He saw the dented fender as if for the first time when he showed it to Jack Matheny. He had listened to himself spinning out the tale of how it had happened, and it was all news to him. He had been telling the truth, or, at least, he had no consciousness of lying. He was just another listener to his own account. It was weird.
But, then, a lot of things had been weird lately. Weirdness was beginning to lose its novelty.
“I’ll bring it by in the morning then,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a loaner.”
This made the body shop owner laugh. “Mister, if I started doin’ that, my insurance company ‘d have me out of business in a week.”
“That’s sort of what I thought you’d say.”
The body shop was just over the state line in Port Chester—Beth had warned him against having the work done in Greenley, where they charged you Rolls Royce rates even if you came in with a dented Subaru—and on the way home he stopped at the Carvel’s to get himself a soft ice cream cone. Carvel’s was one of his recent discoveries about the quality of life on the Eastern Seaboard; there was the same sort of thing back in California, called Frosty Freeze, but this was better. The only thing he really missed from California was the lettuce.
He stood out in the parking lot, leaning against the side on his car and eating his ice cream cone, considering with no small satisfaction the shape his existence was beginning to take. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and Beth was at her apartment, packing a suitcase. He would pick her up in an hour and take her back to the Moonlight. Then he would drive her to work. She would keep on paying her share of the rent until they saw how things were working out between them, but why shouldn’t things work out? Lately things seemed to have gotten into the habit of working out.
Now if only he could find some way to keep the house.
He had gone down to Greenley City Hall for a look at the tax records, and the property was listed at a little under forty-five hundred dollars a year. The heating bills for the past five years, carefully preserved in Jack Matheny’s realty office, averaged about nine hundred every winter—and that was with the thermostat kept just high enough to prevent the pipes from freezing. With other utilities and general maintenance, he would be spending something like eight thousand dollars a year just to hold on.
He had seventy-five hundred dollars in the bank, including his inheritance. And in his whole life he had never earned more than twenty-two hundred a month.
Still, he had to find a way. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to contemplate a future in which he would no longer own the Moonlight. He didn’t give a damn how much he might make off the sale, it couldn’t be enough.
The Moonlight was like a hall of mirrors, full of strange, inexplicable distortions. Things happened there he couldn’t explain—or, rather, for which the explanations were all too obvious but almost impossible to accept—but it didn’t matter. The place scared the shit out of him sometimes, and that didn’t matter either. In fact, its strangeness enhanced its value for him. He felt privileged to own it, and in his whole life he had never before felt privileged.
So he would not part with it. Somehow or other he would find a way of hanging on to it, because it would not let him go.
He finished his ice cream cone and got back into the car, rolling down the window to let the heat escape—that was something else different from California, although he wasn’t sure it was an improvement. The summer weather was ferocious. He wondered what the winters could be like. In his whole life, Phil had never seen snow, and he didn’t know if he would be able to tolerate that kind of cold.
He parked in the lot behind Beth’s place and, before going up, went around to Feenie’s hardware to pick up a couple of lengths of garden hose, since the ones at the Moonlight, he had discovered, were full of cracks. Then he took the stairs up to the apartment and rang the bell.
When Beth let him in he saw that she was already in her waitress uniform, which surprised him a little. There was a suitcase standing beside the door, however, so at least she hadn’t changed her mind at the last minute.
There was also another woman, presumably the roommate, sitting on the sofa, wrapped in a pink bathrobe and balancing a cup of coffee in her lap. She was short and chunky and about forty, with hair that was too violently black to be real, and Phil decided he didn’t like her much. Perhaps that was how you always felt about your girlfriend’s roommate.
“So you’re him,” she said, as if to register her disappointment that Beth wasn’t going to live with Kevin Costner.
“Phil, this is Millie,” Beth said, just a little too quickly, like someone intervening to prevent a brawl.
But Phil liked to think of himself as a gentleman, so he smiled and offered his hand.
“Phil Owings,” he murmured. “Pleased to meet you.”
These little courtesies seemed to make no impression, however, and Millie released his hand after the briefest contact.
“Maybe you could just take the suitcase back with you,” Beth said, in a peculiarly expressionless voice. “I’ll just stay on here and go straight to work, and that way you won’t have to make two trips.”
“I don’t mind making two trips.”
“I still have a few things to do here.”
They regarded each other in silence for a moment and then Phil decided there was nothing to be gained by contesting the point, so he shrugged his shoulders and let it go.
“What time you do want me to pick you up after work?” he asked.
“Oh, well . . .” Beth slipped her hands into the pockets of her black nylon skirt. “Don’t worry about it—I can walk easy enough.”
“Not in the pitch dark you can’t. Now come on, Beth, just tell me what time you want me to pick you up.”
This seemed to please her and she flashed a little smile at Millie, as if to say, “see? I told you. . .”
“Eleven o’clock then,” she said.
“I’ll be parked in front.”
So he picked up the suitcase and gave Beth a kiss, feeling a little self-conscious about doing it in front of someone else. He put the suitcase in the trunk of his car, right next to the garden hose.
And on the way home he entertained himself with trying to decide what Beth’s roommate could possibly have against him. Maybe she resented the prospect of having to hunt around for the other half of the rent money. Maybe she was one of those women who thought all men were evil. Either way, he had the sense of having stepped into the middle of an argument.
He parked the car in the garage to keep it out of the sun and hung the garden hose up on a couple of big hooks on the back wall. Then he got out Beth’s suitcase and took it up to their room.
Then he went down to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette while he refocused his mind on the problem of how to keep from having to sell the Moonlight.
It was his, dammit. It was his, and he resented being forced out of his home by the utility bills. It seemed a fundamental injustice that after finally coming to rest somewhere, somewhere he felt comfortable and safe, he should be expected to give it up, as if a man’s home were just some sort of envelope for the money it consumed or could bring in sale.
While he was sitting at the kitchen table, feeling more and more like the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath, he was startled to hear a sharp click somewhere behind him.
But there was nothing behind him except the empty pantry, the door to which, he noticed, was standing slightly ajar.
He hadn’t been in there since the first day, so probably Beth had looked inside and forgotten to close the door. Except that he hadn’t noticed the door being open when he had come back.
He stood up and went over to close it, and then decided he would just stick his head in to make sure everything as okay. Maybe something had fallen over—maybe that was what he had heard.
Except there was nothing inside to fall over. He snicked on the light, and there was nothing inside at all except for the
old gaming table and the empty shelves around all four walls.
Then why did it look so odd?
It took him perhaps thirty seconds of standing in the doorway to figure out that two rows of shelves against the left-hand wall were angled slightly out into the room, as if someone had taken hold of them at the point where they touched and given them a sharp pull forward.
He went in to investigate and, when he put his hand on one of the angled shelves, it moved quite easily. They both seemed to be mounted on concealed rollers, and double hinged in the back so that they simply pulled forward and out of the way.
Behind them was a round metal hatch, like the door to a safe and about two feet across with a key lock to one side. It probably was a safe, Phil decided.
He never went anywhere without the key ring he had received from Jack Matheny on that first day, but none of his keys fit this lock. He was considering the merits of a crowbar when he turned around and saw a shiny brass key lying in the precise center of the gaming table. It hadn’t been there when he came in. He was quite sure there had been nothing on the table.
His heart was pounding violently when he picked up the key, and his hands shook so that it took him several seconds to fit it into the lock. At last it slid into the barrel and, when he turned it, the tumblers fell into place with a faint clatter.
It had apparently been years since anyone had opened this door, because the hinges screamed in protest.
The compartment inside was perhaps a foot and a half square and about nine inches deep. It contained a number of parcels, about the shape of bricks but a little smaller and wrapped in brown paper. When Phil picked one up he was surprised by how light it felt.
He carried the parcel out into the kitchen, sat down again at the table, and started to look it over with the care of someone who expects to stumble into a booby trap. The brown paper wrapping was sealed at the ends and along one side with duct tape, which here and there was beginning to curl at the edges. Still, whoever had wrapped this wasn’t kidding, and it took Phil a good five minutes to strip the tape from one end. He unfolded the end flap and found that the paper was about three layers thick. Rather than fiddle with any more duct tape, he started to tear the paper along a straight line down the back.
When he had the parcel open he discovered that it contained four bundles of twenty-dollar bills, each held together by a disintegrating rubber band and each about half an inch thick.
Jesus.
Phil pulled off one of the rubber bands, which broke at the first touch, and started to count the money. The bundle contained twenty-five hundred dollars—he had ten thousand dollars lying here on the kitchen table.
And there were twenty-five or thirty parcels still in the safe.
He took one of the bills and looked it over carefully. It seemed quite new, but then he noticed that it was marked “Series 1952”. None of the others was dated later than 1953. The whole wad had probably been in that safe for close to forty years.
Phil thought of his uncle George, sitting helpless in his nursing home through all those years, knowing he had a fortune hidden back at the Moonlight and not able to touch it. No wonder he had never been willing to sell.
But why just leave it here? Why not tell someone he could trust and have the money put in the bank, where it could do him some good? Surely life could have been made a little more comfortable for him by something in excess of a quarter of a million dollars.
Except if he didn’t dare. Except if he had never declared it because he wasn’t eager to put down on an income tax form how he had come by it. Jack Matheny had said George was something of a crook—”a business inside the business” was the way he had put it. No wonder he preferred to keep his little secret.
And there was no reason, Phil decided, why his nephew shouldn’t go right on keeping it. There were inheritance taxes—or the government might just decide that Uncle George had been delinquent in not reporting and confiscate the whole bundle. No, he wasn’t going to tell anyone about this.
He could spend it a little at a time. If anybody asked about his windfall, he could say he’d had a good day at Atlantic City. And why should anybody ask?
Two hundred and fifty, maybe three hundred thousand dollars. Money like that could solve a lot of problems. For one thing, it meant he could keep the Moonlight.
For nearly forty years that money had been sitting there—nearly forty years during which the house had been occupied by perhaps half a dozen different businesses. It had had a good hiding place, but that was still a long time. Why hadn’t anyone found it before this?
The answer came into his mind with the sudden clarity of revelation: because they hadn’t been meant to find it.
That money had been waiting for him—just him. The house, or whatever possessed the house, the way a soul possesses a body, knew how of guard its secrets and had preserved this one against his coming.
He was meant to stay here. The house was claiming him as its own.
In the terms that apply in ordinary life, nothing that had happened made any sense. The only explanation which served was that the house was endowed with some quality of will unique to it, that there was some presence here with him, that he was not alone within these walls. The idea astonished but, strangely, did not frighten him. It was even comforting, like the consciousness of being loved.
“It’s mine,” he thought—he might even have said it out loud, he wasn’t sure. “It’s mine, all of it. The house, the money, the things that go bump in the night, it’s mine. All mine.”
In a kind of panic, he gathered up the loose pile of twenty-dollar bills and started back toward the pantry with them. He had to put this shit back before anybody walked in and found it, he had to. . .
But he got no further than the door. The bills slipped from between his fingers and drifted to the floor. He had forgotten them. He could only stare at the gaming table with a kind of awe, a terror too impersonal to leave room for fear.
There, written in the dust that covered the green felt like a dirty, wrinkled skin—written in the same childish block letters he had seen on the postcard only a few days before—were two words:
ALL YOURS.
Chapter 15
There were, as it turned out, over two hundred wine red ’88 or ’89 Lincoln Town Cars registered in Fairfield County. It seemed to be a very popular color. Granted, only seventy-three of these belonged to the Greenley-Stamford area, but a request to the New York MVD turned up another hundred and twenty just in Port Chester, Rye and White Plains. Since this was a homicide investigation, the police from surrounding areas were cooperating, but Detective Lieutenant Spolino’s instinct told him that the car he was looking for was right here in Greenley. He had a list with twenty-seven names of it and he was checking them all himself, in what struck him as a descending order of probability. He was down to the last five, and so far he had exactly one dented fender.
It wasn’t a very promising lead. Miss Jessica Wilton was sixteen years old, and her parents, who apparently had more money than sense, had given her the car three months ago for her birthday. Spolino had talked not to her—Miss Wilton was in school— but to her mother, who said the accident had happened on the preceding Thursday, when her daughter had hit a fence post while trying to get out of their driveway. Sure enough, the fence post was leaning at an eccentric angle and showed clear evidence of wine red paint. Just as a precaution, however, Spolino had had the lab boys over from Stamford to examine the fender, but they weren’t going to find anything.
Mrs. Wilton just about had a fit.
Leo Galatina hadn’t been killed by a sixteen-year-old high school girl out for a drive in her birthday car. He had been murdered, presumably by a man named Charlie Brush, and Charlie Brush, Spolino would have given odds, wouldn’t be the type to be on car-borrowing terms with any sixteen-year-old Greenley high school girls.
That left the Galatina homicide investigation with five cars.
No—six. The girl who babysat the
fax machine drifted trancelike past his desk and left him a report from the Connecticut MVD that a certain Philip L. Owings of 637 Old River Road in Greenley had, as of Thursday last, taken possession of a wine red Lincoln Town Car, formerly the property of Aristocar Leasing.
It took Lieutenant Spolino several seconds to realize why that address sounded so familiar—it was the old Moonlight.
And Thursday had been the day Leo Galatina was murdered.
A major criminal investigation, as everyone knew, was always filled with coincidences. It was merely the occasional sports in the Law of Averages that made some men look guilty just because they frequented certain bars or got their hair cut on alternate Tuesdays or favored a particular brand of running shoes, because probably so did half the human race. You could drive yourself crazy with that sort of thing. But this was different. This was just too perfect a fit not to work.
He couldn’t have said why he knew, but Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino knew with the certainty of revelation that, one way or the other, he had found his murderer.
He picked up the phone and dialed Research.
“Amy, I want everything there is to know about Philip L. Owings, 637 Old River Road. Call the Bureau. Find out where he lived before he came here, and call them. Call everyone. I want him right back to the Year One.”
When he was finished he didn’t put the receiver down. Instead, he dialed his brother-in-law’s realty office.
“How are you, Jack? Listen, I thought I might go out to the Moonlight and have a look around.”
“Not anymore, Tom—the place is occupied.”
“Is that so?” Spolino tried to sound surprised, but the inflection did not come naturally. “What’s the tenant’s name? Do you think he’d let me in?”
“It’s the heir, a fellow named Owings. He might, if his girlfriend isn’t taking a shower. He seems to be a fast worker with the ladies.”
The Moonlight Page 13
