Moonlight Falls (A Dick Moonlight PI Series Book 1)

by Vincent Zandri

  I thought about the curare that Miner found in Scarlet’s blood. I wondered if it would be discovered in Jake’s blood, too.

  “Are we square on all this?”

  “I don’t think I’ve been asked to play the strong silent type since Tet in ‘68,” he said.

  “You can stand up to Cain. I have total faith.”

  “Faith,” he said. “Don’t see much of that anymore.”

  “That’s because it’s about believing in something you cannot see, feel or prove,” I replied.

  “Like the truth.”

  “Something Cain doesn’t want you to see.”

  38

  I picked the phone back up and dialed Miner’s office. No answer.

  At his age, Miner was hit or miss. I suppose it wasn’t imperative that I talk with him right away. It was mostly for my own peace of mind; for his reaffirmation in backing me up in the case of Scarlet’s murder. Especially in the light of new developments: Jake’s death; the arson of the Green Meadows home; Cain’s change in Scarlet’s manner of death, not to mention his threat to set me up as a prime suspect. Developments Miner was sure to discover by way of the local news while he soaked his aching feet.

  Nothing but ringing coming from Miner’s office phone.

  I pictured a far younger Miner sitting across from my father at the same kitchen table that still occupied the 23 Hope Lane kitchen. The two of them slow-drinking “Coffee Royals.” That is, coffee laced with shots of Crown Royal whiskey. I could still hear them laughing aloud while my old man and the good toxicologist tried to outdo one another with stories and theories that almost always revolved around a dead body they’d both had the pleasure of working on—Miner from the medical toxicology end; Dad from the embalming/burial end.

  When his voicemail clicked on, I decided not to leave a message. I didn’t know his home number. Miner didn’t believe in giving his private number out to anybody. I had it written down someplace, but finding it would be next to impossible. I just could not remember where I put it.

  A minute later, I picked the phone back up and punched in the number for Albany Medical Center, Pathology Unit.

  Phillips wasn’t answering. Or maybe it just seemed that way considering I was once more under the gun. But when he finally picked up, I told him right off, “Cain changed his mind, before you and me could do it for him.”

  My blood was boiling. I could feel it running, pulsing through my veins as if my skin had somehow peeled itself back and away from my body.

  Just breathing coming from the phone.

  “George,” I said. “You there?”

  “Moon,” he mumbled. “Didn’t you just call me?”

  “Yeah, I’m calling you.”

  “No, what I mean is, you called me a couple of minutes ago with the exact same information—suicide to murder; keep Scarlet’s body in storage; hold off Fitzgerald. . . Remember?”

  I sat back, swallowing a hard breath.

  “It’s not memory that’s the problem,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s good, ‘cause for a second or so I thought you might be losing your mind.”

  “What’s left of it,” I murmured. But George didn’t laugh.

  My mind, it wasn’t always right. Maybe I wasn’t aware of the specific medical reasons for why I suffered from the occasional memory lapse; why they became so frequent during stressful moments (the NYC neurologists used to lob around terms like cross electrical activation and synesthesia. The lapses could be both frustrating and embarrassing. And what was worse, there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about them.

  “I’ll call you back, George,” I said.

  “Not again, little brother,” he replied.

  I hung up.

  I sat there at the table with the rain having picked up against the roof and the kitchen windows. I poured a whiskey and wracked my aching brain.

  What it all came down to was this: Just what the hell was Cain hiding? What was so important that he might be willing to murder for it?

  I lifted my head, looked out the kitchen window and the gray, rain-filled sky. I knew that in order to get at the real truth, I had to dig deeper. I had to start investigating the why on top of the how. I had to go back in time to some of the first jobs I’d done for Cain. Not as one of his full time staff detectives, but as his “part-timer.” It might not have been the correct place to begin digging, but at the moment, it was the only place I had.

  I went upstairs into the master bedroom, dug two large boxes out of the closet, and carried them, one atop the other, down to the kitchen table where I began skimming through them.

  I’d been placed on disability not long after botching a raid on a suspected drug dealer. The job had been my first since returning to the force after a lengthy recovery. But after the lawsuit that followed, the department relegated me to the part-time projects Cain and/or Jake specifically brought me in on, not as an A.P.D. detective necessarily, but as an independent investigator or a detective’s assistant assigned to check and corroborate official police findings. In other words, so long as I did what they told me to do, following their leads from A to Z, there was no problem, no head condition to consider.

  Starting with the box marked ‘00-’01, I glanced at my very first part-time assignment dated November 20, 2004 in blue ballpoint. The job involved a teenaged kid who, in a drunken stupor, rammed his motorcycle into a parked car, killing both himself and the woman who was still belted into the driver’s seat.

  A clear case of vehicular manslaughter. That is, had the kid lived.

  At Cain’s request, I gave the scene a quick once-over, examining both the wreckage of the motorcycle and the car—the former a Harley Davidson and the latter an old model Volkswagen Beetle. In my estimation the kid had been killed instantly when he plowed through the side window and collided head-to-head with the driver, who was also killed instantly.

  Even now I recalled taking the time to check out their separate IDs—names, addresses, DOBs and vitals. The fact that they were both organ donors (blood type B and A respectively), didn’t surprise me in the least.

  So far so good, as far as two unnecessary deaths went. But when I requested the scheduling of an autopsy with my friend George Phillips, Cain swore up and down that it would be a waste of precious time. That if I went “easy on this one,” he’d see that I was well compensated. The force—especially S.I.U.—was overworked now, he claimed. The result? The A.P.D. didn’t always have the manpower or the resources necessary to investigate every little accident or drug-related shooting that came their way.

  I remember standing there in the road, little more than a year into my recovery, nauseated as all hell from the anti-inflammatory drugs they were making me take on top of the motion sickness pills and prescription codeine.

  I remember Cain, my wife’s new sig-other, asking me nice-as-pie to work it out with him at his direction and discretion. If I did that, the whole process might go a lot smoother, including my payment.

  “And who knows, old partner,” he said, “this is Albany, after all. I can give you a shit-load of work on top of the disability scratch you take in every month.”

  The golden carrot set before me in the hazy glow of the street lamps, Cain stated that in his own opinion, cause, manner and mechanism of death were obvious: crashed motorcycle; massive head trauma; accident. There was no reason to prolong both family’s agonies. Then, with his back to the parked cruisers and the accident wreckage, he proceeded to slide out ten one-hundred dollar bills from the interior pocket of his blazer and stuffed them into the side pocket of my leather jacket.

  Did I feel ashamed of myself for taking the money? No.

  Correction: yes and no. Yes, because, let’s face it, it was illegal to accept what amounted to a bribe. No, because, financially speaking, I was completely fucked.

  At the time, I was still going through my divorce. With mounting law bills, maintenance and child support payments, I couldn’t even consider the possibility of not ta
king the cash. It was either that or sell dope.

  After all, I wasn’t a regular cop anymore. I was simply a part time consultant living on the Union’s disability. If they wanted to throw a little extra cash at me, I might find myself a little more cooperative in my methods of investigation.

  And cooperative I was.

  As much as it pained me to harbor a somewhat limited sense of ethics, I simply reached out with my pen, signed off on the paperwork, then went home to Dad’s old Olympia typewriter to draw up a full case synopsis of my own.

  The second job came a month later. A fifty-seven-year-old widow had jumped from the fifth-floor window of her downtown apartment building onto the Grand Street cobblestones in Albany’s Little Italy. Murder as the manner of death had already been ruled out by onsite A.P.D. when no forcible entry and no fingerprints, other than the woman’s own, were discovered at the scene.

  But when I was brought in I could immediately see that the shattered body was found lying face down in the road only about twelve feet away from the building. Anyone having passed Forensics 101 will tell you that suicides always jump out of a window or off a ledge. Homicides, on the other hand, are almost always dropped so that they land right beside the wall or the concrete sidewalk below.

  Of course, I recalled not being particularly surprised by the fact that this woman was also an organ donor. I didn’t think twice about it while I watched Cain pull up to the scene in an unmarked cop cruiser, again with specific underhanded instructions for me to keep my mouth shut about the possibility of murder, despite the position and location of the body. Once more he offered me cash. Twenty-one hundred big ones.

  This time however, in the interest of covering our asses, Cain agreed that I call on Phillips to assist with what amounted to about a half hour of bogus pathology paperwork and signatures for the sake of S.O.P.

  S.O.P. according to Cain.

  I took careful sips of the whiskey, moving through the stacks of notes, records and reports like a man possessed.

  Then came the third job. A twenty-year-old black man was gunned down outside TJ’s Bar and Grill on South Pearl Street inside Albany’s south end not far from where the abandoned railroad yards butt up against the Port of Albany. Cain met me on the scene at two in the morning, again asking me to sign off on their case synopsis and, at the same time, seeing what I could do about securing the necessary paperwork without going to the bother of an autopsy.

  “They’re just drug dealers anyway,” is how he put it, while handing me yet another envelope, this time a mouthwatering grand total of twenty-five hundred.

  I sat at the kitchen table and once more ran down the Xeroxed list of the dealer’s vitals. His height, weight, criminal record, and how the dealer had bequeathed his body to science. The postmortem request was to take immediate effect upon his sudden death.

  “Bequeathed his body to science,” I whispered to myself. I guess that’s when the realization slapped me over the head.

  I flipped through the remaining stack of notes. I had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me earlier, or why I had never noticed it until now. Maybe it had something to do with my condition. Maybe it had something to do with sitting down and wading through the material all at once because it was only now that the pattern seemed crystal clear. Obvious, even. Or was it just a coincidence that every single man and woman whose death I had “investigated” had consented to organ donation?

  I looked through each and every case one more time, starting from the top. Like I said, all of them had organ donor status in common. There was something else, too: every one of the victims had died from a violent and/or unnatural death.

  I sat back and thought about it for a moment. If I were the M.E, would I have bothered to save what was left of those damaged bodies for science and or medicine once I’d completed the autopsy? Probably not.

  More than likely, I would have handed over the battle-scarred bodies to the respective families for burial and left it at that. When that happened, I couldn’t help but picture the old man’s face. Organ donation was a relatively new phenomenon that had its genesis in the late sixties and early seventies, concurrent with medical advances and an exploding population. Despite the good it provided for the terminally ill, my father was never keen on the idea of cutting out a corpse’s liver or kidney or, Christ forbid, a living, pumping, human heart.

  To him there was something spooky about burying an incomplete body, if not sacrilegious. He used to look directly at me and George, the both of us probably stoned, holding back the laughter by biting our tongues. With tight lips and right hand raised high to the ceiling of the brightly lit embalming room, he would say, “Boys, one day some scientist will tell you that to bury a human cadaver is a big waste of organs and body parts. You wait, if we allow the secularists to have their way, one day soon we will all be out of a job.”

  But of course progress would go on with or without Dad, never mind his or God’s opinion.

  I inhaled and exhaled deeply. Why hadn’t I bothered to step out of the forest before now? Was it possible that I had been so blind that I hadn’t even begun to recognize the part I had been playing in what now looked to me like a black market operation to harvest and sell body parts? Was my personal policy of asking no (or very few) questions about to backfire on me now that I had left my name on a paper trail that could be traced all over New York State? Was my brain that messed up?

  I took a drink, staring down at the pile of notes, records and papers. Paper tigers poised to bury their fangs and claws into my back. More than two dozen cases of suicides, gunshot and car crash victims, drowning deaths, you name it. Every single one of them organ donors and every one of their case synopses executed by me and in full agreement with A.P.D. findings.

  Dick Moonlight, part-time corroborator, big-time patsy, full-time head case.

  I thought a little more about Cain’s threat to make me the number one suspect in Scarlet’s suicide-cum-murder. He had copies of everything at his disposal, I was sure. You see, Cain wasn’t the type to overlook things like that. He had been using me all along as the perfect chump for his operation and I hadn’t so much as asked a single question about why he wanted to use me.

  That is until the Chief of Dicks himself personally brought me in on Scarlet’s case. No wonder Cain and Montana seemed so caught off guard when I refused to be their rubber stamp. For the first time in three years’ worth of cases, I was turning my back on them, refusing to follow their line.

  Maybe Cain was right when he said that I had suddenly grown a conscience. Maybe not. But then, he was right about one thing: he had the power to nail me to a wall. Power and paper.

  He had the ability to establish motive not only in the form of my having been with Scarlet on the night she died, but also for my having engaged in a lengthy affair with her under the pretense of my being the Montana massage therapist. Or so Cain would no doubt assume. And Cain had the beer bottle with my DNA on it to prove it. He had an oil bottle and footsteps in the wet grass. Who knew what other surprises he had stored up his ass? For all I knew, he had a secret videotape stashed away somewhere, showing Scarlet and me doing the wild thing.

  Shit!

  When I really thought about it, Cain could nail me with motive, opportunity, intent and means. It was as simple as all that.

  No murder weapon?

  Of course, there was no murder weapon because I had been the one to dispose of it. I just had no recollection of my actions. That’s the absolute line they would take in a court of law, so help me God or fate.

  Okay, Moonlight old boy, take a breath. . . that’s it, breathe easy, get your head together.

  I knew then that I needed a lawyer. Cain had been right about that too. There was no time to waste. What choice did I have? None, other than contacting the same man whose firm handled my divorce. Dad’s one-time lawyer.

  Regardless of the thirty G’s I still owed him.

  39

  Seven God-awful digits I knew by heart
. My lawyer, Stanley Rose. His direct office line.

  Sometimes I thought Albany should change its name to Smallbany, because it was nearly impossible to strike up a relationship with anyone, professional or otherwise, who didn’t already have some kind of connection to you. Direct or indirect. In keeping with the tradition, Stanley Rose had been Dad’s lawyer too, having handled the occasional lawsuit that might arise from clients who, for one reason or another, were unhappy with his services. You’d be surprised at the people who not only expect their loved ones to look alive in death (like they’re “sleeping”), but who also expected them to rise up, maybe even sing and dance.

  “They’re dead for Christ’s sakes, Richard!” the old man would shout aloud during an especially frustrating embalming and wake prep.

  Like Phillips and Miner, I’d known Stanley nearly all my life, so naturally I retained him to represent me for my divorce. What I didn’t know at the time, however, is how badly my income would take a hit after my accident and how difficult if not impossible it would be for me to manage my ever-increasing law bills. So to say my relationship with Stanley had become strained over the years was putting it lightly. Our relationship had become nuclear.

  I held my breath as he answered.

  “You got a lot of nerve calling me, Richard,” he said. “Unless this is about a check.”

  I tried to look on the bright side: at least he didn’t hang up on me.

  “I’m doing my best to pay you back,” I said, voice cool and calm. “I swear it.” It was the truth.

  “For more than a year now I’ve been asking you to take some kind of action on your bill,” he said. “You haven’t responded once.”

  I pictured the sixty-something lawyer seated at his wide mahogany desk, horn-rimmed glasses sliding down his straight nose, full head of gray hair groomed to perfection, pale cheeks flushed with anger.

  “Listen, Stanley, I’m working on something that will get you paid back in full, plus plenty extra.”