Moonlight Sonata

  MOONLIGHT SONATA

  A Dick Moonlight PI Thriller

  Vincent Zandri

  PRAISE FOR BOOKS BY VINCENT ZANDRI

  “A riveting story…oh, what a story it is: grisly, surprising, and page-turningly suspenseful. A terrific old-school thriller.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “Zandri writes strong prose that rarely strains for effect, and some of his scenes…achieve a powerful hallucinatory horror.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Captures readers’ attention from the opening scene…creates a story that…is hard to tear away from once a reader is hooked.” —BookPage

  “Sensational…Masterful…Brilliant.” —New York Post

  “The action never wanes.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting.” —Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author

  “A satisfying yarn.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Vincent Zandri nails reader’s attention.” —Boston Herald

  “(Zandri) demonstrates an uncanny knack for exposition, introducing new characters and narrative possibilities with the confidence of an old pro…Zandri does a superb job interlocking puzzle pieces.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Tough, stylish, heartbreaking.” —Don Winslow, bestselling author of Savages

  “A thriller that has depth and substance, wickedness and compassion.” —The Times-Union (Albany)

  Copyright © 2013 by Vincent Zandri

  First Down & Out Books Edition July 2021

  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.

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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.

  Cover design by Zach McCain

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Moonlight Sonata

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from She Talks to Angels by James D.F. Hannah

  Preview from Murder by Moonlight by Vincent Zandri

  Preview from A Place for Snakes to Breed by Patrick Michael Finn

  For Lola, wherever you are…

  “I used to look forward to the day when I got too old to give a damn about women.”

  —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

  Prologue

  YOU’RE DROWNING.

  The entirety of your fragile head plunged deep down into the watery business end of a porcelain toilet inside the men’s room of Ralph’s Tavern in Albany. The water is cold and tastes vaguely of rust and urine as it enters your mouth. You’re on your knees, hands pressed flat against a piss-stained floor, the cold hard steel of a pistol barrel pressed against your spine, a bear claw of a hand shoving your head deeper into the toilet with each thrust.

  “Who sent thee?” the poet barks.

  Pulling you back out by the collar on your black leather coat, you spit out the rancid water and make a desperate attempt to inhale a dose of fresh restroom air. You want to be cooperative, being this man is your client, whether he knows it or not. You truly want to answer his query. But, instead, you’re choking, gagging, and vomiting putrid toilet water.

  “Who sent thee, scoundrel?”

  The pistol barrel is jammed so tight into your back you feel like it’s about to burst through skin and bone and enter into your stomach. You hear a fist banging on the men’s room door. Somebody shouting to open up. Somebody who’s got to drop “a big fucking deuce.” But the poet doesn’t care. He’s locked the door. Dead-bolted it secure. He’s shot one man already, legend has it. What difference does it make if he shoots you, too? The poet is desperate. He’s on the run. He’s drunk and wired on cocaine. Enough Bolivian marching powder to fire up a power line.

  You hear the barrel cock. You feel the mechanical action of the pistol click on a vertebra. In a second or two, you’ll hear the blast and you’ll see your bullet-shredded pink stomach lining spatter against the toilet and graffiti-covered plaster wall—the work-in-progress canvas for the drunk and the damned.

  “One more time. Who sent thee?”

  You open your mouth once more, try to spit out the words. It’s like tearing the skin away from the back of your throat. But you form a single word.

  “Agent,” you whisper. Then, “Your. Fucking. Agent.”

  “Liar,” the poet shouts, thrusting your head back into the toilet, but immediately pulling it back out, your face and head dripping like an overused toilet brush. “You are nothing but a scoundrel and a liar and I will have my revenge upon thee.”

  The pistol barrel shifts from your spine to the back of your skull. In your brain, you picture the poet. His thick, white, Ernest Hemingway Old Man and the Sea beard, his full head of salt and pepper hair cut close to the scalp. You see his short, bulldog build, and his many-times-broken pug nose. You see his ratty khaki safari jacket, its pockets jammed with notebooks, scraps of paper with story-lines and poems, pens, pencils, unsmoked joints, cash, candy bars, and who knows what the hell else. The poet is years older than you, but bears the strength, power, and build of a rhino. A drunk, coked-up rhino.

  “No wait!” You spit. “Wait. Please. Fucking wait, Mr. Walls. I can explain.”

  More pounding on the door. More words. Someone about to crap his pants if you don’t open up.

  “My agent might be a heartless, soulless cunt who would sell out her own aging mother to make a ten-spot,” Walls speaks in his deep, throaty, formal poetry reading voice. “After all, that’s why I’ve signed on with her. But she would never stoop so low as to send a private detective in search of me. You, sir, are a liar and scoundrel.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  A slap upside your head with Walls’s bear claw hand. It makes your head ring.

  “Cease thy banter, rogue.”

  The barrel is pressed harder against your skull. Now you see brain matter, blood, and bits of bone spattered against the wall. With any luck it will cover up the hand-scribbled erect cock and the phone number written below with the words, “I give great head. Call me.”

  More pounding on the door. More shouts.

  “She cares about you, Mr. Walls,” you spit. “She needs you back at your writing desk. You’re all she’s got. She needs you. You need you. You need to be writing. It’s my job to bring you back home.”

  Silence fills the bathroom, like the pause after a carefully recited stanza at a college sponsored literary reading.

  “Liar,” the bearded poet whispers, “turn to me.”

  You don’t turn to him so much as he forces you up by your coat collar. Forces you up enough for you to shift from your knees to your ass.

  “Open up,” Walls spits. “Take thee into your mouth.”

  You open your mouth, your eyes shifting from the black barrel to the poet’s round, red, bearded face. You feel the barrel slide inside, it’s cold metal flattening your tongue and scraping the roof of your mouth.

  “Swallow until you see the colors of the moon,” recites the poet from one of his most famous works. “Swallow until you lose your mind and your soul. Swallow for love. Swallow for me. Swallow your death.”

  You close your eyes,
and wait for the hammer to come down and for the world to turn black. You’ve died before, so why should this time be any different? We all owe God a life. That’s what Shakespeare said. And you, Richard Moonlight, part-time private eye, part-time dad, part-time lover, part-time scribbler of words, full-time head-case…you are long overdue.

  But the hammer doesn’t come down. Something else happens instead.

  The pistol barrel slides back out of your mouth as the poet rises up, filling the stall with his four-by-four body. He doesn’t shoot you, but he doesn’t leave you in peace, either.

  “This is where me and thee take our leave,” he speaks. “One from the other.”

  When he raises up the pistol barrel, you know what’s coming. You close your eyes and wait for the collision of steel against bone.

  “Be advised, Mr. Moonlight, that Roger Walls will never see the inside of a prison cell again. Do we have an understanding?”

  “Duly noted,” you utter through clenched teeth. “But you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  The high-pitched sound of your own scared-like-a-girl voice is the last thing you remember before the men’s room turns black.

  The Previous Day

  Chapter 1

  IN THE DREAM, I’M running. Running along the side of the road. Running slow. Jogging. A nice, slow, steady gate, the blood pumping through my veins, heartbeat elevated, breathing nice even breaths in and out, a small sheen of sweat building on my skin, coating it like a transparent glaze.

  I’m feeling good. Feeling at one with my body and the fresh air. Feeling healthy. Like the little piece of bullet lodged inside my brain doesn’t exist at all. Like I have nothing to look forward to but a long back-nine of a life without the threat of dying at any moment should that little fragment of bullet decide to make like an active fault line and shift.

  Then the cars start passing by.

  I’m facing traffic as I run along the roadside, so I can easily see the faces of the drivers and passengers as they motor past. There’s something about the way they’re gazing upon me. The drivers are slowing down and craning their necks in order to get a good look at me. They’re risking injury to life and limb by taking their eyes off the road to get a full eye-fill of me, your average, everyday jogger taking in his morning run in the sun.

  Or am I?

  When a carload of college-age girls goes by and they begin to scream and hoot, the driver blaring the horn and swaying into the opposite lane of oncoming traffic, I know something must be up.

  That’s when I begin to feel a breeze.

  It’s slight at first. But it’s a breeze all right, and it’s blowing against my midsection. The farther I run away from home, the more intense the cold wind blowing against my junk becomes. I stop running. I look down at myself. It’s then I realize I’ve left home without my shorts. I’m jogging along the soft shoulder of a public street in the middle of a bright busy morning, with only a t-shirt and sneakers on, the rest of me exposed to the world.

  Panic fills me.

  I about-face and try to sprint back to my loft. But my feet won’t move. I’m paralyzed on the street-side as cars and trucks begin piling up. They’re not flying past now, satisfied with a simple rubbernecking gaze. They’re pulling off to the side of the road and getting out. Old people, young people, men and women, girls and boys, cops, firemen, construction workers, students, suits, priests, bearded rabbis, you name it…they’re all stopping their vehicles and getting out. They’re standing in the road, gawking at me with these wide as hell eyes, looking me up and down, feeding upon my nakedness. Upon my exposed manhood.

  Those eyes…

  …They are the same kind of wanting eyes that stare at me now.

  Steely blue eyes that belong to a small but spunky forty-something woman by the name of Suzanne Bonchance. Better known in literary circles as the “Iron Lady,” due to a pair of brass knuckles she keeps conspicuously perched on the edge of her desk. The same brass knuckles I can plainly see as I sit down in a black leather chair positioned directly before the desk. A desk so long and wide it can accommodate a dozen or more manuscripts and still leave room for the Iron Lady’s many framed photos, which are situated so a visitor like me can get a good look at them. Pics of her seated in a café in Paris with Salmon Rushdie. Pics of her dirty dancing with Jackie Collins. Pics of her walking the red carpet at the Oscars, Brad and Angelia only a few steps behind her. Pics of her standing beside Michelle and Barack Obama, a massive American flag perched on the wall behind them.

  I slip my leather briefcase off my lap, set it down on the floor, and once more eye those brass knuckles.

  “You ever use those before?” I ask, nodding in the direction of the very illegal street fighting weapon, as she seats herself gently into her leather swivel chair, her neck-length black hair settling perfectly upon perfectly carved shoulders. This morning those perfect shoulders are covered by a perfectly tailored gray top that perfectly matches a gray mini skirt and knee length leather boots. She looks like the offspring of an in-her-prime Sophia Loren and a Friends-era Jennifer Anniston—that is, if they were ever able to physically hook up and spit out a love child. Her perfect wardrobe du jour costs more than my entire closet of Levi jeans and crew neck, all-cotton t-shirts. But then, I’m not a hotshot literary agent.

  “Would you like to see me in them?” she asks, a hint of a perfect white smile forming on her red lip-sticked mouth.

  “And only in them,” I say. Moonlight the Cagey. Or is it Moonlight the Dog?

  She exhales and does that positively-taken-aback eye blinking thing that all classy women do when I surprise them with my wit and charm.

  “I’ve been warned about your humor,” she says, after a calm and collecting inhale and exhale. “And about your…” Making like a pistol, she points an extended index finger in the direction of her right temple.

  “It’s okay, you can say it. You being the perfect literary agent and all.”

  “Suicide,” she says, the word coming out with a noticeable hint of English on it. As if this New York born and bred woman were from London.

  “Botched suicide, to be perfectly honest. I couldn’t go through with it in the end. Call me a wimp.”

  “But you bear the scars. Emotional and physical.” It’s a statement posed like a question.

  “There’s a small piece of .22 caliber hollow-point lodged beside my cerebral cortex. On occasion it can cause me to pass out, especially during periods of great stress. Or it can mess with my decision-making process. It can also cause me to die right now, in this chair, if it suddenly decides to shift. It’s a hell of a way to live, actually, knowing you can die at any second. Makes you appreciate the time you have all the more.”

  “Sounds positively warm and fuzzy,” she says, the corners of her pretty mouth perking up. “But I trust the little piece of bullet doesn’t impede your performance?”

  I smile.

  “My performance is impeccable.” It’s a lie. But what the hell?

  Her once cautious smile now becomes an ear-to-ear smile. Sitting back in her chair, she sets both hands on the armrests. It causes her jacket to open, revealing a tight-fitting black silk blouse unbuttoned enough to reveal some serious cleavage and a black lace push-up bra. Victoria’s Secret.

  “I’m not interested in that kind of performance,” she explains. “I’m interested in the performance of Dick Moonlight, private detective.”

  “I like the way you say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Dick.”

  We sit in silence while I watch the lids on her eyes rapidly rise and fall. What for some might be an uncomfortable silence, but for me is a whole-lot-of-fun kind of silence. Moonlight the Ball Buster.

  “Why don’t we get right to the heart of the matter, shall we?” the agent says after a beat.

  “Goody,” I say, crossing my right booted foot over my blue-jeaned knee. “Let’s have it, Iron Lady.”

&n
bsp; She shifts her gaze from me to the window wall on her left, as if looking out onto the Hudson Valley helps her think. “Are you familiar with the poet and novelist, Roger Walls?”

  I steal a silent second or two to think. But truth be told, I don’t have to think about it. I’m familiar with Roger Walls, all right. He visited my college during my senior year back in the early ʹ80s when I was about to earn my BA in English Lit. Back when I’d made the solemn vow to never enter into my dad’s funeral business and instead become a world-class author. Like Hemingway. Mailer. Or Walls.

  Roger fucking Walls.

  Sitting in front of the perfectly presented Suzanne Bonchance, I pictured the less than perfectly dressed poet/novelist donning a ratty safari jacket over a pair of worn Levis and Tony Lama cowboy boots. He wasn’t very tall, but barrel-chested and sported a black beard and black, brushed-back hair that by now would be grey. Or so I imagined. He was a bad boy writer, drunk when he arrived at the college for his reading, and even drunker when he carried a bottle of Jack with him to the podium. A daring move that caused the rather conservative Providence College audience of stiff upper-class profs to pucker their assholes while the English students jumped to their feet and issued a rousing standing ovation.

  “Knives, Guns, and Bitches. Slasher Babe. The Killer Inside Her,” I recite, recalling just a few of Walls’s sexually raw and violent books. “Walls has a way with women and he reflects it in his titles.” Moonlight the Lit Critic.

  “Roger is old school, Mr. Moonlight,” Bonchance goes on, her eyes still staring out the window, no doubt picturing an image of her stocky, liquor-soaked client. “He comes from a time when male writers felt they had to live by the Hemingway code. Tough, burly womanizers and drinkers. Men who lived by their word and were willing to back it up with their fists and tire irons, if need be.” She sighs sadly, her eyes glued to the great beyond. Gives me the feeling she misses the Roger Walls kind of bad boy writer. “Nowadays,” she goes on, her voice more sullen, “you’re lucky if a male writer takes real sugar with his double mocha Frappuccino. In today’s manhood-castrated world, a book called The Corrections is as much a hard-core prison novel as Justin Bieber is another Sid Vicious, and being a bad boy means having to give back the Oprah award.”