It was the first really hot day of the summer, the kind that seems to switch itself on about eleven thirty and catches you unaware. Matheny’s car battery had been giving him trouble, so he was afraid to run the air conditioning and thought he might boil in his polyester sport coat. The parking lot behind the railway station in Greenley was as open as a soccer field, no shade anywhere. And the train was late. He just stood there, wiping out the brim of his straw hat, thinking that his commission on this sale, assuming that he could find Owings a buyer, probably wouldn’t be enough to cover two weeks’ expenses.
But you can inherit obligations as well as real estate, and managing the Moonlight Roadhouse property, although it hadn’t been a real roadhouse for forty years, had been part of the business almost since the day Jack’s dad had first gotten his broker’s license. George Patchmore had been a friend, so looking after the place and collecting the rent—when there was somebody to rent it—became one of those family favors that it is just about impossible to disown.
Matheny had hopes that he could find a builder who would tear the old place down and maybe put up condos or something, and that would be the end of that. Besides, until the week before, he hadn’t known that Philip Owings even existed, so he figured he didn’t owe him spit.
Or maybe he did. And maybe that was how it all came to grief.
Anyway, the one-fifteen finally made it in, twenty minutes late and crawling like a wounded snake, and this guy steps off with a suitcase that looks like he got it from the Goodwill, and right away Jack didn’t like him. His suit was too big for him and his hair was too long, and he had “loser” written all over him. A flake, Jack figured, and from California yet. He was probably a vegetarian or something and had a fetish about preserving dilapidated old buildings. Jack knew he’d be trouble; he just didn’t know what kind.
And, anyway, he didn’t like skinny guys. Granted, Owings was probably fifteen or twenty years younger, but Jack just thought a man ought to begin to look a little comfortable when he starts pushing into his middle thirties, like he finds life easy to take and plans to stay. Philip Owings looked as nervous as a whippet.
“Mr. Owings? Jack Matheny—here, let me take that for you.”
He wrestled Owings’ suitcase away from him and shook his hand, which was long-fingered and cold to the touch, a little reminder that the train had probably been as cool as the inside of an ice chest.
“It’s about a fifteen minute drive,” he went on, trying not to hate the guy because the New Haven Railroad had its air conditioning working. “I’ve had the electricity and water turned on, like you asked. Nobody’s lived there for about five years now—you really plan to stay. . ?”
Philip Owings had his window rolled down and was watching the traffic, so Jack couldn’t see his face. At first the only answer he got was a shrug.
“Since this may take a while,” Owings said finally, “I’d just as soon not pay a couple of month’s worth of motel bills.”
“Well, that makes sense.”
Shit, nobody had asked to look at his bank balance.
Owings went on staring out the window. They seemed to have run out of conversation.
Jack just caught himself before asking if he had any family out here, because of course he hadn’t. After old George died in a nursing home it took the lawyers two months to track down a next of kin—a nephew, since George’s boy had gotten himself killed in Korea. Probably New England, or what passes for New England just an hour’s drive from Manhattan, was as alien as the planet Mars.
“I gather you don’t expect much of a sale.”
They were just nosing across the Post Road and, frankly, he took Jack by surprise. He was a few seconds figuring out that Owings probably meant the Moonlight.
“Well, no—not much of one,” he said, feeling, as you always do on these occasions, as if he’d been asked to assess the marriage chances of someone’s ugly daughter. “The land might fetch something by itself, but the buildings are derelict. It’s been years since we’ve even been able to rent the place.”
“And this uncle of mine never wanted to sell?”
“No, he never would.”
Jack didn’t tell him that of course he’d tried, in every way he could think of, to get George to let him put the old place on the market before it fell to pieces—“let the developers knock it down,” he’d say, “and maybe put up a nice Pizza Hut or something”—but George would just grip the arms of his wheelchair, swallow hard, and shake his head. One time, about a year before he died, he even started to cry, trembling all over, as if he’d lost the hope of heaven.
So Jack never asked him again. He didn’t tell Owings any of this, because it wouldn’t do him any good to know which rat hole his inheritance had gone down.
Instead he just laughed and said, “Your uncle was a character. I guess he never got over it when the town incorporated that far north and he couldn’t get by with paying off the county sheriff anymore. The roadhouse didn’t make enough to let him bribe a whole police force, so he had to go legit—more or less. That’s when the place began to slide, right after the war, when everything else started to pick up around here.”
Owings turned his head, letting Jack see his face for the first time since he’d started the car. He smiled, sort of, and looked interested, like he’d just woke up.
“What was he, a gangster?” he asked. Jack shook his head.
“Not exactly, not George. He was just a guy running a business. But there was always a business inside the business, if you follow me—and there was always something going on upstairs. Bathtub gin until Prohibition ended, after that gambling and even women. Always in a small way, but always something. Hell, even when I was a kid you could still drive out there on a Sunday afternoon and get George to sell you a bottle of Scotch. It was one of those things that everybody knew about and nobody really wanted to change. A tradition, sort of—an institution. Part of the town’s romantic past. Then George had his stroke back in ’55, and that was that. We’ve had four or five businesses in there since, but none of them really made a go.”
He didn’t tell Owings about how the place had been a motel back in the Sixties, and about how that came to grief when a little party in one of the upstairs rooms had gotten out of hand and a fellow with a snootful of LSD cut his girlfriend to pieces with a broken beer bottle. And he didn’t tell him how, one time while the property was between tenants, some kidnappers had used it as a hiding place for their victim, and how, two months later, the little girl’s corpse had been found in the cellar. And he didn’t tell him about Harve Wickham, who had tried to run a filling station out of the old roadhouse garage and had ended up one night hanging himself from one of his own gas pumps. He left all that out—hell, the guy had to sleep there that night.
They drove through Shallow Creek, which was where Jack did most of his business. It was a nice place, a bedroom community for all the corporation lawyers who took the 8:07 to New York five days a week, full of great big homes set well back from the road, mostly Tudor and Norman Stone that sold for five hundred thousand and up—he had sold one in there for a million two once, but he had had to split the commission with the listing broker.
He noticed that Owings was paying very close attention, but he just smiled and let him live a few minutes longer in his fool’s paradise, because once they got through Brookville, one of the little villages that Greenley had gobbled up back in the Fifties, things would start to change fast.
Brookville had a hardware store, a Grand Union, a place that rented video tapes, a bank, two liquor stores, a pharmacy, a dank little bar listed on its property tax records as The Brookville Tavern but known locally as Rumbles, a post office, a couple of gas stations and a restaurant and fish shop called the Lobster Pot. That was it. The Old River Road slipped through, made a shallow right turn at the traffic light, and kept on going past houses and vacant lots that somehow had been forgotten in the town’s relentless march towards gentrification. Everybody w
ho lived there had always lived there. Pickup trucks with their wheels off rusted quietly in people’s front yards, and the fences had been so long without paint that the wood had gone gray as death. The trees branches, which somehow the city never got around to pruning, met high over the road like the ribs of a cathedral vault. It was a quiet place—as you drove through you could almost hear the exhausted sigh of collapsing property values.
And then, for about half a mile, there was nothing. And then there was the old Moonlight Roadhouse.
The roadhouse was like an elderly aunt you visited twice a year. You hated the old girl, but she was family so you had to go, and she always ended up telling you some nasty story about how a hundred years ago she had caught your grandfather in the woodshed with the hired girl. The roadhouse was full of secrets—everybody’s secrets. And you had the feeling that if you made the mistake of hanging around too long you would hear them all.
Jack had been there just three days before, to make sure that Mr. Owings didn’t get any excessively unpleasant surprises when he inspected his property, but he needn’t have bothered. The roadhouse seemed to have reached a certain level of decay and then simply stopped, as if holding itself together by sheer force of will. Once a quarter he drove out and had a walk around the perimeter, just to make sure no one had broken in, since empty buildings were a standing temptation to the world. And the police patrols looked in pretty regularly—one of the advantages Jack could offer a client was a relative on the force.
But these were unnecessary precautions, because nobody used the back parking lot as a lover’s lane and no tramps tried to flop for the night in the coal cellar. The locals knew better, and strangers learned. One time, about three years ago, Jack had found the back door standing open and a broken pane of glass where somebody had reached inside to throw the bolt. Whoever it was had walked about halfway into the house—you could still see his bootprints in the dust on the floor—and had turned right around and walked out. He hadn’t even stopped to steal an ashtray. Jack knew just how he must have felt. He didn’t go inside unless he had to.
“This is it,” he said, dropping the ignition keys into his jacket pocket as he opened the car door. He stepped outside into the perpetual shade of the front patio and examined the façade of the building as if he’d never seen it before—it was a way to avoid having to look at Philip Owings’ face while he took in that first sight of his legacy. “I have the keys here somewhere. Let me get your bag.”
But Owings didn’t want to go inside, not just yet. Jack followed him around while he paced off the road frontage and examined the detached building that had been Harve Wickham’s garage—the gas pump from which they had found him dangling was still there, although the tank had been drained even before the finance company came and repossessed all his tools. The big double doors were padlocked, if only to keep the ’possums out.
In what had once been patches of lawn the grass was waist high, with wide, razor-sharp leaves, so that you might have thought you were in the Everglades. Grass and weeds were forcing their way up through the asphalt driveway, which was crumbling at the edges like stale piecrust. They walked along the little path between the main building and the garage to the back.
Just a couple of months before Pearl Harbor, George Patchmore had presented his patrons with what was intended to be the Moonlight Roadhouse’s crowning jewel, the open air dance floor. Today it was just a vast rectangle of empty concrete, spiderwebbed with cracks, the work of nearly fifty New England winters. Every five or six paces around the perimeter were ten-foot-high iron poles from which, so legend had it, Japanese lanterns had once swayed with each little breeze. The bandstand still occupied one corner, although its white paint was just a memory and the wood itself was spongy with rot.
Some people said the Japanese lanterns had been a bad omen, which perhaps they were in that Year of Our Lord 1941, but, in any case, the dance floor had been the old Moonlight’s last blinding flash of pride and glory before the long decline. The dancing stopped when the war began—gas was rationed and the roadhouse was just too far to come. Eventually people got out of the habit, and by VE Day George could hardly afford to keep his doors open.
But he hung on. For another ten years he scraped along somehow—largely, one gathered, on the strength of a bad reputation. The roadhouse had always been that sort of place: a speakeasy back in the Twenties and then, when George took it over in the Thirties, a haven for the little forbidden pleasures of life. In the fat times there had usually been a poker game going in the pantry, and nobody had any trouble finding accommodating ladies who always seemed to have a key to one of the upstairs bedrooms. It was just over the state line, so the bad guys from Westchester County and even Manhattan had been frequent patrons. In those days hoods were celebrities, and people used to come for a drink and a dance and to look for faces they had seen in the newspapers.
All of this had continued, in a shadowy way, right into the mid-Fifties. George had surrendered his liquor license in 1948—just what murky sort of trouble he had gotten into never was clear. The whores were gone. The gangsters Jack was not so sure about.
There were always stories. If somebody needed to have a package collected, the word was he left it with George. At any given time, rumor had it, there might be a hot car in the garage, just waiting for a new paint job. Probably nastier things went on that Jack never heard anything about, but then he wouldn’t.
So the Moonlight Roadhouse, even in its decline, was the town’s bad conscience. Probably a lot of people had been relieved when George collapsed in 1955, while waiting in line to buy stamps at the post office, and Jack’s dad started hunting around for a tenant to supplement George’s social security benefits.
Jack’s dad, Lord love him, had been a good real estate man, but with the best will in the world he had had a hard time getting the Moonlight even to pay for itself, let alone for George’s decades-long convalescence. First there was a restaurant, with French food and high prices, but that lasted a scant two years before going belly up. Then some idiot with romantic ideas had tried to re-open the place as a roadhouse and lasted about six months. Then, for about six or seven years it had been a motel catering to an ever-seedier clientele—that ended in a scandal which had shocked even George.
There had been other businesses over the years, and long periods when the property lay empty, the doors locked and the windows shuttered. It was during one of these that they had found the little girl, the daughter of some New York society doctor, tied and gagged in the cellar and in an advanced state of decay.
And then, about four years after that, Harve opened his service station. A month later, his wife took their kids and left, never to be heard from again. Six months later, Harve tied one end of his belt to the awning over his brand new Exxon gas pump and just slid off into oblivion. He had figured it pretty carefully—when the paperboy found him the next morning his feet were dangling only about four inches above the ground.
Harve, not surprisingly, was the last tenant.
Afterwards, Jack sometimes wondered if that first day Philip Owings hadn’t guessed there was something tragic about his inheritance. He saw him now in memory, standing in the middle of the ruined dance floor, his eyes, reflecting a kind of helpless dejection, fixed on the lightless house. Or maybe he was just beginning to realize that the Moonlight wasn’t going to finance his retirement.
“Let’s have a look inside,” he said, like a man about to open a coffin. Jack had the keys out of his pocket before Owings could change his mind.
Chapter 3
Phil Owings stood in the door, watching the real estate agent’s car pull out of what was now his driveway. When it reached the road, and the right turn signal was flashing, he waved, although he was perfectly sure Jack Matheny couldn’t have seen. Then he stepped back inside and let the door swing shut behind him.
He lit a cigarette as he stood in the foyer and dropped the spent match onto the bare hardwood floor, where there was plenty
of dust to cushion its fall. Through a wide entranceway he could see into the main room, which might once have been a dining room or a bar, and where the few remaining pieces of furniture were covered with sheets which had grown yellow with accumulated age.
He would have his smoke, and then he would go upstairs and pick himself out a bedroom and go to work. He couldn’t turn the place inside out in an afternoon, but at least he didn’t have to sleep in the dirt.
There were things the agent hadn’t told him—he was sure of that. He just had a sense of something withheld, but that was not a new experience. People were always not telling him things, particularly if he had a right to know them.
He walked into the main room looking for an ash tray. There didn’t seem to be one, but it was so gloomy in there, even after he had snicked on the light, that he probably just couldn’t see it. The back wall seemed to be one long series of windows, all shuttered from the outside, with a pair of double doors leading, he assumed, to the patio in the back that Matheny had said used to be a dance floor, and now just collected dead leaves. Where were the snows of yesteryear?
“I know just how you feel, brother,” he said, out loud, with a little shock of surprise at the sound of his own voice.
“I’ll have to watch that,” he thought. “I’ve probably just been living alone too long.”
Too long, or not long enough. Not long enough to get used to it, although it had been nearly a year since Judy walked out on him, and he had been alone, for all practical purposes, a long time before that.
Well, he hoped she was happy with her truck salesman.
You lose your job, you lose your wife—little by little, things had been dropping away from him. So, when he found he had inherited a little something from a great uncle he had never heard of, there wasn’t a thing in the world to hold him in California. He just packed a bag, cleaned out what was left of his bank account, sold his car and left his apartment, on which he owed for two months, for the landlady to worry about. It was like being swept off the face of the earth. It was great.
The Moonlight Page 2
