When I opened my eyes, I knew I should have stayed in bed, but something was gnawing at me. Maybe I was finally experiencing my own psychic breakthrough because I heard a voice speaking to me inside my head. A voice I recognized; a voice that haunted me. Scarlet’s voice.
“I love you, Richard,” it said. The voice made me want to get up, throw on my jeans and a jacket, and make my way back over to her house in the rain.
I never would have believed it, but Scarlet was speaking to me from the dead.
79
I went around back of a rectangular, concrete-walled hole that had provided the foundations for a house that once stood there. A house that was now reduced to an open basement filled with charred timbers and ruined furniture. That’s when it caught my eye. The rear patio, I mean. The small concrete patio butted up against the back lawn, directly below what had been a back porch overhang. The overhang had been located directly below Scarlet’s bedroom window.
I must have slapped the palms of my hands against the concrete in an effort to break my fall after having slipped off the back porch overhang. In all my adrenalin-charged rush to get the hell out of there, I must have never noticed it until later—later when I could only assume that the scratches and abrasions on the palms of my hands must have had something to do with Scarlet’s death.
I’m not sure what possessed me, but when I shined the flashlight into the hole I saw something I recognized. Funny how pristine it still seemed. Or maybe it just looked that way from where I was standing above ground, breathing in the wet, musty charcoal smell. The baby blue porcelain statue of the Madonna—the Christ mother lying on her back, glazed eyes looking up at me, as if truly watching me, calling me to Her.
For a split second, I saw Scarlet’s face in Her face and I felt my throat close up on itself. The whole thing was too strange for words. Still, it took an almost superhuman effort to peel my eyes away. But before I did, I noticed something else stuffed in the rubble just below the statue.
The strongbox.
Dropping to my knees, I extended my arms, reaching for the box without falling into the exposed basement. Clutching the metal box with my fingers, I managed to pull it out. Of course I recognized it right away as the strongbox Scarlet kept directly beside her bed on the nightstand—the off-limits box with the “madness” poem taped to the top that now had been burned away in the fire.
Climbing to my knees, I set the strongbox on the grass before me. As I thumbed the lock release, I realized how badly my now-healed hands were trembling. The box was locked and I didn’t have a key.
I looked all around where I knelt, shining the flashlight onto the wet earth until I found a rock half sticking out of the mud. I dug with my hands and freed the stone. Then, using both hands I raised them up high and brought the rock down hard onto the box’s lock. The one collision was all it took for the lid to pop open. Setting the rock aside, I opened the lid all the way, shining the flashlight inside.
That’s when I saw them. Three items, the first, a business-sized envelope placed inside a plastic Ziploc bag for protection; the second, a leather pouch with a drawstring top; and third, a small leather-bound baby diary.
I took out the plastic-enclosed envelope and immediately stuffed it into the right-hand pocket of my jacket. Then, placing the flashlight under my armpit so that it shined on the diary, I began to thumb through the pages. I thumbed from blank page to blank page until I came to one single entry scribbled on the final page of the diary. Written in what I recognized as Scarlet’s handwriting were these words:
James Montana, April 17, 2000 — April 17, 2000
It was the strangest sensation, me just positioned there on my knees, staring down at the identical birth and death dates of Scarlet’s baby. My hands went from trembling to outright shaking when I set the diary back inside the box and picked up the leather pouch. Drawing back the string, I reached inside and pulled out a bone, then another and another.
I felt something break inside of me and my tears fell hard. But I wasn’t sure who I was crying for. Whether it was for Scarlet, her child or for me. One thing was certain: I wanted the memory of James to be forever buried beside his mother, if only in spirit. I set the bones back inside the bag and the bag back inside the strongbox along with the diary.
Digging with my hands in the same hole from which I freed the rock, I set the strongbox inside and covered it up with the loose, rain- soaked soil. As a final gesture, I set a patch of loose sod on top. Then, standing, I did something extraordinary, even for myself.
I made the sign of the cross for the first time since I could remember.
Pulling my eyes away from James’ small grave, I turned my back on the Montana home. If anyone knew enough not to disturb the dead, it was me.
I was about to head back to Hope Lane when a set of headlights broke through the damp darkness. I killed the flashlight, gazing in their direction.
Lola, driving Dad’s funeral coach.
She must have followed me here. I had no idea how much she might have witnessed, no idea how long she’d been out there watching me in the dark before she decided to pull up front. I guess it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was her presence.
Crossing over the front lawn, I made my way to where she parked up along the curb. When she rolled down the window, I was struck by how beautiful she was with her long brown hair, brown teardrop eyes and soft red lips. For a change, she wasn’t wearing her lab coat.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she whispered.
I smiled, wiping my eyes with my muddy hands. “There are some questions better left unanswered.”
She smiled back. “Some questions are better left un-posed.”
I slid myself into the Harold Moonlight funeral coach and she drove me back home.
80
I’m seated at a long metal table inside a windowless interrogation room.
Just as they have been for more than three hours, Stocky Agent is seated next to me while his bearded partner stands in the far corner, witness to the exchange.
I put out my cigarette, sit back in my chair.
“How do you suppose she was able to keep her child’s remains?” “Scarlet never went to the hospital after her miscarriage,” I say. “She must have buried the child out back and later on, dug him back up. It’s the only explanation.”
“What about the letter inside the plastic bag? Where is it?” “When I opened it, it disintegrated in my hands. Must have been the effects of the fire.”
“You didn’t see anything written on it at all? It might have contained the suicide note everyone was looking for.”
I shake my head.
“Just paper, and it disintegrated. I’m sorry.”
Stocky Agent nods. He sits back in his chair and sighs.
“Well,” he says in a resigned voice, “I guess maybe in the end, you have learned your lesson after all, Mr. Moonlight. You’re not the head case you make yourself out to be. You’re not the killer, either.”
I cross my arms over my chest and exhale. Stocky Agent stands.
“That’s it,” he says, turning toward the giant mirror, running his right index finger across his neck in a slashing motion, like someone slicing their own neck.
“So you’re not going to book me for anything?” I ask.
“You’re cooperating,” he tells me, while his partner moves away from the wall to stand beside him. “No charges are to be filed for now. You’re a free man, pending further questioning, of course.”
“You have no one to arrest now,” I add. “The way I learned it, someone always has to pay when it comes to murder. Especially a cop’s murder.”
“Believe me, Mr. Moonlight,” Stocky Agent says, “someone will pay. Sooner or later, justice will be served and someone will go down for this mess. The body parts op alone extends way beyond the boundaries of Albany and Saratoga.” He rolls his eyes. “And of course, there is the inevitable hellfire.” Stocky Agent is a God-fearing man.
“Cain and Montana were just cogs in a much larger machine, weren’t they?” I inquire.
“Cain, Joy, and Montana tapped into a lucrative market,” the agent offers. “But you took a real chance getting so close to them. They were dangerous men who risked life, limb, and reputation by directly connecting themselves with a mob-sponsored black market operation.”
“Moonlights aren’t afraid of dying,” I say.
“How wonderful for you.”
I find myself nodding as if finally someone besides Dad and George understands. But I know it’s only wishful thinking on my part. Standing, I make for the exit, but turn back around when the agent calls out my name once more.
“Yeah?”
“You forgot your cigarettes,” he says, holding up the pack.
“I’m the last jerk on the earth who should be smoking. How ‘bout you keep ‘em.”
“I quit three years ago,” Stocky Agent says, grinning. “But I suppose I can find the second-to-last jerk.”
I pick up the pack and stuff it into the bottom right-hand pocket of my leather jacket.
Going for the door, I get this cold feeling in my feet, a numbness in my right hand, a pressure in the center of my head. The sensations speak to me, alarming me, just like my built-in shit detector. They tell me these FBI agents won’t ever see me alive again.
81
Outside, it was raining again. I wondered if it would ever stop for more than three or four days at a time.
Pulling the collar up on my leather jacket, I started walking toward the old man’s Mercedes. It was parked up against the curb on Broadway. From where I stood I could make out Lola in the passenger seat. Seated on her lap was my boy. I wasn’t really sure, but it looked like they were playing some sort of tickle game. She was smiling and laughing, waving her hands up and down. I couldn’t see it of course, but deep in my head I imagined their smiling faces, their laughter.
The rain intensified. So much rain I was practically blinded. For a few seconds, all I could make out was the blurry red and blue light that glared from the neon signs hanging over the windows of the downtown gin mills. More doors and signs than I could count.
But then I saw it lying in the road, directly beside a storm sewer drain that had backed up and was overflowing in the heavy rain. A red robin lying on its side on the soaked macadam. The bird was struggling to lift its wings, its beak opening and closing helplessly, black marble eye reflecting the streetlight. I stood there, watching the bird watch me. It was all alone in the open road, suffering, its scarlet feathers trembling, as though begging me for help.
For just a split second I was tempted to walk into the road, pick the bird up with my bare hands, and slip it into my jacket pocket.
But I did nothing.
What could I possibly do for this creature other than put it out of its misery? And somehow the thought of killing, no matter how easy, just didn’t seem like the right thing to do. Because all that’s born dies, one way or another. It’s just a matter of how much time you’ve got. Like the old man used to say: we all owe God a life.
But there was one thing I had to do.
Stepping out into the road, I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out my wallet. Unfolding it, I slipped out a folded letter and a razor blade that had been pulled off the t-shirt I snatched from the floor in Scarlet’s bedroom on the night my ex-wife, Lynn, killed her. Just one of those loose razors construction people use for scraping away old wallpaper. A paper-thin, super-light blade soaked in sticky blood that bore Lynn’s fingerprints and only Lynn’s. Fingerprints that checked out with the prints the A.M.C. security office still kept on file. The blade was the one that Lynn had used to kill Scarlet Montana at Scarlet’s request.
Standing in the rain, I pictured my wife entering the Montana home by using the key she took off her husband’s key ring—a key Scarlet surely would have given him. I saw her quietly climb the stairs, enter Scarlet’s bedroom, just the way Scarlet scripted it in the epistle I took from her strongbox—the plastic-encased letter addressed to Lynn Cain, “Personal and Confidential,” that described what would become the suicide of Scarlet Montana, detail for detail.
I saw Lynn pull a syringe from her jacket pocket, saw her inject Scarlet with the curare. Then returning the syringe to her pocket, she pulled out the blade. I then saw Scarlet’s green eyes looking into Lynn’s. I saw Scarlet nod and close her eyes. It would have been her way of telling Lynn to do it now; to destroy the demons that haunted her by inflicting the cuts and the pain.
That’s when the blade must have come down, the blood spatter hitting Scarlet’s face and the walls behind and beside her. I saw big tears falling off Lynn’s face as she performed a perfectly scripted homicide to resemble suicide by self-cutting.
Scarlet and Lynn. They were a match made in hell.
Scarlet wanted to die and Lynn wanted her to die for what she did to me and later on to Cain.
I looked down at a blade that had gotten stuck to my t-shirt when Lynn dropped it beside the bed, her grisly deed done. That blade did not reappear again until last week’s laundry day when I discovered it at the bottom of the hamper.
I guess stranger things have happened.
For now I held the blade in my fingertips, felt its near weightlessness, witnessed Scarlet’s rain-diluted blood washing away from the blade, pink and cloudy. I dipped my finger into the blood and I pressed it against my lips and I felt my heart stop and my mouth go dry. Then I bent down, dropping the blade through the sewer grate along with the suicide letter.
Standing there in the downpour, I wiped my palms clean against my pants. Then I made the decision to do something else.
Bending at the waist, I cupped my hands under the injured bird and lifted it up in the palms of my hands. I felt its feathery wet heat against my skin, little rapid heart beating against my fingers as I made my way back across the sidewalk, setting it down onto a dry piece of awning- protected concrete
I made sure not to look back.
In the near distance, my fragile family waited for me inside the old man’s pride and joy Mercedes funeral coach. Pulling a cigarette from the pack in my jacket, I cupped my hands around it and fired it up. I wasn’t sure how much time I had left. But then life is full of surprises.
Exhaling blue smoke, I tossed the cig to the pavement. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and made my way toward the laughter in the deep, rainy night.
THE END
If this Dick Moonlight PI novel thrilled you, then check out MOONLIGHT RISES and BLUE MOONLIGHT.
Vincent Zandri is the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of more than sixteen novels, including The Innocent, The Remains, Moonlight Falls, The Shroud Key, and Everything Burns. A freelance photojournalist and traveler, he is also the author of the blog The Vincent Zandri Vox. He lives in New York and Florence, Italy. For more information and to join Vincent’s “For Your Eyes Only” Mailing List, go to www.vincentzandri.com.
Moonlight Falls
(A Dick Moonlight PI Thriller No. 1)
3rd Edition: December 2014
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review or reviews.
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Moonlight Falls (A Dick Moonlight PI Series Book 1) Page 29
