Murder by Moonlight Read online

  I pull out onto an empty Broadway.

  I see the headlights, white and round in the rearview, not five seconds later. Whoever’s following me is obviously an amateur. He isn’t tailgating, but he isn’t back far enough to be inconspicuous, either. He must have been waiting for me to come out of the Greyhound bus station bar. That means he was either following me prior to my meeting with Ferrance or somehow he found out I was inside the joint while I was enjoying my conversation with the reporter.

  I play it cool, let him follow me all the way into South Albany, trying like hell to get a make on him via the rearview. But in the dark and the slushy rain, there’s just no stealing a visual. Judging by the size of the silhouette, however, I know he’s a good-sized man driving a small car. A compact car.

  Soon as I pull up to the port entrance, I give the Caddy a little more gas, pull out ahead. My building is located at the far end of the port along the river’s edge, but I pull a quick right behind one of the metal warehouses, pull over up against the building, kill the lights.

  When he comes searching, I let him get ahead, then wheel out behind him, hit the lights, and pull up on his ass.

  My brights lighting up the rear end of his ride, he drives all the way to the end of the warehouse and stops. Gets out.

  I get out, pull out my piece.

  “Please,” he calls to me, voice high-pitched and cracking. “I just want…to talk.”

  I’m not planting a bead on him, just holding the piece low, barrel pointed at the tarmac. But the effect is the same.

  “Talk about what?”

  “About the reason Christopher Parker could not have possibly attacked his parents.”

  We’re sitting on two side-by-side stools at the kitchen counter inside my bottom-floor loft. I’m nursing a cold beer. My big tailgater, whose name is Mitchell Hart, is drinking the Maxwell House I just brewed for him in my twenty-year-old Mr. Coffee. The same one my dad kept running constantly in our home when it was a working funeral parlor. Same model Peter Parker made coffee with on the morning he dropped dead from severe blood loss.

  Hart’s about thirty-five, heart-attack-in-the-making-big around the gut, balding on top. One of those guys who will age at twice the rate of your average gym rat. He works security for the same judge that Peter Parker worked for as a legal aid and clerk. He found out I was working for Joan the same way everyone else did, when news of the arrangement went out on the legal grapevine. But I’m beginning to think that both Joan and Terry Kindler want the public to know that Mrs. Parker maintains so much belief in her son’s innocence that she’ll stop at nothing to see his name cleared of all charges. Including hiring a private detective. One as glamorous as me.

  “Tell me why you think Chris is innocent,” I say to Hart.

  He looks worriedly into his coffee. “I’m the one who found Peter,” he says.

  I’m already perfectly aware of this. But just hearing it come from his mouth still carries a slight jolt of electricity, along with images of the bloody scene Hart stumbled upon that morning.

  “That morning,” he goes on, “when Peter never showed up, Judge Cross asked me to drive over to the house to see where he was.”

  “Peter was a conscientious employee?”

  “Yeah. Real conscientious. He isn’t…wasn’t the type not to show up and not call first.” Eyes lighting up. “Did you know he hasn’t…hadn’t taken a vacation in, like, three or four years?”

  “He liked his work.”

  “Work was his life, Mr. Moonlight. You don’t spend sixty hours a week working a 75K job unless you absolutely sweat passion.” He makes a kind of curtsey my late mother would have made when he says the word “passion.” He crosses legs too thin for his gut, one over the other. Tightly. Feminine. Also, like my mother. I decide to maintain my personal space at all costs.

  “Finding Peter…that had to have been tough.”

  “Oh yes, it was…I don’t have words for it. I wish I could un-see it. Oh God, and then the Bethlehem Police storming in, and that terrible Detective Gray Hair…what’s his name…Blowfish.”

  “Bowman.”

  He sips his coffee carefully, holding the mug with both hands. Again, like my mother. Soon as he referred to Bowman as “terrible”—not to mention “Blowfish”—I knew his motive behind tracking me down. I’ll give him the time of day, unlike the Bethlehem cop. So he hopes.

  “The judge sent you to the house?” I refocus.

  “That’s right. Judge Cross sent me to the house at Brockley Drive when Peter didn’t show up for work.”

  I think about it for a second. “Kind of odd, isn’t it, Mr. Hart? Sending you to the house to see what’s wrong instead of calling the cops?”

  “There was some trouble last year at the Parker house. A break-in. Laptops were stolen. And as of late, some strange people have been standing in the Parker driveway. Peter talked about it over lunch sometimes. Scary, you ask me.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “Mr. Moonlight, have you ever heard of a terrible man by the name of Freddie ‘the Fireman’ Parker?”

  I know the name. Anybody who works Albany law enforcement, private or public, knows it, just like they know that Peter ratted on him. “Mob-related guy,” I answer. “Peter’s first cousin, I believe. Worked the waste management racket between here and Manhattan. FBI had been trying to pin something on him for years until Peter testified against him, helped secure old Freddie a comfortable prison cell.”

  “Apparently the two were never very close.”

  “That what you think this is all about, Mr. Hart?” I say. “A Mafia hit?”

  He shakes his head, drinks some coffee. “I can’t be sure of anything. But I do know this: Peter didn’t just testify that one time against Freddie. Peter had spoken to the FBI in the past against his cousin. He’s volunteered a wealth of information.”

  More bells, more sirens.

  “What kind of information, exactly?”

  “I’m not sure. But when the Parker house was broken into last year and the laptops were stolen, it was assumed that Freddie might be behind it.”

  “Bet you dollars to doughnuts he was trying to find out what kind of e-mails Peter and Joan had been circulating to the feds on Freddie’s behalf,” I say. But I’m really thinking out loud for my own benefit.

  He raises both hands quickly, as if to say, Stop. “Don’t mention doughnuts, pleeeeease…I’m starving as it is and I’m trying to lose some weight.” Then lowering his hands. “But yes, you are absolutely right on.”

  “And then later on,” I add, “when Peter keeps cooperating with the feds despite the stolen laptops, strange men start appearing in the Parker driveway.”

  “Dangerous men,” he says and nods. “Intimidating men. But there’s just one problem with this little…what do you call it? Oh, diddly-doo. This little scenario, that’s it.” He makes little frustrated fists when he says “diddly-doo.”

  I drink a little more beer, set the bottle down on the counter. Outside the big industrial window, you can make out the red bow lights on a tug that’s pushing a barge upriver. I wonder if it’s the one captained by the Gorton’s Fisherman.

  “The laptops that were stolen from the house were eventually auctioned off on eBay.”

  “By whom?”

  “You have to ask?”

  Hart’s right. I already know the answer. It’s as obvious as the foam on my beer.

  He finishes his coffee. I finish my beer. I slide off the stool, stand.

  “You think there’s a direct connection between Freddie Parker and Christopher? Judge Cross thinks so?”

  He slides off his stool. He’s taller than me. Even porkier than I initially guessed. Like he’s never seen a gym in all his thirty-five diddly-doo years.

  “We think there’s a kind of reciprocity gone bad here,” he says speaking on behalf of Cross. “Christopher needed money. Freddie needed Peter to shut the heck up.”

  “Freddie needs Peter and
Joan dead,” I posit. “Christopher needs the insurance money. So what you’re saying, Mr. Hart, is that it’s possible Christopher could have approached his second cousin with a plan to off the Parkers, maybe split the insurance money. Chris would make it possible for a killer or killers to take out the Parkers. But Freddie double-crosses Chris, has the parents killed in a way that makes it look like the kid did it himself.”

  His big brown eyes light up like he’s about to win a round of that old board game Clue. Freddie the Fireman in the bedroom with a fireman’s axe…

  “That way, Freddie not only gets what he wants by silencing Peter and Joan,” Hart breaks in. “He does so in a way that makes him look completely innocent of any wrongdoing.”

  I take a minute to think. For a change, I’ve got a solid theory backing up the Parker attacks. Though not a theory my client is going to like. But if there’s some truth to this direct Mafia connection, it might also make sense now why the Bethlehem cops were so quick to pass judgment. Might’ve been encouraged to do so, if they were a little bent. Perhaps Detective Bowman knows a little more about Freddie “the Fireman” Parker than he’s letting on. Maybe Joan does also. And if they do, why not tell me about it first thing?

  There’s the sound of a key in the door. It opens.

  Aviva stands there in a fur coat, tan Ugg boots, long, dark hair parted over her right eye, draping her tan winter face. We may not be together in the end-all-be-all sense of the concept, but I really am a lucky man.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting,” she says, setting her keys down on the table by the door.

  “I was just leaving,” Hart says setting his coffee cup down on the counter. Then, turning to me, “Mr. Moonlight. I’m not trying to influence your investigation in any way. But I knew Peter, and I know Joan, and they are good, honest people. Perhaps to a fault. They were mortified over being related to Freddie, a known mobster with bloody fingers, if you will. Peter worked on the right side of the law and he was determined to do everything in his power to assist the police in bringing Freddie to justice.”

  “Even if he risked his and his wife’s lives doing it?”

  “I believe you just answered your own question.”

  The guy’s right. He slips on his jacket, shakes my hand loosely. I give him one of my cards, ask him to call me anytime should he think of something else. “You’re all heart, Mr. Hart,” I tell him.

  “Ha ha. I get that a lot.”

  He heads for the door, but not without giving Aviva the slow up and down and up again. “You are one lovely woman,” he says, not out of lust but pure admiration. “You must tell me who does your nails.”

  Aviva raises her hands. All ten fingers standing at attention, manicured nails proudly displayed. “Me, myself, and I,” she reveals.

  Hart looks down at his hand. “My cutes are a diddly-doo disaster,” he laments.

  Aviva laughs and lets him out, locks the door behind him.

  Turning to me from all the way across the loft, she smiles. “Rough diddly-doo day?” she asks.

  “Long goddamned night, too.”

  “Maybe this will help,” she says, unbuttoning her coat, letting it slide off her shoulders. It isn’t the black lace thong and matching push-up bra she’s wearing that takes my breath away. It’s how fucking delicious she looks in them.

  Star-crossed lovers that we are, I approach her, and she approaches me. I’m pretty sure I know what’s gonna happen next. And that it’s gonna be good. Very diddly-doo good.

  I wake up shortly after dawn.

  I don’t see the empty space beside me so much as feel it. Aviva, gone before the sunrise. Dawn Pilates. Then home to her own place in downtown Albany’s renovated Pastures district, where the prostitutes used to walk up and down Green Street trying to hustle tricks back when my old man was a little boy. Separate residences. That’s why Aviva and I work.

  It’s also why we don’t work. I don’t always like being alone at night. Moonlight, the needy.

  I get up, shuffle across the cold wood floor to the kitchen counter, make the coffee, hit the red light-up button that makes it brew. Then I make my way into the bathroom, turn on the shower, let the place steam up. I don’t even begin to start thinking until I’m under the heavy stream of hot water, letting it strafe my head and face.

  Is it possible to make sense of the Parker attacks?

  On one hand, there’s no doubt in my mind that the kid did it. Maybe the evidence looks circumstantial, but sometimes circumstance is all you need to determine guilt versus innocence. At least in the eyes of God and the common man. All you have to do is take a look at Ferrance’s timeline to realize the kid did it.

  There’s the fact that his Jeep is caught on both a campus security camera and a nearby medical center rooftop camera. There’s the testimony from the toll collectors who are convinced they took tolls from a young man driving a yellow Jeep Wrangler early on the morning of September 15th at a time when non-commercial traffic would be light. There’s the fact that whoever killed the Parkers knew enough to unlock the front door with a key safely hidden inside the flowerpot out front, then staged a break-in of the garage by slicing a phone line and a window screen. There’s the fact that nothing in the house was stolen. Not even Joan’s purse.

  And what about those college kids who testified about Christopher having been missing from the college dorm during the early morning hours when the attacks took place?

  Let’s not forget about nosy neighbor Maxwell Okey, who swears he saw Chris’s yellow Jeep parked in front of the house when he went to work that morning. The yellow Jeep had a mud stain on the back fender. Same mud stain the toll collectors noticed, same mud stain caught on video surveillance.

  Worst of all, there’s the fact that Joan fingered her own son as the guilty perpetrator. Maybe I have no business taking her money. Maybe I should tell her that. But I know what she’ll say. Don’t give up. She’s a mother who loves her son. She’ll take a bullet for him. Gladly. Even if he did try to chop her head off with a fireman’s axe.

  I soap my hands, wash my face. I don’t bother washing my hair with shampoo. My hair is cut so close to the scalp, it makes more sense just running some plain soap over the fuzz and scarred skin.

  I stand under the rinse for a while.

  Thinking.

  On another hand altogether, the very things that make Christopher seem guilty can also be construed as a setup. The “what ifs” in my mind begin popping up like spring petunias.

  What if Freddie “the Fireman” Parker wanted his cousin and his cousin’s wife dead for having testified against him, for having helped put him in prison? What if Chris wanted money so badly he was willing to make a deal with his notorious second cousin? What if Chris made a contract with Freddie to have his parents killed in order to receive a handsome insurance settlement, a percentage of which might be put into an account for Freddie for his use as he saw fit upon his release from a federal lockup? What if Freddie agreed to the murder plot but then pulled a fast one—a fast one that would not only make it look like he had nothing to do with murdering the Parkers but that would place the blame squarely and neatly on Chris’s shoulders? I guess if that was the case, Freddie would be giving up his portion of the insurance proceeds. But then, he would still be exacting his revenge on Peter for singing like a bird to the FBI.

  It’s not like Chris can plead a defense of “my cousin Freddie did it.” That would only implicate him further in the plot to murder his parents. Regardless of whether or not he swung the axe, he would receive just as much prison time. Maybe even get the death penalty. And if it didn’t, with Freddie’s connections in the joint, he’d be sure to get one, anyway.

  Either way you look at it, pointing the finger at Chris just seems too easy. But then pointing the finger at someone else seems stupid, considering the circumstantial evidence. So what if Chris had, in fact, worked in cahoots with Freddie? Either way I try to work this thing, the loose ends abound, but no matter what, the ki
d looks guilty as sin. And here I am trying to figure out a way to make him look not guilty. Doing it for money that belongs to a woman with one eye, a steel plate in her head, and very little life left in her soul.

  I reach outside the shower, grab my razor off the counter, run it down one side of my face and up the other, careful to avoid the goatee. A shock shoots through my spine when I cut myself below the lower jaw. I touch the cut spot with the pad of my finger, bring the blood to my mouth, suck it in. Tastes salty and sweet at the same time. Warm. Brings to mind the Parker kitchen. All that blood smeared all over, like somebody wallowed in it.

  I finish shaving. Then kill the water, towel off.

  If I’m going to continue to take money for this job, I have to admit one very important thing to myself: Chris is guilty of the murder of his father and the attempted murder of his mother. And if he is guilty, then it no longer makes sense to look into the who.

  From this point on, I want to know who else, why, and how they pulled it off. First stop on my revised quest: Chris Parker himself. Second stop: his sweet, second cousin Freddie “the Fireman” Parker.

  The new Albany County Correctional Facility is a country club compared to the old jail that once stood on this very spot, directly across the Hudson River from where my loft and office is located. Instead of the old barred doors and tiered cells, this one has a central common that’s surrounded by two levels of cells.

  Iron bars are no longer in incarceration vogue as the two-man units are closed off by means of heavy-duty Plexiglas. Inside the commons are tables and chairs permanently bolted to the battleship-gray concrete floor. There are wall-mounted televisions for everyone’s entertainment, along with central heating and A/C. There’s talk of limited access Internet, too. In the very center of all this is a flying saucer–shaped guard shack that hovers above all the action. Inside it are two or three uniformed county corrections officers who are constantly looking down at the orange-jumpsuited inmates while they play cards, watch television, or simply sit staring at the painted concrete-block walls trying to figure out where their lives took a turn for the bottoms.