He laughed and threw his cigarette away. It made a yellow arc through the darkness.
“Have you always been here?”
“Always. Ever since June 27, 1941. That was the day you might say I moved in.”
“And you were here when Uncle George was here?”
“Yeah. One way or the other.”
“Is that why he would never sell?”
“Could be—I never really asked him. Come on. I want to show you something.”
Charlie Brush came out of his chair in a crouch and then straightened up. Somehow he seemed taller.
“In the garage. Come on.”
Phil followed along behind him on the gravel path that led to the front of the house and again, as on the stairs, the only footfalls he could hear were his own. Charlie held himself very upright as he walked, but there was an old man’s stiffness in his gait.
When they reached the garage doors, Charlie took a key out of his pocket and sprang the lock. Then he opened the right-hand door just shoulder width.
“Here, this is yours,” he said, handing the key back to Phil. “Don’t lose it.”
He hit the switch, and the overheads bathed everything in a thick, yellowish light.
It was a shock to see him. His skin was gray, the paper gray of an abandoned wasp’s nest, and the eyes were set so deeply in his face that they seemed almost to disappear. There was a line, as irregular as a crack in a plaster wall, running from his left eye to his jaw. He looked like he was breaking apart.
With fingers as wrinkled as talons, he pried open the fuse box against the back wall.
“I haven’t got a lot of time to waste with you, so listen. You see this?” He pointed to a breaker switch, the bottom one on the second of two banks. It looked exactly like all the others, except there was a fleck of yellow paint on it. “This is our insurance policy.”
He smiled, if you could call it that anymore. It was painful to see.
“Harve rigged this up one time while he thought he was still making the decisions. I guess he figured if it got too bad he could burn us all down together. A good idea, but a little before its time.”
“What is it?”
“What is it?” He seemed to like the question. “I guess you could call it a sort of detonator. It goes from the house current down to a couple of wires in the gasoline storage tank that’s buried out front. You throw this switch and up it blows.”
He threw it. There was a sharp snap and then nothing. Phil could feel his heart pounding in his ears.
“A little joke—relax.” Charlie pushed the switch again until it snapped back into place. “Harve thought of everything and rigged it to a timer. There’s a twenty-minute delay, in case he changed his mind. He wanted to be able to throw it, go inside the house, sit down and think about whether that particular afternoon he felt like ending up a cinder. Then, if he decided he didn’t, he could come back out here and reset it.
“Besides, there’s no gasoline in the tank anymore—they drained it after Harve checked himself out. That’s where you come in.”
He closed the fuse box and moved over by the doors, to a little shelf that must once have held a telephone. There was a connection terminal on the wall behind it, just below a yellowing list of names and numbers.
“Tomorrow morning, phone the fuel wholesaler. Tell him you’ve got a thousand gallon tank and you need a fill-up. Tell him to get his ass over here by tomorrow or the next day. Offer to pay cash—that should do it. If he gets nosey, let him think you’re gonna reopen the gas station.
“It’ll probably never come to that, but if anything goes wrong, we all dance out together. You, me and the Moonlight—no goodbyes.”
His face seemed actually to be falling to pieces now, as if the gray, decaying flesh were rotting off the bone. And his whole right shoulder seemed crusted with dried blood.
“You got all that, pal?”
It was only with the greatest difficulty that Phil could bring himself to nod his head. He was in a trance of fascinated loathing which he could hardly break—which he hardly even wanted to break. He was like a man listening to the history of the life that stretched before him into the future.
Except now the future seemed on the verge of obliteration.
Charlie Brush smiled his death’s head smile.
“Don’t look so worried, pal. We gotta be ready, but there’s lots to do before we think about the grand finale. For one thing, I still gotta get square.”
Chapter 24
Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino had received a fairly complete preliminary report on the Grazzi killing. He had everything except the autopsy findings, which, in cases of gunshot wounds, were usually not very helpful.
He had enough, in fact, to know whom he should arrest, but he also knew he had nowhere near enough for a conviction. He was beginning to doubt he ever would.
Suppose, on the basis of the Devere woman’s identification, he were to obtain a search warrant for Philip Owings’ premises. If he found the brown suit he could have it vacuumed for carpet fibers and hope to come up with a match from the brothel. It was possible that the Stamford police would be able to match the suit with samples found at the scene—they might even get supremely lucky and find traces of burnt gunpowder on the sleeves.
But so what? They would have made a fairly solid case that the suit had been there, but they still wouldn’t have Philip Owings inside it. Just such physical evidence had sent more than one bad guy to the slammer, but this time it wasn’t enough.
They had the murder weapon, a hacked-down twelve gauge pump shotgun, and it was possible that with diligence they could run down the store from which it had been sold. You didn’t have to provide identification to purchase a shotgun in this state, but they might stumble across a clerk who would remember Philip Owings. The lab boys might even find some iron filings or something to suggest that Owings had modified the weapon at home.
The problem was that the fucking gun was covered with perfectly clear fingerprints, and none of them matched the ones belonging to Philip Owings that Spolino had received from the Department of Defense. The prints on the gun matched those of a hard guy named Charles Brush, whom nobody had seen since a June evening in 1941 and who, if he was still above ground, would be something in the neighborhood of eighty-five years old.
The Devere woman had identified Philip Owings, but Spolino didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her under defense cross-examination. Philip Owings was the guy she let in the door, but Philip Owings wasn’t the guy who wasted Sal Grazzi. Charlie Brush was that guy. And they both walked around in the same skin. Great. Marvelous. It would have the jury in stitches.
Except that that was just exactly the way it had gone down.
Besides, nobody was going to cross-examine the Devere woman. When the Devere woman checked out of her hospital room, she was going to disappear into a Family limousine and never be heard of around here again. Sonny Galatina wasn’t having any of his business interests involved in a murder trial, not if he could possibly help it.
The prints, the god damned fingerprints—they were the key.
A man doesn’t change his fingerprints. Maybe, if he’s a fanatic about it, he can burn them off, but he can’t grow new ones. It can’t be done.
So, what were the possibilities? Has Philip Owings somehow gained access to a set of Charlie Brush’s prints, which by some process, unspecified and probably unimaginable, he transfers to the shotgun? The prints of a man who has been missing for fifty years?
Or maybe Charlie Brush handles the gun at some time in the past, and Owings uses it without leaving any of his own? Is he wearing, say, latex gloves?
The Devere woman would have noticed the gloves. She was probably studying this joker pretty carefully while he decided if he was going to take her head off. She wouldn’t have missed the gloves.
And when would Brush have had his hands on that gun? How much time were we talking about? Could the gun have been lying a
round somewhere ever since Charlie had got what was coming to him?
Spolino had heard once about a fingerprint that was lifted from the inside of a car window four years after the car, with some slob tied up in the trunk, had been buried in a land fill. Four years, away from the light, preserved as if in a time capsule, and everyone was amazed. Four years, not fifty.
Or maybe Charlie was alive somewhere and running the show. Or maybe Charlie was dead somewhere and running the show.
The Devere woman had said the guy changed, right in front of her. He started out as one man and ended up as another—or, more accurately, as the walking, talking corpse of another. Philip Owings to Charlie Brush, and Charlie Brush, from all accounts, wasn’t wearing too well.
That was what she had said. And the Devere woman, whatever else she was, was no mental case. She would have made a favorable impression on any jury if only she’d had a slightly less loony story to tell.
And it was loony. But then the whole fucking case was loony.
The clock over the door to the holding pen said one, and Spolino was hungry. It was a nice day, for once not too warm, so probably, unless she heard on the kitchen radio that there was a crime wave on Greenley Avenue, Alice would be expecting him home for lunch. She would have saved him some of the homemade fettucini verdi left over from dinner. For a prim little yankee girl, Alice cooked pretty mean Italian.
He scooped up the reports from the Stamford police and tossed them in the top drawer of his desk, which he slammed shut with a casual twitch of his hand—it did not occur to him to lock the drawer. Then he put on his sports jacket and started on his way.
Alice, that good girl, even had a piece of cold steak for him to have with the fettucini, and she sat at the kitchen table and watched him eat it.
“You want to hear something weird, Alice?” he asked her, aware that he was about to break one of the long-standing customs of the house—but who else was there? Alice was perhaps the one person on earth who knew him well enough to believe he wasn’t out of his mind.
“Is it about the Grazzi killing?” she asked, her voice perfectly even as she sat with her arms folded over her slender bosom, as if he had discussed his cases with her every day of their married life.
“How did you know that?”
Alice merely shrugged. “You left a manila envelope on the dresser last night. It was stamped ‘Stamford P.D.’ What else would it be?”
The woman was amazing.
“Yeah, well, have you ever heard of a ghost that uses a sawed-off shotgun. Do you believe in ghosts, Alice? Because I think that’s what we’ve got here.”
Then he told her about the fingerprints.
She listened carefully, and when he was finished she absentmindedly ran her left hand through her short brown hair, which with Alice was always a sign of perplexity.
“You don’t think it’s possible someone’s pulling your leg?” she asked. “I don’t mean a practical joke, but a deception.”
Spolino shook his head. “I’d love to believe that, but I don’t see how they’d have managed it.”
“Are you going to tell the Stamford police about this?”
“I wouldn’t dare, Alice. They wouldn’t believe it. They’d think I was the one pulling someone’s leg.”
“Then I think you have to find Charlie Brush.”
“Alive or dead?”
“Alive or dead.”
The telephone rang and Spolino went over to the kitchen counter to answer it. It was the station secretary.
“Tom, I got a call from the branch manager at the Union Trust—I thought, since you’re closer, you might want to stop in there on your way back.”
“Okay. What’s it about.”
“Some funny money, sounds like. Oh, and a package came for you. I put it on your desk.”
He hung up, feeling reprieved. He had been all set to tell Alice about the Devere woman, and maybe even the note in Charlie Brush’s suitcoat, but now he thought that might have been a mistake. No point in giving her something to worry about.
“I have to go to the bank,” he said. “Are we overdrawn?”
He smiled so she would know he was making a joke.
The Union Trust was at the top of Greenley Avenue, in a building that looked like a wedding cake and hadn’t even been there twenty years ago. The manager, whose name was Crary, was a solid citizen who commuted from Norwalk, so Spolino had never met him before.
They shook hands, Crary asked him to sit down and then closed his office door before taking his place behind a large, uncluttered desk. He opened a drawer and removed a letter-sized envelope. Inside were about three dozen bills, all twenties.
Spolino took one, looked at the front, then the back, and held it up to the light. Then he checked it against the others. The serial numbers were all different and non-consecutive.
“They seem okay to me,” he said, “but I’m no expert.”
“They are okay. But look at the date.”
Crary was short, about five six, and a good thirty pounds overweight. His slick black hair was thinning badly and he looked worried. But maybe bank managers always looked worried.
Spolino hunted around on the note until he found a date.
“Series 1951.”
Crary folded his hands together and put them under his chin, as if he was worried about keeping his head from wobbling.
“The life expectancy of a twenty-dollar bill is about two and a half to three years, because they don’t circulate as much. A single is rarely good for more than eighteen months. This bill is close to forty years old, and they’re all like that.”
“Who spotted this, a teller?”
“That’s right. I had everybody check their drawers, and we came up with what you see. Money moves through a bank pretty fast, Lieutenant, so I would guess everything here has come in over the last week.”
“So what you’re telling me is that someone out there has a wad of very old money and he’s beginning to spread it around.”
Crary nodded, looking more worried than ever.
“I don’t even know if this is a police problem . . .”
“I’ll bet the IRS people will enjoy hearing about it.” Spolino gave the man one of his Community Relations smiles. “You did the right thing to call us, Mr. Crary. People don’t normally hold on to a stash like this if they’ve paid their taxes on it, but you never know. Maybe some nutty old lady’s been keeping a nest egg hidden in her corset and the heirs found it.”
For the very first time, the bank manager seemed to ease up a bit—a man in his position likes to hear he hasn’t made a fool out of himself.
“Mr. Crary, I’ll tell you what I’d appreciate your doing. These bills are probably being passed in stores—at least, if it was me I wouldn’t bring them into a bank, where they would be spotted in a minute. If you could have your people check the cash bags that come in at the end of the week, and note who is taking the stuff in, and maybe the amounts, we’ll take it from there.”
He shook hands again and was back out on the street in two minutes. Somehow bankers didn’t like you to linger.
“Well what do you know,” Spolino murmured to himself as he picked his way among the shoppers on Greenley Avenue. “Charlie Brush seems to have himself a roll.”
. . . . .
The package on his desk was from Philip Owings’ insurance company and contained an audio cassette—he had almost forgotten about it.
Lieutenant Spolino hunted up a tape player and sat down to listen through a pair of earphones.
He didn’t even have to find his place. There was a high-pitched squeak, and then the date stamp, and then the voice: “Ah, this is Philip Owings of 637 Old River Road, Greenley, Connecticut 06831. My policy number is 6568-8765-7724. I had a little accident. The car is drivable and there were no injuries. Please have an agent get in touch with me. My telephone number is 203-628-6787. Thank you.” And then a click.
Spolino rewound the tape and played it again.
The car is drivable and there were no injuries. That was the part he liked best. I’ve had a little accident. No specifics, just I’ve had a little accident. It could be anything. It was like the guy was reading a script. Clever bastard.
But there was something wrong. Spolino had to replay the tape about half a dozen times before it hit him.
“My policy number is . . .”
It was the way he pronounced the “o” from the back of his throat, the way the “r” got lost.
He had talked to Philip Owings for maybe half an hour, and the Philip Owings who had talked back was perfect to type—a nice California boy with that flat, accentless, California voice all the television newsmen worked so hard to imitate. People out there might be crazy, their brains baked soft in all that sun, but there were supposed to speak the purest English in the world.
The voice on the tape was Philip Owings, only transplanted—like he had really grown up on Second Avenue and it still showed a little through the cracks.
It was Philip Owings, and it wasn’t. Just like the guy who had blown Sal Grazzi out of his socks—he was Philip Owings, and then he was somebody else.
A copy of the whorehouse tape was part of the evidence package Spolino had received from Jerry Reilly. He hadn’t played it yet—he had been too hypnotized by the fingerprints. He got it out now and put in on the machine.
“Personal Services.” That was the Devere woman, coming on all breathless and sophisticated.
“I got your number from a friend of a friend. My name is Charlie, and I’m looking for a good time.”
Jesus, there he was. Our authentic hard-ass boy, the righteous New York born and bred hood, singing his song of love through Philip Owings’ pipes. My name is Charlie.
“It was like he became someone else, like one face just pressed its way through the other,” the Devere woman had said. “And the second face could have belonged to a corpse.”
The Moonlight Page 22
