Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

  It wouldn’t be easy.

  Not with the low- to medium velocity blood spatters that stained the baby blue walls and window pane above the bed. Not with the blood that soaked the mattress, pillow and down comforter. Not with the odor- -the sickly sweet smell that filled the twelve-by-fifteen foot bedroom, telling me that Scarlet had definitely entered her second hour of death.

  I approached the bed, feeling my feet shuffle across the surprisingly clean carpeting as though in slow motion.

  This was not the same woman I’d caressed with my oil-soaked fingertips just hours earlier. Now the human she had become an inhuman it.

  I had to believe in that one distinction if I was going to get through the procedure without passing out. She’d become a soulless shell with a thick, blood-encrusted gash that ran from ear to ear, and numerous puncture wounds marring her bared chest.

  This was a body that once belonged to a beautiful woman with wide open eyes, the whites of which were slowly fading to gray, the pupils fully dilated, the head cocked unnaturally to the left, the mouth slightly open in the right-hand corner as if she were about to issue one of her wry smiles.

  Cain came back into the room, stepping up behind me. He pulled a cigarette from out of his left breast pocket—slid it out without having to remove the pack. Professional smoker that he was.

  I stared down at the horizontal and vertical hesitation slits carved into Scarlet’s chest and stomach; at the puncture wounds; at the blue-tinted legs now marbleized with jagged purple and red spider veins. Then a second glance at the window before quickly about-facing to examine the doorjamb behind me.

  “You’re right about one thing,” I said. “No sign of break-in.”

  I took a cursory look at the room furniture—the unbroken table lamp, the tidy table still with its prescription bottle of Ambien and a glass of what appeared to be water, but what I knew had to be Stohly. There was the neatly placed strong box that I had been forbidden to touch, the poem taped to its cover. I found myself once more gazing down at those typed words:

  “The world has so many ways of fooling us. . .

  My eyes shifted to the title, “Could it be Madness - this?”

  I thought to myself, Just look at all that madness spattered all over the fucking wall.

  “No sign of a struggle,” Cain said, before popping the cigarette into his mouth, unlit.

  “Not so much as a footprint or a smear,” I added while once more gazing over the tan carpeting.

  “A clean scene, Gene,” Cain agreed, lighting up the smoke with a silver-plated Zippo. “A clean scene-a-reno.”

  “Maybe too clean,” I said to myself. “We’ll need to Luminal for prints and smears, scrape for fibers.”

  “Not necessary,” Cain said.

  Joy appeared inside the open door. Cain handed him the still-lit, partially smoked cigarette.

  “Would you mind?” he asked.

  I had to wonder where Jake disappeared to. Or maybe “disappeared” wasn’t the right word for his obvious absence. Under normal circumstances, he would have remained on site to answer questions.

  But these were no ordinary circumstances.

  This dead woman was no stranger. She was Jake’s own wife and, right or wrong, that was explanation enough for his absence. I knew that the last place he’d want to be seen was here. I knew that the last thing Cain wanted was for me to demand an audience with him. But then, under the circumstances, it would have been the right thing to do.

  Joy nervously took the smoking butt into his fingertips, proceeded to carry it down the hall as if it were a lit bomb.

  My head was beginning to pound inside its core.

  I asked Cain if I could get a drink as I raised my right hand, grabbed hold of it with my left, pinched the feeling back into the flesh and bone.

  I opened up the top middle drawer on the large wooden chest pressed up against the far wall, rummaged around the underwear and socks. Maybe by pretending to do some real detective work I might distract myself from having to look at Scarlet and from going into another seizure.

  Cain asked, “Hard or soft kind of drink?”

  I closed the drawer and proceeded to rummage through the other five, not searching for anything in particular, just giving my hands something to do, my eyes a distraction from my lover’s massacred body.

  “More coffee,” I breathed. “And Advil.”

  Cain had to chuckle.

  Arms outstretched, I steadied myself against the dresser of drawers, regaining my balance.

  Joy came back into the room. He was wiping wet hands off on his blue trousers.

  Cain turned to him as I finished up the last drawer. He spit out an order for two large blacks, a small bottle of Advil, and a pack of Marlboro Lights. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a considerable bankroll, peeled off a twenty, and handed it to the young cop.

  He said, “Bring me back the change.”

  The baby-faced rookie never uttered a single word of objection, even though he’d have to find a place open in the middle of the night in Albany. The town that always sleeps. A Stop-and-Shop maybe. Or a Seven-Eleven.

  I turned, breathed in the smell of death once more.

  It was while walking back towards the bed that I noticed it. On the floor, rolled up under the box spring, almost entirely hidden by the bed stand. The gray t-shirt that I had worn to Scarlet’s just a few hours before.

  “You gonna make your evidence search of the body or what, old partner?” Cain asked.

  I looked over my shoulder. His back was turned to me while he returned the bankroll to his pants pocket. I never hesitated. I just walked over to the bed, went down to my knees, grabbed the t-shirt, and stuffed it into my jacket.

  God willing, no one the wiser.

  With my heart beating in my temples, I pulled a pair of green rubber gloves from the right-hand pocket of my leather jacket, yanked them on. Then I leaned over Scarlet’s body, brought my face within inches of her face.

  Reaching out, I touched her tender lips, as if for the very first time.

  11

  “So these screw-heads put you in the middle of a pretty bad situation,” Stocky Agent says. “If you refused the job, you knew they’d come after you. Maybe even with some kind of evidence that would incriminate you; something that would prove you had sex with Scarlet only an hour or two before the hack job that killed her. But then, if you took the job you knew you’d have to lie for them.” Eyes wide. “Double- fucking-whammy. . . if you’ll excuse my French!”

  I nod as if to agree. But then just as quickly, I shake my head like I’m disagreeing.

  “Yes and no,” I say. “Yes, meaning they put me in a bad situation. Yes, they wanted me to do what they told me to do. But at that point, they had no idea that Scarlet and I were intimate.”

  “So as of that point you were more or less in the clear,” Stocky Agent says. “But they still wanted you to lie for them; rubber-stamp their conclusion of suicide.”

  “Cain and Jake had been paying me a pretty good buck if I did what they told me to do.”

  “By being a bad cop; by going through the surface motions of an investigation with the intent to issue a bald-faced lie on their behalf.”

  “I didn’t know I was lying for them.”

  “How can you not know, Moonlight? They told you what to put down in your reports?”

  “They issued directives, told me what they expected from me. Time was always tight, so I carried out their orders, quick and painless.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “I’ve got half a bullet in my brain and divorce debt up to my eyeballs. I wouldn’t have had any work at all if it weren’t for Montana or Cain.”

  “Cain’s married to your ex-wife and yet you still took work from him.”

  “Maybe you find this hard to believe, but I never held a grudge against Mitch Cain for what happened between him and Lynn.” But then raising up my hand I added “Correction. . . didn’t hold a grudg
e for all that long.”

  “Had there been some trouble in paradise, Mr. Moonlight?”

  “Lynn and I were over before my affair with Scarlet started; long before she started sleeping with my partner. It was only a matter of time until it broke down the way it did. ‘Course, I would have preferred that the breakdown did not include my partner. But by then it was out of my hands.”

  “Had Lynn wanted out of the marriage while you were still living with her?”

  “She’d been threatening me with divorce since the birth of our boy. I just ignored her. She, in turn, gave in to Cain. . . if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I know all too well,” Stocky Agent laughs. “And in that search she found your partner at the A.P.D. Shit, Moonlight, it all must have driven you a little nuts—the good partner and old friend now becomes the wife’s squeeze. Maybe even drove you over the edge.”

  I try to swallow. But there’s nothing to swallow.

  “Something like that,” I say.

  “But you still didn’t blame Cain. In fact, you willingly took him up on the jobs he offered you as an independent corroborator.”

  “It was strictly business. I did the jobs and in turn, he gave me the cash I needed to survive.”

  “By being the human rubber-stamp,” Stocky Agent says while his thin partner merely stands on the opposite side of the room, listening, witnessing.

  “I never found much reason not to corroborate their reports,” I say. “Until Scarlet died, of course. It’s then I decided that for once in my life I was going to stick to S.O.P.”

  “With your lover dead, you couldn’t just maintain your status quo with Montana and Cain, do what they told you to do?”

  “How could I in all good conscience? If I went along with the suicide just because they wanted me to, then where did that leave Scarlet? Where did it leave her memory? Her life? And what if there really was a murderer out there? Somebody capable of cutting up a beautiful woman? What if that killer really turned out to be her husband? No amount of money could make me turn my head on something like that.”

  Stocky Agent pauses for a moment, as though to chew on my words. I see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his thick neck. I guess my words are none too easy to swallow.

  “So it’s at this stage you make the transition from simply being the rubber-stamp on the investigation to a real decision maker.”

  “The major decision being to investigate per S.O.P.”

  “Now let me get this straight,” he continues. “They wanted you to sign off on a suicide, but they had no suicide weapon.”

  “Here’s this brutally cut-up woman whom I had only just slept with. She’s supposedly cut herself up bad and yet, where’s the blade? She didn’t just get up, wash it off, return it to the drawer, get back in her bed and die.”

  “Could it be that her husband disposed of it?”

  “I could only assume he took it, did something with it. Hid it, or got rid of it.”

  “Which would point to him as a murderer. . . potentially.”

  “Or as somebody who was so upset at the sight of his mutilated wife, he just had to dispose of the means of the mutilation.”

  “People do fucked-up things at fucked-up times. Isn’t that right, Moonlight?”

  Stocky Agent raises his right hand, makes like a pistol with forefinger and thumb, presses the pretend barrel against his temple. When the thumb falls, he mouths the word “Boom.”

  I smile, but there’s nothing to smile about.

  “Listen, I could have done exactly what they wanted me to. But how could I live with myself after that? I’d slept with the deceased. My semen was inside her. I’d left residual evidence lying around the house. Not just fingerprints, but footprints on the back lawn. Christ, I was lucky enough to find my t-shirt before they did. Who knows what they would have found just by taking a close look at the bed sheets. Hair follicles, DNA, who knows what else.”

  “But this wasn’t all about you,” the agent says, voice raised an octave or two. “Just like your old pal Cain said, you did go ahead and grow a conscience.”

  Stamping out my cigarette, I sit back in my chair, look directly into the face of the agent. In my right hand, the pins and needles begin taking over once more until I grab hold of it with my left.

  “I was having a hard time accepting the fact that Scarlet would kill herself, let alone self-mutilate her body with a razor or a kitchen knife or however it was done. Plus I knew Jake and Mitch were not beyond manipulating a crime scene to suit their own purposes.”

  The agent’s face lights up. He busts out laughing.

  He says, “Corrupt fucking cops. Well, there’s something different.”

  “Listen,” I say, “she wasn’t just another dead body. She was no rapist or drug dealer who was about to tie up the court system. Scarlet was a nice, lonely kid.”

  “You’d grown attached to her?” A question the agent poses just when he’s beginning to calm down.

  “Not attached,” I exhale. “But then not unattached either. I cared for her a lot. More than a lot. But she deserved better than what the head cops wanted to give her, whatever their motive. As the independent field man in charge under Cain’s thumb, I knew I had at least some opportunity to control three things: first, keeping my name cleared of any and all false charges.”

  “Second, Mr. Moonlight?”

  “Finding out just who or what might have been responsible for her killing. Even if, in the end, I had no choice but to call it a suicide. Just like the bastards wanted.”

  “And finally?”

  “By destroying any evidence that might prove the unthinkable.”

  “What’s the unthinkable?”

  “That I killed her and for some reason, couldn’t remember any of it.”

  12

  On the ride back to my house, Joy drove the cruiser so silently and cautiously it was as if the road was paved with eggs. In return, I sat in the back seat feeling somewhat like the scolded child, running through the events of Scarlet’s physical evidence examination over and over again in my mind.

  Sitting there with the rain once more coming down steady and hard, I relived the whole thing in my brain. Placing the tips of my Latex gloves to her cheeks, gently brushing the still warm flesh. I recalled how the facial skin turned purple where I touched it, the distinct imprint of my fingertip left behind where the dermis blanched, recalled how the sudden discoloration returned to its natural pale, consistent with the shock that always accompanies massive hemorrhage. I swear I could still smell her sweet, oil-perfumed skin—the sheen from liquid still visible beneath the blood trails and spatter.

  A dead body loses an average of a degree to a degree and a half of its heat per hour. In this case, it told me Cain hadn’t been all wrong with his E.T.D. I had conducted the examination (if you want to call it that) at about 3:15. The way I judged it, the body had to have been deceased for less than three hours. Probably no more than two, but definitely no more than three. So between one and two o’clock must have been a fairly good call.

  Right hand clutched in left, I looked out the window onto the black, wet night. I saw myself running my fingers down the length of Scarlet’s torso. From shoulder to pelvis (avoiding the blood leakage), down along the neck, alongside the rib cage, over the pancreatic region to the hip bone, removing for a moment the bit of blood-soaked bed sheet that covered her sex—pubic hair that looked stark and dark against blue-white skin. I had to look away for a beat or two, gaze instead at the blood spatters that stained the wall. As if this would calm me down.

  Ever since we’d entered the house, the bile had been shooting up from my stomach. I had no choice but to swallow it back down.

  The whole thing was starting to get to me. Hours before I’d been running these same hands along this very same body, under completely different circumstances. I had been inside her. In a very real way, I was still inside her.

  When my breathing returned to normal, I continued runnin
g my hands down the length of her left leg, feeling for any inconsistencies, bumps or bruises that might suggest she’d been beaten. Or maybe bound and gagged, carried into the room not by her own free will.

  There was a crucial piece of the puzzle missing.

  If I’d had the blade or knife to work with, I could have checked it for prints, latent or otherwise, compared them to anything I might have pulled off the bed frame or the body itself. But Cain was sticking to his story. He told me that Jake had panicked when he found her all cut up. He panicked and disposed of the knife. Where he disposed of it, he didn’t know.

  That seemed wrong to me. If there were a knife or some kind of razor blade involved, Jake of all people would have been careful to preserve it—to leave it where it lay, untouched. Because if Scarlet had committed suicide as the captain insisted, then it only stood to reason that the blade would have contained only her fingerprints. By disposing of the blade, Jake could easily have turned himself into a potential suspect. That is, a ruling of suicide was tossed out.

  But then, what about Jake?

  Apparently, I wasn’t being granted much of an interview. At least no more than I’d already been granted earlier that morning during the drive from my house to the A.P.D.

  Jake Montana, my part-time boss.

  You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. But you might just give it a slight nip once in a while.

  Here’s how I nipped at Cain: I’m not entirely sure what got into me. Maybe it had something to do with my possible involvement in Scarlet’s death. Or maybe it had more to do with Jake’s possible involvement. But as I raised myself up off the floor and began removing my gloves, I felt a sense of resolve pour over me like the blood that covered my lover’s chest. Because, at that point, I knew for certain that what I was dealing with was her cold, calculated murder.

  I directed my gaze at Joy. “Tag and bag her,” I said.

  Joy turned to Cain, blue eyes gaping open.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, as if to say What do I do?