It belonged to . . . Who?
Yesterday he had been happy to think that the house belonged to him. Now it seemed that he belonged to the house, and that made him happier still.
“Come to bed, Hotshot. It’s been a long day.”
But not so long that Beth minded making it a little longer. They almost didn’t bother with the preliminaries anymore—he would crawl in beside her, and just the touch of her flesh against his own was enough to get him up and climbing between her legs. He might come once and hardly even break stride, so they might be at it for twenty minutes at a time.
But when they were done, and she was sleeping peacefully beside him, her breathing deep and slow, he almost wished she weren’t there. He loved her. He craved her body, and it made him feel good just to be around her. He couldn’t bear the idea of parting with her. But there was a sense in which she was an intruder in his life. He wanted to be alone with his house.
He hardly ever slept through the night anymore. Perhaps it was a kind of compensation for the times during the day when he couldn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d done—perhaps they were a kind of sleep—but he would find himself broad awake now at three or four o’clock in the morning. When that happened he would put on his bathrobe and slippers and pad downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee and have a cigarette. Fortunately, Beth was a heavy sleeper and never stirred.
He didn’t mind. He liked it. He liked the sense of being alone inside the Moonlight’s stillness, a stillness that was full of memories no one was alive to remember. He felt a sense of connection then, of perfect possession—although whether he was the possessor or the possessed he could not have said. It didn’t really seem to matter.
Sometimes he would sit out on the patio and listen to the night sounds, and sometimes he would float from room to room like a ghost. Was he looking for something? He didn’t know. Sometimes he would just sit in the kitchen and smoke.
Then, around six thirty or seven, he would go upstairs and crawl back into bed. He might sleep for another hour then, until Beth woke up. Sometimes, when the sunshine first poured in through their bedroom window and he watched Beth, naked as dawn, doing her morning stretches on the floor, he felt he was waking into a dream. It was pleasant, but it had no reality.
He had finished painting the house and was now starting work on the garage, which he was quite sure he could finish in two days. He would leave the garage white, since there was nothing to suggest that it had ever been any other color.
That was how he spent Sunday morning, scraping off paint flakes and sanding down the rough spots. Beth had taken the car to go do a little shopping so he was alone, with no company except the music from his old wooden radio. He preferred to be alone when he worked.
He kept all his painting supplies in the same cabinet with his gardening tools. There was a carpenter’s work bench in the garage, but he was not inclined that way and hardly ever went near it. He wouldn’t have today if he hadn’t accidentally dropped a paint can on his scraper and bent the blade. And, of course, he hadn’t thought to buy a spare.
There was a metal vice bolted to the work bench, and it had a little flat surface at one end like a miniature anvil, so Phil figured he could lay the scraper blade on that and use a hammer to pound it flat again.
It was then he discovered that that corner of the work bench, along with the floor around it, was covered was sawdust.
Only a couple of days before, as absolutely the last item in his house cleaning campaign, he had tidied up the garage. So he knew the sawdust was fresh. He picked up a little with thumb and forefinger and noticed there was something mixed in with it. Something that looked and felt like iron filings.
“What has he been up to?” he murmured under his breath. Several seconds passed before it occurred to him to notice what he had said—he?
A search of the trash barrel produced the answer.
Phil’s father had been a duck hunter and, given that Mr. Owings senior was never very deeply committed to the paternal relationship, as an adolescent Phil had been obliged to spend a fair number of weekends during the season sitting in a reed blind up to his ankles in ice water. It was almost the only way he ever got any time with his old man.
He hadn’t been any good at it, and pretty soon his dad had stopped taking him. Once he graduated from high school, Phil never hunted again. An M-15 during Navy boot camp was the last gun he had ever handled—the very idea of getting up before dawn to slog out to the rice paddies for the purpose of murdering a few teal was enough to make him shudder. That sort of thing just wasn’t for him.
But he remembered enough from those uncomfortable, faintly anxious weekends to recognize a foot-long section from the barrel of a twelve gauge shotgun, complete with polychoke and little white-painted sight bead. There was also a good piece of the stock, with the rubber shoulder pad at the broad end.
Somebody—and who could that somebody be if not Phil Owings, sole owner and proprietor?—had cut himself down a sawed-off shotgun.
Phil’s father had had an old twelve gauge pump he swore by, and the whole barrel and magazine assembly came off for cleaning. It just broke apart, right in front of the loading chamber. Hack a little off each end, and the two sections would easily fit in a briefcase or even a paper bag. With a little practice, anyone could put the thing back together in about a second and a half. Just a click and a snap, and you were open for business.
And what kind of business was pretty obvious. A shotgun, cut down for easy concealment, wasn’t going to be used for anything the NRA would approve of. It seemed the hunting season was about to start up again, only this time the ducks had nothing to worry about.
Was that where the four hundred dollars had gone? A shotgun, some shells, and maybe something to carry them in?
And was that why his hands had ached last night, from spending his evening fashioning a murder weapon?
And where was all this stuff?
Phil knew, knew with a perfect certainty, that he could search for the rest of his life and he would never find the gun. What the house wanted concealed, it concealed—who should know that better than he, the recipient of its long-hidden treasures?
“What the hell is going on?” he said out loud.
And the answer came in his mind, just as if someone had spoken: “You’ll find out, when I need for you to know.”
And who the hell was this, who had taken possession of him like this, as if his soul were a vacant building—as empty as the Moonlight had been that first day?
“Don’t worry about a thing,” the voice in his head came back. “I’ll look after you just fine. There isn’t a thing to worry about.”
Like shit there wasn’t.
Phil stood beside the carpenter’s bench, holding the section of shotgun barrel in one hand and the chunk of stock in the other, and suddenly it occurred to him that at the very least he had to get rid of these things. He couldn’t just put them out with the trash—if the garbage man found them he would probably have the police over here in about half an hour. And he didn’t want another interview with that guy Spolino.
What had really happened to his car? All at once he found he didn’t believe a word of that story about the Grand Union parking lot.
If he wasn’t careful, he was going to earn himself a lot of prison time for things he couldn’t even remember.
And the worst part of that—the absolute worst thing, he realized with a kind of wild panic—was that he would lose the Moonlight. He would never be able to come back.
And that would be like death.
The shotgun stock was no problem. Phil just took a chisel and pealed off the shoulder cushion, then a couple of cracks with a hatchet reduced it to unrecognizable fragments of wood. The cushion would go into one of the town’s ubiquitous trash cans, and the wood pieces he would burn.
The barrel was not so easily disposed of. He couldn’t destroy it—what was he supposed to do, melt it down?—so he had to get rid of it s
omewhere.
He would find himself a pond. Greenley was full of ponds. He would toss it out in the middle so it could settle down into the mud on the bottom, where probably no one would ever see it again. When Beth got back from her errands he would hide it someplace in the car, and after he dropped her at work he would go in search of a nice big stretch of stagnant water.
It couldn’t be soon enough.
Beth came home about one thirty, and he helped her unload her groceries from the trunk of the Lincoln.
“How’s the garage coming?”
“Garage?” It took him a second to remember what he was supposed to have been doing all this time. “Oh, the painting. I hit a snag.”
“All right, so we don’t make the cover of House Beautiful this month.”
She laughed and didn’t ask anymore more questions about the garage. It was one of Beth’s great virtues, this capacity just to let a subject drop.
While she was changing into her waitress uniform, Phil hid the shotgun barrel under the rear seat of the car. The whole operation took about twenty seconds, and there was no chance of Beth walking in and catching him at it, but he was terrified the entire time and for several minutes after. What made it bad was the hopelessness of any explanation.
After he dropped Beth off at the Lobster Pot he went home. Suddenly there was no hurry about getting rid of the shogun barrel. He sat out on the patio for a while and then went upstairs and took a long shower. The last thing he remembered was putting in his new brown suit. Why? Was he going somewhere special?
That night he was tormented by terrible dreams. And after he woke up he went right on dreaming them, because they weren’t dreams but memories. They were bad, as bad an anything he could imagine, full of blood and screaming and the sound of a twelve gauge shotgun being fired in an enclosed space.
This time he knew what had happened during the long waking sleep that had overcome him that afternoon. It was floating back to him in bits and pieces, and it was horrible.
He even knew the name of the man he had killed—Sal Grazzi. He just didn’t know why.
Had he done this thing? Had he done it? No, not really, not him. He had been standing somehow outside it. A witness, nothing more.
He remembered now how the Lincoln had gotten dented. That old man . . .
He climbed out of bed as quietly as he could and went downstairs. He didn’t want to awaken Beth—what could be tell her?—and he felt as if he was about to begin sobbing.
Yet he didn’t. As he sat in the kitchen, nursing a cup of luke warm coffee, a terrible calm descended over him. He knew now that he was in a trap, and he saw with perfect clarity how willingly he had walked into it.
He was damned.
Phil took his coffee with him into the old dining room. He thought he would go outside and have a smoke.
All he had to do was to look out through the glass doors.
It was one of those nights when the moon washes the world in its silver light. He could see everything quite clearly.
He could see the man sitting on one of the lawn chairs—a man dressed in a brown suit, smoking a cigarette.
The house was dark, but this stranger who was somehow so familiar knew Phil was there behind the glass doors. He turned his head and smiled.
Chapter 18
If Jim Phelan had taken better care of his teeth, the break in the case might never have come.
The grocery store near the bottom of Greenley Avenue had been a family enterprise for as long as anyone could remember. Little Tommy Spolino had bought his Fruit Fizzes and his baseball cards from Jim’s grandfather, who died in 1951, and not even the arrival of the big chains had managed to put Phelan & Son out of business. They delivered, for one thing, and they always got your order right, and, for another, if you happened to have left your wallet at home they would trust you for the price of an evening paper because they knew your name and knew you were coming back. It was one of those places that define the life of a community and keep it, in some sense, a small town even if fifty or sixty thousand people live there.
So when Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino needed a box of licorice pieces—no man is so perfect as to be without a vice, and this was his—he went to Phelan & Son, out of long habit and because he knew they always stocked his brand.
The sound of the bell tinkling as he opened the door was so familiar he hardly noticed it, no more than the creak of the wooden floor or the faint smell of sawdust. The store had only one other patron, which was not unusual at eight fifteen on a Monday morning—Spolino hadn’t even reported for work yet—and he stopped by the jams and jellies shelf and pretended to read all the labels while the middle-aged lady explained her shopping list to the not-quite-elderly man in the long white apron who was waiting on her. When she swept past him and he heard the bell tinkle again, he turned to the counter and smiled.
“Morning, Tom,” the man said, taking off his glasses to clean them on the hem of his apron. “You’re up early.”
“Morning, Mr. Phelan. Jimmy off today?”
Gus Phelan nodded gravely. He was one of those Irishmen who enter old age with a full head of white, slightly curly hair and a shrimp-pink complexion left unmarked, it seemed, by the sorrows of this world. Everyone under the age of sixty called him “Mister” because, like Tom Spolino, they had been coming here since they were children. Gus was perhaps seventy himself and had been retired for five years on the theory that his son, who had worked beside him for close to thirty years, was all grown up and had a right to run the business without interference.
“He has to see the dentist this morning—impacted molar. His jaw is so swollen he can hardly eat. It’s been driving him crazy all weekend.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
“He’ll live,” Gus responded casually. “And, besides, it gets me out of the house for a day. Seems like only yesterday I started as my dad’s stock boy—never thought I’d miss clerkin’ store, but sometimes I do.”
He smiled, as if the irony pleased him.
And Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino had one of his famous inspirations.
“Mr. Phelan, did you ever hear the name ‘Charlie Brush’ before?”
For a split second Gus Phelan seemed to consider the question, and then he frowned, as if remembering some dental appointment of his own.
“Not for a long time. If your interest is professional, Tom, you’re a little late.”
He laughed softly at his own joke and then picked up a feather duster, glancing about for something to clean with it.
“Who was he, Mr. Phelan? And, yes, it is professional.”
Phelan & Son, as everyone knew, had the cleanest plate glass windows of any store in Greenley. All you could see, looking through them from the inside, was the other side of the street: Bixby’s Restaurant and Bar, the Lido Bakery, a clothing store for rich kids called the Yuppy Puppy, and one small corner of an antique store that seemed to change hands every two years. Maybe it was because the glass was kept so clean, but in sixty years and more nothing had happened around this corner of town that Gus Phelan didn’t know about.
In a kind of ritual cleansing, he wiped a hand on his apron and pointed to the little cluster of empty tables in front of Bixby’s.
“Back in the Thirties it was called ‘Dink’s’,” he said, and then he paused for a moment, as if to check his memory, and then nodded. “You could sit outside back then too. I remember the day Roosevelt repealed the Volstead Act—it was the first really nice day of the year. I came straight from school to help my dad in the store, right around that corner there, and I nearly tripped over Charlie Brush’s feet.
“He looked at me for a second, like he was trying to decide if he should cut my heart out, and then he said, ‘Kid, go get me a beer.’ Well, I got him his beer. I came over here and snagged one of the bottles dad kept in behind the ice chest, and I had it on the table in front of Charlie inside of two minutes. He said, ‘Thanks, kid,’ and flipped me a fifty-cent piec
e. Hell, in those days, even when there was Prohibition, a beer only cost a nickel. That was Charlie—a real high roller. Very generous if he was in the right mood, but watch out. That’s what he was like.”
The memory did not seem entirely pleasant. After a moment, Gus shook his head and laughed.
“What was he?” Spolino asked. “I mean, what did he do to get the money for fifty-cent tips?”
He smiled, although it was an effort.
“Everything. You name it. He and George Patchmore used to run booze, so it was said. And even I knew they were into gambling because one time they rented the basement of this store for a poker game—maybe I shouldn’t tell you that, Tom.”
But Spolino smiled again and shook his head. “Way past the Statute of Limitations, Mr. Phelan, so you’re safe. What else?”
“Murder.” Gus Phelan’s voice was bland as butter, as if the word had lost all power to shock him. “He used to ride around with a sawed-off shotgun on the front seat of his car. At least, that’s what I heard. I never saw the shotgun, but I remember the car—a great big Lincoln, beautiful thing, dark red, always kept it polished up like a new apple. Whenever you read in the newspapers that somebody ‘d been found with his face blown away, you always knew it was Charlie.”
Spolino looked out the polished windows at the tables in front of Bixby’s and thought about the last time he’d seen a dark red Lincoln, polished up like a new apple.
“Was he a local boy?” he asked.
“No. He was a slicker.”
“Was he George’s partner? I mean, in the Moonlight?”
“That’s what people said.”
“What happened to him?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Gus Phelan shrugged, as if the answer were not only unknown but unknowable. “He just disappeared. Maybe somebody killed him, or maybe he just figured they were about to and he took off. I guess that must have been right before the War, because I was still living with my mom and dad.
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