Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  He clicked the e-mail message that had woken him. It was for his father:

  Dear groverwhalen2,

  Congratulations on winning the bid for the World’s Fair Opening Ceremonies invitation. I promise to ship the item within 24 hours of receiving payment.

  Best—

  cancanman036

  What the hell was a cancanman036? Who would do business under a nickname like that? His father planned to send money to this unseen person on the West Coast. Who knew where cancanman036 even got this thirty-five-dollar invitation? He could have stolen it from a geriatric invalid at the nursing home next door.

  Billy pushed himself from the chair, and gasped as his body tightened like a clamp. He heard his father’s voice in his mind, Welcome to my world. Feel good? Clutching the back of his chair, he rolled his shoulders and gently forced his back to straighten. “Oh! Oh!” he cried quietly, in surprise. The pain was like having the nerves yanked from his legs, the way an electrician pulls wires through a pipe. He grew lightheaded and feared he might pass out, until the muscles loosened and the pain slowly diluted through his body. He found aspirin in the cabinet and chewed five tablets with no water. He kept the aspirin paste under his tongue for a minute before he swallowed, because he had heard it got into the bloodstream faster that way.

  “Ain’t you the picture of health,” said the old man. “Who did this to you? I thought you were paid up with the bookmakers.”

  Billy turned to face him, felt a twinge in his lower lumbar, and froze. “Didn’t hear you come in.” He rolled his upper body around his hips. “Hey, Pa, did I hear you talking to yourself again this morning?”

  The old man bristled. “So what if you did? This apartment is in America, ain’t it? I got my free speech rights, even in this second-story gulag with no elevator.”

  Billy turned his hands up in surrender. “I bow to the First Amendment. Talk all you want.”

  “I’m skipping treatment today,” the old man declared.

  Oh, fuck, not now.

  “We never had our discussion,” Billy said, not daring to look at him.

  “That’s your fault. I don’t have forever to wait.”

  Billy turned to his father. The old man wore a short housecoat over threadbare cotton pajamas. His knees were parted. His legs were so goddamn thin, just sticks and angles, like a grasshopper’s legs. “Pop—”

  “Any news on my world’s fair item?”

  Billy licked his lips and accepted the old man’s detour around the discussion of his slow suicide. He said, “Just got an e-mail from someone named cancanman-zero-three-six—”

  Billy stopped, struck by a thought.

  The anonymity of the Internet …

  “Well, what did he say?” the old man demanded. “He better not be backing out of this auction. I won—fair and rectangular.”

  “Pop, can we look people up by their nicknames? At this auction site?”

  “Yeah, nicknames and home cities. But you can’t see their real names unless they want you to. Am I not getting my world’s fair invitation?”

  Billy shuffled to the chair and plopped down. His hands trembled as he tapped the address for the auction site. “Show me how.”

  Together, the two Povich men—one of whom was still mystified that a microwave can make a frozen sausage so hot it explodes, yet somehow knows not to set paper plates on fire—navigated the site’s various search features until they found a place to type a nickname to locate any member.

  “Who you looking for?” the old man asked.

  Billy typed dismas23 and commanded the machine to search.

  One exact match.

  Hometown: Providence, R.I.

  “Huh. You found somebody local,” the old man said. He clumsily slapped a photograph on the table, and turned it to read the inscription on Adam Rackers’s shoulder. “Dismas-twenty-three? Who is this feller supposed to be?”

  Billy was too far along to begin an explanation. “How can I see what he’s been selling?” he snapped.

  “Click his history.” He pointed to the screen.

  What a history!

  Billy browsed page after page of recorded transactions. Over the past twelve months, dismas23 had been a clearinghouse for women’s fashion, high-end electronics, new DVD movies, designer sunglasses, wristwatches, rare silver coins, and sterling tableware.

  The old man let go a low whistle. “This guy’s made a fortune online.”

  “Would all of these people have sent him checks or money orders?”

  “He only accepted electronic transfers,” the old man said, reading the screen. He shifted in the wheelchair, and Billy caught the faintest whiff of aftershave and dirty hair. “I’m afraid of those transfers. What’s wrong with money on paper? What if I hit a bad key and send my bank account to some teenager in Poland? Uh-uh, boy.”

  Billy could not be sure dismas23 was Adam Rackers, but the clues were persuasive. There were no new auctions listed under that nickname after Rackers’s death, and several of his most recent buyers had posted complaints that they never got their merchandise. Dead men don’t visit the post office.

  “We’re so close,” Billy said. “How can these people help us find him?”

  “See if he bought anything,” the old man suggested.

  Billy clicked the buttons to exclude all sales from the list of transactions. A much shorter list of purchases remained. With the old man’s shaky guidance, Billy found the one item dismas23 had bought within the last three months of Rackers’s life—the period for which he had no known address.

  The object was a tiny eyepiece, for which dismas23 had paid sixteen dollars.

  “What the hell is that?” the old man asked.

  “A loupe,” Billy said. “It’s like a magnifying glass or a little microscope. Jewelers use them to examine gems, to help decide what the stones are worth. Hmm. Now, why would Rackers buy a loupe?”

  “Why would who buy a magnifying doohickey?”

  “Just a guy I’m trying to find, Pa.”

  “This guy in the pictures you got spread out here?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Ain’t he dead?”

  “He was alive for the time I’m trying to find him.”

  “What—?”

  “Why would he buy a loupe … unless he was going to examine some gems … .”

  “If you wanna find this guy, why not ask the photographer who took these pictures? Doesn’t look like he’ll be moving too fast.”

  “Let’s concentrate on the loupe, okay?” Billy asked.

  The old man harrumphed and tightened the drawstring of his housecoat. His waist was as thin as a child’s. Billy looked away. In his youth, William Povich Sr. could have benchpressed Greenland, or so it had seemed to Billy.

  “Sixteen bucks for that doohickey,” the old man said with a chuckle. “I told you there were deals on this site.”

  “Pop, please,” Billy said after a deep breath. “I need to find where this guy was living.”

  “Well, then ask the seller where the heck he mailed the doohickey. Had to send it somewhere.”

  Billy slapped his own forehead and thundered, “Now you goddamn tell me!”

  In a far corner of the apartment, Bo’s tiny voice echoed: “Now you goddamn tell me!”

  The old man punished Billy with a dirty look, then called down the hall: “You hush with that talk, Bo.”

  “Yup!”

  “Change outta your jammies and get me the newspaper on the porch, okay?” the old man ordered.

  “Yup!”

  Billy sighed and typed a message to the seller, icedealer177. “I’ll just ask him for the address, right?”

  “Won’t work,” the old man said with a sour face. “Say that you’re interested in what he’s got for sale, on the recommendation of dismas-twenty-three.”

  “Why so complicated?”

  “If some stranger asks anonymously for the address of one of your customers, what would you do?”

 
Billy huffed impatiently. But he took the old man’s suggestion, deleted what he had typed, and wrote a new message.

  He sent it.

  They waited.

  “I guess that’s all we do right now,” Billy said after three minutes.

  “If I don’t hear from him, I’ll send another message every twenty-four hours. Eventually … .”

  “Missed it by THAT much!”

  Billy and the old man looked at each other in surprise. Billy opened the message:

  To groverwhalen2 … i offer many items for sale, on the internet and through special arrangement. where is dismas23? is he mad i sold his address to junk mail marketing list? an oversight on my part. tell him i remain VERY interested in the arrangement we discussed. i am prepared to offer best price, if quality as good as he says.

  icedealer177

  The old man scratched his scalp and shed dandruff flakes into the air. “That don’t make sense,” he said.

  “He’s a diamond dealer, Pop,” Billy said. “By the look of it, not a scrupulous one. Rackers bought a loupe from him, so Rackers must have gotten his hands on a stone. You can’t just list stolen diamonds on the Internet, can you? This guy must have offered a black-market deal to fence whatever rocks Rackers had stolen.”

  “Have there been any diamond robberies the last few months?” the old man asked. “I ain’t heard of any.”

  Billy searched his mental record of front-page headlines. “Naw, nothing like that. That would be a big story.” He sighed and read the message again. “Maybe Rackers hadn’t gotten a diamond yet. Maybe he was planning to steal one, and was preparing ahead to fence it.”

  “That’s bad luck.”

  Billy glanced at the dead man’s pictures on the table. “Apparently.”

  The old man would not let go the point. “Do you schedule a victory parade before you play the game?” he asked incredulously.

  “I get it, Pop.”

  “Because Fate—she gets pissed when you do that.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “I should know. I’ve had it with Fate and she’s had it with me. That lady … is a bitch!”

  “That lady is a bitch!” sang Bo brightly as he stomped into the kitchen with the newspaper.

  Billy glared at his father, but the old man refused to look at him.

  The kid still wore his Atomic Thunderbolt pajamas: red booties and gloves, little blue shorts, and an off-white shirt with a red splotch on the chest, like someone had splattered him with a paint balloon. Billy could not understand why Bo had taken to an obscure comic book character from the 1940s. The Atomic Thunderbolt never even had his own cartoon. This was the old man’s influence, of course. Billy’s father thought everything was better in his day, even the superheroes.

  Bo staggered into the kitchen like a four-foot hurricane and threw his arms around Billy.

  From the corner of his eye, Billy watched the old man recoil.

  So much can happen in a split second. His father’s lips spread into a snarl, and the heat of jealousy burned in his eyes. In an instant, the emotion was gone, forced back beneath his face.

  The reaction startled Billy. He held the kid by the shoulders and gently moved him to arm’s length, then laughed as if it were a game.

  “Weren’t you supposed to change?” Billy asked.

  The kid hugged himself, and his costume. “I want to show Stu,” he said.

  Billy looked at the old man. “Treatment day, Pop,” he said. “We should get to the hospital, so the kid here can show Stu Tracy his superhero pj’s.”

  The old man glared bitterly at some spot on the ceiling. “Stu’s blind, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I want to show him,” said Bo.

  The old man papered a smile over his rage and took the newspaper from Bo. “Fine, then. We’ll see Stu after I get my blood scrubbed, okay? Why don’t you pick a movie for us from Billy’s collection.”

  The kid snapped to attention, broke off a crisp Atomic Thunderbolt salute, then ran recklessly down the hall.

  “That was shitty of you,” the old man growled. “A betrayal.”

  “Let’s type a response,” Billy said cheerfully, locking his eyes on the screen.

  “You only delay what I have decided is inevitable.”

  Billy spoke aloud as he typed: “Dear icedealer-one-seven-seven, thanks for the e-mail. My friend, Dismas-two-three, is currently, um … out of commission.” He paused, thinking.

  “Dismas authorized you to take over the deal,” the old man urged, unable, even in betrayal, to resist being part of the action.

  “Yup,” Billy said as he typed the suggestion. Then he added, “But my friend left town rather suddenly and you need to send me his mailing address so I may pick up the appropriate item for the transaction.”

  “That’s a fucking whopper,” the old man whispered.

  “I hope this guy is greedy enough to buy it.”

  He sent the e-mail.

  They sat together in silence. The old man emitted hot anger like radiation. Christ, like sitting next to a hunk of uranium. Billy sensed that his father could not stand to be near him, but was too curious about the e-mail deception to leave. The old man dumped the newspaper from its plastic bag and snapped the paper into shape. For two minutes he read in silence, then showed the front page to Billy and demanded, “This the case you’re on?”

  A front-page photo showed the State House memorial for Judge Harmony. Two smaller photos showed June Harmony delivering a speech, and Martin Smothers at the podium, with his jacket open and a nasty black spot on his shirt.

  “That’s my case,” Billy confirmed. “Not that I’ve gotten anything out of the investigation, except a beating and two pounds of sand in my ear.”

  The computer said, “Missed it by THAT much!”

  Billy hurled the paper over his shoulder and banged the key to open the e-mail:

  To groverwhalen2 … if dismas23 is your friend, what is the item?

  “Shit, we’re bagged,” Billy said.

  “How are we supposed to know what the item is?”

  “Exactly, Pop, this is a test. And we need to send the answer fast, or this guy’s gonna get too spooked to deal with us.”

  “Well, it’s a gem. Tell him it’s a gem.”

  “Not specific enough.” Billy pushed himself from the chair and moaned at the pain. “So goddamn close!” He paced the room, ignoring the complaints of battered muscles. He wound up to kick the newspaper, but stopped and slowly lowered his foot.

  He stared at the pictures of Martin and June Harmony. Something about the two of them together held his attention … . What was it?

  Holy shit.

  He needed a phone. Billy barked, “Where’s the goddamn cordless?”

  “There!” The old man pointed.

  Billy snatched the phone from the countertop and began to dial Martin Smothers. “No,” he scolded himself. “Not something Martin would know offhand.” He hung up, and then dialed a new number: the cellular phone of Martin’s assistant, Carol.

  His father stared up at him helplessly. “What? What’s going on?” On the second ring, a voice like a phone sex operator oozed into Billy’s ear: “Hello, Billy boy.”

  “Thank God, Carol. I need help fast!”

  “Mmmmm. I hear that from lots of men. Why should I help you?”

  “Because I know you’re a goddess.”

  She laughed. “You have passed the test. What do you need?”

  “The police report on the judge’s murder—somewhere in there it mentions June Harmony’s earrings, the expensive pair left out in a jewelry dish the night Rackers killed her husband. I need to know the specifics about those stones. Details, details—whatever you know.”

  “Her diamond earrings? Of course,” Carol purred. “I saw her sashaying in them yesterday at the memorial. Oh, gorgeous stones! Colorless, ideal cuts, just blazing. A pair of perfectly matched solitary diamonds in platinum bezel settings. Mmm-mm. Four carats total weight. Worth about
two hundred thousand.” She lowered her voice and cooed, “A man gives me stones like that, I might be tempted to overlook a comatta in New York City.”

  “I am madly in love with you,” Billy joked.

  She laughed. “Keep that between us. I don’t want my business out in the street.”

  “Gotta go!” He hung up and pitched the phone into his father’s lap. The old man caught it in the housecoat.

  “You got the answer?” the old man pleaded. “Billy?”

  Billy typed furiously:

  Dear icedealer177 … diamond earrings, perfect match, four carats total, platinum bezel settings … we still on?

  Send.

  Billy dropped his head on the table with a thud. “I hope that was fast enough.”

  “Aw sure,” the old man said. “This is e-mail. How does he know you weren’t taking a dump?” He scraped a finger on his white neck stubble. “Who’s this person you’re madly in love with?”

  “Smooth segue,” Billy said.

  The old man’s eyes widened. He shrugged in innocence. “What?”

  Despite the pain in his chest and the anxiety crushing him from every direction, Billy laughed out loud.

  The answer came two hours later, about the time Billy had convinced himself that his hunch about June Harmony’s diamond earrings had been wrong.

  Billy waved his hands over the keyboard like a magician for good luck, then opened the e-mail:

  To groverwhalen2

  my terms are unchanged for the stones. you and dismas23 carve your own split. leave me out of it. i don’t want to know. this is the address i mailed the loupe … .

  The address was in Providence.