Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

  Still, I persisted. “Did she seem depressed or angry? Was she acting out in any way that might seem unusual to any of you? Did she— “

  “Mr. Moonlight,” Dubois interrupted. “As you can see, this is a closed session and you are violating our right of assemblage. I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”

  He uncrossed his lotus legs and stood up. All six feet, six inches of him.

  Jesus H. Christmas, behold the psychic giant. I knew if I persisted much longer, he might whip my glutes with a bean sprout.

  “Take it easy, Father,” I said. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of a tragedy.”

  “There is no tragedy because there is no death. And it’s not Father, it’s Reverend, if you don’t mind.”

  I backed off.

  “Well then, Reverend,” I said, “I’ll take my leave, back to the world of the mortals.” I reached into my pocket for my wallet, slid out as many cards as I had on me, and began passing them around to the circle of ladies. The one named Kismet smiled.

  “Richard Moonlight,” she said. “Masseur, personal trainer and private investigator. Might you sing and dance as well?”

  “Wasn’t room for all that on the card,” I said. Then, “If any of you happen to recall anything of importance, I urge you to give me a call.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” the good Reverend said.

  By the time I got to him, I had two cards left. I placed them back in my wallet, underneath my silver-plated badge.

  “Sorry,” I said. “None for you.”

  He sat back down. “Oh, and why is that, Mr. Moonlight?”

  “You’re psychic,” I said. “You already know my number.”

  He smiled and laughed a little under his breath. He held out his hand, as though inviting me to place my hand inside it.

  “May I?” he inquired.

  I felt my stomach tighten up. My hands were scratched up. Inexplicably. But then, this didn’t seem exactly like the time to deny the man, give him an excuse to inform a higher authority of my hiding something.

  I set my left hand in his far larger hand, palm up.

  Surprisingly, he said nothing about the cuts as if they didn’t exist. Instead, he ran the tip of his right index finger along a thin line that curved its way around the meat of my thumb. After gazing down at the palm for a few beats, he let go of my hand, smiled and shook his head as though puzzled.

  “What is it?” I asked, my eyes nervously veering from his to the many women who circled him.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “It’s just that your palm, it’s giving me a reading that just can’t be.”

  “What reading is that?”

  He laughed again. “It could very well have something to do with those recent abrasions,” he remarked. “But if you must know, it says you’re already dead.”

  “I had an accident with a bullet to the head a few years back,” I explained. “I should be dead. So they tell me, anyway.”

  “But then, death does not exist, does it, Mr. Moonlight?” “I guess I’m living proof,” I said. “Too bad we can’t say the same for Scarlet.”

  24

  I was first introduced to George Phillips back when I was a little kid. Sometime around 1971 or 72, if I remember correctly.

  He was a blue-jeaned, crazy-haired, skinny rebel, recently returned from the Vietnam War. In a word, Dad got a kick out of him. Didn’t matter how different they were or how George used to bust a gut boasting to my Nixon-supporting old man that he’d fought in the land of the mighty Viet Cong and never once witnessed a single “domino” fall to communism. Dad’s attraction to him was immediate.

  The fact of the matter was that George grew up a fatherless troubled kid who, had he not possessed “unusual smarts” as my father referred to them, might have ended up a lifetime resident of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison for grand theft auto. But with Dad’s encouragement and a full-time/part-time gig at the funeral parlor, George was able to work his way through med school. I’ve always harbored a sneaking suspicion that when his G.I. bill ran out, Dad had no trouble wiring a payment or two to the Albany Medical College on the Viet Nam vet’s behalf. In that manner, George became not only a friend to me, but the big brother I never had.

  I was standing inside the open double doorway that accessed the Albany Medical Arts Center autopsy room. My ears pricked up to the soft classical music the pathologist was broadcasting from a rather expensive stereo console system that was set up on the lab counter directly behind the ceiling-mounted weight scale.

  I breathed in.

  For some people, the pungent odor of formaldehyde and alcohol might make them sick. But to me, the smell reminded me of home. It immediately transported me back to my childhood.

  Scarlet’s cadaver had already been removed from cold storage and was laid out on the table. From where I stood, I could clearly see the blood and water that was dripping off the body and collecting inside the stainless steel vat positioned beneath the table’s drain. Thoughtfully, Phillips had covered her private parts with a green sheet.

  He had his back to me while he stood over the body, contemplating it the same way a mad scientist might contemplate a Frankenstein monster. In his right hand he gripped the water spigot which he’d used to wash the body down.

  Sensing my presence, he about-faced, set down the spigot, then peeled off his Latex gloves and tossed them into a blue medical waste bin.

  “You’re late, little brother,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, stepping further inside. “I got caught up in a psychic reading of sorts.”

  We met in the center of the room, directly beside the body- length table. We shook hands and hugged not only like brothers, but like a couple of battle-seasoned crime vets—Phillips, having gained much of his experience with the dead in Viet Nam as he did my father’s funeral parlor where he’d done everything from assist with embalming to driving the Mercedes coach in a funeral procession.

  “So Detective Cain has requested that you solve their little suicide problem,” he grinned sympathetically.

  I shot a tentative glance in the direction of Scarlet’s prone body.

  I knew that the sight of her naked limbs and torso had no affect on a pathologist like George. For him, she was just another night’s work. The same might have been said for me had I not been her lover. For me, she was still flesh and blood. Still a person. Despite the effort, I was having some real trouble referring to her as an “it.” Every time I glanced at her for more than a few seconds at a time, I felt a dull drumming in the center of my head and in the back of my throat. There was the nagging pressure against the backs of my eyeballs, the buzzing in my brain.

  Had I had anything to do with this?

  I could only believe that I hadn’t; that, on the other hand, Jake had everything to do with it, including motive, opportunity and means.

  “Montana extended a personal invitation late last night,” I said.

  “He wants this one bought and sold right away,” Phillips correctly suggested. “Wants the transaction to go down his way, your name and only your name on the sales receipt. Avoid a full-blown internal investigation.”

  “I am the internal investigation,” I clarified. “In the interest of preserving his wife’s memory.”

  Phillips grinned.

  “He didn’t feed you that bullshit, did he Moon?”

  “Directly to my bald-headed face.”

  “The only thing Montana wants to save in a case like this is his own ass. And believe me, that’s a lot of real estate to save.”

  I nodded in the direction of the body. “Along with his freedom,” I said. “O’Connor starts flinging accusations, things could get mighty ugly for Albany’s finest cop.”

  If I had to guesstimate, I would have put George’s age at around fifty-seven or fifty-eight. But because of his condition—Non-Hotchkins Lymphoma, which had entered into a state of remission some ten years ago but that recently made a comeback—he loo
ked quite a bit older. If you didn’t know he was an M.D., you’d swear he was an aging rock and roll musician. He was a small, too-thin man with shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair parted in the middle, a navy blue bandana wrapped around his forehead. That night he was wearing a white smock that buttoned down the front and hung short of his knees.

  His sleeves rolled up around his elbows, he wore three silver chain bracelets on his right wrist. He still wore his wedding band even though his divorce went through fifteen years ago, his ex-wife, daughter and granddaughter having taken up roots somewhere outside of Bozeman, Montana. His earlobes supported one silver hoop apiece and on his feet, a pair of worn cowboy boots over which he sported a pair of tight-fitting Levi’s jeans with a good-sized tear over the right kneecap.

  If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear they were the same jeans and boots I’d seen him wearing on the day he arrived at the front door to 23 Hope Lane to answer a help wanted ad. I recall long hair done up in a ponytail, his unzipped Viet Nam flack jacket now a loose-fitting vest, right hand raised high, index and middle fingers extended into a peaceful V, gaunt face sporting the widest smile I ever saw on a hippie. Like Dad, I remember liking him right away.

  He disappeared into the connecting back office.

  A moment later he came back out carrying a neatly folded smock. On top of the smock was placed a pair of green booties, a transparent plastic face shield, a pair of beige Latex gloves and a green cap. He handed the pile to me and told me to get dressed. While I slipped into my hospital costume, he stepped over to the stereo system and proceeded to replace the existing CD with a romantic composition by Vaughn Williams entitled Symphony Numbers 3 and 4, better known as the “Pastoral Symphonies.” The same soundtrack he always worked to. Take it from an insider.

  He turned to me, just as the lush operatic voices began to fill the white-tiled room. Through his narrow mask I saw him purse his lips as if to say, Take a deep breath. I know this isn’t easy on you.

  Fingering a Teflon scalpel off the tool tray, he brought the razor sharp tip to Scarlet’s already scarred sternum.

  25

  The autopsy proceeded uneventfully.

  Having removed the lungs, trachea and esophagus “en bloc” and setting them out on the foldable dissection table, George weighed organ after organ, recording each and every detail of the procedure into a microphone clipped onto his safety glasses.

  From the start I had been careful to keep my distance. Especially when he initiated the proceedings by swiping the blade down the center of her chest, following the exact path of the long hesitation scars that, in my mind, anyway, Scarlet did not produce on her own.

  After a time, however, I found myself taking a good look at her face.

  Her open eyes were unusually sunken in. Concave, even. I knew that the eyes of a dead person gradually flattened out, the same way a bicycle tire will lose its air over time (the old man’s metaphor). But then, from where I stood maybe four feet away from her face, it seemed as though the eyes no longer possessed any type of reflective sheen whatsoever. Even under the high-powered lamps, the once vivid jade had been reduced to a dull green. Such were the affects of death.

  I ran the tips of my Latex-covered fingers over the eyelids, opening and closing them. I noticed then that my fingers were trembling. Taking a step back, I removed them from her face.

  Maybe I was just tired and a little crazy, but I shook my head and spit out a little nervous laughter.

  I spotted George out of the corner of my eye. He had just completed an examination of her pelvis, using not only his fingers but a stainless steel instrument as well. What he collected from his search he scraped into a small plastic jar the same way you might scrape a dollop of peanut butter off a knife. The procedure completed, he then sealed the lid tightly. After setting the jar down on the counter, he just stood there, staring me down.

  “I might be taking a shot in the dark here,” he said. “But can I ask you a personal question, Moon?”

  I nodded.

  “Were you still sleeping with her?”

  My wide eyes must have shouted volumes. George was my big brother. I shared and bared many of my secrets with him.

  As if to answer his question, I smiled.

  “Sheeeeit,” is all he said.

  26

  Scarlet’s autopsy was now official pathological history—all Polaroid and digital photos developed and downloaded, the proper “opinion form” filled out in longhand, the place hosed down, the tissue, blood and stomach content samples tagged, bagged and sent down to Tox for processing.

  George was sticking his neck out for me on this one. More than usual. If I got buried alive, he was going to choke on a dirt sandwich right along with me.

  The simple fact of the matter was this: some questions had been answered while others remained agonizingly out of reach. In George’s official opinion, the mechanism of death constituted traumatic laceration of the throat, which was derived initially from asphyxiation and secondarily from massive hemorrhage. The cause of death was a sharp instrument—a razor or a carving knife. More likely a razor blade, judging by the precise “slash” cuts (people tend to stab when using a knife).

  The manner of death, however, was a different story.

  While the scars on her upper body (cuts to the epidermal and upper-epidermal skin layers) and the absence of clothing damage (she was naked) might point to suicide, they could just as easily point to homicide.

  The white blanching on her chest and limbs, plus the moderate scrapes and scratches he found along the arms and legs, were thus far the best proof that she might have put up a struggle against an attacker. But then, it was also conceivable that the scratches and bruises could have come from the EMTs who handled her during transport.

  The exact time of death? Twelve a.m. or thereabouts. How long did Scarlet live after her throat had been cut? No more than a few seconds. Had she been under the influence of drugs and alcohol? That was for Toxicology to determine, but then, I knew firsthand the truth about her love of Stohly and her need for sleep aids like Ambien.

  Aside from the hesitation scars, bruises and light scratches, there was no evidence of skin under her fingernails or behind her teeth. No foreign flesh that you might naturally associate with a person struggling for their life. In that sense, with Scarlet acting in the manner of a specific body of evidence, the autopsy served to back up Cain’s and Montana’s suicide theory. Because if she had been murdered, then by all appearances it looked as though she’d asked for it.

  I looked down at my hands. No flesh beneath her fingernails. . . no sign of putting up a struggle with an attacker. Good news for me.

  But then, what did all this analysis mean? What conclusion could be drawn from the pathological examination? What it meant was the autopsy I so badly wanted revealed evidence that moved me as close to suicide as it did homicide. Which also meant I wasn’t about to jump on the horn with Lyons and lay the scoop of the decade on him. Not yet. Not until I had definitive, irrefutable proof concerning the precise manner of death.

  The physics question had been gnawing away at me since I’d first laid eyes on the newly deceased Scarlet: “How many pounds of pressure per square inch do you suppose it would take to inflict that kind of wound on a human neck?”

  We were sitting around George’s metal desk inside the small office that adjoined the autopsy room. A rectangular room with no windows. The long-haired pathologist was looking directly at me, contemplatively, brain matter heating up, gears and belts grinding.

  “I once heard about a man who cut himself up pretty bad after ingesting potassium hydroxide. Another guy who stabbed himself to death after drinking an alkaline detergent solution. But in those cases, the poison probably killed them before the hemorrhaging did.”

  “But we agree that it would take a hell of a lot of strength.”

  “Abnormal strength. More than a healthy thirty-eight-year-old woman fired up on pills and vodka could work up.” George t
ook a toke off a pharmaceutically rolled and distributed marijuana cigarette, held the smoke in even while conversing. “I mean, if you’re that interested, it wouldn’t take much to pull one of the unclaimed stiffs in cold storage, run a blade through its neck, somehow measure the pressure.” Eyes as wide as a kid on Christmas morning, he shot up. “Come on Moon, it’ll be like old times!”

  Fuckin’ George. What the hell would he do without dead people?

  “I’ve had enough blood and guts for one day and night,” I said as I sat back in the wood chair and stared at the plain block wall behind his desk— a wall that might have proudly displayed his diplomas if he had a vain bone in his body. “Besides,” I went on, “I think the answer I’m looking for is obvious enough.”

  I thought George was turning blue. Finally, he released the pain-killing smoke from his over-inflated lungs.

  “I guess you’d never get an accurate reading anyway, Moony,” he said through a series of coughs and nose farts.

  “Unless someone was willing to demonstrate by cutting their own neck open for us,” I suggested.

  “Totally unrealistic scenario to duplicate.”

  “Listen George, we both know that self-cutting and self-stabbing is just about the most uncommon method of suicide there is.”

  He nodded and sat back down. “Something like five percent of all suicides occur from a blade. In almost every case the victim is either schizophrenic or psychotic or drugged up. Usually, all three.”

  “All the more reason for me to make the differentiation between suicide and homicide. What basic criteria do you gotta establish to prove suicide by knife? Or in this case, a blade?”

  Phillips shifted the cigarette into his left hand, then he raised his right hand and extended the index finger.