Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

Riding in the back of that wormy-smelling cruiser, I felt so dizzy I had to swallow slow, deep breaths. Do it without Jake being the wiser.

  When Joy pulled up to the old stone-and-glass monstrosity that I once referred to as my home away from home, the big chief turned to me.

  He said, “Consider yourself back on the clock. I want you to act as a special independent investigator. For the record, you’ll report directly to Mitch Cain. You’ll take his lead, corroborate Scarlet’s suicide. When it’s all over and your report filed, I want you to forget that any of this ever happened. Which shouldn’t be too difficult for you.”

  Memory’s not exactly the problem, I wanted to say. But then imagine the time it would have taken to admit the God’s honest truth? That because of a bullet fragment barely one millimeter in length lodged up against my cerebral cortex, I sometimes felt the overwhelming need for sleep, or that on occasion my speech became slurred while my right arm went stone stiff, or that when faced with even the simplest of problems I might make the wrong decision.

  So was memory a problem?

  There were moments I could be forgetful, especially in the short term. But I didn’t suffer from amnesia. Technically speaking, I maintained one-hundred percent of my physical faculties. It’s just that the bullet fragment sometimes acted like a monkey-in-the-works.

  But I remembered Scarlet’s face all right.

  Sitting in the back seat of that foul-smelling cruiser, I couldn’t help but picture the green eyes, the long hair, the milky skin, the full mouth. The face that attracted me to the point of desperation all those years ago. The face that Jake loved, or was supposed to love, anyway. But now that the face belonged to a dead woman, he was dismissing her, not even giving her the benefit of a proper investigation. He was supposed to be her husband; her protector. What I mean is, why not throw every resource available as the captain of the A.P.D. into a hunt for a killer or killers? Why not call in the Staties or even the FBI? Why was he so sure we had a suicide on our hands?

  I looked into Jake’s eyes and saw the past.

  I couldn’t help but recall the incident that resulted in my forced leave of absence from the cops. Not my attempted suicide, but the incident that occurred not long after my “recovery”—when after passing out on an eight-man drug stakeout, I suddenly regained consciousness only to order the raid of the wrong house.

  I hadn’t been back on the force for more than a week. Despite Jake’s objections, I talked him into giving me another shot at my old “Violent Crimes” job. It was a major risk employing a man in possession of my kind of head injury and Jake knew it. But seeing as Albany was outgunned and outmanned, he might see his way to giving me another shot at V.C. But at the first sign of trouble, the first sign of seizure or memory loss or so much as a twitch of my eye, I’d be out on my ass.

  Was I clear on the matter? Crystal.

  The strings pulled, I was reissued my badge and my service weapon.

  It wasn’t long before my first shot at a significant collar presented itself. We’d been monitoring a row house in downtown Albany that we suspected of being the base for a major synthetic crack cocaine and crystal meth operation. It had been my job to assemble a team of plainclothes dicks to perform a middle-of-the-night raid in the interest of safety and maybe catching the operation at its busiest. While I took the lead car, Jake and Mitch Cain teamed up behind me in an unmarked suburban. Around the corner awaited four blue-and-whites filled with A.P.D. officers. They would provide immediate backup as soon as the raid was initiated. Everyone was to wait for my signal. Or so it was understood. S.O.P.

  And while I aimed night vision binoculars on the bottom floor of the three-story inner-city row house, a radio headset wrapped around my head, the earpiece fitted into the right ear canal, I observed complete silence. But what I didn’t know at the time was that the numbness I was beginning to feel in my right arm was actually the telltale sign of an oncoming seizure. Not having experienced one during my convalescence (but having been warned of them), I chalked up the sensation to having slept on it the wrong way the night before. But as the night wore on, the radio silence maintained, the numbness turned to trembling. Flashes of light began to explode behind my eyeballs. Not man-made light, but a super bright white light manufactured inside my brain. I began to feel faint. My breathing grew strained. I tried to speak, but my words emerged from my mouth as a slow, slurred whisper. It was all I could do to hold my head up.

  Then a big black nothing.

  What woke me from out of my spell was the banter of panicked shouting coming over the earpiece.

  “Suspect’s fleeing the scene! Suspect’s fleeing the scene! Moonlight, you with us?”

  With a start, I threw open the cruiser door. Pulling my service weapon, I shouted “Go, go, go!” into the headset. I was certain that the wood door I was heading for had to be the right one. I’d been staring at it all night.

  Even when I kicked the fucker in, I was certain I had the right place.

  But then imagine twelve armed cops dressed in black barging into a quiet family flat during the late night, drawing weapons, startling a husband, his wife, and their two teenaged daughters to the point of tears.

  The six-figure false arrest lawsuit that followed pretty much put an end to my full-time work with the A.P.D. As a kind of consolation I was relegated instead to partial Medical Disability and the part-time investigation of “nothing” cases—accident victims, suicides, drug-related shootings, beatings, and stabbings. Nothing that required a true investigation per se, other than my John Hancocking a case synopsis.

  Not exactly glamour work, but it was badly needed work all the same.

  My eyes were back on Jake.

  “Since when do you ask me in on something this important?” I said. “I’ve been assigned to the nobodies that nobody will miss, remember? Scarlet is a somebody. You should know that better than anyone.”

  “She committed suicide, Moonlight,” he said. “She’s my wife. I want the case shut before it’s even opened. That’s why you’re here.”

  But what if it’s not suicide? I wanted to ask him.

  In the end, I decided not to. I was the fuck-up who made all the wrong moves, took all the wrong turns, raided the wrong house! He was the captain. Where the hell would I get with him in his present condition, anyway?

  I said, “Am I back on the clock?”

  He made a sour face. “I just told you that.”

  He was right. He had. The simplest things get by me sometimes.

  Joy got out of the car, opened the door for me. I could tell it wasn’t the night for long goodbyes.

  I got out of the cruiser just as Joy got back in, shut the door behind him. I lifted the collar on my leather jacket and started up the stone stairs. Maybe I didn’t feel the need to empty my bladder, but as soon as I made it through the glass doors, I headed directly for the safety of the men’s room.

  6

  The bathroom was empty.

  I locked the door behind me, took my place at the sink, positioned my hands beneath the faucet, allowed the hot water to pour down over them. Didn’t matter how hot the water was, how much it stung the skin. Blood-pink water was pouring into the bowl, disappearing down the drain.

  Clean hands, never mind a clean conscience. That’s all that counted.

  I turned off the water, dried myself with the paper towels, discarded them not into the trash bin but by flushing them down the toilet. It was only then that I noticed how much I was sweating. The black t-shirt underneath my jacket was wringing wet. Beads of sweat covered my brow. Turning the water back on, I splashed it onto my face, repeated the drying process.

  Then I looked down at my hands. There were no cuts on the tops of them. No scratches, no abrasions. Nothing that could be construed as defensive wounds. No wonder I hadn’t noticed the dried blood immediately upon waking.

  But then I turned them over.

  My palms and finger pads had seen better days. The cuts weren’t deep. Nor w
ere they bleeding any longer. Still, they’d been scratched up pretty bad. I moved my fingers, cocked my wrists. The bones, muscles, and ligaments weren’t damaged in any way. But there was a definite soreness there. Or maybe the dull pain was all in my head.

  I swear you could have heard my heart beating inside the empty echo chamber of the men’s room.

  Why couldn’t I recall having done that kind of damage to my hands? What had happened between the time I arrived home from Scarlet’s house earlier and the arrival of Joy to my North Albany split- level at two-thirty in the morning? Had I slept-walked, stumbled and tripped? Had I fallen forward onto outstretched hands and not remembered a single detail about the mishap?

  Or had something worse occurred?

  Scarlet was dead.

  Did I have something to do with it?

  I looked at my face in the mirror. It was as ashen as a dead man’s. The face didn’t to belong to me. It belonged to someone else. Someone who looked just like me. Someone with my face, my voice, my name, my life. Someone who was following me, trying to kill me. The man who had tried to kill me once before but failed. Maybe the same person who killed Scarlet. I had no way of knowing; of being sure about anything.

  My mind. . . it wasn’t always right.

  There was a knock at the door. It startled the daylights out me. I took a deep breath, exhaled.

  Unlocking the bolt, I opened the door to an old man pushing a cleaning bucket and a mop.

  “What the hell you been doing in there?” he snapped.

  “I wouldn’t go in there I were you,” I said, pushing past him.

  7

  It was no coincidence that my former colleague, Mitch Cain, was waiting for me inside the hallowed stone walls of the Albany P.D. booking room. Dressed in blue blazer and tan khakis, he was patiently sitting on the edge of one of a dozen identical metal desks set out equidistant from one another inside the wide open space. Gripped in his right hand, a big white Styrofoam cup of Krispy Kreme coffee. In his free hand, a lit cigarette.

  An identical coffee cup sat on top of the desk to his left.

  Without exchanging a single word, I picked up the second cup, cracked the plastic lid.

  “Thought you quit,” I said.

  He stole a quick glance down at the cigarette.

  “Blame compulsion,” he said. “The more Lynn tries to make me quit, the more I feel compelled to do it.”

  “What do you expect from a nurse?” I said, recalling the face of my ex-wife and ever-tenacious chief nurse for the Albany Medical Center’s emergency room. That’s right, Mitch Cain was married to my ex-wife, which pretty much made our personal and professional relationship an awkward one, to say the least. It also made for some heavy personal baggage, at least when it came to my love life, that is. What I mean is, while on one side of the spectrum was Lola, the psychologist who was willing to cross over professional boundaries to pursue an as-of-yet unconsummated relationship, on the other side was Scarlet, the secret love that was all about the sex. Taking up the middle was Lynn, the former wife who now regarded me with a hatred best described as palpable.

  I took a quick look around the dimly lit room. The place was as hollow as a church.

  Two or three comatose cops sitting at metal desks, hands positioned atop computer keyboards—chubby, static faces glowing in the radiant light that shot off their monitors.

  Mounted to the painted concrete block walls, numerous plastic signs declaring the A.P.D. a “Smoke-Free Workplace.” When Cain wasn’t around, that is.

  Joy stepped in. He approached Cain and me, transparent raingear still protecting his uniform blues like Saran Wrap.

  “They’re ready for us, Detective,” he said.

  Cain shot Joy a silent look. The kid about-faced and exited the room by way of an unpainted solid metal door that led out into the parking garage.

  Stamping out his cigarette into a metal ashtray, my old partner set down his coffee. He ran his right hand through cropped hair and down a clean, narrow face.

  Exhaling a breath, he said, “I see no need for briefings. You know the seriousness of the situation.”

  “Dead serious,” I said. “Which is why I’m a little surprised you called me in.”

  “Listen, Moonlight, it’s Jake’s wife we’re talking about here. We can’t give Internal Affairs or Prosecutor O’Connor an opportunity to plunge into a full-blown investigation. It just wouldn’t . . .” He raised his right hand as though searching for the right words. “It just wouldn’t look. . . copastetic.”

  “Copasetic,” I corrected.

  “What?”

  “It’s copasetic, not copastetic.”

  He smiled.

  “That head of yours,” he said, “it’s working pretty good these days, old partner.”

  “I’ve been taking better care of myself lately. Doctor’s orders.”

  He added, “Well then, just follow my lead and you, me and Jake will get through this thing without a hitch.” Grinning. “Per the usual deal there’ll be a little bit extra for your trouble.”

  I listened like a good, pension-collecting, on-again-off-again cop should and sipped my coffee. Until my brain kicked in. I pictured Scarlet lying back on her bed, auburn hair fluffed up against her pillow, tear- soaked eyes wide open, lips smiling wryly. Maybe the reality of her death hadn’t begun to sink in. But somehow I knew she deserved better than what I was hearing from her husband and her husband’s second in command. Then there was the issue of my hands—the blood, the scrapes, the soreness in the wrists. Just what if I’d had something to do with Scarlet’s death? Was I somehow blocking the memory?

  One thing was obvious: the question of whether or not Jake had seen me standing on the back lawn outside Scarlet’s bedroom window had been answered. No way he would have called me in on the case if he knew I’d been sleeping with the deceased.

  But then something else might have been happening.

  I gazed into Cain’s slate-gray eyes and took a shot.

  “You plan on booking Jake tonight?” I said. “Or is all this copasetic stuff about giving him a little head start?”

  As stale as it was, the air inside the booking room was sucked out like starlight into a black hole. Cain’s grin suddenly morphed into a frown.

  “You suddenly grow a conscience overnight, Moonlight?” he whispered, firing up another smoke. “This is an extremely sensitive situation which will require every bit of your professional talents and resources.”

  In other words, my old partner was asking me to do exactly what he told me to do.

  Joy walked back into the room.

  Cain exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. First he gave the rookie a confirming nod. Then he looked back up at me.

  “I don’t mean to be pushy, Moonlight,” he sighed. “It’s just that your A.P.D. needs you like never before.” Pausing for a beat, as if to correct himself, he added, “Rather, I’m asking you, as an old partner and a member in good standing of this most decorated force, to just go along for the ride.”

  “Part-time member,” I interjected. “I made that false bust, remember?”

  “We all make our little mistakes,” he said. “Besides, your head … well, let’s just say you weren’t up for that kind of job.”

  A frigid sensation enveloped me. Like my pants had somehow just fallen down around my ankles with everybody watching.

  I glanced over at the two uniformed cops, their faces never veering from their computer switchboards. I knew they had to be dying to get a better view of our apparently friendly exchange. But I also knew they wouldn’t dare.

  “No choice,” I said like a question. The non-committing part-timer suddenly committed.

  He grinned. “Not really.”

  He checked the pockets of his blazer to make sure he had everything he needed: keys, smokes, lighter, wallet, bullets.

  Copasetic. . .

  He began walking towards Joy.

  “Hey,” I called out.

  He tu
rned.

  I said, “You haven’t mentioned a word about my boy.”

  He said, “Kid’s okay. Just started Little League. . . Tee-ball.”

  Little League, I repeated to myself. I didn’t know why it hurt so much to hear those two words. Sure I had a visitation schedule with my son—every other Saturday afternoon; every Tuesday evening for dinner. But it was never enough time together. Harrison, or Bear as I nicknamed him, was going on eight years old. Over the past four years Cain had become a dominant force in his life. All it took was half a boy’s life for my former partner to replace me as a stable parent. Suicide, successful or not, was not looked upon with a smile by the New York State family court system.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  Cain sort of smirked, nodding over one shoulder and then the other, as if to suggest not bad, but not great. “Kids are awkward at that age,” he said. “But he’s having fun. I help with the coaching.” He looked at his watch.

  I took one last sip of the still too-hot coffee and set it back down on the booking desk. My hands felt like they were on fire. I lifted them up to my face and blew on them. That’s when I remembered the cuts and scrapes. Abruptly I shoved them back into my jacket pockets.

  “There’s a kill scene waiting for us,” my old partner said.

  I exhaled a breath. I just could not get it through my head that Scarlet was dead; just could not get over the nagging possibility that I might have had something to do with it.

  8

  It’s been nearly twelve years since my initial meeting with Jake.

  It was only my second night on the job without having to wear uniform blues. Cain and I had finally graduated to the level of Junior Detective. That night we were called in to participate on a drug surveillance op going down inside the Henry Johnson-assisted housing complex located in the south end of Albany’s no man’s land, not far out of view of the Hudson River. Or as some cops liked to refer to it, the “Garden of Evil.”

  Considering that this was our second full day on the job as J.D.s, we were ordered to meet up with then-Lieutenant Montana. He’d recently transferred from the Troy P.D. and was presently assisting a handful of F.B.I. inside the bed of one of those white unmarked command vans with black-tinted windows—the kind of van that just screams cop.