by Diane Capri
“And I’m not about to go to prison for a murder I didn’t commit,” I say.
That’s when Roger raises up his glass.
“A toast,” he says. “To us. The Naked and the Dead and the Totally Fucked.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
REACHING ACROSS THE TABLE, I grab hold of Roger’s Bloody Mary and take a big drink. I slam the glass back down. Hard, blood-red liquid spatters the table.
“Jeeze, take it easy, Moonlight,” he says. “It’s not our fault you had to go and fuck my wife.”
Guy’s got a point.
I partied and fucked his wife. I’ve been avoiding that obvious little deviation of SOP for a quite a while now and it’s time I owned up to it. In fact, if it weren’t for that little, major mistake, I might walk out of there right now with payment in hand, and later on take my chances with the Albany cops. But not me. Not Richard “Dick” Moonlight. Not Captain Head-Case. I might have a little piece of .22 caliber bullet stuck inside my brain where it’s lodged directly up against my cerebral cortex. And that bullet might help cause me to make the wrong decision from time to time. But I’m also supposed to be a private detective who is dedicated to doing the right thing. And now that I fucked Roger’s wife, and now that she’s dead, the least I can do is try and help them find out who might have done it, and while I’m at it, maybe help locate their money. Which is exactly what I offer up.
“But I don’t come cheap,” I tell Suzanne. “My fee just doubled. And if I locate the money, I’d like a bonus.”
“Such as?”
“You take on Moonlight Falls as my official agent. No questions asked.”
She smiles.
“I was going to do that anyway, Moonlight.”
“Congrats Moonlight,” Roger says, holding out his hand, “you just scored the best hard-core tight ass, pussy shaved agent in the business. Plus you got a blowjob and a little doggy style for a signing bonus. Jeeze, you must have some lit skills after all.”
I let the hand go ignored.
“I have a question,” Suzanne says. “With Sissy’s body no doubt in police custody, how in the world are we going to arrange preventing the police from suspecting you or Roger as the killer?”
Roger lowers his hand slowly.
“We’re going to do the impossible,” I say.
“How’s that, Moonlight?” Roger begs.
“We’re going to steal back Sissy’s body,” I say. “And then we’re going to make it look like a certain Russian mobster killed her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
OKAY HERE’S THE TRUTH: I have about as much chance at locating that missing million bucks as I do winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. I might be wanting to do the right thing here to make up for my tryst with Sissy, but I’m also not about to head to prison. That will take enlisting these two fallen literary angels to help out with my cause. If they can help with stealing Sissy and arranging her body to appear to have been killed by someone in possession of fingerprints and DNA besides my own—especially those of a Russian thug—it might at least place a semblance of doubt in the minds of the cops as to who actually killed her. That alone would get me off the hook. And if I could do so under the pretense that I am also working on locating their money, they might be willing to help me out, even if the body we’re about to steal is Roger’s wife.
In the meantime, I decide that it might be time to place a call to my old friend and spiritual brother, Georgie Phillips, retired Albany Medical Center pathologist.
I do it.
Georgie comes on the line. I picture the long, gray-haired Vietnam vet sitting in his living room parlor, a little Hendrix going on the stereo, the vintage vinyl record spinning on the turn table while he rolls himself a fresh joint.
“Moonlight,” he says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
I explain everything to him.
“I can get you the private viewing if we head there now,” he assures me. “This early in the morning the joint will be as quiet as a—”
“As a morgue,” I say. “Funny.”
“But this little plan of yours,” he adds. “It’ll be highly illegal.”
“Never stopped us before,” I say.
“True ʹdat, Moon,” he says. “I can expect the usual payout?”
“For your grandkid’s college education,” I say. “Absolutely.”
“I’ll pick you guys up in my van. Be ready in ten.”
“We’re ready now,” I say.
He hangs up.
That’s when my cell phone vibrates with a new text message. I thumb it open, stare down at it. It’s from Erica Beckett. I’d almost forgotten about her. To say that I’m troubled regarding the young poet’s intentions is putting it lightly. Her being a major cock tease is the least of it. Why didn’t she tell me how well she knew Roger? Why not just be open about it? And now I discover that she was present the day he lost all that money. Even if she didn’t steal it, something isn’t right here, and I intend to confront her about it the first chance I get.
I read the text. How is Roger? I’m worried.
I thumb a text back in. Hanging in there. How was your night?
Fun. Until we found out about Sissy.
It occurs to me that Roger didn’t have a cell phone on him, and that no one, aside from Erica and I knew where he was, much less the police. Far as I know, news about her death hasn’t yet gone out on the wire.
I thumb in another text: Who told you she was dead?
I wait for a response. Until I get one.
I miss you cutie. Heading to bed. Long night. Long morning. ;)
How did you find out? I text once more. But again, I get nothing in response.
I try and call, but all I get is her answering service. “Hi this is Erica … You know what to do…” Her voice screams of confidence, youth, and beauty. But I’m beginning to suspect something else.
I pocket my cell just as a white Ford extended van pulls up
My bro, Georgie Phillips, to the rescue.
CHAPTER THIRTY
INTRODUCTIONS ARE QUICKLY MADE and within a few minutes we’re piled into Georgie’s van. Suzanne rides up front while Roger and I occupy the back. Georgie is driving. He’s wearing his usual uniform of Levis straight leg jeans, cowboy boots, black all-cotton T under a ratty jean jacket he’s probably owned since high school prior to his being shipped off to Viet Nam. His long gray hair is tied back tight in a ponytail and his clean-shaven face is tanned from the sun, even though technically speaking, he’s supposed to stay out of the sun since being diagnosed with skin cancer.
On the way to the hospital, George asks for our undivided attention while he goes over the plan to steal Sissy. When he’s through, he focuses his ice-blue eyes in the rearview so that he can get a look at Roger.
“I’ve read all your books, Mr. Walls,” he says. “I was a big fan in college after ʹNam. I thought you nailed the pure, raw, male, sexual character better than Norman Mailer or Henry Miller.”
Roger looks at him and smiles.
“Thank you, Doc,” he says. “But I’m afraid there’s not a very big market anymore for what I’m doing. If there was, Sissy wouldn’t be dead, and we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Who knows?” Georgie says. “Maybe you’ll get a new book out of all this.”
“That is your pal, Moonlight, doesn’t write it first.”
Suzanne turns, shoots me a smile and a wink. Suddenly, she’s back to her old confident self.
“Maybe we can both take a shot at writing it,” I say. “But let’s hope we’re not doing it from a prison cell.”
“A prison cell might be optimistic,” Roger says. “I don’t locate that money then I just might find myself not writing anything from six feet under.”
#
We make it to the Albany Medical Center in five minutes flat. Because we need to drive around the back in order to access the morgue, we’re required to enter the campus through the delivery entrance which is man
ned by a guard shack. Obviously security at the AMC isn’t exactly paramount, that is judging by the overweight attendee who barely fits inside the glass booth. But that doesn’t stop Georgie from insisting that we make ourselves invisible. Without argument, Roger and I crawl into the empty back-bay, with Suzanne following on our tails.
The former pathologist stops the van outside the shack.
“Nice to see you again, Doctor Phillips,” says the overweight man behind the glass. “You coming back to work?”
“Good to see you too, Brian,” Georgie says, as he’s handed a laminated clip-on badge. “Just doing a little freelance work. Helps pay the bills.” He signs his name to a sheet of paper that’s stuck to a clipboard, then hands it back to the guard.
“Enjoy the morgue,” the guard says.
“Seems like everyone is dying to get there,” Georgie says, with a laugh.
Tapping the gas, Georgie drives into the heart of the campus, past the main hospital, then the medical college building, and past the physical plant on our left. Soon we come to a series of concrete docks, the last one of which is set beside a pair of extra wide electronic sliding double-doors. Georgie makes a three-point turn, then backs up slowly to the doors. Attaching his laminated badge to his jean jacket, he opens the door to the van, and slips on out.
“How much money you got?” he says.
“Which one of us?” I say.
“All of you?”
I shovel through my pockets, come up with three crumped up twenties, some dollar bills, and some loose coinage.
“Seventy-three and change,” I say.
“Come on,” Georgie presses. “Who’s got some real money?”
“Maybe we should have hit a cash machine on the way over,” I say.
Both Roger and Suzanne are going through their respective pockets.
“Nothing,” the literary agent says. “Not a dime.”
But then Roger raises his right hand high while lying on his side on the van’s metal pan floor. The hand is squeezing a folded stack of bills. “Five hundred plus,” he spits.
“Jesus,” I say. “Leave it to the broke bestseller.”
“That should last Roger a couple of days at the bars of his choosing,” Suzanne chimes in.
“I might have more in the other pocket,” adds Roger.
“Just slip me two hundred,” Georgie insists. “Now. Please.”
I take the money from Roger, slip out two, one hundred dollar bills and hand them to Georgie who takes them and closes the door. Then I hand the rest of the money back to Roger.
“Plenty left over,” he says, repocketing the cash into a chest pocket on his bush jacket. “We should probably stop at the liquor store on the way home. Pick up some supplies.”
#
We wait.
Minutes tick away like hours.
l decide to kill some of the time by pressing Roger for more info.
“Those two rednecks I mentioned before. The ones who threatened me. They really work for you?”
He nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “Mostly they do maintenance around the house. Mow the lawns, do the shopping, things like that. Sometimes they try and act like my bodyguards even though the only fighting they’ve ever done is on Nintendo. I let them do it anyway. Gets them off. Makes them feel important.”
Once more I tell him about the third man who popped his head up inside the cab. How I swear to God I saw a third bald-headed man when I was speeding away from the pickup truck. Saw his reflection in the rearview mirror.
“No fucking way,” Roger insists from down on the van floor. “Those guys always work together and alone together. They’re retarded like that. Maybe even queer. Not a chance anyone else would be with them. Especially some asshole who’s hiding.”
“It could have been the Russian who wants the money back. Alexander Stalin. The one who wants you to write his book, make him famous.”
“No way,” Roger repeats. “Those dumb rednecks aren’t even aware of the existence of those Russian freaks. And vise-versa.”
“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” Suzanne says in my stead.
“I still don’t believe it,” demands Roger.
I would argue further with him, but that's when I hear the doors to the morgue open back up, and the sound of a heavy gurney being wheeled out.
#
One of the van’s back-bay doors opens. Standing outside it is Georgie. He’s positioned at the front end of a gurney that’s got a black body bag set upon it. The body bag is filled with a body. Presumably Sissy’s. At the foot of the gurney is a young African American male dressed in the button-down shirt and pants of a morgue orderly. Now I know the reason for the two hundred dollars. Those orderlies make squat while expected to clean up after the dead. Literally. Georgie, who is both Pathologist Emeritus at the AMC and a former carjacker in another life, knows precisely who to grease on the inside and who not to grease.
“Shift over everyone,” he insists.
We do it.
Georgie takes a quick step back while the black man pushes the body forward into the empty space on the van bay floor. My stomach turns at the thought of the dead Sissy Walls now pressed up against me in that cold body bag.
The bay door slams shut.
The gurney is wheeled back through the morgue doors while Georgie repositions himself behind the wheel of the van. Turning the engine over, he shifts the transmission into drive and pulls out, heading back in the direction from which we came.
Impossible bodysnatching mission accomplished.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
BACK OUT ON THE open road, I sit up and breathe a silent sigh of relief. But then, I also half-expect a cop to pull up on our tail, hit the flashers and sirens. I can hear the headlines broadcast over the airwaves now:
“Murder Suspect Also Charged in Body Snatching. Details at Eleven.”
“How on earth did you manage to grab Sissy’s body?” Suzanne asks Georgie while she snakes herself back into the front passenger side seat.
“It’s not all that difficult,” Georgie says while pulling onto Madison Avenue which will take us up to the street where his townhouse is located. “If you have full authorized access to every nook and cranny of the hospital including the morgue, you can pretty much take what you want. So long as you return it in a reasonable amount of time. How do you think it was possible President Kennedy’s brain went missing during his autopsy in ’63? In Sissy’s case here, she was already bagged and stored inside the cooler. She’d even been assigned her own gurney. It was just a matter of wheeling her back outside and into the van.”
“Isn’t she scheduled for an autopsy soon?”
“Tomorrow afternoon at three to be exact. Says so on the charts and on her toe tags.”
“What if the schedule changes and somebody shows up to find that there’s no body?”
“That’s where luck comes in. Plus, my examination won’t take all that long, and we’ll have her back in place in the morgue cooler in a matter of three hours. Maybe less.”
Georgie turns onto his street. It’s then, inside the relative silence of the van, that I hear it. Crying.
I turn and see that Roger is lying beside the body-bagged Sissy. He’s hugging her, his face jammed into the nape of her neck, tears streaming down his round white-bearded face and onto the black poly.
“I can’t believe it,” Suzanne whispers after a time. “All she did was screw around on him, tell him to his face how sorry she was for marrying him. How she had zero feelings for him.”
“Love works in mysterious ways,” I say.
“So does grief,” adds Georgie pulling up to his townhouse, thumbing the button on the overhead garage door opener. When it’s opened all the way, he slowly pulls the van inside and closes the garage door. Killing the engine, he slips on out of the van.
“Okay, people,” he says, coming around to the back of the vehicle, where he opens the back bay door. “Time to find out what happened to
Sissy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
GEORGIE AND I OCCUPY his basement laboratory while Suzanne and an upset Roger elect to hang out upstairs in the living room. The work Georgie is about to do is not pretty, but then it’s not the least bit unusual for Georgie or me. I grew up with this stuff. Dead bodies were an everyday sight for me. Some of the bodies that came my dad’s way were not very pretty. Car accidents. Gunshot wounds. Stabbings. Facial mutilations, contusions, and crushings from head-on collisions.
Once—and I remember this like it happened three minutes ago—we received a decapitated body that belonged to a construction worker who’d fallen from a high scaffolding tower and onto a metal fence. Imagine a nine-year-old boy waking up in the morning in his Batman and Robin pajamas only to head on down to his dad’s embalming room where a badly bruised and battered headless body was lying on the gurney while its head rested on a stainless steel tray on the counter beside it. Meanwhile, my dad feasted on his morning ham and egg sandwich, a tall Dunkin’ Donuts coffee set directly beside the head, the wall-mounted television tuned into Good Morning America and some recipe they were trying out for a low-calorie Sloppy Joe.
“Morning son,” my dad barked in his usual Moonlight Funeral Home cheer. Then, while taking a bite of his sandwich and aiming his thumb over his right shoulder. “Do me a favor and hand me that, would you, kid?”
I remember taking a few steps toward the head, my pre-adolescent stature just the right height for me to stare the head directly in the eyes. Which were wide open and dark brown. The expression on the face was pure shock, like the head knew that it had been detached from its better half just before it died. The face was round and sported a three or four day growth like lots of construction workers who don’t care what they look like on the job. The hair was thick and black, mussed up and caked with dried blood. I raised up my hands and, not knowing where to take hold of the head, grabbed hold of both ears.
