Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Where were you when this place was ransacked?”

  Dante had already described the evening for Chin, how Marilyn had been here for a little while, and how after that he’d gone to the Naked Moon. He did not tell her about the prostitute, though, or the business at the Sam Wong.

  “You didn’t call the police?”

  “About the break-in? No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know how busy you all are.”

  “It seems to me, whoever came through here, it appears they were looking for something.”

  “Kids,” Dante said. “They made a mess. They took a crap in the toilet. Broke a vase.”

  “What did they take?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to go through it all. But there wasn’t anything of value here.”

  “It seems like they might have taken the Wesson. Or your mother’s jewelry.”

  “I guess they didn’t find it.”

  If Chin was skeptical, her face did not show it. It did not show much at all. Her lip gloss was pale, and there was the slightest shadow on her eyes.

  “I’ve been talking to your cousin, you know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “I advised him to turn state’s evidence.”

  “I don’t think he was crazy about the idea.”

  “We were supposed to meet, but he didn’t show up.” Chin gave him a gray-eyed look, empty, revealing nothing—but that emptiness itself, it told him everything. “The last time you saw him, when was that?”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “Tell me again.”

  It was a mixed crew searching the house—Angelo’s people and Chin’s, homicide and SI—and there was only one reason homicide would be along. Dante hoped he was mistaken. Chin got up all of a sudden, leaving him in the room with Sergeant Jones, the hulking cop with the blond crew cut and the thick neck and the fat jaw. Interrogators liked to do this sometimes, just leave you sitting while they thought it over, piecing it together in their heads. He heard a thumping in the attic. The warrant boys rummaged above him now, handing boxes down to Angelo in the kitchen, yukking it up as they worked. He caught a glimpse of Chin through the window, out in the street, talking into her cell.

  Dante waited with the thick-necked cop in his father’s den. The cop was admiring the old RCA, a tube model with the rabbit ears on top.

  “This thing work?”

  “Sure.”

  The cop bent down. “Which knob?”

  “The one in the center.”

  “This one?”

  “Push.”

  “Nothing happens.”

  “You have to plug it in.”

  The man bent over, reaching for the plug. Dante felt the urge to leap up and knock the son of a bitch over the head, for all the good it would do.

  “It’s plugged in now.”

  “Takes a while to warm up.”

  “How long?”

  “Not long.”

  “It doesn’t work, does it? You’re pulling my leg.”

  “You’re a bright guy.”

  “You think you’re funny.”

  “It just takes a little while to warm up. It’s got tubes. Put your hand on top of the cabinet. You’ll feel the heat.”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  Dante remembered his grandfather, the fisherman, watching the old shows. Queen for a Day. Supermarket Sweep. The Milton Berle Show, with Milton himself, the big Jew, dressed in drag, strutting across the stage. The old man watched with the El Producto hanging from his lips, laughing his head off—blowing smoke through that enormous nose. Of course, the television didn’t work anymore and hadn’t worked for years. The set had been a problem even in its prime: the tuner came off in your hand, so you had to turn the channels with a pair of pliers, then jiggle the antennae forever until the snow and the static disappeared. Now the cop stood with his hand on the cabinet, waiting for that light at the center of the picture tube to spring large and fill the screen. But it wasn’t going to happen. All the light and sound had collapsed into a tiny square years ago, a pinprick, vanished into darkness, and it was never going to spring back.

  The cop took away his hand. “It doesn’t work,” he said.

  “You have to be patient.”

  “You’re a real card. A regular joker.”

  “No. You’re the card.”

  Angelo appeared in the doorway holding a carton his buddies had dragged from the attic.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  “Sergeant Jones is interested in my father’s television.”

  Dante recognized the box Angelo held, a carton full of his mother’s baubles, things she’d had in the asylum, hairbrush, Polaroids, news clippings, bundles of unmailed letters she’d written in her final years, notes to Pope John XXIII, Holy Father in Rome. To Al Capone and Marie Antoinette. Letters intermingling world events with family business, confessing guilt one moment, innocence the next, a complex tissue of associations in which it was impossible to separate the real from the imagined.

  “Put that down,” said Dante.

  Once upon a time, he and Frank Angelo had been friends, more or less. Working the beat together, they both had known the way it was in the neighborhood, or the way it had been. Backdoor whorehouses that the cop station left alone. High-stakes card games at Portofino’s. Underage kids dry-humping Fiora Pistola on the dance floor while her husband triple-charged them for drinks. There was a lot of little stuff that as a cop you didn’t do anything about, and a lot of big stuff, too, depending. All the rumors about the Mancuso warehouse back then, they’d reached a fever pitch, it seemed, when he had been Angelo’s partner. Angelo who’d been like a brother to him, both of them up for promotion at the same time.

  “What are you looking for?”

  One of the warrant boys brought in another box and put it at Angelo’s feet. The box had his mother’s name on it, written in big letters in his father’s hand, and Dante remembered the day his father had packed it, not so long after she died, going through her clothes, hand-folding her blouses, her skirts, and laying these articles one at a time into the box. Angelo put his hand into the carton: his partner, soft-hearted Angelo, taunting him in a way Dante had seen him do before, just like this, on the job, trying to get a suspect to blow. “I remember the day the doctors picked her up. I remember her out on the sidewalk there, screaming and hollering.” Angelo took one of the dresses in his stubby hands. Behind Angelo, Dante saw Chin returning.

  “This was what she was wearing, wasn’t it?”

  Dante stood up then. He’d had enough. He meant to take the dress away from Angelo, put it back in the box, but Dante moved too quickly, too rash, and the big cop wasn’t taking any chances. Or Jones was still mad about the television. Either way, the big cop got him from behind with a slapjack to the head.

  Dante went down.

  He lolled painfully on the carpet, peering up through the cracked light. Angelo peered back down, and Chin did, too. The hard lines were back in her face, but whether that hardness was for him or for Angelo, he didn’t know. Maybe she had some reservations about the way Angelo had provoked him, or maybe she didn’t see it that way. Cops crossed the line all the time. Out of necessity, or because it was a frustrating job, the crooks were assholes, and you had to get your pleasure where you could.

  Dante understood this. Or had understood once. It was harder to understand rolling on the floor, wincing into that cracked light.

  She and Angelo were talking.

  “CSI?”

  “They sent it over.”

  “The photograph, yes.”

  “Show it to him,” said Angelo.

  “Give him a minute.”

  Dante did not want to see. He had already guessed what they were about to show him, and he did not want to see. In the old days, it took time to get the photos developed. These days, the CSI cars had a printer embedded in the dash, hooked up to the wireless, and out it came. There weren�
�t enough cops on the street, the hydrants didn’t work, but the city had plenty of money for this kind of stuff. Dante lay there, holding his head. The big cop got down on his hands and knees and propped the photo against the couch leg. It was a crummy print, with the color all lousy, and in the middle of that lousy color, Gary Mancuso lay twisted and dead.

  “Déjà vu,” said Angelo.

  THIRTEEN

  The way the neck hung, the slash in the esophagus, the narrow band that encircled the throat—Dante had seen it before. His cousin had been strangled with a steel sling, a simple device: a length of wire affixed at each end to a wooden dowel. It wasn’t hard to kill somebody this way, but it took some practice, some training. Approach the victim from behind, loop the cord over the head.

  Dante had seen similar photos when he was with the company, traveling abroad. A diplomat’s son had been murdered in this manner, then his wife, strangled a week apart. Eventually, the diplomat had been arrested, and had hanged himself in jail.

  Murder-suicide, the police had concluded, though Dante knew better. The deceased diplomat had been peddling information, working both sides. And there’d been similar cases in Toronto, in Bonn.

  The company did not tolerate betrayal.

  A simple move, one motion. Turn around, pivot, back to back with the victim, still holding the dowels, yanking. Then bend at the waist. Not a deep bend, but far enough so that the victim’s feet came off the ground, so the killer and the victim were one self, one beast, a two-headed animal, if only for a moment, joined at the spine, with two feet on the ground and the other two in the air, arms flailing up top.

  The secret was in the first move, after looping the wire over the head. When the killer turned, the wire crossed, cinching the victim’s neck. After that, it was easy. Just bend, hold tight. Let gravity do the rest.

  Dante had been in the gray room before. If not this exact room, then rooms like it. He had sat on every side of the table, in every chair. He’d been the kiss-ass cop who brought the coffee and the Snickers bar, sweet-talking the witness, and he’d been the bulldog in a spiked collar lunging at the throat. He’d been the invisible snoop, the man on the other side of the one-way glass, plotting the interrogation.

  He’d also been in the position he now occupied. A person of interest, as the phrase went. A suspect in the matter at hand.

  Angelo and Chin had driven him from his father’s place to the station downtown. They had talked to him together for a little while. Now it was just Chin.

  She pulled the blind on the observation window and killed the mike and the audio recorder, too. None of that meant anything necessarily, because she could have a wire up her sleeve, for all he knew, or there could be a tiny video camera in the lamp. Or she could just write it all down in her notepad after she walked out of here, truth or lie, it didn’t matter. In the end, nothing, anywhere, was confidential.

  “After you left the force, you lived in New Orleans.”

  “Seven years.”

  “Private security?”

  “Export firm.”

  “Sometimes you went abroad?”

  “They did imports, too. Intracompany stuff, mostly. Sometimes, you know, between here and there, there would be a shortfall.”

  “And you’d have to track it down.”

  “Or not.”

  “But the pay was good?”

  “Good enough.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “I was raised here.”

  Her face gave him nothing. Chin was in Special Investigations, so she had access to things and could make her own deductions. Perhaps she’d penetrated to his other life, the one in which he’d been deep cover, officially unaffiliated, in an organization within an organization, down in that murky area, the shadowland. In the government flowchart, SI had connections to Homeland, and Homeland connected to the CIA and the NSA, with lines going back and forth, and then outside all that, off the chart, nameless, unlabeled, were the boxes connected by invisible lines. Chinn was savvy enough to suspect that his job had been out there, in the space outside the lines.

  “Given your ownership interests in the warehouse, you will need to talk to the Wus. There are business concerns to untangle.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The investigation doesn’t stop. Your name—it’s on the deed.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “You have to talk to the Wus, one way or the other. They’ll make you an offer of some sort, even if it’s just to buy you off, send you away. I want you to tell me what they offer.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  She shrugged off the question. “We can offer you protection,” she said. “You won’t have to answer to the Wus.”

  He didn’t believe her any more than his cousin had believed her. She couldn’t protect him.

  “I’ll think about your offer,” he said, though in truth he had no intention. If he talked to the Wus, it would be for his own reasons.

  Chin was pretty good at holding her face empty, but it slipped, and he saw her weariness. Her face, her eyes, they showed her age, but at the same time, he could see the school-girl with the pleated dress and the skinny legs and the piercing expression. She’d gone to the Salesian School, run by the Saints Peter and Paul Church, same as he had gone. They shared that much, anyway.

  “You’re making a mistake,” said Chin.

  She left him alone in the gray room. He expected to be sitting at the table for some time, staring at those dull walls. He expected the sweet stuff was over and sooner or later, she and Angelo would be back, working in tandem or pairs, bringing in a third buddy, then a fourth, not letting him sleep, trying to wear him down. They could charge him in the murder, or just take him down to the holding tank and let him sit there overnight. He thought about his cousin. About Marilyn, unprotected. He had made a mistake, no doubt, though it wasn’t the mistake Chin thought. She and Angelo meant to hold him, he determined, the only question was for how long. As it turned out, he was wrong about that as well. The next person to appear was neither Angelo nor Chin, but the sergeant who minded the hall.

  “You’re free to go.”

  FOURTEEN

  Ten years ago, Dante had driven across the Mississippi River to a small office in Algiers across from New Orleans. He had walked up some long steps and talked to a man in that office and the man had sent him across the way, to a phone booth on the Rue Sangre. The booth was hot and the connection was poor. The voice inside the static gave him an assignment, a place to go, an agent to meet. In the years since, Dante had never gotten used to the sound of the voice. He was often tempted to go back to Algiers, walking up the stairs to the office where the small man had hunched over the desk, but he knew it would not be the same and the man would be long gone. As it was, Dante could not shake the feeling that he had never left, that once he’d crossed the river to that other side, there was no going back—no matter what self-deception he practiced, he was forever in that phone booth with his ear pressed to the receiver, listening to the insect on the other side.

  Now he lingered in the shadows outside Marilyn’s house, insubstantial, a shadow himself, watching, to be sure she was safe. That was all he wanted. The cops had confiscated his guns, but they’d not found the stiletto, and he carried it now in his pocket. A woman passed by, harmless. Then a couple, arm in arm, headed up the hill. Before he’d left the force, when his father was still alive, there’d been a moment, like the moment with Chin, when he could have cooperated with the investigation, but he hadn’t done so. He could have cooperated, to hell with his family, and had some kind of other life, here with Marilyn. Instead, he’d left her and gone to New Orleans.

  Someways, things had come full circle. Except now it was more complicated, more dangerous. Dominick Greene was still staying in the Wong, and spent his afternoons in the cafés and his evenings wandering the clubs along Broadway, and ended up often as not in the Melody Lounge. Dante knew this much about Greene already, and he wo
uld know more soon, he hoped, because he’d put in a call to Jake, down at Cicero Investigations, asking his boss to run a make. Meanwhile, a car pulled up, a Mercedes. Then in a little while, Marilyn came down with David Lake. Dressed for the opera.

  Lake was a good man.

  Dante knew this because he’d looked into Lake’s past as well, playing it nosy, back when the man had first appeared in Marilyn’s life. The fact of Lake’s goodness, though, didn’t make it any easier, watching the two of them climb into the car. The Mercedes drove down the hill, its taillights flaring in the twilight.

  Then Dante went to the Naked Moon.

  He still needed to talk to Rossi, but the man wouldn’t be home, not yet, and in the meantime he still hoped to find the girl. But the dancer was not there, and she was not at her room down in the flats. Her disappearance was coincidence, he told himself again. Meanwhile, there were places girls like her ended up. He caught a taxi then down to South of Market, to a spot under the freeway, where the hard-core girls worked the corner, hailing passersby, and in between clients, the girls got on their knees, crawling through a break in the fence, to a concrete field where you could buy just about any drug you wanted.

  “Slow down,” he said.

  The driver obliged.

  The girl was not among those on the corner. He peered through the taxi window toward the darkness underneath the freeway. Maybe the girl was there, with the users, and he was tempted for a minute to follow her into those shadows. Because he wanted to know if Greene had sent her, he told himself, though maybe that was not the reason at all. Because it was time for him to disappear, too. He’d seen Marilyn on Lake’s arm. He closed his eyes, full of yearning, and his nostrils widened, as if taking in the acrid smoke from the foil, and he remembered the girl touching him, back in the elevator.

  “What next?” asked the driver.

  Dante reached into his pocket, touched the stilletto in its case. If I disappear, he thought, if I vanish from the face of the earth, Marilyn becomes irrelevant. They won’t be able to move against me by hurting her, but he wasn’t sure how to accomplish that, not yet. Or maybe he still hoped there was another way.