Murder by Moonlight

by Vincent Zandri

  I’m confident that the trek out will be far shorter if I follow an easterly path, toward Brockley Drive. It’s exactly what I do, bushwhacking my way through the thick stuff for what seems an eternity but that more realistically is probably a period of no more than thirty minutes.

  When I emerge from the woods onto the property directly next door to the Parker’s abandoned residence, I think it only fitting. I’m also exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and more than a little disturbed by what I witnessed inside that crumbling Boy Scout camp.

  I head toward the Parker property, walk along the north side of the house, then down the length of the driveway to the road. As though expecting me all along, Maxwell Okey is standing in the middle of his lawn, dressed in his blue jeans, red-and-black Mackinaw, and New York Yankees baseball hat. He’s got a sledgehammer in his hands. He’s lifting the heavy sledge up over his head, bringing it down hard onto a stake he’s pounding into the lawn. I wonder what the stake is for. Maybe he’s setting up tarps to protect his shrubs for a snowstorm we’re about to get. He needs the stakes in order to tie down the tarps.

  He spots me, meets up with me in the middle of the empty suburban street.

  “You ever sleep, Maxwell?” I pose.

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” he says, glancing at his wristwatch.

  “How come you’re not at work?” Briars are stuck to my pant legs. I begin picking them off, one by one.

  “Took a sick day,” he says, smiling. “You been doing some hiking in the Five Rivers State Park?”

  “Nice day for a hike. Not gonna be many more of these left. Gonna eventually snow on the little town of Bethlehem.”

  I pick off the last briar, flick it out into the street. Maxwell looks at me with creamy eyes that don’t blink despite the cold wind.

  “I thought Mrs. Parker didn’t need you anymore.” There’s more than a little sting to the inquisitiveness in his voice.

  “Jeepers, I’m not sure that’s any of your business, Maxwell.”

  He works up another smile. A mouthful of gray/brown teeth. The smile is about as real as the blow-up Santas perched on all these heroin-brown lawns. “Maybe she’s not looking to have you around anymore. Snooping like you do.”

  “Maybe. But last I heard, the country is still free and I felt like looking at those woods.”

  He nods. But he doesn’t trust me.

  “Can I ask you a favor, Maxwell?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Can you give me a ride to my car? It’s parked in the Five Rivers lot.”

  He nods again. More distrustfully than before. “Suppose,” he exhales. “Wait here.”

  “Gosh, thanks a bunch. That’s really swell of you.”

  “Bet you don’t really mean that,” he utters, as he turns for his house.

  The spider isn’t far.

  I can feel it watching me with all those eyes.

  The demon spider is near me, waiting for me.

  The spider is hungry, and it resides in Bethlehem.

  ____

  We’re riding in Maxwell’s Ford F150 pickup, heading west on Delaware Avenue, in the direction of the Five Rivers parking area. The truck smells like pine trees, probably from the pine-tree-shaped air freshener that hangs from the rearview mirror.

  “Can I ask you something else, Maxwell?”

  “Can’t stop you, can I.” Wise-ass rhetorical from the nosy engineer.

  “I found an abandoned Boy Scout camp in the middle of those woods. In the thick woods, off the trail, where nobody goes. I took a look inside. It didn’t look too pretty with all that blood spatter on the wall up in the loft. You’re a scoutmaster. Maybe you know what happened there?”

  For what seems a full minute, Okey doesn’t say a word. He just stares straight ahead at the road, both hands gripping the steering wheel, white-knuckled.

  I decided to press him a little. “You used to lead Boy Scout troops into those woods. You must have come across the place at one time or another. You must have spent the night there. With Chris.”

  More silence. More white knuckles.

  Until the engineer lifts his right leg, slams on the brakes. If I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, I’d be gone-baby-gone through the windshield. Bethlehem roadkill.

  “You stay away from that place!” He’s shouting. Spitting. “That’s no place for anybody but a bunch of ghosts!” He’s visibly shaken, hands trembling, his already-white knuckles growing paler.

  “Why can’t you talk about it?”

  “Because it’s not a good place. That’s why nobody goes into those woods anymore.” His lips tight, teeth clenched. After a time he adds, “How long you been living in the area, Mr. Moonlight?”

  “All my life.”

  “And you never heard about what happened in that camp?”

  I try to think. Can’t recall anything about a Boy Scout camp or any trouble at one in recent years. Like I said, I didn’t even know the Boy Scouts still existed.

  “Listen, Moonlight, I’ll make it short and sweet. The property you were on is not owned by Five Rivers. It’s owned by a family who rented the camp property to my Boy Scout troop for a dollar per year. But all that changed when the family discovered their only son dead inside the upstairs loft, the barrel of a shotgun stuffed down what was left of his throat. The part that hadn’t stuck to the wall anyway. Since then, no one from the family has visited the place, and no one goes hiking there. The family I’m talking about still keeps up with their taxes, but even that will probably end soon, now that man who owned it passed away recently. But that’s all I know and all I care to know.”

  “What was the kid’s name?”

  He shakes his head, like I’m torturing him with my questions. And I am.

  “You really wanna know all this, Moonlight? What the hell can it possibly matter? What’s it got to do with whoever attacked Chris’s poor parents?”

  “It matters to me and I’ve got a gut feeling that everything that happens in the land of the Great Society is somehow connected. I’m an investigator, after all.”

  “You saying that the Town of Bethlehem killed my neighbor, Peter Parker? Took out Joan’s eye?”

  I picture the demon spider hiding inside one of Okey’s pockets while he drives.

  “Maybe that’s precisely what I’m saying, Maxwell. You believe in evil?”

  He tosses me a glance. “I’m an engineer, Moonlight. People are what they are. They’re neither evil nor good. They just are, and it’s the actions of individuals that determines who’s evil or not.”

  “Jeepers, what an outlook. Thought you called yourself a Christian, Maxwell. You understand the Biblical significance of the name of your town?”

  “Tell you what,” he says, pressing his foot to the gas. “There was a boy. Let’s call him Chuckie. A thirteen-year-old Boy Scout. Belonged to my troop, in fact. Nice kid. Helpful, kind, courteous, respectful of his elders. The real deal. Lived alone with his divorced dad. Used to stay at that very same Boy Scout camp. And on occasion, even his dad would spend the weekend with us to help out, since it was his camp in the first place. The last kid you’d think to have any hang-ups.

  “One day on an overnight weekend trip, I notice Chuckie missing. After a brief search, I find him sitting alone in that upstairs loft. Brown-haired kid, just staring out the window onto nothing. I kneel down beside him, speak with him, ask him what’s wrong. He’s silent for a while, until he tells me he wants to jump out the window. That he’s been sitting there for an hour, just contemplating doing a nosedive out the window, landing on his head, going to sleep forever. He talks to me so calmly and with such resolve, it raises the fine hairs up on the back of my neck.

  “I talk him down, so to speak, and alert his old man, who then takes him to a shrink who diagnoses him with quote emotional problems end quote. Something having to do with the onset of puberty. Nothing to worry about. Two weeks to the day later, that very same boy, Chuckie, whom we are not supposed to be worried about, drags one of hi
s dad’s shotguns into the woods, makes his way to the camp, unlocks the padlock with his old man’s key, climbs the stairs, and blows his head off.

  “I was the first on the scene three days later. The kid’s body was pretty well decomposed and bloated by then. At his father’s request, the place has been abandoned ever since and no one goes there. Boy Scouts claim it’s haunted. Only reason it’s still there at all is that it’s surrounded by all that state land.”

  I picture the bare mattresses, the rust-colored spatter on the walls. I suddenly find myself experiencing just a little empathy for old Maxwell Okey. Coming upon a sight like that dead kid could do some real emotional damage to a man. Especially when the troop leader tried to prevent the kid from offing himself in the first place.

  We arrive at the entrance to the Five Rivers parking area. Maxwell pulls up to my ride. I open the door, slide out. But I stand facing him.

  “Maxwell, what the hell is going on in this neighborhood?”

  His all-brown smile turns upside down into a frown. “Go home, Mr. Moonlight,” he says. “There’s nothing more to find out about Christopher. He’s out on bail and he did not kill his father or attack his mother.”

  “Even though you testified to seeing his yellow Jeep outside the house on the morning of September 15th?”

  “Could have been anyone’s. Now if you don’t mind.”

  “That boy, Chuckie…was he a part of Chris’s Scout troop?”

  He nods in the affirmative. “Sucks, don’t it?” he says.

  “A suicide would certainly make an impression on me if I’d been a kid in his troop. Kids don’t really understand the concept of death.” I stand in the wind for a minute, the truck door still open, the engine still idling. “One last question,” I push, holding up my right hand, three-fingered Boy Scout style. “Promise.”

  He inhales a frustrated breath.

  “What was Chuckie’s last name?”

  Okey exhales, toes the gas, revving the engine. Impatient as all hell. “Bowman,” he says. “Chuck. Bowman. Junior. Satisfied, Mr. Detective?”

  A sudden slap to the face wouldn’t have surprised me more.

  “Thanks for the lift, Maxwell.” I close the door, take a step back, feel my body spinning out of balance.

  The rear tires on Okey’s truck spit gravel as he pulls away.

  Hell of a place, this little town of Bethlehem. The Great Society.

  Good place for ghosts.

  Great place for evil demons.

  Aviva and I are seated inside the cafeteria at the Albany Public High School, where she teaches an Intro to Painting course to juniors and seniors once a week for free. I’m having a plastic plate piled high with institutional beef stroganoff. She’s having a dry ham and cheese sandwich that’s wrapped in several layers of Saran Wrap. We’re both drinking 1 percent milk from those small, oilyfeeling, half-pint cartons that have been around since the dawn of man. Or since I was a boy, anyway.

  The cafeteria is filled with kids. Teenagers. The worst kind. Half a table of empty space separates us from a dozen juvies who choose to sit on top of one another rather than be seated near an adult, not to mention two adults. Below the table, my booted feet have gone from wet and cold to damp and itchy.

  I tell Aviva all about my excursion through the woods behind the Parker house. About my coming upon Maxwell Okey later on. I also tell her the story about the abandoned Boy Scout camp and the suicide of Bowman’s son years ago.

  “And you believe the story?” Aviva poses. She brings a neat triangular half sandwich to her mouth, nibbles on the end.

  I shovel in some of the stroganoff. It’s not half bad. What did we call it when I was in high school? Beef stroke-me-off. Silly, I know. But just saying it in my head still makes me grin.

  “I didn’t see any reason not to believe him. He’s a mechanical engineer, after all. Don’t they have to abide by some sort of truth code? Anyway, the walls in the upstairs loft, they were covered in blood spatter. I’m trained to recognize these things.”

  Aviva blinks. “You’re positive?”

  “I’ve seen blood spatter before. When it gets old it gets rust-colored. When it gets real old, it turns brown/black. But it’s still blood. Some poor bastard’s DNA.”

  “I don’t recall hearing anything about the suicide of a top cop’s son occurring in Bethlehem,” Aviva offers.

  “Fell off the local media radar somehow.” I smile. “Gee. Imagine that.”

  She taps my leg under the table, sending a chill up and down my spine. “Maybe you should check the Times Union archives online.” Nibbling some more. And then, bright-eyed, like a vision of Christ has appeared in my stroganoff, “Jeez, Moon, are you even sure Bowman had a son? I’ve seen about half a dozen TV reports on his suicide and not once did I hear mention of his having had a son who also killed himself with a gun. Be a kind of obvious twist to skip.”

  Aviva’s got a point. A real good point. Could Okey be yanking my chain? And if so, why?

  “I’m not sure how far the TU online archives go back,” I say. “But it doesn’t matter, since my new friend and crime reporter Steve Ferrance will certainly be happy to check the morgue for me.”

  “Maybe it’s just a hunch, but I can bet you an entire night’s sex that Bowman never had a son, much less one who committed suicide. Because it certainly would have been a hot topic for a reporter.”

  Tapping my forehead with my index finger. “Always thinking, creative woman that you are. But let me ask you something: Chris Parker spent untold hours in those woods. He was also a Boy Scout. Okey told me Chris was in the same Boy Scout troop as Bowman’s supposed son. That the suicide would have had a profound affect on him. But what I’m thinking is this: that camp would have been a great place for Chris to hide out in isolation, even after Bowman closed it up for good.”

  “But you would think he would have stayed away from the place like all the other kids must have. Again, assuming Bowman had a son, and assuming said son killed himself inside the camp.”

  “Avoided it altogether, right? It’s supposed to be haunted now. That’s what Okey said. Christ, it gave me the creeps and I’m no kid.”

  “Not by a long shot.” Aviva smiles. “But if Chris knew all about this supposed suicide, and he still chose to play in the home and spend a lot of time there, then yes, I would say the place would not have had a positive affect on his head.”

  “That is, assuming he hung out there at all, and assuming Bowman had a son who killed himself there.”

  “Assuming…Correct.”

  “Well, something had to have been slaughtered there, because that blood didn’t get there by itself.”

  Aviva takes another nibble out of her sandwich. The kids seated at the end of the table get up with their trays. The boys wear baggy pants, belting them around the tops of their thighs, exposing their underwear-covered butts. On their lids they sport New York Knicks baseball hats with the shiny new tags still stuck to the brims. They’re trying to look badass urban ghetto, and getting away with it. Bet they’ve never even heard of Bethlehem or the Great Society. One of them tries to stare me down as he shuffles past. I stare back until he looks away. Moonlight, the unbeatable head case.

  “Maybe you should back off the project now that you’re no longer being paid to look into anything,” Aviva suggests.

  “Always the voice of reason. But that’s not the ‘can do’ attitude I’ve grown to know and love.”

  “I understand what you’re going through. You’re convinced Christopher killed his father and now you feel the need to find out why. But don’t you think you’re reaching for something that doesn’t exist?”

  I give her the Huh? look.

  “What in the world would a suicide that occurred ten or whatever years ago have to do with the Parker attacks? Even if Bowman had a son who killed himself, and he was Chris’s Boy Scout friend, and even if Chris did explore the camp after it was shut down…One thing has nothing to do with the other.”
>
  I look into her deep brown eyes, admire the way her smooth dark hair veils her face. I wonder if the kids would mind if we smooch a little. It might embarrass them, cause cracks to form in their rock-hard exteriors.

  “I’m just going with my gut,” I explain.

  “Listen, honey,” she says, taking another nibble of sandwich. “If Chris did take an axe to his parents, maybe there is no why.”

  “No why? Why wouldn’t there be a why?”

  “Maybe there is no why Chris did what he did, other than he wanted the insurance money. He didn’t do it because he hung out at the scene of a suicide that took place half his life ago.”

  “Christopher doesn’t seem like that kind of stone-cold killer,” I offer. “A do-it-for-the-money assassin. He just doesn’t seem like that kind of psychopath.”

  “What’s a psychopath look like?”

  I take another bite of stroke-me-off, think about it. “Like Hannibal Lector,” I say. “That’s what a psychopath axe murderer looks like to me.”

  “Exactly. Your opinions are derived in part from popular conceptions and misconceptions. We all fall into the trap.”

  “So what do you think? You still think he did it and his mother is covering up for him after having fingered him in the first place?”

  “If I had to make a decision, I would say that’s the case. I think Detective Bowman knew that was the case and did his best to expedite due process. Plus he had to cover up the fact that he was sleeping with the perp’s mother. Plus on top of plus, he might have actually loved the perp’s mother and feared for her life. But when she turned around and tried to protect her son, she might have done so at the expense of her love affair. Maybe that’s why Bowman killed himself.”

  “You might have something there, Viv. On the record, he kills himself because he paid off an expert witness. But off the record, he does so because his lover is now breaking it off in order to support the son who tried to slay her with a fireman’s axe.”