The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  Spolino knocked on the glass upper half of the chief’s door, dreading what was to come.

  “You got a minute?” he asked, sticking his head into the tiny office. “I need to talk to you about this Galatina thing. It’s getting out of hand.”

  Monser was in his shirtsleeves and seated behind his desk, his black suspenders like a badge of office. The jacket of his elegantly tailored gray suit was on a wooden hanger suspended from a hook beside the door. His wardrobe was an extravagance, even on a captain’s salary.

  He was in his middle forties, with black hair that was going a little gray at the temples, and he had a wide, impassive, intelligent face. His hands were folded and his eyebrows slightly raised, one of those calculated bureaucratic poses intended to indicate that you had his complete if skeptical attention.

  “So what’s the problem, Tom? Sit down.”

  Spolino laid out the case for him: the dented car, the fingerprints, Leo’s deathbed identification, even his suspicions about the money. He told him everything, except the Devere woman’s statement, the grave dust and the note he had found in Charlie Brush’s suitcoat—he didn’t need to have Monser tell him he should take some time off and to see the department psychologist on his way out.

  “It sounds like you’re working toward a double indictment, that Owings and Brush have conspired to commit murder and maybe tax fraud.” Monser closed the file folder like God at the Last Judgment and tossed it back across the desk to Spolino. “So prove a link and arrest them.”

  “There’s just the one catch. Charlie Brush was a one-man crime wave around here back in the Thirties. He was a real bad boy and this kind of stuff would have suited him down to the ground, but he disappeared in June, 1941, and nobody was seen or heard from him since.”

  It was interesting to watch Monser’s reaction—or, rather, his lack of one. He never even blinked. It was a wonderful exercise of self-control, because of course no cop likes to admit that he hasn’t seen it all already.

  There was only a long silence during which he turned the thing over a few times in his mind.

  “Tom, is this some kind of a gag?” he asked finally.

  “I’m just giving you the facts, Ed—what I have. I don’t make jokes about murder.”

  “No. I don’t suppose you do.”

  Without unclasping his hands, Monser took them from his desk and parked them behind his head while he tilted back his chair as if to read something off the ceiling. After a time he took a deep breath and let it out with a rush.

  “So what’s next?” he asked. It was less a question than a statement of incredulity.

  “I want to toss the Moonlight,” Spolino answered, pulling the file folder back into his lap. “I want a search team and a couple of people from the lab to take the place apart.”

  “Looking for what?” Monser’s eyes dropped from the ceiling to Spolino’s face, and instantly narrowed with suspicion.

  “Anything I can find—money, weapons, evidence of Charlie Brush. We have to put this guy away, Ed. We’ve got a psycho on our hands.”

  Monser let his gaze drift back up to the ceiling, a bad sign.

  “First off, forget about the money,” he said. “You have no probable cause—you have nothing at all that points to Owings. And even if you did, it’s a federal beef. We have no jurisdiction.

  “For the rest, you have to be looking for specific evidence relating to a specific crime. You know that, Tom. No judge is going to give us a fishing license.”

  “Then let me go out there with an arrest warrant for Charlie Brush.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Ed Monser pulled himself upright in his chair and laid his hands palm down on the desktop. “You told me yourself, nobody’s heard from this guy in fifty years—you expect to walk in there and arrest him?

  “Do you know what’ll happen if you’re wrong, Tom? Owings will have your badge, that’s what’ll happen. This is Greenley, Connecticut, not Lower Manhattan and not some suburb of Moscow. Citizens have protection against illegal search and seizure, and they’re not the least little bit timid about hiring a lawyer to hang some cop’s guts out to dry.”

  Behind his desk Monser was set and ready, like a bulldog guarding the front gate, but Spolino wasn’t going to give him an argument. Spolino hadn’t heard anything except what he expected to hear—what he probably would have said himself if one of his sergeants had come to him with the same idea. He had known the answer before he knocked on the door. But some questions have to be asked anyway.

  “This guy’s going to kill again,” he said quietly, just stating a fact. “We have to do something.”

  “The answer is no. No search warrant, no arrest warrant. No.”

  Spolino got up from his chair, feeling old and tired and used up, wondering if Dick Tracy had ever had days like this.

  “Fine,” he said. “We’ve got a psychotic running around loose and you’re worried about legal niceties.”

  “Stay away from Owings, Tom.”

  “I don’t think so.” Spolino gave his captain a ratty grin. “I think I’ll take a drive out there—maybe he’ll invite me in for tea. Anyway, the bastard ’ll know we’ve got him figured out. Maybe he’ll decide to pick up his winnings and quit.”

  “And maybe he’ll sue you and the department both.”

  “Relax, will you? I’m just gonna talk to him. Or do you want me to clear it with the A.C.L.U. first?”

  He closed the door with sufficient force to make the glass rattle.

  . . . . .

  When Spolino got to the Moonlight, he found he had to stop his car out on the road because the driveway was completely blocked off by a gigantic, shiny silver tank truck marked “Exxon”. It was a good fifteen minutes before he saw the driver up in the truck’s cab and heard the low, fluttering rumble of the engine revving up. When the Exxon truck finally jack-knifed its way out of the driveway, Spolino could see Philip Owings standing beside the gas pumps.

  He drove in and parked in front of the garage doors.

  “You going into the service station business?” he asked as he climbed out of his car and slammed the door behind him.

  For a moment Owings stared at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. And then he looked embarrassed.

  “Yeah, I thought maybe . . .” He let the sentence trail off, smiling rather foolishly.

  “You put in for your retail sales license yet?” Spolino could see from his reaction that that detail hadn’t even occurred to him. “And garages have to have state clearance. You’d better do it pretty quick, or you’ll end up using all that gas in your own car. By the way, how’s the Lincoln? Any more fender benders?”

  Owings seemed about to deflect the question with another of his witless smiles, and then, apparently, he remembered the small matter of a felony investigation. He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers and stared sullenly at the ground.

  “Are we back to that?”

  “Yes, we’re back to that—among other things.”

  You could always tell when you were dealing with a hard case. There was no outrage, no offended declarations of innocence, no failures of nerve. Owings didn’t even seem surprised. This wasn’t the same guy Spolino had talked to only a few days ago.

  “You want to tell me where you were last Sunday night between the hours of eight and eleven?”

  “Home, reading the paper.” Philip Owings, the spotless citizen, gave Spolino an under-the-eyebrows look that would have done any two-time loser proud. “I picked up my girlfriend from work at eleven.”

  “But you’ve got no witnesses can put you here before that?”

  “You got any can put me someplace else?”

  Spolino didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to hear.

  “That the lady I saw here last time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You own a shotgun, Mr. Owings?”

  The question seemed to take him by surprise—his glance wavered for just an instant and
then, without his expression changing in any obvious way, he seemed to smile faintly.

  “Sure. I own a shotgun.”

  “What kind?”

  “A twelve gauge pump.”

  “You have it on the premises?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mind if I take a look at it?”

  “No. I don’t mind.”

  That was it, the clever bastard—he knew he was safe.

  “Why don’t you come inside,” he said. “I’ll go get it.”

  Spolino followed him toward the house and through the massive oak front door. It was the first time he had been inside the Moonlight since the day after Harve Wickham hanged himself, and it gave him the authentic creeps. Just standing there in the entrance hall made his flesh crawl.

  “It’s up in my closet,” Owings said. “I won’t be a minute.”

  Spolino stood there, listening to Owings on the stairs, trying to account to himself for the peculiar sense of desolation he could feel in this place, like the damp cold of a room that has been left closed up too long. The entrance hall was lined with windows along one side—little panes of rippled glass held together by a spider’s web of lead, the sort of thing you hardly saw anymore—but they did almost nothing to dissipate the gloom. It was as if the light itself died as it entered within these walls.

  “Here we are.”

  Owings had returned, carrying a long brown plastic gun sleeve, obviously new. He unzipped it along the wider end and pulled out the shotgun butt first. He handed it to Spolino, who drew back the pump to make sure the chamber was empty.

  “You a hunter?”

  “From time to time,” Owings replied. He had his confidence back now. He was enjoying this. “Here, if you’re going to look it over, we might as well go in the kitchen.”

  “Let’s go back outside.” Spolino gave him a hard look, as if he knew Owings had the edge as long as they were inside the Moonlight. “I don’t suppose we’ll scare the neighbors.”

  On his way out the door, he pressed the release catch for the pump lever, which he then slid all the way forward. In a second he had the barrel unscrewed. It was clean. The chamber was glossy with new oil. Spolino guessed that the gun had never even been fired.

  “New?”

  “Brand new.” Owings smiled with the faint pride of ownership. “I’ve only had it a few days. You want to see the receipt?”

  Spolino shook his head—what was the point? Sal Grazzi’s killer had left the murder weapon behind. That was why Owings had been so pleased to show him this one.

  He would have been willing to bet that Owings had that receipt in his pocket, and that it was dated last Saturday.

  Spolino screwed the barrel back into place and handed the shotgun to its owner.

  “A nice gun,” he said, smiling himself, but without the slightest human warmth. “You won’t have much use of it close to home, though. Ducks and Geese are protected year round in this state.”

  “I’ll find something.”

  Spolino went over to his car and opened the door. He stood there for a moment as if trying to decide something.

  “You might find a lot of things in an old house like this,” he said at last. “God knows what George Patchmore might have had tucked away.”

  “Well, if I find anything I think you should know about, I’ll be sure to tell you.”

  “That might be wise.” He let Owings feel the weight of his cold, appraising gaze. “Say, if you happened to find a lot of twenty-dollar bills, all dated from the early Fifties. You might mention that to someone, just so the tax people wouldn’t get the wrong idea.”

  Good. Owings wasn’t smiling now. Spolino knew he had scored a direct hit.

  “By the way,” he said, as if it had just popped into his mind, “I wonder if you’ve ever met a fellow by the name of Charlie Brush. Sound familiar?”

  Owings shook his head—you had the impression that for those first few seconds maybe he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “No. Yeah, well, he was quite a boy around here once. He liked shotguns too.”

  Spolino climbed into his car and closed the door. He turned on the ignition, then he rolled down the window and leaned out. He even smiled.

  “Anyway, next time you see him, tell him I got his message.”

  Chapter 27

  July 5, 1990

  The funeral of Sal Grazzi took place at one o’clock in the afternoon at Saint Anselm’s in Stamford, his parish church where he and Beatrice Alioto had been married and where they had witnessed their children’s confirmations. Otherwise, Sal had hardly been inside the doors since grammar school.

  Everyone who knew him assumed that Sal Grazzi, found naked and shot to pieces in a downtown brothel, had probably not died in a state of grace, but this was not what gave his funeral its added solemnity. Sal’s had been the first mob hit in Fairfield County in many years, so all the Families in Western Connecticut, and even those from Westchester County and New York City itself, sent high-ranking representatives to pay their respects and to assure the Galatina people that they knew nothing whatever about this shocking breach of their long and profitable peace. The street in front of Saint Anselm’s was almost solid with black stretch limousines.

  Sonny Galatina arrived early and took the seat which had been reserved for him, six rows back and next but one from the aisle on the right-hand side. There, in the interval before the priest arrived, he received one after the other the condolences of old men who remembered the long and bitter wars through which the Galatina Family had established itself and who wanted no repetition. One of these was Carlo Riesi, consigliere of the Calabria Family of New Haven.

  Carlo had grown so feeble in recent years that one of his bodyguards had to help him lower himself into the pew seat. This done, he took Sonny’s hand and squeezed it.

  “A terrible thing,” Carlo mourned in a gravelly whisper, shaking his head. “If there’s anything we can do. . .”

  But Sonny waved the offer aside with an impatient gesture. It wouldn’t do to let people imagine the Galatinas couldn’t manage their own affairs.

  “We’re on it,” Sonny answered. “The police seem to think we did it ourselves. Can you imagine anything so dumb?”

  “Cops. . .” Carlo shook his head again.

  “Yeah, well, what we got here is a nut case—just some clown who’s been watchin’ too many movies. We’ll find him, and we’ll put his lights out.”

  “Any leads?”

  “We got a name already. We just got to make sure.”

  “Good.” Carlo patted him on the arm and motioned to his bodyguard to help him up. “We knew you’d be on top of this, Sonny.”

  It was only after the old man had left that Sonny realized how deeply he had committed himself. But what else could he have done? He couldn’t look like a jerk in front of a man like Carlo Riesi, who had once traded shots with his grandfather.

  He just hoped this Philip Owings was the one, because he was almost certainly going to have to kill him now.

  Sonny looked up to the altar and, about ten feet in front of the communion rail, the bronze casket—closed, of course, because Sal Grazzi was in no condition to be seen—and suddenly he was conscious of having reached the crisis of his life. Sal had never amounted to much, but he had been Enrico’s godson, and now he was sealed off forever from the light of day. An offense had been committed against the honor of the Galatinas, and it demanded to be avenged. If he could manage this one thing, Sonny thought, then at last he would be the true Don, like his father and grandfather before him. If he could not, he was nothing more than a businessman who dealt in illegal substances.

  The last people to arrive were the grieving family. There was Bea and her three children, two young girls and a pimply, sullen thirteen-year-old son, and there was the widowed mother. The mother, Teresa, a fat, white-haired woman in her sixties, never took her face out of the lace handkerchief she held unfolded over her rig
ht hand. Stupid woman. She should be relieved, Sonny thought. Now she wouldn’t have to take Sal in anymore on the regular occasions when his wife threw him out of the house.

  Bea was tall and angular, an unappealing woman but possessed in mourning of a certain grim dignity. She glanced over her shoulder and caught Sonny’s eye, and he nodded. He had made his promise, it seemed, and now it was up to him to keep it.

  Sal’s boy kept twisting his head around, like a theater manager checking the house. He looked uncomfortable in his black suit. He seemed to resent being here at all.

  Terry—that was the kid’s name, Terry, like a goddamned pansy hairdresser—Terry was not a very promising youth, and chances were good that in five or six years “Uncle Sonny” was going to have to invent a job for him. Probably he would follow in his old man’s footsteps, playing Mafia hard guy to an audience of bored hookers, a wise ass in gold chains and a white Cadillac who kept a big nickel-plated automatic in his glove compartment just so the girls could see it when they went for a kleenex.

  That was the trouble with the Families these days. They were the employers of last resort. If a kid had any brains he went to college and learned how to be a legitimate thief. It was only the morons who came into the business, the deadwood for whom you had to “find something” because their fathers and grandfathers had been righteous hoods back in the days when that was still a badge of honor. The Mafia today was just a kind of hereditary civil service for no talent crooks.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine how Sal had died, pleading for mercy and squealing like a pig. And yet he had to be avenged, because he was a made man in the Galatina Family and that continued to mean something.

  And it would go on meaning something until the day Sonny Galatina forgot how to be a man and let such an insult go unanswered.

  During the service Sonny assumed an expression of the most impenetrable gravity, as if he were listening not to the priest but to some terrible inner voice that counseled war and destruction and spoke with a distinct Sicilian accent. This was expected of him.

  When the priest was finished, and the organ gurgled somberly, Sonny went to the front of the church, faced Sal Grazzi’s casket and crossed himself, and then went to the grieving family. He shook young Terry’s hand, touched the young daughters on the heads, patted Sal’s mother on the arm and then took Bea by the shoulders and kissed her once on each cheek. This too was expected of him. He spoke to Bea, just a few sentences. He hardly knew himself what he said, and it did not matter. Everyone would see him with the widow, and they would believe he was promising her vengeance.