Here’s what I did: I jumped out of bed, scrambled about the dark room in search of my shorts and sneakers. All the time I’m doing this crazy one-legged dance while trying to step into my shorts mouthing “Shit, shit, shit” in this sort of screaming whisper voice.
Then comes the back door off the kitchen opening and slamming closed.
“Why’d you let me fall asleep?”
“Relax,” Scarlet insisted. “What’s he going to do? Shoot you in the head?”
Listen, even from behind closed doors I could see Jake’s tight, mustached face, big beefy arms, barrel chest and sausage-thick fingers already reaching for my neck. He didn’t have to shoot me. A stranglehold would do the trick.
And get this: while my life and death were flashing before my eyes, Scarlet calmly lay on her side. What a couple of beats before had been tears were now suddenly replaced with the sweetest smile you ever saw, a white bed sheet covering only her legs, leaving those lovely white titties exposed. I swear, even with the old man marching up those stairs, I almost laid back down with her, started kissing her sweet mouth, pressing her body tightly against mine.
My right mind: it’s not always right.
“Are you going home to Lola?” she asked, casually firing up another Virginia Slim. “I think you’re beginning to like her more than me.”
“I’m about to die,” I said, pulling up my gym shorts.
“No really one dies, Richard.”
She laughed. I had no idea what the hell was so funny. Especially with the tell-tale footsteps just outside the door—one heavy heartbeat-like clump after the other. But then, that was the thing about Scarlet. You never knew exactly which woman you were getting. Her mood could change as easily as the second hand on a watch face. So that one minute she might be laughing hysterically and the next staring out into space in an all-consuming sullenness. She could go from sexy to teary-eyed in one point five seconds, especially post-coitus. The time when lovers should be hugging, not pulling away.
I took one final look at Scarlet before climbing out the second-floor window. With my socks and Nike Airs balled up inside my left arm, I heard her smooth voice utter the words I’d never before heard: “I love you, Richard.”
Without a response, I jumped down onto the back porch overhang. Bare feet slid out from under me so that I landed flat on my ass just a second before falling forward, dropping down onto the rain-soaked lawn on hands and knees.
No time to check for broken bones, no time to feel the pain, no time to consider the sudden stiffness in my right arm.
No time like the present to avoid one of my seizures!
I just bounded back up, caught my breath, and like my fellow Marines drilled me in the first Gulf War, selected a direct line of retreat.
But before I started to run…just in that instant it takes your gray matter to shift from Stop to all-out Go…I took one last peek up at Scarlet’s bedroom. Through the driving rain, I made out her face, her green eyes and auburn hair made all the thicker and richer when the bedroom light was suddenly flicked on behind her.
In that quick second, I could tell that she was no longer laughing.
From where I stood in the rain and the quick flashes of lightning, I saw that she was simply smiling. A lonely kind of smile that had nothing to do with happiness. When she raised her right hand, extended an index finger, pressed it to her lips as if to give the sign for all quiet, I knew that I could trust her not to reveal anything about our affair to Jake. That no matter how difficult things might get for her that night, no matter how rough, I could trust her and her silence. She, in turn, could trust in me—trust in the fact that I would do just about anything for her. Anything but brave a face-down with Jake in the flesh inside his wife’s bedroom.
When Scarlet turned away from the window, I made my swift and stealthy exit from the Montana homestead, such as it was, praying that a damn good lesson had finally been learned that night—that I would never more be led astray by my other head.
2
Here’s how Scarlet first invaded my life: we were both guests at a department fundraiser held every Christmas season inside the Elks Club ballroom. Me having attended the function by department mandate without my first wife—a chief E.R. nurse for the Albany Medical Center who that night was working the four-to-midnight “action shift”—and Scarlet, the guest of her then-fiance and my department super.
That winter night back in ‘99 was her coming out, so to speak. No one had ever met her before. We only heard rumors about Jake’s long-distance love affair with a beautiful young woman from the west coast. But we had never seen so much as a photograph. Considering Jake’s wide girth, sloppy appearance, and constant three-day shadow, expectations weren’t running terribly high. To be frank, we expected a Montana look-alike in drag.
Our expectations could not have been more wrong.
When she walked in arm-in-arm with the top cop, I thought the dance floor might fall out from under my feet. This slim young woman, dressed all in black with thick auburn hair and green eyes, was nothing like I’d imagined. When Jake left her side to get her a drink, she could not have stood more than ten feet away from me. Maybe it was the effects of one too many Jack and Cokes, but I guess I must have been staring, because it was only a matter of a few seconds before her green eyes were drawn to my browns. When they locked on me, I would have sworn that somebody had sucked the oxygen from my lungs.
I remember wanting to say something. Something to put her at ease.
The tight-lipped look on her face, the way she cocked her head, the way she brushed back her hair with a slightly trembling hand, the way she speed-blinked her eyes, it was if she were begging me to say something. Anything at all. Even a simple “Hello” would have been fine, I’m sure.
But instead I just stood there staring, the biggest dolt you ever saw dressed in a blue blazer, wrinkled button-down and blue-striped rep tie, coffee stain painting its center.
By the time Jake made it back with the drinks, Scarlet shifted her focus to him. Gladly. Or so I guessed.
The spell might have been broken, but what had definitely become an infatuation-at-first-sight was not.
Jake wasn’t blind.
He threw me a silent glare, one that suggested territorial boundaries. The big bear staring down the littler bear. I knew my opportunity to introduce myself had come and gone, at least for the time being. Naturally, Jake would make a formal introduction to everyone on his support staff later in the evening.
But then what difference did introductions make? Or more accurately, what difference did my crush make?
I was married to a woman who had recently given birth to our first and what would be our only child together. As far as life partners went, I was locked up till death did us in. But standing there alone on the Elk’s Club dance floor, Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas,” I eyed the woman who jealously clung to Jake Montana. For the first time in our brief working relationship, I would have cut off my left nut to trade places with him.
This is what I learned about Scarlet over the course of the evening: that she was a recent transplant from Southern California. Santa Monica, to be precise. Why she chose to transplant herself to an east coast Deadwood-like Albany might have been anybody’s guess.
Santa Monica. . . the name just dripped off your tongue and lips like sweet nectar. It evoked images of bright sunshine, long stretches of white sandy beach, clear blue surf and killer waves.
Scarlet’s bright smile and gentle grace seemed so out of place inside a city like Albany, a place known more for its gray winters than anything else.
There was something else too.
The way Scarlet clung to Jake’s beefy arm. Not like he’d become her significant other; more like he’d become her bodyguard. It was as if behind the beautiful smile existed something tragic.
It would be much later on, back when my own marriage was finally falling apart, that she would reveal the fate of her first husband and only child—abou
t how they’d been killed in a head-on by a drunken driver— a stockbroker who crossed over the meridian after having passed out at the wheel of his Lexus sedan. From what Scarlet told me while the two of us lay side by side in her bed, she’d waited up all night for her husband and son to arrive home, knowing that as the hours ticked by she should have been calling the police; she should have been searching for them. But instead she chose to do nothing, because in her heart she already knew that they were dead. She physically felt their absence the same way a person will feel only a cold sensation when a limb is suddenly and unexpectedly severed.
She came east not long after burying her family in the hopes that she could start over, forget the past, begin anew in a different location—a location as far away from sunny California in geography and spirit as a location could get.
For a while, her relationship with Jake represented a brighter future. For a time he became her guardian angel, her protector against what I would come to know as her “psychic demons.” But what Scarlet didn’t know then was that Jake also had a past as tragic as her own. Like one violent hurricane merging into another, it would be the coming together of those tragic forces that would inevitably spell destruction for them both.
3
But then why did she have to call me on that particular Sunday night?
Or why did I make the wrong decision by answering the phone?
I’d have been better off letting the digital answering service do its job while I kept on pumping out repetition after repetition on my incline bench, filling muscles and veins with precious over-oxygenated blood.
Blame it on the head injury or blame it on plain bad luck. But one thing was for certain, the gods were not with me that night any more than they were with Scarlet. But then maybe the gods had nothing to do with it. Maybe none of this had to do with a damaged cerebral cortex for that matter. Maybe it was just a man thing.
What is it about the deceptive face of lust that taunts us, lures us, tests us? The monster disguised as the prettiest little package you ever saw topped off in delicious auburn hair?
Such were the rapid-fire deliberations that immediately shot through my brain when, later that night, I was startled out of a restless sleep by a fist pounding on my door. I immediately pictured Lola. But then she would never pound on the door. That wasn’t her style. Besides, she had a key to the place.
I sat up, rubbed the sleep from my eyes. The gears in my temporal lobe started churning. Thoughts drifted from Lola to Scarlet.
I pictured Scarlet standing outside my front door, the rainwater dripping off her long hair onto chiseled cheekbones and succulent lips. She would have had a knock-down-drag-out with Jake. He came home drunk, angry. He would have landed into her, blackened one of her teardrop eyes.
That’s what I imagined
But it wasn’t until I dragged myself out of bed, slid into a pair of jeans, hobbled on down the stairs to the front door, that I realized how false my imagination could be.
The late-night caller was a far cry from Scarlet.
He was just a police officer. The kind of cop you might call “kid” if you were, say, in your mid to late forties. Anything beyond that and you might not notice him at all.
But I recognized him for exactly who he was.
A young cop with barely thirty-six month’s experience under his belt—a twenty-something cop with a degree in Criminology from Providence College who went by the name of Joy.
Officer Nicolas “Nicky” Joy.
I remembered him all right.
Just this wiry, nervous little guy with a better-than-regulation buzz and snug-fitting uniform blues, sized thirty-eight short at the max. Actually, a boy/mankind of cop—pink-cheeked where most men his age were bearded. If he didn’t look studious enough already, he wore round granny specs over baby blue eyes.
I’d been running into Joy all year long on those occasions when my old partner, Detective Mitchell Cain, called me in on a situation requiring a still-medically-inactive cop who might be willing to work part time with an overtaxed, or should I say, non-existent S.I.U. (Special Independent Unit).
That night, the blue-eyed Joy stood four-square on the small front portico of my Hope Lane home, the rainwater dripping off the transparent plastic that protected his headpiece and clothing. It didn’t take a genius or part-time detective with a constant headache to see that he was breathing unusually hard, bottom lip shaking to the point of trembling. Gripped in his right hand, a heavy black Maglite. As for the palm of his left hand, it rested securely on the butt of his service sidearm.
Looking over the kid’s shoulder, I made out the Albany blue- and-white parked up against the opposite curb, a beam of sodium street light shining down upon it, the still heavy rain strafing the metal trunk and hood. From where I stood inside the open door, I couldn’t help but make out the man who was sitting in the back seat, round mustached face looking out onto an empty, rain-soaked neighborhood street.
Jake Montana.
I knew then that something terrible had happened.
I caught my reflection in the door light— my two-day stubble, bald head, and brown eyes. My face said I need sleep. But sleep suddenly seemed out of the question.
I told Joy to step inside. He did. The rainwater dripped off his plastic raincoat.
“Jake wants you to come with us, Moonlight,” he said.
I began to feel the familiar tightness starting in the back of my head, already working its way towards the middle.
“What’s wrong?”
“Jake would rather tell you himself.”
I stood there, bare-chested and stone stiff, the cool May mist soaking my skin.
What choice did I have but to go along for the ride? Didn’t matter that I was trying to separate myself from police work; reinvent myself as a massage therapist and a personal trainer. I was still a detective. . . Rather, a private detective still collecting a Council 82 Law Enforcement Union disability pension. Technically speaking, that meant the cops still owned my ass—private license or no private license. By law and by all that was morally right under God and country, I had no choice but to “heed the call” whenever the mighty trumpet sounded.
I said, “Wait for me in the cruiser while I put on a shirt.”
But Joy just stood there stiff as a plank, not saying a word, but somehow shouting volumes.
I said, “Let me guess. You think I’m gonna forget you’re even here.”
“You shot yourself in the head,” he said as I started up the stairs. “People say you’re not the same.”
“It was an accident,” I said. “And it’s not memory that’s the problem.”
“Hey Dick,” he jumped in. “Maybe you should explain it to someone who understands.”
“The name’s Moonlight,” I said, slamming the bedroom door shut.
4
Joy opened the cruiser’s rear door for me.
I slipped inside, sat myself down beside Jake, my once full-time now part-time superior in the Albany P.D. I held my breath, tried to remain as calm and collected as possible.
The first thing I noticed, besides his sheer mass, was that he wouldn’t look at me. From the moment I sat down on the springy back seat, he turned away, focused his gaze outside onto the rain-soaked blacktop.
The cruiser smelled bad; a cross between worms and old tuna fish gone south.
He was dressed in gray slacks with matching suit jacket, white shirt underneath. No tie. The suit was wrinkled as if he had just picked it up off the bedroom floor and threw it on. Maybe he had. His once-jet- black hair had developed some significant gray across the temples over recent years. It blended naturally with the metallic gray that sprinkled his mustache.
Joy sat up in the driver’s seat, blue eyes forward, but on occasion sneaking their way into the rearview.
I had no idea what was thicker: the humidity or the tension, until both were broken by the sound of the chief detective’s baritone.
“They almost never leave
notes,” he uttered in a voice that bore the weight of the world. “Something like ten percent leave notes. That’s all.”
I swallowed my breath, hoping that somehow it would slow my pulse. It dawned on me that maybe Scarlet had finally left him. That her walking out on him, once and for all, might be the reason behind all of this. In my mind, I saw my easy lover with suitcase in hand, closing the back door behind her, stepping out into the night . . .
I said, “She’ll contact you. Just give her a little time to get her head together.”
Jake grunted like he’d been stabbed in the stomach. He said, “At this point contact would be a miracle.”
I turned to him. “What’s happened?”
“She’s dead,” he said. “And that’s all.”
Off in the near distance, a streak of lightning followed by a slow, rolling thunder.
I pictured the light going on in Scarlet’s bedroom, not seconds after I’d jumped out the window. Had Jake seen me standing outside on the back lawn in the rain?
I repeated, “Tell me what happened.”
He told me to say nothing more. “Not a fucking word.”
Up front, Joy put the car in drive. As he pulled away from the curb, I crossed one hand over the other. For the first time that night I felt the tacky, bloody residue that stained the palms of my hands
5
The ten-minute ride from my home to the Pearl Street Precinct felt like it lasted an entire hour. The whole time I was rubbing my palms together as if to erase the thin layer of dried blood that coated them.
Where the hell had blood come from? Had something happened in the night that I could not remember?
Maybe if I hadn’t been startled from out of a deep sleep; maybe if I hadn’t put my pants on in the dark and in such a rush, I might have noticed the blood before leaving the house.
Moonlight Falls Page 2
