The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  The restaurant dining room was air conditioned. In fact it was almost as cold as the locker where the fish were kept. That meant that you went through roughly a forty-degree rise in temperature every time you went into the kitchen, so the trick was not to stay in either place too long but to keep floating between them, but that was only practical during the three or so peak hours of the dinner traffic. After about 9:00 p.m., when the late arrivals were maybe halfway through their main course and everyone else was fooling around over dessert and considering, however remotely, the possibility of going home, things slowed down quite a bit.

  It was one of the decorums of the job that, when they weren’t actually carrying dishes, the waitresses were supposed to stand against the wall next to the kitchen door, looking like they were only just waiting for a signal from one of the patrons that he needed more coffee. The trick was to scan the air about a foot or so above their heads, to appear at attention and yet not intrusive, because most diners hated the idea that the second they put down their fork they were going to be handed the check and then promptly hustled out the door. And they took their revenge.

  So you stood around and gossiped, in a peculiarly furtive way because waitresses had to avoid looking like they were talking to one another—waitresses, as everyone knew, lived only to carry plates. There would be a quiet, side-of-the-mouth exchange of information: why the cook was in such a filthy mood, and how the owner kept cornering the new girl against the salad counter, and the latest on somebody-or-other’s boyfriend. Except that, just lately, the somebody-or-other in question happened to be Beth herself.

  “So I haven’t seen him in here the last few nights,” Sally Barbini would murmur sidewise at her. Sally’s not-yet-ex-husband was working in a carwash in Port Chester after doing eighteen months for housebreaking, and it was her settled conviction that all men should be doing eighteen months for something. “What’s the trouble? You and Lover Boy have a fight?”

  “No fight. How much of the food here do you think he can stand?”

  Sally emitted a little pop of laughter which, if owner had seen it, would have earned her a trip to his office to straighten out her little attitude problem—probably, so was the prevailing belief, it would be straightened out lengthwise across his desk with her skirt up around her waist, the way she seemed to straighten out most of her problems.

  “Well, take my advice. Fuck him until you’ve got it out of your system, and then walk.”

  “Oh. Is that what you do?”

  “Goddam right.”

  The conversation lapsed, but only for a minute or so, while Sally smoothed back a lock of her intricately styled brass-blond hair and redirected her malice.

  “Has he got a job yet?”

  “Not yet. Why don’t you ask your old man if there’s an opening at the car wash.”

  Fortunately, that was the moment chosen by the gentleman who was dining alone at table 6 to raise his hand for the check, so Sally didn’t say another word—she just clicked on her brightest smile and scooted off to work on boosting her tip.

  Beth took a deep breath and thought, God, how she hated the women in this place. Every one of them had the world’s worst husband somewhere in her past, as if a bad marriage was just something that happened to you, like being struck by lightning. And the price of freedom, or safety, or whatever the hell else you were looking for when you shucked your old man was always the same, to end up carrying around other people’s dinner. She wondered sometimes if That wasn’t what divorce courts were for, to keep the restaurants supplied with waitresses.

  Sally wasn’t the worst, for all that she could be the biggest pain. It was easy to forget how, after Dave got out of the slammer and before she summoned up the courage to move out of him, she used to come in almost every Tuesday afternoon wearing an inch-thick layer of foundation to cover the bruises on her face. No wonder she couldn’t stand to believe that a man could be anything except some kind of domestic mugger. Who could blame her?

  Beth smiled to herself, thinking about Phil, trying hard not to feel smug. She had only been going with him a couple of weeks, but she knew all about him. He wasn’t the kind who hit women, who liked to frighten and torment them—he was the kind they frightened and tormented. Well, she didn’t have the least intention of doing either to anybody, and certainly not to Phil, so maybe they would be good for each other.

  When eleven o’clock came, and the last customers had long since paid their tabs and walked out through the double doors, Beth picked up her purse from under the cashier’s desk and said “good night” to the cook’s helper who was sweeping up the kitchen floor. Outside, in the alley behind the restaurant, the cats were already up in the trash bins, fighting over bits of broken fish.

  As she stepped out onto the sidewalk in front, a couple of the girls were already halfway across the street, on their way to Rumbles for a couple of beers and another chance at getting picked up by Mr. Right. Once, in the distant past that was two weeks ago, she would have been one of them, but that wasn’t for her anymore.

  The lock to her apartment building stuck, as, for some reason, it always did in warm weather, and she had to wiggle the key around for a good half minute before it clicked over. The stairs were lit by a single bulb, about twenty feet over her head, and she could hear her footsteps echoing in the shadowed emptiness—somehow it had never occurred to her before how scary this place was.

  When she was inside her apartment, she held aside the curtain over the back window and looked down at the parking lot below. There were no strange cars, so Phil hadn’t shown up yet. She discovered that she was disappointed, although she had told him that he should come about eleven twenty because she wanted to take a shower first. She looked at her watch. It was seven minutes after.

  She got undressed and took her shower, a process she knew lasted an average of eleven minutes. With the towel wrapped around her, he checked the back window again. He still wasn’t there.

  She was about to let the curtain drop back into place when a car pulled into the lot and drew to a stop almost directly beneath her. It was only a shape in the darkness, but it was big. And the chrome glowed with that inner light that only new cars have. The left headlamp didn’t seem to work, something she didn’t notice until the driver switched off his lights. The throb of the motor died away. No one got out.

  Was it Phil, or did someone else have a late-night appointment in the parking lot of Feenie’s Hardware? So why didn’t he step around and ring the doorbell? He had never expected her to come down to him, but he had never had a car before. Some men got a buzz on about cars, like all at once they’re Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.

  She gave up staring down at the soft, metallic shadow that was the car roof and went to get dressed. When she was finished, and still there had been no doorbell, she looked outside again. The car was still there.

  Okay, she wasn’t going to make a contest out of it. She would go down.

  When she reached the parking lot, Beth froze for a second as the man inside the car lit a cigarette. She could see straight in through the windshield and for an instant, as the light from the match bathed his face, she was sure this was someone she had never seen before. She felt a surge of panic—had he been waiting for her, this stranger?

  And then he looked up, and he was Phil again. She was so relieved she was almost angry.

  He reached across the front seat and opened the door on the passenger side.

  “Well—what do you think?” he asked, with an edge in his voice she had never heard before. She got in and slid across the seat toward him, and he put his hand around the back of her neck to draw her towards him for a kiss.

  The kiss was full of knowledge, as if he had lived another lifetime in the twenty-some-odd hours since the last time she had seen him.

  “How do you like the wheels, Doll?”

  Chapter 8

  In Jack Matheny’s experience, June had always been a very good month for selling commercial property. The weath
er hasn’t really started to heat up, and everything is in bloom—even vacant lots look better. People don’t mind being out of doors the way they do in July and August. Besides, there is something about June that fills everyone with hope. Young couples get married, and every sucker in the world thinks he’s going to strike it rich.

  So Jack put an ad for the Moonlight in a couple of the local papers, playing up its strong points. It did have its strong points, in spite of the fact that the land is only about an acre and a half and in that part of town a residential lot had to be at least two. For one thing, although the city fathers would have loved to have that whole area nothing but single family dwellings, the Moonlight was zoned commercial, a variance that was grandfathered in from the days when everything north of Brookville along the Old River Road was a howling wilderness, outside anybody’s city limits.

  He didn’t run a picture with the ad because even in black-and-white the two buildings looked like a couple of old whores, peeling paint and all. He just said: “BROOKV’LL—Comm’l prop, 2 bldg, priced to sell: $275,000.” He had no hopes of getting more than two hundred and fifty, but you had to price in a little slack. After taxes and fees, Philip Owings might be left with a hundred and fifty. Jack didn’t suppose he would find anything to complain about in that.

  And he had a few calls, even in the first week. One guy wanted to knock him down to two hundred, right over the phone. Jack told him to come by and he would show him over the property, so, naturally, he never heard from him again—the real estate adds seemed to attract a certain class of nut case who thought the world was populated by morons. A couple of people wanted to know the address—maybe they thought they would cut a private deal with Owings and save on the commission—but all they heard from Jack was “along the Old River Road.” And he got a few who dropped by the office.

  Not local people. He knew he wasn’t going to sell the Moonlight to anybody from Greenley, at least not to anybody who had lived here long enough to remember some of the things that had happened there.

  Anyway, it was a hopeful start, something to balance against the high interest rates that were choking off the home market.

  He drove by the place a couple of times, although he never stopped, and he was encouraged to see that Owings had started to clean things up. The lawns were cut, and he had swept the dead leaves from the front driveway. He had even cleaned the windows, and that made a big difference in how a house looked from the street. The place seemed lived-in again.

  But the Moonlight had never been lucky for anybody, as Jack knew better than most. So he wasn’t even surprised when, the Monday morning of his ad’s second week, he got a visit from his brother-in-law.

  Tom Spolino and he had gone to high school together, and he had never known him when he wanted to be anything besides a cop. At nineteen he had joined the N.Y.P.D, and at thirty he had been one of the youngest detective lieutenants in Manhattan. Then something happened—Jack never did find out exactly what, but somehow life in the big city lost its charm for Tom—and he threw it all up and came back home.

  Well, New York’s loss was Greenley’s gain, and if the town had been big enough to have a Chief of Detectives, Tom would have been it.

  Twelve years ago he had married Jack’s kid sister Alice, who was beginning to look a little shopworn, and he had been a good husband. What the hell, the family thought, better a cop’s wife than an old maid. They had two children.

  Jack liked Tom, but he preferred him to pay his visits at home rather than at the office—a lot of people were funny about police. So he couldn’t say he was particularly happy to see him in the course of business.

  “How are you?” he asked, standing up from behind his desk and offering him a hand. It was one of those times when he wished he had a private office, but as it was the whole world walking by only had to look in through the plate glass window. “Sit down. You want some coffee?”

  Tom took the coffee, although he didn’t appear very happy about it. He was a big man, so that the styrofoam cup seemed lost in his enormous hand, and his chair creaked ominously as he leaned back in it.

  Jack had often wondered why Tom had finally settled for his tiny, spinsterish sister, because he was quite handsome in his rough-and-ready, man’s man way, with hair that was almost blond—you’d never take him for an Italian, which he was, straight through—but perhaps it was a case of opposites attract. He had never heard any complaints, from either of them.

  “I just wondered if there was anything you could tell me about George Patchmore and Leo Galatina,” Tom said, with no preamble whatsoever. “They were partners once, weren’t they? I just figured if anybody would know, you would.”

  Leo Galatina? It took a minute to place the name, and then all Jack could dredge up from memory was an old man he had seen maybe half a dozen times over the last ten years—an old man up on Mill House Road, walking his arthritic poodle. An old man of whom it was said that he had had a colorful life and, for all that he lived in a house with a screened-in front porch and less than forty feet of street frontage, would probably leave each of his numberless grandchildren a millionaire.

  “Yeah—sure.” Jack nodded vigorously, suddenly more than a little concerned for his commission on the Moonlight property. “Partners, sure. But that was back before the War, Tom. Why?”

  “Galatina was struck down in a hit-and-run last evening, about a quarter after seven. He died nine hours ago. We’re treating it as a homicide.”

  He said it as if he were reading it off a card, but Jack knew this wasn’t just a routine investigation of a traffic accident. Not if they were looking all the way back to George Patchmore.

  What could he do except shrug?

  “George couldn’t have done it,” he said. “He’s been dead for three months.”

  He smiled—it was a little joke, you see—but Tom looked as if he hadn’t been listening.

  “Do you know what kind of dealings they might have been involved in, Jack? You could save me a lot of work.”

  And maybe avoid some unprofitable publicity for one of the firm’s listings, was the implication. Jack suddenly understood why his brother-in-law was considered such a good cop: he knew how to push the right buttons.

  “In 1935, when George bought the Moonlight, Leo Galatina was somehow instrumental in getting him the money. Leo Galatina was strictly a silent partner—he was never involved in running the business. In 1941, George bought him out. End of story.”

  “And that’s all you know?”

  “That’s all I know, Tom. Maybe that’s all there is to know.”

  Tom gave him a look, as if he couldn’t believe anyone was that stupid, and Jack remembered that Tom had sources he could turn to who were better informed than he would ever be about old doings at the Moonlight. He wondered what they were telling him.

  Or perhaps Tom didn’t like to ask.

  “What has this got to do with George, Tom? I mean, really? I’d like to sell the Moonlight, Tom—if it’s okay with you. I’d like to get shut of the whole god damned thing, and then you can drag all the skeletons out of the closet you want to. But until then . . .”

  Tom leaned forward, bringing his chair’s front legs down to the floor with a snap. He handed his brother-in-law back his styrofoam cup, half empty.

  “I read you, Jack,” he said, softly, like a mortician consoling the departed one’s family. “No one is interested in dredging up a lot of old scandals. But, as you might have guessed, it wasn’t just anybody who got run over last night.”

  “I understand that. I’ve told you everything I know, which is what’s in the paperwork. I wasn’t George’s confessor, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Jesus, he looked tired. Jack wondered what friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend had been on the phone to him that morning, calling in old debts and threatening God only knows what kind of trouble. It was something Greenley people understand very well here in their little corner of the world, even if they didn’t happen to
be Italian.

  “Just keep it under your hat that we talked about this,” he said as he stood up. “I figured you’d rather I asked you than somebody else.”

  “You figured right, Tom. And if I think of anything else, I’ll give you a call—at home, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure.”

  Tom stared toward the door and then, with his hand actually on the knob, turned around.

  “George didn’t have anything except his social security, did he?”

  “That and a little savings, now almost gone,” Jack answered. “He died just in time.”

  “Then who’s been paying the tab on the Moonlight all these years when you haven’t been able to rent it to anybody? The property taxes alone should have wiped him out years ago.”

  It was a good point, and one Jack kind of wished he hadn’t raised.

  “I used to get a check—twice a year, regular as clockwork. It was from a Delaware corporation as therefore as anonymous as an unmarked grave. Don’t ask me who sent it, because I don’t know.”

  “Sure.”

  They shook hands again, and Jack found himself feeling sorry he had ever heard of the Moonlight Roadhouse, because now he felt like he had broken faith with family, which he hadn’t. He didn’t know a single thing he hadn’t spelled out for Tom—Tom was the one who was holding something back, which, one supposed, as a policeman was his right and duty. Still, as Tom closed the door behind him, he left him feeling bad.

  And Jack went home for lunch, as he always did when he was not romancing a client, and he didn’t say anything to Kitty—that was Mrs. Matheny, whom he had also known since high school, except in this case in the Biblical sense as well.

  But the woman you bagged for the first time nearly thirty-five years ago on the back seat of your Dad’s Oldsmobile, and who has been doing your laundry ever since, wasn’t all that easy to fool. Kitty always knew when he had a bone stuck in his throat. He could tell from the silence and so, probably, could she. Yet Jack had always found Kitty good company to think by, so he made up his mind over her meatloaf sandwich and ice tea that maybe he would just take a drive out to the Moonlight before he went back to the office, just to see if the sight of the old place could shake a memory loose in one of the back rooms of his head.