Murder by Moonlight Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Vincent Zandri

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612183510

  ISBN-10: 1612183514

  For Laura

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The footsteps sound leaden and painful, and remind me of the walking dead. It’s just like I expected them to sound. Dead but somehow still alive. I stand at the big window looking out onto the Hudson River and listen to the victim of an attempted murder slowly climb the stairs to my second-floor office.

  Gripped in my right hand, an early afternoon Jack.

  I sip the whiskey slowly and stare through the glass, beyond the transparent reflection of my scruffy face, cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and the surgically shaved scar behind my right earlobe, where a piece of .22-caliber hollow-point bullet penetrated it.

  I can’t avoid them: the footsteps, heavy and labored, like a beating heart. I do my best to sight in on a flock of seagulls swooping down at the river in random arcs before pulling out of their dives barely an inch ahead of crashing into the water. It’s nature’s grace incarnate. But beauty is the last thing on my mind.

  The day is cold and concrete gray. The usual meteorological song and dance for Albany. A lost-in-time city gripped by cold from November all the way through May. The time my mortician dad did the majority of his business. “Tax season,” he used to call it.

  It’s only January 4th, but already I’m beginning to feel like the state capital will never know warmth again. What did Shakespeare call it? The winter of our discontent? I wonder if anyone ever experienced a contented winter in Albany. Skiers, maybe. Snowboarders. People with the money to hop a flight to Palm Beach.

  I’m mouthing the whiskey glass once more when the footsteps stop. The door opens, and she walks into my office without knocking.

  “Mr. Moonlight,” she says to my back. “I hope I’m not too early.”

  The voice is noticeably slurred and delayed, which I also expected. But then, the woman has been through one hell of a painful ordeal. I chug down what’s left of my whiskey, run the fingers of my free hand down my face, wishing I’d shaved. Ah, what the hell.

  I turn.

  Setting the now-empty glass and whiskey bottle inside the open desk drawer, I attempt to smile warmly but give up almost immediately. I close the drawer without slamming it.

  “You’re right on time, Mrs. Parker.” Holding my hand out toward an empty wooden chair. “Please have a seat.”

  “Do you always drink alone?”

  “Only when I am alone.” I force a second smile for effect, but it’s no use. Then, “Hope it won’t be a problem.”

  “Has it been for you? In the past, I mean?”

  My second smile dissolves like freshly fallen snow on a puddle of warm blood. Do I tell her now about my failed suicide attempt, or do I leave it for later? Maybe she already knows. This is SmAlbany, after all. She closes the wooden door behind her, painstakingly makes her way into the office, gingerly sits herself down. Life is no easy task for this zombielike woman.

  In truth, she should be dead.

  “I understand if this…my appearance…is difficult for you,” she comments, peering into my face and then lowering her head. She feels ugly. Somehow proud, too, but ugly. She’s badly scarred, and, to be honest, it makes my back teeth hurt and my throat constrict just to look at her.

  I take a load off in the old swivel chair behind the desk, nod.

  “I’m not fully healed,” she explains. “I may never fully heal.”

  She’s a small, thin, fragile woman. A woman who’s lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. But that doesn’t prevent her from taking pride in putting herself together. She wears an expensive tan jacket and skirt, black leather boots that rise up to her knees. There’s also something that at first appears to be a scarf wrapped around the upper portion of her birdlike neck. But when you look closer you can see that it’s actually a man’s necktie. A blue-and-scarlet-striped rep tie. No doubt, one of her recently murdered husband’s mementos.

  A snow-white patch covers the empty socket where her right eye used to be before a fireman’s axe chopped through it. The other one is wide open, deep blue, and fully functional. But it’s lost all its life.

  Her dirty blonde hair is coming back in places. Patches mostly, like the clumps of grass that grow out of the cracks in the sidewalk in the springtime. Since the peach-fuzz hair is newly sprouted, it does little to hide the edge of the curved plate that’s been inserted in the place where the skull was split and shattered in the axe attack. I’m no expert, but I can’t imagine hair ever growing back there.

  A scar, the width of a vein, runs from her lower lip up through the upper lip, from which it travels like the jagged line on a road map until it meets the damaged eye. Even though four months have passed since the September morning when the attacks occurred, the scar is still thick, purple, and tender looking. Like it formed an hour ago. When her facial muscles contract, it appears to throb, like a live electric cable.

  “I would have met you at your home,” I offer, after a beat. “You had to make the stairs.”

  “I’m not a cripple, Mr. Moonlight,” she insists, her words still slow, but direct. “I bear the scars and injuries of a killer who still roams the streets of Albany.”

  “Which is why you are here.” A third attempt at smiling. But I can’t do it. Three and out.

  She inhales a breath and then leans forward. Rea
ching down, she lifts up her bone-colored purse, sets it up on her lap. Stuffing her hand inside, she comes back out with a compact disc housed inside a transparent plastic case. She tries to hand it to me from across the desk. But even this simple act seems to take a great effort. And, of course, her injuries prevent her from reaching across it, anyway.

  I shoot up fast, hold my hand out for her.

  “Photographs of my son Christopher. I thought you’d like to see them. See how we raised him.”

  I take the case in my hand. The plastic feels as cold and dead as she looks.

  “This isn’t necessary, Mrs. Parker.”

  I sit back down, stare at the generic CD. It’s got “Chris’s Life” scrawled on the silver metallic side in thoughtful, if not feminine, Sharpie script. She’s even added a little smiley face beneath the name “Chris.”

  ‘“Call me Joan…please.” The pseudo-drunk way she pronounces her name makes it sound like Shoan.

  “Joan,” I repeat, setting the case on the desk. “Makes no difference to me if he was raised by a pack of wolves in the woods.”

  She shoots me a hard look. Something I wouldn’t have thought possible a few seconds before. Despite her crippling injures, the woman still sports some spunk.

  “My bad,” I say. “I was reaching for a little humor.”

  “I’m not sure I can laugh anymore,” she says.

  I look into her good eye and view a world of pain and anger so profound, my heart skips a beat. “Understood,” I say. “Let’s get down to it then, shall we?”

  “Time is of the essence,” she agrees.

  I open the top drawer, pull out a fresh yellow legal pad. I set the pad on the desk beside the CD and close the drawer. I write, “Joan Parker, axe attack survivor, wife of Peter Parker, law clerk and murder victim, mother of twenty-two-year-old Chris Parker, the accused.” I finish by scrawling a long line under my notes.

  “Mr. Moonlight, I would like you to show this city that my son Christopher is not guilty.”

  “He’s already been charged by Bethlehem’s finest. Murder and attempted murder in the first degree. Based on the evidence. Based on eyewitness testimony that came directly from you, Joan.”

  “Mr. Moonlight, I have no recollection whatsoever of telling the Bethlehem police, who are most definitely not fine, that my son Christopher took an axe to his father and me. My skull was caved in. I was nearly entirely bled out.” Pausing to breathe. Then, “I simply have no recollection of the event.”

  She tries sitting up straighter in the chair, as if adding conviction to a statement she must have delivered a thousand times before over the past few months. I know she’s in pain. And for a fleeting moment, I consider offering her a shot of whiskey. But then when I picture myself having to carry her back down the stairs, I think better of it.

  What we do instead is sit in uncomfortable silence for a while. But the silence isn’t complete. Outside the window, you can’t help but hear the faint squeal of gulls as they swoop over the river.

  At last I clear my throat. “Do you feel that you were coerced into pointing the finger at Christopher, Joan?”

  She cups her right hand, brings it to her mouth, coughs into it. “I told you, I don’t recall a thing.”

  I pretend to write down a notation, but in reality, I’m only just scribbling some X’s and O’s. When I’m through, I scrawl a line under the scribbles. Moonlight, the detail man.

  “Christopher was two hundred miles away at college in Rochester when Peter and I were horribly attacked. My oldest son, Jonathan, was out to sea with the navy.” Slamming a now-fisted right hand against her stick of a thigh. “There’s a killer out there! He killed my husband! He tried to kill me!”

  I nod. “Have you entertained the thought that your son might be found guilty in a court of law, regardless of my opinion?”

  “Not for a second.”

  “Who’s his lawyer?”

  “Mr. Terry…Franklin…Kindler.”

  I know the name. Crusty old defense lawyer from across the river in Troy. Type of guy who can afford to hop a flight to Palm Beach when it gets too cold for the wife. I write the name down anyway, scrawl a line under it. Gives me something to distract myself from Joan’s tragic face.

  “What’s Kindler’s take?”

  Her throat rattles when she clears it, as if it’s still full of arterial blood. “You don’t read the papers, I take it?”

  “I need to hear it from you.”

  “Bethlehem police were too narrow in their search. They set their sights on Christopher and never took their eyes off of him.”

  I nod again, as though agreeing. Like it’s about time I stopped disputing her theories. She is a potential client after all, and I don’t have them lining up outside my door. Work ain’t always easy to come by for a head case with a piece of .22-caliber hollow point lodged inside his brain.

  “Will Kindler speak with me?”

  “He’s been instructed to do so.”

  “As I understand it, Christopher is still being held inside the Albany County Correctional Facility?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll need to speak with him also.”

  “It would be in his best interest. Did you know it was his idea to hire you?” She attempts to raise a smile on her pale, hard face. But it has the same appeal as a jagged crack in a concrete sidewalk.

  “Christopher doesn’t know me.”

  “He knows you, Mr. Moonlight. Knows you almost died, yourself.” Raising her right hand, touching the side of her head. “Must have taken a great deal of strength to come back from that kind of low point.”

  That answers that. Like I said, SmAlbany. Outside the window, more gulls, more squeals. My botched suicide has made me the subject of local curiosity. Or in Joan’s case and her son’s, the object of pity. And, interestingly, recommended me to them as a real good fit for their cause.

  Best for me to change the subject.

  “You do realize, Joan, that I may not be able to prove your son’s innocence.”

  I set the legal pad down on the desk, set the pen on top of it.

  “It’s a moot point,” she insists, raising her right hand slowly, touching an extended index finger to the thick purple scar. “You just find the truth, and he will be freed. My son didn’t do this!”

  “Loud and clear. Any idea who might have? You got any enemies?”

  The question isn’t lifted from the Moonlight private detective boilerplate questionnaire. It’s me trying to act like a real investigator. I don’t read the papers every day, but I recall that a few years ago, her husband, Peter, got mixed up in testifying against his mob-connected cousin. Guy by the name of Freddie “the Fireman” Parker. Methinks old Freddie would most definitely fall into the “enemy” category, especially since he wakes up inside a concrete cell every day. Thanks to Peter Parker. God rest his soul.

  She grabs hold of her purse strap, stands up as a woman not far from the grave would stand.

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for an enemy who would do such a thing, Mr. Moonlight. That’s precisely why I’m here.”

  No mention of Freddie as a candidate. Maybe her head injuries have caused her to forget all about the family mob connection. I scrawl one last scribble on the notepad before standing, coming around the desk.

  “Guess I should have thought of that,” I say.

  “I’ll allow that one to slide,” she says.

  I show the axe-attack victim to the door.

  I pour another whiskey, remove the CD from its case, pop it into the media tray on the laptop. Slapping it back home, I wait for the images to appear. A couple dozen photographs show up on the screen in contact-sheet fashion. The computer asks me if I wish to view the pics as a slideshow. I take a drink of whiskey and double-click on Yes.

  “Let the show begin,” I say aloud. But my voice sounds strange and detached inside the empty office. When my dad used to work on embalming a new client, he’d blare opera and sing
along like he was Pavarotti performing for a “live” audience. Seemed perfectly normal to me at the time. But then, so did the stiffs that used to come and go from our home on a daily basis.

  It doesn’t take long to see that Joan Parker has assembled this collection of images with all the tender loving care only a mother can provide for her blood son. First picture, a much younger and healthier woman clutching a newborn Christopher in her arms. She’s lying in a hospital bed, her pale forehead still bearing the beaded sweat of her painful labors, but somehow looking radiant and even, dare I say it, hot. Next picture shows a chubby, bushy-haired toddler attempting his first step, jubilant but protective parents positioned on either side of him should he fall. Then comes little Christopher’s first day at grammar school, standing nervously beside a taller, brooding big brother.

  Time flies…

  Next pic shows a preteen holding two big fish by the gills, one in each hand, the portly, black-haired, State Supreme Court law clerk smiling proudly beside his youngest boy. Then there’s the green Boy Scout issuing the three-finger salute, the more seasoned Boy Scout chopping firewood in the backyard with an axe, the chest-full-of-medals Boy Scout at a ceremony receiving yet another badge from a stocky, mustached den leader. Just looking at Christopher’s face, you can’t help but sense a kid who’s going places. A kid whose future is full of possibilities and promise. A kid who cannot tell a lie. A perfect kid.

  The life story continues…

  The tall, lanky, dark-haired, blue-eyed Christopher heading off to high school; his first prom; attempting a layup in a high school basketball game; a family get-together in the backyard of what must be the Parker home; a traditional, high school cap-and-gown graduation; yet another ceremony in which the Boy Scout becomes the coveted Eagle Scout, the same stocky but older den leader hugging him so tight even my dead dad can feel it.

  And so it goes…

  A picture-perfect youth only Martha Stewart could have scripted…before she did time in the joint.

  I sit back, drink down the rest of my whiskey. I wonder what Joan is trying to prove with this photomontage. That her flawless son is incapable of killing her husband? Of trying to kill her and leave her for dead? Good people kill sometimes. That’s all there is to it. I almost murdered myself once. And I’m not all bad, depending upon whom you talk to.