The reporter grinned, took a drink of beer. “Albany’s a small city,” he said. “Pretty much no one knows me here. . . What I am, what I do. No one expects me to be working an angle if we get to chatting.”
The bartender set my beer down atop a paper napkin. I took notice of the nameplate pinned to her purple uniform shirt. “Anna Mae,” it said. I drank some beer.
“That what I am?” I asked. “Angle of the day?”
“Scarlet Montana,” he exhaled.
“How’d you find out I was working the case?”
He said, “I called around, checked in with a few sources. Finally, I got a cop who told me you were brought in to work the case in place of the non-existent Violent Crimes S.I.U.”
“What cop?”
“You know the way the news beat works, Mr. Detective.”
He was right, but it didn’t hurt to ask. Simple fact of the matter was that people on the inside talked. Their motive was almost always personal gain—for greenbacks. But then, there was also the occasional stab in the back—one pissed-off cop to another. I knew he wasn’t about to reveal his source and I wasn’t about to push the matter.
We both drank some more beer.
“So how can I help?” I asked.
He never bothered to pull out a tape recorder or a steno pad. No pen or pencil. “I am going to make an assumption, Detective Moonlight,” he said. “You believe that Scarlet Montana was murdered last night, or else you would not be wasting your time with me right now.” He held his breath for a beat or two. “And, you believe that her husband—the esteemed chief of our very own A.P.D.—has everything to do with that murder.”
Sure, it had been more or less my theory for the past twelve hours. I’d even been toying with the idea that I might have had something to do with that murder. There was the issue of my hands, after all. The scrapes, cuts, and abrasions. But just hearing the word “murder” come from another’s mouth made it seem all the more based in reality—a reality as toxic and frightening to me as cancer.
“Look, Mr. Lyons—”
“Brendan.”
“Brendan,” I said. “All I know is that I was brought in last night on a potential conflict-of-interest situation that Mitchell Cain and Jake Montana thought important enough to warrant my independent attention.”
“What could be more important than the mutilation of one’s wife?”
I looked into his face. It looked better in the flesh than in the grainy newsprint.
“Scarlet’s death was as gruesome as I’ve ever witnessed in my life,” I said. “That includes the bodies my father sometimes took into his funeral home. County reimbursable jobs. Potter’s field burials no one else could or would work with.” A drink of beer. “I’m no stranger to the dead, Brendan. To just assume that Scarlet had committed suicide. . .” I threw up my hands. “Well, you get the point.”
“So you’re saying it is murder.”
“No, you’re saying that,” I said. “That hasn’t been determined yet. Thus our little friendly conversation in the airport bar.”
Lyons made this little crooked kissing motion with his lips. He nodded.
“I’m not ruling anything out,” I said. “I’ve got the rules of engagement to pursue before I can determine anything.”
He bit his lip.
Outside the big picture window, the chopper body came alive as it bounced up and down on the tarmac, its red, blue and white overhead and undercarriage lights flashing on and off. Beyond that, a U.S. Air 737 was taking off on the main north-south runway.
“My guess is that Cain must be having a real fit over your intention to investigate. That is if you were to really investigate. Because naturally, old man Montana has got to be pissing his pants.”
“His own wife,” I added. “No evidence of a break-in; no murder or suicide weapon, as in a knife or razor blade.”
“Montana can probably feel the County Prosecutor breathing down the back of his fat neck. And you know as well as I do that if O’Connor decides to pursue him, then I.A. will follow. They start pulling out cards at random, the whole place will tumble.”
“The only thing they have going for them now is a very weak suicide theory and the fact that Albany hardly registers a blip on the world map,” I said.
“Right now, Moonlight, everyone is holding their water waiting to see how things are going to play out. Let’s face it, those stiffs at I.A. got no more loyalty than the prosecutor’s office. Only to themselves, their own advancement. They’re all politicians.”
“Go figure,” I said.
“Go figure,” Lyons chuckled.
Anna Mae brought us another round without our having to ask. Either she was a real good barkeep or Lyons was somewhat of a regular. A little of both, I guessed.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m gonna level with you. I’ve been ordered by my own editor-in-chief to lay off this one.”
“Screw the First Amendment,” I said.
“Lay off for now,” he said. “You have any idea what ‘lay off means to a city desk man?”
I pulled back on the beer. “Lay off,” I said, picturing a giant red flag in my head. “Lot of that going around lately. Or maybe she’s using reverse psychology on you.”
“Nah, my editor’s a straight shooter. She wants me to lay off, she means lay off. Last thing she wants to do is piss off the cops in this city.”
“Could make things difficult for you when those threats start rolling in.”
“Reporters need protection. Especially investigative reporters who like to dig up the bad news.”
We drank for a while.
“Anything else you wanna ask me?” I said after a beat.
He slid off his stool, reached into his trouser pockets, came out with a twenty, and laid it atop the bar.
“I have a small proposition for you.”
I finished up my beer, got up off the stool.
“In the course of your independent investigation,” he said, “if you should happen upon any evidence of a, let’s say, irrefutable nature that would somehow lead to murder, how’s about giving me a little heads-up?”
He said it. Exactly what I wanted him to say. “What about your boss?” I said. “Her gag order?”
“A serious journalist has his integrity to think of.”
“And in return?”
“You see justice served.”
“What more could I want? Moral payola.” I held out my hand. He shook it, then bent down and grabbed his briefcase.
“Remember,” he said, “irrefutable evidence or this whole thing will be shot. Looks like that missing blade is a good start.”
“We’re after the same thing,” I agreed, just as the giant chopper rotors went full-blast, so loud you could hear them through the soundproof glass.
Lyons started to leave, but then he stopped to look at me.
“Is it true what they say?” he asked. “About your. . . head? The bullet is still lodged inside there?”
“A fragment. I try not to think about it much,” I lied.
“A.P.D. placed you on disability over three years ago,” he said. “Why work at all?”
“TV sucks,” I said. “Besides, I’m learning to be a massage therapist and a personal trainer. But I’m also still a part-time cop. And I like a good mystery now and again.”
“Death,” he said. “Ain’t no mystery in being dead.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said, “soon as I get there.”
22
Back on the first floor of the terminal, I couldn’t help but take notice of the giant television that took up most of the terminal’s northwest wall. Actually not a single monitor, but maybe two dozen digital flat-screens joined together to form one giant electronic display.
The giant T.V. had been tuned to one of the local news channels. They were running a kind of photo montage of Scarlet Montana. From what I could tell, the montage was intended to tell the story of her life through pictures, beginning with when she was just a ki
d growing up in what I knew were the suburbs of west L.A., to her graduation from a Santa Monica high school, to her commencement from UCLA. There were photographs of her working with disadvantaged youths in Albany’s south end and even a photo taken of her and Jake as they walked arm in arm down the church aisle on their wedding day.
No photos of Scarlet drinking herself to sleep.
No photos of the child and husband she lost to a fatal head-on collision.
No photos of her and I having sex.
But there she was again, alive, bright eyes looking out at me from a candid snapshot taken during her high school graduation, donning white cap and gown, clutching a rolled-up diploma tight to her chest. She had a future to look forward to.
But then suddenly the smiling face was replaced with a video clip of a filled body bag being pulled out the back end of a black Chevy Suburban and set on a gurney for the ride through the rear doors of the Albany Medical Center morgue.
With the sound muted, I had no way of telling just what was being reported about Scarlet’s death, although I knew it couldn’t be that different from what Lyons had reported this morning.
Then I saw my own face plastered up on the screen.
The transmission had shifted from the photo montage to the television anchor. Broadcast up on the right-hand corner of the screen, beside the anchor’s face, a photograph of me.
The broadcast photo was one I remembered well. It had been taken not long after I’d earned my detective’s badge. A nice, professional- quality picture of my clean-shaven image sporting a full head of thick black hair. I was standing in front of a pole-mounted American flag that was set beside the official yellow and navy blue flag representing the Albany Police Department.
For just those few seconds, I stood there paralyzed, sure that Jake and Cain had just announced me as their primary suspect. But then, underneath the photo appeared the words I wanted to see: “A.P.D. Special Detective Richard Moonlight: the independent investigator in charge of the Montana inquest.”
There, I thought. Breathe easy, Moonlight. Lyons wasn’t kidding. They were making my involvement public.
I wasn’t a suspect after all. At least in the eyes of the media. I was just a paranoid part-timer with a guilty conscience.
My heart was beating inside my throat.
The news report had served as a warning. The sooner I got to the bottom of Scarlet’s death, the sooner I could remove myself from the Montana equation and get down to the business of nailing the real killer.
I looked down at my scarred palms.
Cain and Montana knew that I’d been sleeping with Scarlet. My only guess was that Scarlet must have come out and told her husband— point blank—just to burn him up; just to make it hurt. Sure as shit, they were somehow going to use that knowledge against me. That is if I didn’t play by their rules. Therein lay their leverage.
But I wasn’t about to play by their rules. If there was a killer out there, I was going to find him. If the killer was Jake, I’d nail him to the wall. In the meantime, if Cain and Jake had it in their mind to make me a suspect, I’d prove them wrong.
If there was any kind of justice for Scarlet, I would dig it up. Even if I had to take out the whole A.P.D. in the process.
I drove across the flat lot in the direction of the manned exit booths where I paid three dollars’ worth of short-term parking fees. Pressing my receipt into the unused ashtray, I might have felt at relative peace had I not taken immediate notice of the Toyota Land Cruiser making its way into the lot, just as I was making my way out.
The albino man was driving the SUV. He made a right-hand turn into the parking lot. He was going so slowly along the one-way road, I could make out pink eyes lit up in the glare from the illuminated dash. We eyed one another for the entire few seconds it took to make our respective drive-bys.
I nearly gave myself a case of whiplash trying to catch his license plate number. But by the time I turned around, he was gone.
Behind me, a taxi pulled up. Right on my bumper. The driver hit the horn. I guess he didn’t know I was a part-time cop—that I actually did own the road.
No choice but to drive on through the exit, back out onto the main road. I peered into the rearview and side mirrors. Nothing ahead of me, nothing behind or to the sides. No blue Toyota Land Cruiser, that is.
But I had learned something: I was being tailed by a white-faced creep with a purple scar-tissue map on his lower torso. Exactly who he was and what he wanted, I had no way of knowing. But I knew it couldn’t be good.
Reaching into my jacket, I pulled out my Browning, thumbed off the safety, and set it on the seat beside me.
Browning Hi-Power 9mm, first introduced to US law enforcement in 1935, the year my old man was born.
Both of them my most valuable companions.
23
I’d never attended even a single Psychic Fair meeting. But while Scarlet was pretty closed-mouthed about the subject, she’d revealed enough for me to have a decent idea of what went on in them. For instance, I knew that meditation and mind freeing played a big role in the proceedings; that the members were mostly leftover hippies from the sixties and seventies; that the seating was mostly lotus style, the dress code something you might find in an old film about Haight-Ashbury circa 1967.
So by the time I entered the St. Pious Catholic Church gymnasium on Upper Loudon Road, right around the corner from my home, I pretty much knew what to expect. In fact, that evening’s session was already underway. Sure enough, there were twelve of them sitting in folding chairs, circle formation, legs crossed lotus style.
On the near end of the gym to my left, under the ceiling- mounted basketball hoop, stood a long table. Set upon it were plates of sprouts, tofu, carrots, celery and lots of other mostly vegetarian fare. Plus one of those extra big percolating coffee pots. No doughnuts.
No Krispy Kremes; no Dunkins. Not so much as a glazed Munchkin.
As far as I could tell, the Fair was made up entirely of women of varying ages and builds. Except for one man whom I took for the leader. He was a tall, flabby man of about fifty, with long, stark-gray hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. He was dressed in what I can only describe as bright red and yellow pajamas. No shoes. Sandals. Birkenstocks.
His chin and upper lip were hidden behind a thick goatee. Maybe I’d never had the pleasure of this man’s acquaintance on any prior occasion, but I knew who he was. Scarlet’s psychic leader, her guru or, if you will, her shaman. A man I knew of only as the Reverend Roland Doobie.
He turned to me. “Can I help you with something?” he asked.
“Master Doobie, I presume?” I said.
“That’s Dubois.” A couple members of the faithful put their heads down and chuckled silently to themselves.
I walked over to the table, poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup and added a squirt of the only milk to be found: soy milk. No plastic stirrers.
“My psychic gateways need some clearing,” I smiled. “I was hoping you could help.”
This time a college-age young woman with long hair and a tie- dyed t-shirt chuckled out loud.
Roland “Doobie” Dubois shot her an angry look. “Kismet,” he snapped. “Please.”
Whatever happened to peace, love, and understanding?
“I’m investigating the death of one of your members,” I said. “Scarlet Montana.”
The entire group, as if on cue, immediately shifted their gaze from me to the floor. Dubois perked up. He shot me a look that told me I wasn’t exactly a stranger to him, even though we had definitely never crossed paths before, at least this side of the cosmos. Had Scarlet actually spoken to him about me?
Clearing his throat, he posed, “What is death, Mr. . . “
“Moonlight,” I said.
“That’s a rather unusual name. Beautiful, but unusual all the same.”
“It was my grandfather’s name,” I said. “My father took it from his father, passed it down to me.”
H
e said, “Tell me, Mr. Moonlight, do you understand the transformation of the soul, the other side of silence as it were?”
I must have looked as dumb as I felt because Roland Dubois offered up a sad smirk.
“Allow me to put it another way: how would you describe death?”
“I’m tied to a chair, the lids on my eyes pinned back. On the television, a commercial-free ‘American Idol’ marathon.”
Dubois smiled. “In clinical terms,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “Death is achieved via irreversible cessation of circulation of blood in the body of the person or irreversible cessation of all function of the brain of the person.”
Raising up his hands, Dubois clapped. “Very good,” he said. “As a mortal, you are not without knowledge of life’s final mystery.”
“Dead people have been a sort of hobby for me my whole life.”
Nodding, he turned to a woman on his direct right. A woman of about forty-five, I guessed. Short, rather plump, with thick, round glasses and long black hair streaked with white.
“How would you describe death, Suma?”
The woman raised her head tentatively. Around her neck she wore about two dozen beaded necklaces. She seemed kind of frightened.
She cleared her throat. “Death does not exist,” she said in this high-pitched, almost rattled voice. “Death is a mortal term. We are immortal. Therefore, death has no meaning for us. It has no place in our vocabulary.”
“Thank you, Suma,” he said. “There you have it, Mr. Moonlight. Scarlet is not dead. She is merely transfigured into another life form.”
“Well, I guess that about puts me out of a job,” I said while sipping my coffee. It tasted like liquid dirt. In fact, I think it was liquid dirt, aka organic mud. I set the cup back on the table.
“Reincarnation,” I said.
Dubois nodded.
“Scarlet truly believed in the resurrection not only of the soul, but of the corpus, too,” he explained.
All this enlightenment was making me dizzy.
“Can anyone here tell me if Scarlet had been acting strangely over the past few days or weeks?” I asked. It was like asking a group of clowns if they noticed anyone acting funny. Again, the entire group stared at the floor.
Moonlight Falls Page 9
