“Come to me alive,” she said. “And next time leave the hand-cannon at home or I’ll call a real cop.”
19
The funeral coach rolled like a big black tank.
I made my way through the ‘burbs” due south, in the direction of Montana’s office on South Pearl Street. Per direct order. Running fifteen minutes late. But that still didn’t stop me from making a slight detour.
I thought maybe, if I timed it right, I might catch my boy as he got off the school bus.
As it turned out, I could not have timed it any better.
The yellow bus was pulling up in the opposite direction, slowly coming to a stop at the edge of the uphill drive, just as I made the curve past the tall pines that surrounded Mitch Cain’s property (my former property) directly to my left.
I’m not sure exactly why I did it, or why I took the chance even, but I pulled the Mercedes over to the side of the road, a good one- hundred feet away from the house to remain hidden by the trees.
Heart beating, I located the vaguest image of my son’s head and shoulders through the bus’s slightly tinted windshield. The Bear was awkwardly making his way towards the front, his little hand waving goodbye to the other kids who were still belted into their seats, a wide smile planted between a pair of rosy red cheeks.
Happy, not-a-care-on-earth cheeks.
My heart was pounding.
It was over four years ago that I tried to take myself out of his life. But then if it hadn’t been for his face—his image—I might not have survived. Of course, we never discussed my accident with him; never discussed exactly what daddy had done to have caused the purple hole in the side of his head. We just referred to it as an accident. Even when the little Bear approached me where I lay in the Albany Medical Hospital bed, all he could muster was a kind of curious glance. After all, I had already moved out of the family home, Lynn having taken up with my partner. So the Bear was growing used to me as the part-time dad. Now I was a part-time dad with a hole in his head. Not that the boy didn’t love me. But I think that as time wore on I also became more an object of curiosity for him. Just who was this strange man who came into his life every other Saturday? The man with the purple hole in his head who called himself “dad?”
I gripped the steering wheel while I watched the Bear make it to the front of the bus where he offered a wave to the driver, just as the old man opened the door. I kept a steady eye on him as he descended carefully down the school bus steps until he landed with both feet on the dusty soft shoulder of the road. For just a couple of seconds I lost him while he made his way around the front of the yellow vehicle in baggy blue jeans and a hooded navy blue GAP sweatshirt.
He looked so small to me.
Lynn appeared then at the top of the drive, dressed up in her hospital whites. She shouted out for the kid to look both ways before crossing.
With backpack sliding all the way down his left arm, he came to the edge of the bus, looked both ways, heaved the backpack up on his shoulder and jogged his way across the road into his mother’s arms. I tried to get a good look at his face, but it wasn’t easy at that distance.
I threw the transmission back into drive. At exactly the same moment, the bus’s caution lights stopped flashing and the miniature side- mounted STOP sign mechanically folded back against the side of the school bus.
Would I ever learn?
I could feel the tears building up again behind my eyeballs just as the bus passed me by and the Bear skipped his way down the driveway to his home without me. I waited there for a full minute or two, frozen beneath the cloud cover. Then I shifted the Mercedes transmission into reverse and backed the black monster around so that it faced in the opposite direction.
If psychologist Lola Ross were to analyze me, she would tell me there existed a distinct pattern inherent in my actions, a kind of Pavlovian action and reaction. Every time I went to visit Dr. Lane for my checkups, I inevitably made the trip back to this house to see my son get off the school bus.
20
The mood inside the A.P.D. South Pearl Street station was downright black and blue.
As always, uniformed cops filled the wide-open booking room while ceiling-mounted fans blew stale air down at the tile floor. And as always, the cops were busy filling out reports, answering phones, questioning the newly arrested, fielding complaints. Maybe it was me, but the place seemed a lot quieter that afternoon, a lot more subdued.
Even the Green Street hookers they brought in through the back door and detained inside the Plexiglas cage seemed to be behaving themselves while the entire department tried to make sense of Scarlet’s sudden death. Or so I imagined.
Jake’s second-floor office was no different.
With the wood door closed behind me, the square-shaped corner room screamed silence. The only sign of life was the slight guttural noise Jake made with his throat when he breathed in and out, as if the action were no longer involuntary, but somehow forced.
Only three of us occupied the office. Jake, Cain, and me. In descending order of importance.
Jake sat behind his desk, leaning back in his swivel chair at an angle that allowed him to stare out the window onto South Pearl Street two stories down. Glaring at his profile, I could plainly see how entirely exhausted he was—haggard, his thick, gray-streaked hair pressed against the back and side of his head like he’d only just woken up. But somehow I sensed he never went to bed in the first place.
“Go ahead and sit,” Cain said from where he was seated in front of the desk.
He was wearing his usual blue blazer and tan slacks, no doubt his 9mm tucked under the left armpit. He was smoking.
“You know why we called you in,” he said.
I stood instead of sitting. Mr. Independence. Here was my one chance to confront Jake over the odd circumstances regarding his wife’s killing.
I said, “Let me get his straight. Now that Scarlet has been delivered to the M.E., you want me to sign and seal a case synopsis attesting to her suicide.”
“We’re giving you a chance to do this the right way,” Cain said while Jake continued looking out the window. “The way you’ve always done it for us before, Moonlight.”
“The way you tell me to do it.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “We want a full case synopsis, case management analysis, issue and comparison analysis just in the case Prosecuting Attorney O’Connor gets bored and wants to test your findings against information he decides to collect later on down the road. We also want a diagram of the crime scene. As for disposition and collection of the evidence and photographs, we already have those, thanks to forensics. They will, of course, be made available for you to examine, so long as you initial the bag tags.”
By the sound of it, Cain did want me to go by the book. At least procedurally. But my built-in shit detector told me it was Cain’s attempt at sugar-coating the process. Which in the end meant that those procedurally required reports he now requested were still going to jive with his and Jake’s theories. Or else!
But then a report detailing suicide as the manner of death would exempt me from any and all involvement in Scarlet’s death. I should have been happy about their directives. But I wasn’t. I could only assume that even under the most severe memory loss situation, I would never be capable of cutting up a woman like Scarlet.
Okay, then what about Jake? What if he was capable of the unimaginable? What if he had killed his wife and now had no choice but to manipulate the formal investigative proceedings?
“I’ll want copies enough for everybody,” Cain went on. “Everything on department letterhead. After that, we’ll need the M.E. to release the body for burial per Scarlet’s last will and testament.”
“Then you do want me to proceed with an inquiry,” I confirmed. “You got a timeline in mind?”
“Initial paperwork by tomorrow night,” Cain said. “Two weeks from this very second for the rest of it.” He stamped out his cigarette. Smoke poured out of his nostrils.
“What about the autopsy?” I asked.
Cain’s smile faded. “Please, Moonlight,” he said, “will you just forget about the autopsy? She cut her throat. We’re working with you. Now work with us a little.”
I approached the desk. I knew the only reason they weren’t firing me on the spot was because I already knew too much. I might have given in, in the interest of protecting myself. But then sometimes you have take risks in life. Do it not for yourself, but for others. In this case, for a woman who was newly dead. A woman who, under different circumstances, I might have taken as my significant other.
“Where’s the blade, Jake?” I asked. He stared out the window. “Where’s the blade, Chief?” I repeated. “The blade, Jake?”
“Stop your shit!” Cain shouted.
I looked my former partner in the eye. “I’m still a cop,” I said. “And this situation is all fucked up.”
“What that’s supposed to mean?” Cain asked.
“It means Scarlet was murdered and you and Jake are covering your asses. It also means I’m honestly not giving you anything until I get a pathologist to autopsy.”
Jake made a fist and slammed his desktop. The shock wave it created blew through me like a jolt of raw electricity. It almost knocked Cain out of his chair.
“What the hell will it take for you to cooperate the way you used to cooperate?” he demanded. “How much more cash?”
I stepped back like some invisible force had shoved me.
Breathing in deep, I said, “This isn’t about money.”
“Give us the statement we need, Richard,” Cain said, pulling yet another smoke from the pack in his pocket and firing it up with the Zippo, “or think about giving up the A.P.D. altogether.”
Cain, my old partner and the stepfather to my son, threatening me. As if threats mattered at this point.
I turned my attention back to Jake.
“Let’s say I’ll execute the false statement, play the game,” I said. “Word leaks out, I’ll be the one indicted. I mean for Christ’s sakes, Jake, this is your wife we’re talking about here. Not some rogue dope pusher we found belly-up in the South End.”
“When are you going to finally understand, Moonlight, that you have no choice but to go along?” Cain jumped in.
“A cop always has a choice,” I said.
He nodded for a beat. But then he formed a grin. He said, “Considering what you’ve already done to contribute to Scarlet’s. . . how shall we say. . . already delicate mental condition, I’m sure you’ll decide in the end to make the right choice.”
I began to feel the floor shifting out from under my feet.
Jake looked at me with pursed lips and eyes at half-mast, as if to say Don’t play dumb. Then he dropped the atom bomb squarely on my head.
“We know all about your affair with Scarlet,” Cain said. “We know you two were lovers and we can prove it.”
Now, along with the shifting floor, I felt an invisible noose wrapping itself around my neck.
“All proof aside,” Jake said in a surprisingly even tone, “we don’t have to prove a goddamned thing. I’m the chief of detectives. I’m popular. I just lost my wife. All I have to do is accuse you of being my wife’s fuck buddy, just to get the ball rolling.”
Cain said, “That accusation could very well make you a suspect. Maybe even the prime suspect. That is if you don’t approve our discovery of suicide.”
I was still focusing on Jake. He was doing something I should have been expecting all along. He sat far back in his chair, opened the top drawer on his desk, and pulled out a plastic evidence bag. Inside the transparent bag was a beer bottle. Budweiser was the brand. There was something else too: a small plastic bottle filled with oil—a bottle only a masseur might recognize.
Well, I’ll be a sad son of a bitch. Not only did I forget to look for the beer bottle inside Scarlet’s bedroom (probably inside her waste can), I’d forgotten all about the oil bottle. My brain. . . my powers of recall. . . they weren’t all there sometimes.
Cain asked, “Do we need to further this conversation, Moonlight?”
Jake reached into his desk once more, pulled out a plain white business-sized envelope, tossed it across the desk. I caught it in mid-air. Flipping open the unsealed lid, I recognized at least fifty fifty-dollar bills.
“Down payment,” Jake said. “Now that we’re all on the same page again.”
I looked at Cain. He inhaled a deep drag of his cigarette, exhaling it through his nostrils. “Told you he’d come to his senses,” he said.
“Despite appearances,” Jake jumped in, “we are not trying to cover anything up. You’re right, Scarlet was not just another drug dealer. She was my wife. We are, quite simply, expediting the process of providing a reasonable explanation for her death, based upon the existing evidence. With your. . . ah. . . recent intimate involvement with the deceased I’m sure you’ll see to it that we wrap up the case, ASAP.”
“Expediting,” I said. “In the interest of what?” I felt the weight of the money in my hand and the weight of the plastic bag that contained the oil and beer bottles set out on Jake’s desk.
“In the interest of preserving my wife’s memory,” Jake said. “The Scarlet I married.”
The Scarlet he married. . . Where the hell was the blade he cut her up with?
Cash deposit or no cash deposit, beer bottle or no beer bottle, proof of my bedding down with Scarlet or no proof, I knew exactly what an official investigation would do to a man like Jake. It would crack open all sorts of boxes that he and Cain might not want cracked. That was my leverage.
So what’s a part-timer with a constant headache to do?
He takes a shot.
I opened the envelope once more, counted out twenty-five- hundred dollars. Then I stuffed the packet into the interior pocket of my leather jacket.
“Since it’s the truth we all want, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” I said.
I took a few more steps forward, reached across Jake’s desk, picked up the handset on the phone, and punched the number nine. When the outside line clicked over, I dialed the number for the Albany Medical Center, Office of Pathology. The autopsy room. As expected, George Phillips answered. I asked the Albany pathologist (and my father’s former faithful employee) if he had the body of Mrs. Montana scheduled for an exam. He said he had her on ice, pending further orders, and that was it. I asked him if I could get a look at her tonight. He said he didn’t see why not.
“Off the record,” he clarified.
“Not exactly, George,” I said, staring at Jake’s face. “The A.P.D. has instructed me to submit a thorough report, which I guess kind of makes me your ‘pending further orders.’“
“Come on down, little brother,” George said, the former smoker’s voice reverberating inside the tiled autopsy room.
I hung up, shifted my gaze to Cain.
Judging by the tight red face and bulging eyeballs, I sensed that his blood pressure was just a few degrees short of rapid boil. I’d never seen him so pissed off in my life. But then, never in my life had I seen Scarlet dead. Never in my life had I considered my feelings for her as I had over the past few hours.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
“Getting at the truth,” I said, patting the thick packet that filled my jacket. “In the interest of preserving Scarlet’s memory.”
I snatched one of Cain’s ballpoints from his chest pocket, then ripped a yellow Post-a-Note from one of the pads on Jake’s desk. I penned a receipt for the twenty-five hundred large, signed it, dated it and pasted it back on the desktop. Then I tossed Cain’s pen back in his lap.
“There now,” I said. “It’s official. I am currently in your employ to discover the truth and the whole truth behind the death of Mrs. Jake Montana.”
“You, my old partner,” Cain said, “are flirting with your own premature demise.” He could not have made a truer statement.
“My demise can be expect
ed at any time,” I said quietly. “With or without you.”
“Oh yeah. Suicide.”
“No. Accident.”
“Leave,” Jake said. “Before I throw you out the window.”
I smiled and made for the door.
“Hell of a way to treat an employee,” I said, my left hand twisting the brass doorknob. “This keeps up, I’ll contact the Better Business Bureau.”
Cain whipped the pen at the door.
“We are your Better Business Bureau!” he said.
21
Some thirty minutes later I was pulling into short-term parking at Albany International Airport. International. . . as in the puddle jumpers that fly to Canada and Mexico. At the video-monitored entrance gate, I rolled down the funeral coach window, snatched the ticket from the automated ticket vendor and parked as close to the U.S. Air terminal as I could manage.
I met up with Brendan Lyons inside the Skybar on the second floor of the terminal. I recognized his face from the black and white portrait printed in the paper beside his by-line. In person he was a tall, slim, somewhat balding man of about my age. He was wearing gray slacks and a black blazer over a pressed, olive-colored button-down. No tie.
A brown, soft leather briefcase sat on the floor by his feet and on the bar was the same morning edition of the Albany Times Union newspaper that I’d read earlier.
He’d already started on a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft by the time I walked in at five minutes after five. As we shook, I took a quick look over his shoulder at the wide expanse of tarmac plainly visible through the plate glass wall. Outside, a bright yellow turbo-prop helicopter was warming up its rotors, the giant blades spinning mirage-like circles above the sleek craft.
While Brendan got the attention of the gray-haired woman tending the bar, I sat myself down on one of the seven or so available stools. The gray-haired lady asked for my order.
“Bud,” I smiled. I took a look around the small bar. We were the only people to occupy the place. “So what’s with the airport?”
Moonlight Falls Page 8
