Moonlight Falls (A Dick Moonlight PI Series Book 1)

by Vincent Zandri

  I closed my eyes. That’s when I heard Dr. Miner’s voice clear as day.

  “Mitchell Cain,” he said. “Put down the gun.”

  That’s when my old partner pulled the pistol back away from my head. He straightened up, looked at Miner. My dad’s old buddy was standing there in a black rain slicker, baggy khakis, work boots, and a round brimmed fisherman’s hat pulled down tight over a full head of curly white hair. He was sopping wet from head to toe. In his right hand, an old black-plated revolver, like the kind cops used to carry before there was color TV. He was striking a bead on Cain.

  “Don’t do this,” Miner said. “He’s not well.”

  Cain turned the 9mm on the doctor, aimed for his face.

  “You have got to be kidding me, old man,” he growled. “You gonna let this one-man holocaust go free?”

  “Who you calling old?” Miner demanded, a split second before the blast.

  72

  “Let me get this straight: Jake and Cain decided they had you right where they wanted you—desperate and short of cash.” Stocky Agent pontificated. “They pulled you back in as a part-timer, asked you politely to rubberstamp a few of their open-and-shut cases. They told you the force was understaffed and you believed them. You were a cop. Now they needed you again. But you were different somehow. The bullet fragment had changed you, made you more naive, let’s say. You had difficulty telling the difference between right and wrong sometimes. You already fucked up one major arrest, gotten yourself busted down to forced medical leave. Which made you the perfect candidate for Cain’s operation. But even after willingly completing false document after false document, you make matters worse by getting in bed with the police captain’s wife.”

  “It all seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” I say.

  “You realize what I can do now?” Stocky Agent asks, eyes peering not at me but at his silent partner. “I can book you on multiple counts of conspiracy to falsify police reports, plus multiple counts in the complicity to commit the illegal harvesting and sale of organs and body parts. Not to mention fraud and grand larceny. Then there’s all those murders, all that carnage. People connected directly to you.”

  I pull the pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket, set them on the table.

  “You’re not believing all that bullshit Cain laid on me?”

  “What’s not to believe?”

  We stare at one another for a beat, until I say “Let me guess: you’ll book me for multiple counts of murder unless I give you something else.”

  “You want your only child to know that his father is going to spend eternity in hell? Or would you rather he knew that, for once, his dad did the right thing?”

  “My head, it can’t be trusted.”

  Stocky Agent leans up, getting right in my face again. Nose tip to nose tip.

  He says, “You said that you and Dr. Miner fled the scene at Joy’s condo. Albany was still looking at you as an escaped murderer. What’d you do next?”

  “I did exactly what I should have done when I collected the bodies of evidence in the first place. I turned myself in.” I slide another smoke from the pack.

  “Before all that, Moonlight.before you turned yourself in, Miner did more for you than just neutralize Cain. He helped you out with your story. Because.”

  He pauses. I look down at the cigarette burning between my fingers. It’s trembling. Behind my eyeballs, I feel a great pressure. I feel tears. I can’t help the tears.

  “Because. . . my head. . . it’s not right.”

  “And now you needed help.”

  “There’s a bullet frag in my head. It makes me do all the wrong things sometimes.”

  “Tell me Moonlight: was Cain right? Did you, in fact, make the decision to commit murder. . . right or wrong?”

  73

  As soon as the single round hit him, Cain fell backward, what was left of his head smacking against the bloody linoleum. The .38 caliber bullet from Miner’s old revolver had pierced his right eye. That kind of entrance wound told me he was already on his way to hell before he hit the floor.

  I was still sitting on the floor not three feet away from him, back pressed up against the refrigerator door, when Dr. Miner handed me the revolver. He bent down, checked Lyons’s pulse, and shook his head almost sadly. But when he came to George, he looked up at me with piercing blue eyes. It was a good look.

  “He’s alive.”

  He then pulled a white hanky from his back pocket and wrapped it around his hand. He picked up the phone and dialed 911, urging the dispatcher to hurry with an ambulance. Then he gave the dispatcher the address. He hung up without revealing his name.

  Next he grabbed the .38 back out of my hand and stuffed it into his pants pocket. Then he did something horrible. Careful to step over the bodies and the blood, he reached down and stuck his fingers into the palm-sized section of Cain’s blown-away skullcap. He dug around the brains for what seemed like a full minute until he stood up with what he wanted.

  From where I was seated I could see it in his hand—a blunted cylindrical lump of .38 caliber slug. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. With that hanky once more wrapped around his hand, he pulled the 9mm from Cain’s death grip and blew another round into the eye socket entry wound where the .38 had pierced it minutes before. The deed done, he replaced the piece back into Cain’s hand, only this time positioning the pistol barrel towards the dead man’s face, the right-hand thumb pressed against the trigger.

  I sat there staring at him for a minute—the man who became my ex-wife’s husband, the stepfather to my kid.

  Miner asked me if I was okay. It was impossible to answer.

  He stood there beside me for a beat, maybe two. He said nothing at first until he offered me his hand, telling me it was time to get the hell out of there.

  By the time we made it back out the sliding glass doors, we could already hear the sirens.

  74

  The temporary paralysis in my right arm was just that. Temporary.

  Still, it required a maximum effort to follow Miner in his blue Volvo to a Seven-Eleven located about a half-mile up the road. Pulling into the lot, he parked it behind the dumpster. After grabbing a crowbar from out of his trunk, he told me to scoot over while he took the wheel of the van—gout be damned. Six cop cars, a fire engine, and an E.M.S. van blew by the store. They appeared to have no clue about us.

  So we hoped.

  Knowing that the dry ice might not be enough to keep the Montana bodies from decomposing beyond the point of viable physical evidence (Ryan was sealed in his casket), Miner bought up a whole lot of ice and packed the bagged bodies well. He also bought up a handful of Snickers candy bars. I wasn’t sure why. We then drove across town to the banks of the Hudson River where he got out, hobbled over to the concrete dike wall and tossed both the .38 revolver and the .38 automatic into the drink. From there, we proceeded to the last place I thought we’d ever go.

  My house on Hope Lane.

  With crowbar in hand, Miner led me around to the back door off the kitchen, where he pried off the lockbox the cops had installed some days before. He then jimmied the door lock and we were in.

  In a word, the place was a wreck.

  The cops had ransacked it. Not a single drawer hadn’t been pulled out of the kitchen counters and overturned—spoons, knives, and broken plates strewn about the floor. It was the same story with every room in the house. Just what they were looking for, I had no idea.

  I pulled a broom from the closet and started sweeping the glass and broken china into a pile. But Miner ordered me to sit down. He packed a plastic sandwich bag with ice and told me to keep it pressed against the back of my head.

  “Where do you keep your pain killers?” he asked.

  “Codeine?”

  “Codeine will put you to sleep, son. Advil or aspirin.”

  I told him he could find a bottle of what he was looking for in the cabinet above the Lazy Susan, directly beside the prescription
codeine.

  He set the Advil on the table along with a glass of water. I swallowed two tablets while he went back out to his car, then came back in with an old black leather bag. The same kind of leather bag doctors used to carry with them when they still made house calls. Opening it, he pulled out a blood pressure kit and another instrument that he said would measure my blood sugar levels.

  “I thought you were a toxicologist?” I said.

  “I’m an M.D. first,” he stated.

  His examination completed, he put the stuff back into the bag. Hobbling away from the table, he opened the refrigerator.

  “Just what I thought,” he murmured.

  I turned and gazed into the empty fridge. Well, not completely empty. There was some beer in there, a bottle of vodka and some French’s mustard.

  “When was the last time you ate a proper meal?”

  I looked Norman in the eye. “I honestly can’t remember,” I answered.

  “Have you ever thought about why exactly you might be experiencing these episodes of dizziness and passing out? Ever thought about why you make a lot of wrong decisions? Ever wonder why there are things you can’t remember doing?”

  I recalled Cain sitting up on the kitchen counter inside Joy’s townhouse. I recalled the list of murders he said I’d committed—murders that I could not have possibly committed. That’s what I believed, anyway. It’s what I had to believe.

  “I have this condition,” I said.

  “Maybe you have a bullet frag in your head and maybe it is directly responsible for your condition, but it certainly does not help that you remember to drink but forget to eat.”

  His face turned stone cold as he pulled the Snickers bars from the right-hand pocket of his rain slicker and dropped them before me onto the table.

  “Eat up, Tiger,” he ordered.

  Tiger. It’s what the old man used to call me when I was still a kid. It felt good, him calling me Tiger. Sweet, like the candy.

  Miner looked relieved when he was finally able to drop himself in the chair across from me. We sat there in the dark while I ate the candy bars.

  I started telling him everything that had happened since I’d escaped. At least, I told him my first-hand version. About Joy’s murder, about the albino man cutting his heart out, then wanting to take my liver. I told him about the exhumation, about the post-burial autopsy that revealed the illegally harvested organs. I told him everything.

  When it was done, I looked into his gentle old face.

  “How the hell did you find me?” I asked.

  “You called me, remember? You gave me Joy’s address.”

  I suddenly remembered. “But that was two in the morning,” I said. “Your office line.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Not with what I was finding out about your case.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why are you willing to kill for me?”

  “First of all, you’re the closest thing I have to a son. Second of all, your dad and I were pals. Third of all, proof of suicide is the only thing that will save you. Fourth of all, Cain was going to shoot you in the head. . . I was your last line of self-defense.”

  I sat back, let out a breath. I wondered why Cain would bother reciting a list of people he thought I’d killed if he were only going to blow my brains out in the end anyway. Must have made him feel good to expound on his version of the truth.

  “You do believe I didn’t kill Scarlet, don’t you, Doc?”

  Miner averted his eyes, got up from the table, reached inside his rain slicker once more, and pulled out a transparent plastic evidence bag that contained a beer bottle. He pulled out his bloodstained handkerchief, then opened the bag, grabbed hold of the bottle, and set it on the table beside the bottle of Advil.

  I just looked at the long-necked bottle, the tinted transparency of the glass, the red, white, blue and gold label, the big cursive letters that spelled out Budweiser. I pictured the photograph of the bottle Prosecutor O’Connor produced at my hearing in place of the real thing. I knew then that it had to be the one.

  I asked him how he managed to get it.

  “It was sent to me,” he said, “from Nicky Joy. Probably after it had been processed at the fingerprint lab.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “There is no way Nicky would have willingly turned that over to tox,” I said, “unless he meant to cooperate with us. Knowing our relationship, he never would have done it unless he were throwing in the towel on both Scarlet and the body parts operation.”

  “I think it was the beginning of the end for Nicky Joy,” Miner said. “First he hands this bottle over to me, knowing full well that you and George would also have requested a tox analysis of Scarlet’s poisoned blood. The action completed, he slips you a key to your shackles and cuffs, knowing you’d get away from the deputies because you had no choice but to get away. And had your rendezvous at the hotel turned out differently, he would have turned himself in to his own people, told the whole truth about how and why Scarlet died. As he reveals the whole truth, Cain would go down right along with him and you’d be free and clear of all charges. Least that’s how I think it was supposed to work.”

  “You found something on the bottle besides my saliva,” I guessed.

  “Zolpidem tartrate,” he said. “What you and I know as common, everyday Ambien. It was mixed in with the small amount of backwash.”

  “How much Ambien?”

  “My guess is she must have crushed up three or four of her own ten milligram pills into a fine powder, then slipped it in the beer after she opened it for you.” He paused a beat. “She did open it for you?”

  I held the ice pack against the back of my head. I recalled that night, lying in her bed while she made her way down to the kitchen, then came back upstairs with a bottle of beer for me, a Stohly on the rocks for her. It’s what she always did after we made love. It was the routine. Knowing what I know now, I couldn’t help but wonder if Scarlet had used her short time away from me down in the kitchen to snort a line of two of the heroin before she returned with my beer. Maybe that would explain her sudden if not erratic mood shifts—her going from sullen to giddy happy in what seemed an instant. I never gave it a second thought until now.

  “That would explain why I fell asleep so quickly after drinking the beer,” I said. “Why I would always fall asleep.”

  “The Ambien would perhaps trigger a seizure,” he suggested.

  I set down the ice pack and got up from the table. Reaching up to the cupboard above the sink, I pulled down a bottle of Jack, pouring a shot into the water glass. Then I raised the bottle up, as if to offer some to Miner. He shook his head.

  I took a sip of the warm whiskey, let it sit against the back of my throat before I swallowed it. The beer bottle explains a lot, I told myself. The reason why Joy slipped that cuff key into my slipper. Nicky must have realized the whole thing was about to crumble now that I’d revealed my intention to pursue the real truth behind Scarlet’s death.

  Sitting there at the table, I pictured skinny Nicky getting into one of the A.P.D. blue-and-whites and driving to the hospital, leaving a package outside the door to Toxicology. A package marked URGENT with Miner’s name scribbled on it.

  “You have a new death theory,” I said.

  Miner sat back, focusing his gaze on the empty beer bottle.

  “A theory backed up by solid evidence,” he answered with a breath. “You ready to listen?”

  I drank down what was left in my glass and poured another. Then I sat back in my chair, grabbing hold of my right hand with my left.

  “You talk,” I said. “For a change, I’ll listen.”

  75

  He removed his fishing hat and set it on the table. Despite his years, his hair was thick and white as opposed to gray. It seemed to make his blue eyes even more penetrating.

  Speaking in soft tones from across the table, he transported me back to the night of nights—Sunday, May fi
fth.

  This was his professional opinion based upon what he called “the totality of the collected evidence:” that not long after I’d left the house through her window, Scarlet began to drink heavily.

  “Maybe she drank with Jake. Maybe she drank by herself. Maybe they argued and fought and drank. Who knows? Fact is, her binge drinking was not a symptom of some depression. That night it became a deliberate, calculated act. She was anesthetizing herself by binging to a point where she could do some serious stabbing, serious cutting to her flesh and not feel all the pain.”

  I sipped my drink and pictured Scarlet—her long auburn hair and rich green eyes. It was easy picturing Scarlet. But what didn’t come easy was seeing her cut herself up.

  Miner said that, at some point, she began to ingest a mixture of speed and heroin. Not speed-balling, but snorting the stuff in lines. Alternating between the drugs and the drink. When she reached the point where courage and pain were no longer an issue, she began to stab at her torso, self-inflicting the surface wounds.

  He said that she must have continued making the cuts for some time, alternating between the drugs and the drink. What’s even more incredible, Miner noted, is the quiet she’d have to maintain during the entire procedure so that she didn’t wake her husband.

  I looked at him, listening to the nearly clinical way he was explaining his theory.

  “But is all this physically possible?” I asked.

  “Given the right conditions,” he said, while once more standing, reaching for his jacket, and retrieving a folded sheet of paper from an interior pocket.

  “Especially if her husband was passed out from too much drink.”

  He handed the sheet to me. I glanced at it as he sat back down.

  It appeared to be Xeroxed from a medical textbook. Diagrams of human bodies with black Xs printed on their torsos where self-inflicted cuts would be found. The single sheet detailed eight “self-cutting or self-stabbing” suicides. Suicides who, much like Scarlet, had managed to cut themselves from navel to throat.