to Georgie, who takes them and closes the door. Then I hand the rest of the money back to Roger.

  “Plenty left over,” he says, re-pocketing the cash. “We should probably stop at the liquor store on the way home. Pick up some supplies.”

  We wait.

  Minutes tick away like hours.

  l decide to kill some of the time by pressing Roger for more info.

  “Those two rednecks I mentioned before. The ones who threatened me. They really work for you?”

  He nods.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Mostly they do maintenance around the house. Mow the lawns, do the shopping, things like that. Sometimes they try and act like my bodyguards even though the only fighting they’ve ever done is on Nintendo. I let them do it anyway. Gets them off. Makes them feel important.”

  Once more I tell him about the third man inside the cab. How I swear to God I saw his reflection in the rearview mirror as I sped away.

  “No fucking way,” Roger insists from down on the van floor. “Those hillbillies work alone, no one else hangs with those two. They’re morons. Maybe even queer. Not a chance anyone else would be with them since no one likes them. Especially some asshole who’s hiding.”

  “It could have been the Russian who wants the money back. Alexander Stalin. The one who wants you to write his book, make him famous.”

  “No way,” Roger repeats. “Those dumb rednecks aren’t even aware of the existence of those Russian freaks. And vise-versa.”

  “Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” Suzanne says in my stead.

  “I still don’t believe it,” Roger insists.

  I would argue further with him, but that’s when I hear the doors to the morgue open, and the sound of a heavy gurney being wheeled out.

  One of the van’s back-bay doors opens. Standing there is Georgie. He’s positioned at the front end of a gurney with a black body bag set upon it. The body bag is filled with a corpse. Presumably Sissy’s. And, at the foot of the gurney, is a young African American male dressed in the button-down shirt and pants of a morgue orderly. Now I know the reason for the two hundred dollars. Those orderlies make squat while expected to clean up after the dead. Literally. Georgie, who is both Pathologist Emeritus at the AMC and a former carjacker in another life, knows precisely who to grease on the inside and who not to grease.

  “Shift over everyone,” he insists.

  We do it.

  Georgie takes a quick step back while the black man pushes the body forward, into the empty space on the van bay floor. My stomach turns at the thought of the dead Sissy Walls now pressed up against me in that cold body bag. I can only imagine how Roger feels.

  The bay door slams shut.

  The gurney is wheeled back through the morgue doors while Georgie repositions himself back behind the wheel of the van. Turning the engine over, he shifts the transmission into drive and heads in the direction from which we came.

  Impossible body snatching mission accomplished.

  Chapter 31

  BACK OUT ON THE open road, I sit up and breathe a silent sigh of relief. But then, I also half-expect a cop to pull up on our tail, hit the flashers and sirens. I can hear the headlines broadcast over the airwaves now:

  “Murder Suspect Also Charged in Body Snatching. Details at Eleven.”

  “How on earth did you manage to grab Sissy’s body?” Suzanne asks Georgie while she snakes herself back into the front passenger side seat.

  “It’s not all that difficult,” Georgie says while turning onto Madison Avenue, which will take us up to the street where his townhouse is located. “If you have full authorized access to every nook and cranny of the hospital, including the morgue, you can pretty much take what you want. So long as you return it in a reasonable amount of time. How do you think it was possible President Kennedy’s brain went missing during his autopsy in ’63? In Sissy’s case here, she was already bagged and stored inside the cooler. She’d even been assigned her own gurney. It was just a matter of wheeling her back outside and into the van.”

  “Isn’t she scheduled for an autopsy soon?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon at three, to be exact. Says so on the charts and on her toe tags.”

  “What if the schedule changes and somebody shows up to find that there’s no body?”

  “That’s where luck comes in. Plus, my examination won’t take that long, and we’ll have her back in the morgue cooler in a matter of three hours. Maybe less.”

  “Yes, but why not just examine her inside the morgue?” Suzanne presses.

  “Hospitals don’t sleep. Can’t take the chance that somebody will walk in on me and start asking the wrong questions. Better that I borrow her for a little while.”

  Georgie turns onto his street. It’s then, inside
the relative silence of the van, that I hear it. Crying.

  I turn and see that Roger is lying beside the body-bagged Sissy. He’s hugging her, his face jammed into what must be the nape of her neck, tears streaming down his round white-bearded face and onto the black poly.

  “I can’t believe it,” Suzanne whispers after a time. “All she did was screw around on him, tell him to his face how sorry she was for marrying him. How she had zero feelings for him.”

  “Love works in mysterious ways,” I say.

  “So does grief,” adds Georgie steering up to his townhouse, thumbing the button on the overhead garage door opener. When it’s opened, he slowly rolls the van inside and closes the garage door. Killing the engine, he slips out.

  “Okay, people,” he says, coming around to the back of the vehicle, where he opens the back-bay door. “Time to find out what happened to Sissy.”

  Chapter 32

  GEORGIE AND I OCCUPY his basement laboratory while Suzanne and an upset Roger elect to hang out upstairs in the living room. The work Georgie is about to do is not pretty, but then it’s not the least bit unusual for the medically trained, Vietnam vet and former Moonlight Funeral Home employee. And, as for me, I grew up with this stuff. Dead bodies were an everyday sight for me. Some of the bodies that came my dad’s way were gruesome. Car accidents. Gunshot wounds. Stabbings. Facial mutilations, contusions, and crushings from head-on collisions.

  Once—and I remember this like it happened three minutes ago—we received a decapitated body that belonged to a construction worker who’d fallen from a high scaffolding tower and onto a metal fence. Imagine a nine-year-old boy waking up in the morning in his Batman and Robin pajamas only to head on down to his dad’s embalming room where a badly bruised and battered headless body was lying on the gurney, its head resting on a stainless-steel tray on the counter. Meanwhile, my dad feasted on his morning ham and egg sandwich, a tall Dunkin’ Donuts coffee set directly beside the head, the clunky wall-mounted television tuned into Good Morning America and some recipe they were trying out for a low-calorie Sloppy Joe.

  “Morning, son,” my dad barked in his usual Moonlight Funeral Home cheer. Then, while taking a bite of his sandwich and aiming his thumb over his right shoulder. “Do me a favor and hand me that, would you, kid?”

  I remember taking a few steps toward the head, my pre-adolescent stature just the right height for me to stare directly into the eyes, which were wide open and dark brown. The expression on the face was pure shock, like the head knew it had been detached from its better half just before it died. The face was round and sported a three- or four-day growth like a lot of construction workers who don’t care what they look like on the job. The hair was thick and black, mussed up and caked with dried blood. I raised up my hands and, not knowing where to take hold of the head, grabbed hold of both ears.

  That’s when my dad nearly scared the pajamas off of me by issuing a loud belly laugh.

  “Not that!” he exclaimed, his mouth full of ham and egg. “My coffee!”

  The body lying on the gurney in front of me now couldn’t be more different from that mutilated construction worker from forty years past. The naked Sissy Walls looked as beautiful and sexy as she had when I shared a bed with her less than twenty-four hours ago. Only difference now was her skin was cold and pale, some marbleization having taken effect, mostly in the legs. SOP for the newly dead, especially for women, as their skin is somewhat thinner than a man’s.

  I watch while Georgie makes a cursory examination of her body, careful not to make any lasting marks on her skin while he pokes and prods at her flesh with an extended index finger covered in a blue latex glove.

  “So, let me get this straight,” he says after a time. “You had sex with her, and you did a few lines and had some drinks. She had already been partying?”

  “I’m guessing that, much like her husband, she is the type to never stop. Only when she passes out and can’t help but take a break.”

  “What’s that they say about opposites attracting, Moon?”

  “Clearly not in this case. Only reason she still looks so good is because she’s young.”

  He pokes and prods her scalp with one hand while holding back sections of her long red hair with the other. When he’s finished, he stands upright.

  “I gotta’ be honest,” he says, peeling off the rubber gloves, tossing them into the medical waste bin beside the stainless-steel table. “I ain’t seeing anything here that tells me somebody messed with her other than herself. No bruises. No scrapes. No scratches. No cuts or lacerations of any kind. Not even in the scalp.”

  “Evidence of an injection?”

  Shaking his head.

  “Not that I can see. And I would most definitely see the familiar target-shaped, round purple bruise and black pin-prick center on a girl whose skin is as light as hers.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I guess it’s possible someone forced her to ingest a whole lot of drugs. But then, from what you tell me, she was already doing this?”

  “What if someone poisoned her?”

  “Takes tox exam to figure that one out, and I most definitely cannot do that here.”

  My eyes glance at her neatly groomed sex.

  “Can you clean her up for me?”

  “Yah,” he says, nodding gently. “I can get rid of anything that proves you were the last to be with her within hours of her death. But you probably don’t want to hang around to watch.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why don’t you head upstairs and catch the local real-time news on the computer. See if your face shows up. Then we can figure out your next move and make plans for getting Sissy back to the hospital.”

  “You’re a good pal, Georgie.”

  “Don’t mention it. Just another little adventure in illegal pathological examinations in a long list of illegal examinations.”

  “Naturally.”

  I go for the stairs that lead up to the living room.

  “Moon,” Georgie calls out, as I take the first stair.

  “What is it?”

  “Those two calamities upstairs. Bonchance and Walls. You really trust them? They telling you everything?”

  I exhale, then breathe in the odor of disinfectant and alcohol. “Look who we’re dealing with here, Georgie. A man who makes shit up for a living and a woman who sells those lies for big money.”

  “Enough said,” Georgie frowns.

  “No truer words…” I say, and head back up the stairs.

  Chapter 33

  UPSTAIRS IN THE LIVING room, I check my cell. Two calls from Detective Miller at the APD. Two messages. I decide not to listen to them, heading instead for Georgie’s laptop computer, which is set up on the same long table where he stores his 1970s-era Yamaha stereo-cassette system and turntable.

  Since the laptop is already opened, I click on the spacer and the Google search engine appears for me like magic. I type in Channel 9 News, which is the local Albany real-time news network. Real-time, meaning it’s updated every hour on the hour.

  My stomach drops as soon as I click on the site.

  My face appears for me in full-color glory. It’s not a bad shot, actually, snapped when I was a detective at the APD. I had more hair then. It was darker, too. I sported an equally dark mustache and goatee. My brown eyes screamed of optimism, along with hopes and dreams that had yet to be shattered. Not exactly the face of someone who now is a suspect in the death of the wife of New York Times bestselling author, Roger Walls.

  From behind me I hear the sounds of Roger and Suzanne in the kitchen. Roger has obviously raided the refrigerator and discovered Georgie’s stash of Budweiser tall boys. Since the house smells of pot smoke, Suzanne must have had no issues lighting up a cigarette. I can smell cigarette smoke coming from the living room.

  I read the short article that goes with my picture.

  The story tells of Sissy’s body having been
discovered in her Chatham home by two workers under the employ of the Walls family, whom I take to be the rednecks from the tavern. After examination of the premises it’s apparent Sissy was doing drugs and alcohol, possibly with myself since not only was my calling card found on the scene but so were my prints. Said prints are easily traceable via the Albany Police Department database as I not only used to be under their employ but I currently collect a half-pension from them.

  Go figure.

  Detective Nick Miller is then quoted as saying, “While we haven’t arrested Mr. Moonlight, we are currently requesting that he surrender himself to authorities for questioning.”

  Now I know the reason for his phone calls.

  The piece finishes up by saying the deceased’s husband has been missing for more than a week and a half, and is still missing. While Walls was arrested in the early 1980s for having shot a man who trespassed on his Chatham property, he is at present not being considered a suspect in the case of his wife’s death.

  So there it is.

  Roger is off the hook for his wife’s death while all the fingers point to me. I know that soon, the AMC pathologists will go to work on Sissy and, when they do, they will not find my semen inside of her. But that won’t exactly prove I didn’t kill her, will it?

  I sit stewing while I listen to the sound of Roger pontificating on the nature of death and its inevitability. Suzanne smokes, listens and no doubt worries her pretty little head off over recovering that one million in cash she owes the Russians.

  That’s when it comes to me.

  The Albany cops have been looking for a way to nail me for something for years, ever since I brought their department down over that Mickey Mouse body parts op they were running. I know if even the slightest possibility of my having aided in Sissy’s demise exists, they are going to try and nail me with manslaughter, or worse. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times before. At the very least, a person who is doing heavy drugs with another person bears a responsibility to prevent that other person from ingesting too much. It’s possible they are going to try and nail me with aggravated assault and negligence and try their damnedest to put me in Sing Sing. When it comes to the death of a high-profile figure or, in this case, the death of the wife of a prominent world-renowned author, someone will have to pay.