by Diane Capri
“You’re standing in the starting place. Or directly beside it anyway.”
“I’m guessing Walls spends a lot of time here.”
The two rednecks both break out in laughter.
“That’s an understatement,” May smirks. “Roger pays my salary. We hurt when he’s not around. He attracts a crowd too. And that crowd drinks, especially with Roger’s encouragement, because Roger hates to drink alone.”
“Then you must have noticed his lack of presence in recent days. Can you tell me how long he’s been gone?”
She cocks her head over her right shoulder.
“This time? I’d say about a week and a half so far.”
“And if he’s on a bender, about how long will he be gone? In your estimation?”
“If it’s one of his typical benders, he won’t be much more than a week or two before he comes crawling back in, filthy, broke, and not remembering a goddamned thing. He’ll sleep it off in the back room for a day or two and then get his shit together over a pitcher of Bloody Marys.”
May’s story about Walls’s benders matches that of the fly fisherman’s. Could it be that I’m actually making progress?
“How come he doesn’t head right home?”
The rednecks choke on their laughter again. May shoots them a quick look over her opposite shoulder. It immediately shuts them up.
“His wife still lives in the house,” she explains, turning back to me.
“I heard he was married again. To an actress.”
“Well this is wife number eight, and she’s rather young. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Her name is Sissy. She’s kicked him out a few times for his drinking and drugging. She’s always on him about it, and the more she does it, the worse he gets. The benders become more frequent if he’s not writing. And when he’s on a bender he can’t write even if he wants to.”
“So what you’re describing here is a vicious cycle.”
“Something like that.” She shakes her head. “Poor Roger. If it’s not the booze that’s his own worst enemy. It’s the pussy. If only he can learn to keep that cock of his in his pants for a while, he might get down to writing another good book instead of that silly barroom poetry.”
“I take it Roger is trapped in another bad marriage?”
More guffaws from the rednecks.
“You can say that again, Mister,” offers the clean-shaven one.
“If you had to guess, where would Roger go on one of these benders?”
“Probably Albany,” May says. “But you could spend your entire life chasing him from one bar to another and never find him.”
“Will his wife talk to me?”
May works up a smile.
“You can certainly try.”
“You got an address for casa Walls?”
May shoots another look at the rednecks, as if she needs their approval. The skinny, bearded one glares back at her silently. But his silence is deafening.
“Come on, Harlan, use your words like a good boy. He’s gonna find the place anyway. And besides, Sissy will probably chase him off before he gets his first question out of that pretty little mouth of his.”
“Pretty little mouth,” I repeat, Deliverance flashing through my brain again. “Thanks for saying so. I think.”
May picks up a pen from beside the cash register, jots down a couple of lines on a Post-it note, hands it to me from across the bar. I pocket it and then finish my beer.
“Thanks for your help,” I say, backing away from the bar. “Enjoy the rest of this fine afternoon in God’s country.”
May says nothing. But the rednecks both grin at me like I’m not a human being, but something that might taste good for dinner roasted over a spit.
“She wasn’t lying, Mr. Moonlight,” Harlan says as I approach the door.
“I’m sorry?” I say, my left hand gripping the handle.
“You do have yourself a pertty little mouth,” he mumbles.
I feel my heart pound in my throat, visions of a Ned Beatty down on his knees, his underwear wrapped around his ankles, dancing in my head.
Clean-Shaven Chubby Redneck snorts like a pig.
I open the door and shoot on out like a pig escaping the butcher’s blade.
CHAPTER NINE
BEHIND THE WHEEL OF Dad’s hearse, I read the address May scribbled down for me on the Post-it note.
16 Pipeline Road.
Sounds like a country address to me, if ever there was one.
I pick up my smart phone, type the address into the Google search engine, thumb send. A map appears. It says, “Get Directions.” I do it. Thank God for GPS and digital technology. Otherwise, I might actually have to think for myself or, worse yet, stop at a gas station and ask for directions from a real live human being.
I turn the big eight-cylinder engine over, listen to it purr. Glancing into the driver’s side-view mirror, I determine that the coast is clear and pull out onto the gravel-covered road, begin heading in the direction of Walls’s spread. Over my right shoulder I can’t help but notice an old, blue Ford F-150 pickup truck parked alongside the road. It’s got a gun rack mounted behind the seats, at least two bolt action rifles stored there. The tires are thick, off-road, mud chompers. There’s a couple of bumper stickers stuck to the rear fender. The first one depicts the red and blue X-shaped rebel flag of the long defunct US Confederacy. Another one says, “How’s my driving? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT.” The license plate is a specialty vanity plate. It says, “Free Bird 69.”
As I speed up Dad’s hearse, I picture my new redneck friends cruising the streets of downtown Old Chatham in that truck, a case of beer set out on the seat between them. I think about being a single girl walking those streets as the truck passes by. Or worse, a lone African American, Hasidic Jew, or Asian citizen. I picture empty beer cans flying out the window, along with a redneck curse only a Neo-Nazi or a Ku Klux Klan member would appreciate.
But then just as quickly, I try and remove the evil thoughts from my brain.
#
Ten minutes later I arrive at a wooden gate that’s attached to a long perimeter fence of wood and barbed wire. It looks like something you might see out west on a cattle ranch. There’s a large sign that’s been nailed to the top most horizontal board on the rectangular gate. It reads:
Do Not Enter This Driveway Unless You Have Called First! This Means You!
For a brief moment, I sit behind the wheel of the idling hearse, and contemplate the sign. In Walls’s defense, I can’t imagine the horror he must feel when he’s trying hard to concentrate on a new book or a new batch of poems only to be unexpectedly interrupted by an uninvited guest. Or worse, the in-laws.
On the other hand, the words on the sign are menacing enough to give me pause. I mean, what if Roger’s suddenly returned home and is now standing at the top of the drive, an automatic rifle gripped in his hands? He’s already shot somebody once before for having trespassed onto his property. Who’s to say he wouldn’t do it again, even if it means jail time?
But then, the whole point to this little exercise is that Roger is in fact, not home. Roger is off on one of his benders. Roger isn’t home to stop intruders from coming up the drive uninvited anymore than he’s around to put a stop to a nosy head-case private dick like myself.
Tossing the hearse back in drive, I pull onto the driveway, and head on through the gate.
#
The driveway isn’t paved. The gradual incline is about a half mile long, both sides lined with oak trees that won’t be blossoming for another week or two. At the end of the road is the house. It’s a typical two-story white farmhouse with a painted metal roof, single-paned, double-hung windows, and a wraparound porch. Near the steps that lead up to the porch, a two-person swing hangs down from the rafters by means of four chains. The swing is empty, even on a warm, early spring day like this one.
I stop the hearse and get out. I’m not halfway to the porch steps when the front door opens.
“Who the
fuck are you?” a woman shouts.
I stop in my tracks. It’s got to be Walls’s wife. And if it’s Walls’s wife and she’s as crazy as he is, she might just be carrying a gun.
“I’m sorry,” I offer from down on the narrow, slate-covered path. “I know the sign says to call. But I didn’t think you’d mind.”
The woman is standing inside the open door. From what I can see, she’s a small, but nicely curved woman, with thick red hair and greenish blue eyes that laser into me even from where’s she’s perched inside the open door. I’m not entirely sure, but from where I’m standing, it looks like she’s holding a beer bottle in her left hand.
“My name is Richard Moonlight,” I say. “I understand that Roger has gone missing. His agent, Suzanne Bonchance, has hired me to look for him.”
Silence.
“I thought I would start by visiting his home first.”
More silence.
“You’re his wife, Sissy, am I right? The actress? You might be able to shed some light on where he went. Plus you must be really worried.”
Even more silence. I stand there on the path looking dumb and feeling even dumber.
She lifts her left hand, takes a swig of beer. “She sent you here, did she?”
Referring to someone as Bonchance in in the third person instead of using her real human name is never a good sign. But then, what the hell do I know? I’m just the hired hand trying to do my job. It only makes sense that I interview the old ball and chain. Ball and chain number eight, or so I’m told.
“All right, come on up,” she says, after a time.
I make it up the rest of the path and climb the stairs onto the porch.
“You want a beer?” she asks, not cordially, but then not impolite either.
“Might as well,” I say, watching her turn and head for the interior of the house. “Seems to be the thing to do today.”
“Around here it’s the thing to do every day,” she says, as I step into the house, my eyes glued to her heart-shaped ass which happens to be nicely packaged in the tight Levis. “Night time too.”
“Sounds fun,” I say closing the door behind me.
“Fun?” she laughs. “You obviously haven’t met Roger.”
“Not officially, no.” I think about telling her about his visit to my college campus all those years ago. But then she’ll get an idea of how old I am and she’ll figure out that she was probably still a babe in swaddling clothes back then.
“Well then you have no idea just how much fun you’re missing, Mr. Moonlight.”
“Call me, Dick,” I say.
She bursts out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” she says through a snort-filled chuckle. “It just sounded funny the way you said it … Call. Me. Dick.”
Turns out Mrs. Walls is younger than I thought. Young enough to still be into dick jokes anyway.
I follow her into the kitchen at the end of the corridor. Laid out on the counter beside the coffee maker and the microwave is a mirror. It’s got cocaine on it, cut into the cutest little white Bolivian marching powder lines you ever did see. An American Express credit card and a rolled up dollar bill are set on the mirror glass beside them.
“Want a blast?” she offers. “Dick.” More laughing.
“Usually people offer me tea or coffee when I first enter into their household.”
She leans over the mirror, shoves the dollar up into her nostril with the index finger and opposing thumb on her right hand, and snorts up a line like a human vacuum cleaner.
“Tea and coffee is for pussies,” she says, lifting some of the coke off the mirror with the pad of her right index finger, rubbing it onto her gums. “Coke is more fun.”
She goes to hand me the dollar bill. I’ve got a piece of hollow-point bullet lodged inside my brain. The last thing I should be doing is snorting coke and getting my synapses into a pulsating turmoil. I am however, working, and imbibing a little might loosen up Mrs. Walls’s lips. The lips on her mouth, that is. The things one has to do in the name of good detecting. Moonlight the Mercenary.
As usual, Richard Moonlight, is about to make the wrong decision. In the line of duty. I take the dollar bill, head on over to the mirror, and dig right the fuck in.
CHAPTER TEN
BACK WHEN I WAS just a kid—a teenager—my dad used to insist on smelling my breath whenever I came home from a night out with my friends. It’s not that he didn’t expect me to have a good time and do all those things boys and girls will do when they are coming of age. He didn’t mind if I drank a beer or two, so long as I wasn’t driving and so long as I wasn’t getting in the car with any of my friends who might be drinking and driving. But he wasn’t looking for the smell of beer on my breath, so much as he was looking for pot. Dad was a single parent and a conservative one at that. Smoking pot he used to say, was a wrong that would inevitably lead to other wrongs. All it would take is one toke and I’d be heading down that dark, slippery-sloped, heroin-LSD-crystal meth tunnel from which there was no return other than inside one of the Moonlight Funeral Parlor pine boxes. Whether or not dad was way off base about the effects of recreational drugs leading to hard-core narcotics, I never lost sight of the true meaning behind his paranoia. Once you take the leap and make that first wrong decision, it can often lead to other, even more wrong decisions.
Case and point.
Snorting an innocent line or two and washing it down with a couple of cold beers along with Sissy Walls may sound innocent enough, in relative terms. After all, I’m here to get information about where her husband might have disappeared to. And if she’s in the middle of doing a little partying, the last thing I want to be is a party pooper. Partiers like it when other people party with them. They like forming a bond with other like-minded people. In doing so, they form loose lips. They talk. A lot. And that’s exactly what I wanted from Sissy Walls. Loose lips.
Problem is, those few innocent lines and beers quickly turned into a bunch of lines and a bunch of beers and the next thing you know, we’re tearing one another’s clothes off all the way upstairs on the way to her bedroom.
An hour later I’m lying naked beside the equally naked Mrs. Walls in her big king-sized marriage bed wondering how the hell I got here but knowing full well it all has to do with making that first wrong decision by snorting that first skinny little delicious line.
“Was it good for you too, cowboy?” she asks, while firing up a post-sex cigarette.
“It was all my pleasure,” I tell her. “Believe me. You’re a little spitfire. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I don’t mind your saying so,” she says, setting the lighter back down on the night stand, exhaling that initial nicotine-laced hit of blue smoke. “As you no doubt already know, Roger is getting on in years, and his bedroom performances aren’t exactly what they used to be.”
“Viagra,” I say, not without a chuckle.
“Viagra only works if you’re not drunk. It’s powerless against whiskey dick.”
I turn to get a look at her then. She’s lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, smoking. An unhappy and extremely attractive young woman who no doubt was caught up in the fever of Roger’s charm, only to realize a short time later that infatuation is not spelled the same as love. Not even close.
“We’ve partied and done the wild thing,” I say after a time. “And it’s been lovely. But I eventually have to get around to the reason for my little visit.”
She smokes, exhales.
“Do I have any idea where my husband could have gone?” she sighs posing the question for me.
“That’s a good question to start with.”
“And his hotshot Manhattan agent just can’t rest until she finds him.”
“Formerly from Manhattan agent. But yes, she can’t rest.”
She turns to look at me over her shoulder. “How much is she paying you to lasso him?”
“Enough. Does it matter?”
“Well, I were you I’d get some
of that money upfront. She tell you why she wants you to find him?”
“She doesn’t have to. Nor is it my business. But she did tell me that she’s run into trouble as of late and Roger is pretty much her only client these days. She doesn’t get him back behind a typewriter, she doesn’t eat. Or something along those lines.”
She laughed. Snorted out her snowflake-chilled nostrils is more like it.
“Mr. Moonlight,” she says, “Suzanne Bonchance has some money. Some. Money. But not all of it from the sales of her client’s books however. Never mind Roger Walls.”
I roll over, plant my elbow on the bed, rest the side of my head on my fisted hand. Using my free hand, I snatch the cigarette away from her, steal a slow drag, hand it back. Why is it that everyone smokes when you’re trying to quit? Moonlight the hopelessly addicted.
“I’m all ears,” I say, placing the cigarette back in her hand.
“Let me ask you a question,” she says. “Did you like that coke we just did?”
I’m not sure if I could tell the difference between good coke and bad coke. But I’m not about to let her know that.
“Primo,” I say, taking a shot at getting it right. “The best.”
“Yup, not bad, right? You know where Roger gets his shit?”
“You mean who he buys it from?”
The invisible light bulb flashes on over my head.
“His agent,” I say.
“Hey, New York’s top agent has not only fallen from glory with her little literary stealing act, but she’s been forced to resort to some alternative bottom-feeding ways of making a living. She tell you about the FBI investigation?”
I picture the Suzanne Bonchance I had lunch with just a few short hours ago. Done up perfectly in a dark suit, not a strand of hair out of place. Maybe she seemed to be sucking down the martinis but she didn’t seem to be getting drunk. Despite the slurring of certain words, she seemed pretty much in control. But then she did hardly touch her food. If there’s one substance on earth that will kill an appetite, it’s Bolivian marching powder.
“She hasn’t mentioned it,” I admit, remembering how the agent spoke about prank phone calls. Somebody who was out to get her for what she’d done. That someone most likely being the man whose manuscript she stole. Ian Brando.
