One thing had become painfully evident: the albino man had somehow beaten him to the punch. The albino man must have suspected that the kid was up to something and tracked him here. And as for the second painfully evident reality: there would be no fact-finding interview with the white-skinned man now. Not in his condition. No names or places that might shed light on the specific nature of his associations with Scarlet, the heroin, and the body parts operation.
My mouth was parched and pasty. It tasted of blood and gunmetal. The bleeding in my left arm had slowed, but I knew I had to get myself to a doctor. Do it soon before infection set in. Which meant I had two choices: either get a hold of Dr. Lane or George.
Didn’t make sense to implicate Lane in this mess. If word got out that she’d assisted a fugitive, her license would be pulled. Not that George’s wouldn’t be if he got snagged. But then, he was already in on things, which meant I had to make an appeal to him whether I liked it or not. Whether he liked it or not.
Bending, I patted the pockets of Joy’s size thirty-eight uniform. I didn’t come up with anything other than a key ring that contained maybe a dozen keys. Not car keys, but the kind of keys that might go to your average household locksets.
Pocketing the key ring, I walked to the nearest window. A window that accessed an alley. I pulled back the shade. There was an old fire escape mounted to the brick exterior. Exactly what I had hoped for.
Before I took off, I thought about checking to see if the albino man had any ID on him. Of course, he wouldn’t. He was a professional, after all. Just what the hell did I expect to find on him anyway: a calling card?
Turning to get one more good look at him, I saw that his shirt tails were pulled up around his chest, exposing the bottom of his torso. A thick purple scar circumnavigated his right side where the kidney should be and a jagged depression in the flesh, as if a shark had taken a bite out of the son of a bitch. Above that was the tattoo of a skull. The ink was black, including the eyes. Eyes that looked right through me.
Pulling my eyes away from the tattoo, I reversed my earlier decision and searched his pockets. As expected, I discovered no ID, but what I did find was an envelope full of cash and a plane ticket. I pulled the items out of his pockets, stuffed it inside the tattered Kevlar vest and backed away.
Standing up straight, I took a quick glance around the place like I normally do before checking out of a hotel room. For a quick second I thought about taking Joy’s boxed heart with me, putting it to good use. Who knew what poor soul was waiting for a heart? But then what the hell was I thinking? I also thought about maybe wiping the place clean of prints. But then, what the hell was the use? My blood was all over the place, for Christ’s sake.
My blood, Joy’s blood and the blood of the albino man—this harvester of body parts; this heroin pusher; this killer.
At this point, I knew Cain would take great pleasure in nailing me with both their deaths, whether it looked like a murder-suicide or not. Because that’s the way things had been going for me. Just one more nail in the coffin for old Richard Moonlight—Captain Head Case.
I was losing blood.
I walked back over to the window and tore away the shade. Taking a deep, painful breath, I raised up my right leg and kicked out the glass pane. Then I crouched my way through the opening, stepping out onto the metal grate. From up there on the landing, I looked out onto downtown Albany. Nothing moving in the abandoned alley of the Hotel Wellington, other than the rain.
52
Stocky Agent and I face one another across the long table. Tall Witnessing Agent stands silently in the brightly lit room’s far corner.
“This man you killed,” he says. “Did he ever give you a name?”
“No, he did not.”
Stocky Agent looks up at the thin, bearded man. “Get me the sheet,” he says.
The thin man walks out of the room and after a brief few beats comes back in. He hands Stocky Agent an 8.5x11-inch poster with front and side mug shots of the albino man printed on it beside a list of vitals. At the top of the sheet is the word WANTED in bold black letters. Just below that are the words IN CONNECTION WITH DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL SMUGGLING ACTIVITIES.
I stare at the poster, recall jabbing the .9mm barrel against the man’s head, recall pressing the trigger and the sudden dead body-weight pressed against my bruised ribs. I recall the purple scar that wrapped around his kidney area, the tattoo of a small skull above it. Did the motherfucker actually have one his own kidneys cut out to pawn off on the black market? I read the man’s name off the sheet: Joseph Surikov. I roll the name around in my brain for a few seconds, until I spit it back out. Metaphorically speaking, that is.
“Did you know that we’d been tracing this piece of shit for more than four months?” Stocky Agent says. “Do you know what Joseph’s untimely death did to our operation?” He pronounced Joseph like Yoseph.
“Let me guess,” I say. “One less Russian mobster is going to get away from the big bad FBI.”
“Keep wisecracking!” the agent explodes, slapping the sheet onto the table and bounding up from his chair. “We wanted him alive. You made him dead. We could make you do time for putting a cap in his ass.”
I pull another smoke from my chest pocket. He’s got to be fucking kidding if he expects me to buy that shit even for a second.
“Son of a bitch tried to kill me,” I say, going for the Zippo laid out on the tabletop, but not before Stocky Agent snatches it up first.
“Kill or be killed, is that your defense, Moonlight? I wonder what a Federal judge would have to say to that.”
The unlit cigarette dangles from between my lips. I know exactly what a Fed judge would say: Mr. Moonlight, you did what you had to do under the circumstances.
“I’ve been near dead and I’ve been very alive,” I say. “Believe me, alive is better. So yes, I would indeed plead self-defense. . . now may I please have my lighter back?”
“It’s your life,” Stocky Agent offers while striking up a flame. “Now why not use it to give me some real information before I decide to hold you overnight?”
53
I called George’s number from a payphone at the bottom of the State Street hill.
“The whole city is looking for you, Moon.”
Nothing but dead air on the line and the rain that strafed the concrete sidewalk. I made a tight fist with my right hand, looking all around me. Not a soul on the street. Just the occasional taxi flying past, the drivers either not bothering to give me a second look or not seeing me at all in the darkness and the rain. No cops, no troopers, no marshals. But I knew my luck wouldn’t last.
“Tell me what to do,” George said.
I looked over my shoulder at the red-lettered neon sign mounted over the door to a bar called “Red Square” on the corner of State and Broadway.
“Get your car,” I told him. “Meet me outside Red Square in ten minutes.”
“The whole town is buzzing with pigs,” he said. “And you want me to pick you up outside a bar?”
“Pull up and wait. You won’t see me, but I’ll see you.”
54
Less than an hour later, I was sitting on top of the dissecting table in the AMC basement autopsy room.
George had locked the lab doors. He’d also brought in a television, set it on the counter beside the stereo system, and run a cable to it from outside his open office door. It was tuned to one of the local early morning news programs. They were showing some video footage shot the previous afternoon. The scene of the car crash that had resulted in my escape from county authorities who’d been assigned to escort me to jail.
There was the banged up Chevy Suburban, its front end smashed in and the large gouge it put in the metal rail and concrete safety wall. There was the shattered windshield and the kicked-out side window that I squirmed out of immediately after the collision. Standing bewildered beside the smashed up Chevy were the two sheriff’s deputies who’d been fighting over the childproof li
ghter. Paulie and Timmy, if I remembered correctly.
The two brainiacs were being bandaged up by a couple of EMTs. Their faces were wide-eyed, filled with shock. According to the reporter on the scene, they’d been brutally attacked by yours truly.
“It’s a miracle we’re still alive!” Timmy Ferguson was quoted as saying.
“Yeah, a real miracle,” added the tall blond-haired Paulie Rabuffo.
Conveniently they left out the part about firing up the joint.
In a moment, the video feed shifted to Cain. He was dressed in his blue blazer and pressed white shirt. He was wearing sunglasses in the cloud cover and the rain. He said he was putting all other duties aside to concentrate on one task and one task only: “The apprehension of Richard Moonlight.”
When the news continued on to another story, George turned off the set.
For maybe the fourth time since he’d escorted me into the autopsy room, he was checking the double doors to make sure they were locked. We both knew it was only a matter of time until Cain came sneaking around. Meanwhile, the good pathologist wasn’t taking any chances.
The formerly white, now blood-soaked t-shirt I had taken from the port locker room was lying on the floor beside the damaged Kevlar vest. The money-filled envelope I’d stuffed into the vest was now stuffed into my pants pocket, along with the plane ticket.
Destination? There wasn’t one listed. It was an open ticket. By the looks of it, the albino man was about to skip town as soon as he cleaned a little house. I wondered if Cain had been on his list of “things to do.”
My ribs had been wrapped with gauze and surgical tape while the dozen stitches George had sewn into my left arm were already beginning to itch. Resting inside a small stainless steel bowl to my immediate left, in a tiny pool of blood, were two steel BBs.
George stood beside me with his long, mostly gray hair hanging over the collar of his white smock. For a change, the stereo was turned off while we kept eyes and ears open for any trouble that might come our way in the form of the A.P.D. For the past twenty minutes, I had managed to fill him in on everything that went down on the sixth floor of the Hotel Wellington while he patched me up.
The only thing that remained were questions. Lots of questions.
“If you think Cain killed Jake,” he said, picking up the bloodied t-shirt and vest off the floor and stuffing them into the bio-waste can, “might we also assume Cain killed Scarlet?”
“We might assume it,” I said. “That is if the albino man didn’t kill her.”
“But no body parts had been harvested from her. Seems to me any man willing to cut out his own kidney isn’t about to waste an opportunity like Scarlet would have been.”
“Cain,” I said.
“Cain,” he agreed. Then he said, “Tell you what, Moony. Let’s take a look at Jake. He’s in a drawer on ice, right next to Scarlet.”
“The funeral home doesn’t have her yet?”
“It took a little doing,” he said, “but I held the Fitzgerald Funeral Home off. Just like you told me to. I spoke with Mrs. Fitz herself. She’s doing it as a personal favor to me and your dad.”
Loyalty: it was one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s qualities. Clearly the old gal had a long and good memory of us Moonlights.
“You know what this means,” I said.
“Not one body of evidence, but two.”
“No way in hell anybody else is gonna get their hands on them but us.”
We made our way out of the autopsy room and down the hall to the morgue. When we stepped inside, George locked the door behind us. Paranoia maybe, but for good reason.
The morgue was a large, rectangular room. It had a tile floor with a drain in the center. The wall to your right as you walked in was filled with drawers. They looked like file cabinet drawers. Only instead of papers, they contained dead bodies. To the left was a Corian counter and glass-faced cabinets filled with various chemical solutions. Beside it was a walk-in cooler, usually where new arrivals awaiting autopsy or embalming were stored.
The smell of the place was anything but foreign to me.
George made his way to two side-by-side drawers, both marked Montana. He opened the one to the right, the one with the name Jacob penned on the white ID card along with Case Number 33 (Scarlet was 32).
When George slid him out, I could see that Jake had been positioned headfirst. I could also see that his arms, which had previously been rendered in an overhead pugilist’s position, were now broken in order for him to better fit inside the drawer. He smelled like a burnt pot roast.
First George slapped on a pair of latex gloves, then he reached inside the drawer and lifted up Jake’s charred head. He felt around with his fingers until he found something.
“There she blows,” he said. “Looks like the old chief took one hell of a wallop to the back of the head.”
I slapped a glove on my right hand, reached inside and confirmed the walnut-sized divot in the back of the dead man’s skull.
I slipped off the glove. “Somebody hit him,” I said. George shut the drawer. “I can bet dollars to diamonds he did not die in the fire. I can bet somebody snuck up on him from behind, whacked him over the head, then torched the place to cover his or her tracks.”
“Papers said his body was found curled up on the kitchen floor of his home.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “There’s a door off the kitchen. Cain could have broken in and taken care of business.”
“We’re getting closer,” George replied. “You match up the divot in the back of his head to the barrel of Cain’s pistol, you got a winner.”
“But it still doesn’t do us any good about Scarlet,” I said. “There’s nothing to prove that he had anything to do with her death.”
George nodded.
I asked him to pull her out one more time. “I just want to take one more look at her. See if we might have missed something the first time.”
He slid her out.
There it was again, that organ-slide sensation in my stomach, the pressure in my head and behind the eyeballs. If I just looked at her auburn hair, closed eyes and red lips she might have appeared to be sleeping. But then, by glancing downwards a couple of inches, you couldn’t help but see the lacerated neck and the dozens of cuts and hesitation marks on her chest. There were the crude sutures from George’s autopsy.
The pathologist pulled her all the way out. I stared down at her. Like every time when I looked at her in this condition, I tried to remain as clinical as possible, not letting my emotions get to me. Maybe I had liked her more than I thought. Maybe I loved her, just a little. But then I thought about murder. What were some of the things that would lead me to believe another person had stabbed her to death?
First, there would be “defensive” cuts visible in the dorsal or palm side of the hands. In the drawer, she was lying palms up. They were as clean and undamaged as a baby’s whistle.
Secondly, a murderer would stab repeatedly. Okay, there was something. Scarlet had multiple stab wounds. But then, it was the wounds themselves that bothered me. Other than the neck wound, the cuts were shallow.
Thirdly, the wounds were all relegated to the chest, belly, and neck area. A murderer would almost surely have stabbed her in the shoulders or in the pelvic region or even in the back.
Now what about suicide? I thought. Were there any tentative stabs? Something Scarlet might have inflicted to see how much it was going to hurt before she worked up the courage needed to pull off the entire deed? There were dozens of them. Did she remove her clothes before she stabbed herself? She had. Were there any defensive wounds on her arms or on the backs of her hands? Not a damn thing.
I took a step back.
“Homicide made to look like suicide,” I said.
“Damn good job of it too,” George agreed. “Because it almost looks like Scarlet wanted to die.”
“She certainly didn’t put a fight,” I said. “It’s almost like she could have scripted it herself.”
/> George slammed the drawer closed. “Might have been perfect, Moon, if only the killer thought to leave behind a note and a blade.”
I nodded. “Still, she’s the best body of evidence we have and quite possibly, my only way out of this thing. If only we can manage to hold onto her, which at this point is going to be pretty impossible.”
That’s when it came to me.
“George, pull both bodies. Let’s bag them and get them the hell out of here.”
He looked at me and laughed.
“You can’t just remove them from the deep freeze,” he said. “They’ll start to thaw.”
I thought about the old man, how during the 1965 blackout that ravaged the entire state for two days, he was forced to store two cadavers in each of the Hope Lane bathtubs, one upstairs, one down. All it took to keep them from rotting was plenty of ice, so my dad bragged to George and me on more than one occasion.
“How many bathtubs you got at your place?” I asked.
“Why my place?”
“How many?”
“Two,” he surrendered.
“Perfect,” I said. “Exactly what we’ll need.”
He laughed again. “I see what you’re up to, little bro. Your dad’s blackout story, which I’m not sure I ever believed. Funeral homes, even in the sixties, came equipped with generators. In any case, it’s gonna take an awful lot of ice.”
It took only about five minutes to get them bagged and laid out onto two gurneys for transport in George’s old El Camino.
Outside, I knew daybreak was coming soon. I wanted to get going while we could still depend on the dark for cover, get the bodies safely inside George’s downtown townhouse, get them into the tubs and packed with ice. We would have made it without a hitch too, if only it hadn’t been for that knock on the morgue door. A pounding fist, followed by Cain ordering George to “Open the fuck up!”
Moonlight Falls (A Dick Moonlight PI Series Book 1) Page 20
