Murder by Moonlight Read online

Like the Albany County jail up north, the interior of Green Haven Prison is battleship gray and devoid of primary colors. Blood would look really good here spilled on the floor. That is to say, it would really show up scarlet/crimson against a gray-matter backdrop. Unlike up north, however, this place is old. It smells like old unwashed socks, and even though it’s made of concrete and iron, the place seems to creak like a scrawny old man.

  As the guard sergeant leads me along a narrow, windowless corridor that connects the public waiting area with general population, I can’t help but make out the sounds of the prison. There are the occasional indiscernible shouts of the inmates, the occasional scream, the occasional man bursting forth with a tortured laugh. The banging of doors and cells competes with the human noises. That combination wet-sock-and-worm smell pervades the air. It’s a thick, pasty odor that seems to coat the inside of my mouth and tongue like a vapor. It leaves me feeling slightly nauseous.

  When we come to G Block, however, the sick smell gives way to something entirely different. This place smells good. Like an Italian restaurant on Prince Street in Manhattan. The old wet socks are now replaced with the good smell of garlic, olive oil, rosemary, tomato sauce, and sizzling meats. The guard sergeant doesn’t lead me to a windowless interview room or a cell, but instead, to a small kitchen that’s located in an area converted from two or three separate first-floor cells.

  When I step inside through the narrow door, two men look up at me. They’re seated at a round kitchen table positioned to the right of a giant stove and a butcher-block counter. The two men are wearing green prison jumpsuits that look like they’ve been professionally cleaned and pressed. They also wear expensive running shoes on their feet. Their hair is thick and black and the one on the far right has streaks of gray in his. They’re playing cards and drinking wine. Set out on the tabletop is an uncorked, fat-bottomed bottle of Chianti. The kind with the little wicker basket wrapped around the lower half.

  If you’re gonna do time in prison, it pays to be a wise guy.

  Standing at the stove is a portly man who also wears prison greens, his protected by a long apron on which is stitched the words “God Bless the Cuoco” in the red, green, and white of the Italian national flag. He’s stirring something in a big metal pot. Set out on the counter beside him is a big loaf of Italian bread. Pulling the spoon from the pot, he sets it down, breaks off a piece of the bread, dips it into the pot. Coming back out with the now-steaming, sauce-covered bread, he hands it to the guard sergeant.

  “You staying for dinner, Giovanni?” the cook asks in a low, raspy, smoker’s voice. He’s a short man, but thick around the middle. His face is puffy and clean-shaven, hair trimmed and jet black. A professional dye job to be sure. Brown eyes seem to bulge out of their sockets when the guard starts chomping on the bread. Lovingly.

  “Nah,” the guard mumbles, chewing. “Maddy’s making supper tonight. Fucking cube steaks. You can bounce ’em off the wall by the time she’s done cookin’ the wee-wee out of ’em. Wish I could stay.” The CO seems genuinely disappointed. Then, “This is the man I told you about. Name’s Moonlight. Wants a minute of your time to talk about your nephew, Chris.” Turning to me, holding out his hand in introductory fashion. “Moonlight, Freddie; Freddie, Moonlight.”

  Puckering his lips, Freddie wipes his hand on his apron, then holds it out to me. He’s being cordial, polite, sincere even. But my built-in shit detector also tells me that the last thing he wants is for me to be invading his personal space for the purpose of quizzing him on his wayward nephew.

  “Private eye, huh?” he says, not without a grin.

  “Yeah, like Jim Rockford.” I shake his hand. It’s warm from the stove. But he puts no effort into his grip, not unlike his second cousin Chris.

  He pulls off his apron, tosses it onto the counter, grabs a pack of smokes from his chest pocket, flips a cig into his mouth.

  One of the guys at the table, the one with the gray in his hair, lays out his cards flat onto the table. “Uno. Due. Tre. Quattro…Cinque!” The other man drops his cards, shakes his head, disgusted. Gray Hair grabs the money off the table, shoves it into his chest pocket.

  “Come on, Rockford,” Freddie says, “we’ll get more privacy outside.”

  The guard sergeant begins to leave us. “Call me when you’re done, Moonlight,” he instructs, nodding to the black phone mounted on the wall outside the kitchen.

  I follow the infamous Freddie “the Fireman” Parker out of the kitchen and out of the block to an open yard full of fresh air.

  The yard is wide and cheerful. Especially for a prison. The razor wire–topped chain-link fence doesn’t hide the fact that a man can enjoy a nice lunch on the picnic table, or shoot a couple of hoops on the basketball court, or play a little handball against the vertical concrete wall, or maybe jog a few laps on the gravel path that follows the perimeter of the yard. This isn’t like any prison environment I’m used to. Mob men like Fireman Freddie have their privileges.

  There won’t be any picnics today, though, since the temperature is barely above freezing. Still, Freddie doesn’t seem to mind the cold in his thin jumpsuit as he cups his cigarette and fires it up with a Bic butane.

  “Parker doesn’t seem like an Italian name to me.” Me, breaking the ice.

  “It’s ain’t. My name’s Grosso. Peter and I share the same grandparents on my father’s side.”

  “I see. Peter was half Italian or thereabouts.”

  “So you wanna know about Christopher,” he says through a blue cloud of exhaled smoke. “You wanna know if you think he fucked up my cousin and his wife.”

  I nod.

  “And you wanna know if maybe, just maybe, I had something to do with it, too. ’Cause no way in hell could a white-bread kid like Chris manage that kind of hack job all on his lonesome.” Turning to me, that cig dangling from his lips. “Am I close, Moonlight?”

  “Yup,” I agree. And then, “Your cousin, Peter. Is it possible you two had become enemies since he handed over information regarding the…ah…business you have chosen?”

  He chuckles. What a writer might refer to as a sardonic laugh.

  “Peter was a dope,” he jibes with a shake of his head. “He wanted to be a lawyer, but he didn’t want to make money at it. He chose instead to play errand boy to judges like Cross.” Dragging on his smoke. “Joan’s never forgiven him.”

  “She expected something more from her husband?”

  Shooting me a glance. “You ever seen the clothes that bitch wears? Probably cost half Peter’s salary. She used to be a good lookin’ broad. Don’t look so good now, though, I’ll bet. Always wondered what she was like in the sack. My cousin might have treated her better.”

  “I got the impression Joan loved her husband.”

  He cocks his head, exhales some more smoke. “Maybe she did. Who knows. They were very Catholic. Catholics are loyal to the core, you know? Part of their self-punishment makeup.”

  “You ever persuade Peter to join the dark side?”

  He belts out a laugh, nearly doubles over. “That what this is? Fuckin’ Star Wars? Fuckin’ Luke versus Darth? You give the lawyers of the world too much fuckin’ credit. At least I’m honest about what I do for a living. Those crooks hide behind a sheepskin and a goddamned country club membership.”

  “Not Peter. He was the exception.”

  “Peter was the can-do-nothin’-wrong-in-the-eyes-of-the-Lord white knight and his family paid dearly.” He sucks in the rest of the cig, then flicks the smoking butt out onto the frozen brown grass. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he pulls his arms close to his body for warmth. “Yeah, sure, Moonlight, what the fuck, I asked him to join me. Once, a long time ago. He was barely outta law school. Told him I could get him a cush job as family consigliere. Know what that is?”

  “I’ve seen the Godfathers six times. Not the third one. Third one sucks.”

  “Oh, yeah, love those flicks, and yeah, the third one blows…Anyway, I can net Peter like
six figures back when six figures is a fuckin’ fortune, right? He won’t even have to get his hands dirty. Shit, just shuffle a bunch of paper, maybe move some cash around, pay some PR visits to some local judges now and again.”

  “But Peter can’t be persuaded.” It’s a question. If I were Doc O’Connor, I’d put a hmmmmm, at the end of it.

  “Peter won’t bite. So we go our separate ways and I never really speak to him a whole lot again, other than at the occasional family function. Until…” Freddy lets the thought dangle like a string of garlic off the kitchen wall.

  “Until what, Mr. Fireman?”

  “It’s Freddie, asshole. Jesus, Moonlight, ain’t you got more sense than to bust a wise guy’s balls? You got a death wish or something?”

  If only he knew. “Sorry…Until what, Fredo?”

  That gets a chuckle out of him. He’s looking far out in the distance now, past the fence, at something I can’t imagine. “A few years back, the kid, Chris, he comes knockin’ at my door. Says he’s got a job for me, if I’m interested.”

  “A job, for you.”

  “Yeah, can you fuckin’ believe it? Kid can’t be more than eighteen and he thinks he’s bringing me work. Anyway, he says he’s got these two computers he wants to hock and maybe I can help him with a buyer. I ask him where he got the computers and why I should waste my time with something so small. But he just laughs, cute and cuddly-like.”

  “His parents’ computers. Am I right?”

  It dawns on me that Peter and Joan might have had some real dirt on their cousin stored on those computer hard drives. Dirt the FBI might have been very interested in when it came time to put Freddie away.

  “So this kid—who has some serious cojones, by the way—this kid steals his own parents’ computers and tries to get me to sell them. Can you believe the steel ones on this skinny punk? I tell him to take a hike and put the laptops back before Peter finds out and takes away his PlayStation for a week. So what’s he do? He puts them up on eBay, tries to hock them there. Then he stages a break-in. Kid’s ballsy, but he’s no Einstein.”

  Freddie ordered the kid to put the computers back instead of using the opportunity to destroy them. Maybe he didn’t give a rat’s ass what evidence against him might have been stored on the computers. In the end, he landed in prison anyway.

  “Did he ever approach you again, Freddie?”

  “Yeah, from time to time, he’d ask me if I had any work for him, which I would have been happy to give him, if he wasn’t psicotico.” Pointing the index finger on his smoking hand at his temple, rolling it around a few times.

  “You mean like psycho?”

  “Exactly. You can see it in the kid’s eyes. He’s super polite and thin and gentle and gives off this appearance like he wouldn’t so much as tear the wing off a fly. But I can see it in him. He’s a fuckin’ crazy psycho killer and he just doesn’t know it yet. Or maybe he does, now. But then he didn’t yet. You know, like a young guy who doesn’t know he’s queer.” He shivers, like he’s just gotten the chills. “Kid fuckin’ gives me the creeps, man.”

  “Peter think he was psycho?”

  “Well, after the computer incident, Peter got in touch with me. Asked me if the kid approached me with the computers. I told him the truth. He got mad at me, like it was my fault the kid came to me. I told him I wasn’t the kid’s keeper. He was. That maybe he ought to get a better job so the kid didn’t have to turn to grand larceny with a well-known third-class mobster to make his car and tuition payments. Peter hung up on me. Six weeks later, I’m indicted for tax evasion. I get sent down here for a five-year stretch of Green Haven paradise. Peter’s the prosecutor’s main witness. Jesus, had I known that, I would have gladly accepted the computers, gone though them a little, gotten some dirt on my cousin and his beautiful wife.” He shakes his head, puckers his lips, and spits.

  So that explains why Freddie never bothered to take charge of the computers. He must not have been privy to Peter’s cozy little relationship with the feds yet.

  “You mad at Peter?”

  He laughs some more. Sardonically. “Lot of good being pissed off does me now.”

  “You mad enough to send strange men to the house? Men who might hang around the driveway from time to time, put a scare in Joan and Peter?”

  “Not me. I don’t make the decisions for shit like that. If that happened, it would have come from an order somebody above me made.” Cocking his head. “I wouldn’t doubt we sent a wise guy or two over there. Serves the bastard right for not minding his own business…God rest his fucking soul.”

  “You ever mad enough at Peter to kill him? Joan?”

  He turns to me, looks me in the eye. He isn’t laughing or smiling now. “Let’s get one thing straight, Moonlight. I might be a wise guy and lowlife, at that, but I ain’t no fucking killer and I don’t hand down orders to kill. And even if I could, I wouldn’t take out my own flesh and blood, no matter how fucked up our relationship. Got it? I do hope to go to heaven one night in my sleep, if there is a heaven.” Cocking his head again. “We got other guys to do the dirty work. You know what I mean? But let me ask you something? You ever known a wise guy to use an axe in an assassination? Give me a fucking break.”

  “Capice.” I nod, knowing full well that mobsters prefer guns. Pistols—.22-caliber untraceable weapons, in fact. “But what about the kid?”

  Filling chubby cheeks with air, blowing it out through puckered lips, real slow. “Jeez, I’m freezin’ my ass off,” he says suddenly. “And my sauce is gonna burn.”

  I get the message loud and super crystal.

  “You got anymore for me, Moonlight?”

  “No thanks, Freddie.” I hold out my hand.

  He takes it, shakes it, harder this time. Lets it go. “You know, I like you, Moonlight. You’re not like other PIs I seen come round here.”

  I follow him to the door. He holds it open for me.

  “You don’t jump to a lot of conclusions,” he keeps talking. “And you might be a ballbuster, but you do listen.”

  “I wish my new girlfriend would tell me that.”

  “That you’s a ballbuster?”

  “That I’m a good listener.”

  “She pretty?”

  “Yup.”

  “She smart, got a good job?”

  “Double yup. An artist and a teacher.”

  “You a pain in the ass to live with?”

  “Triple yup.”

  “Treat her better or you’ll lose her.” He opens the door to the kitchen, the good smell of homemade spaghetti sauce hitting me in the face. “Hang on to her. Hang on to what’s important.”

  “I’ll try harder.” I don’t have the heart to tell him about my son, about his living all the way out on the West Coast. Don’t have the heart to tell him about the pit that grows in my stomach whenever I’m reminded of him.

  “Come for dinner sometime, Moonlight,” Freddie offers while wrapping his apron back around his paunch. “It ain’t the Four Seasons, but the food’s better. So’s the vino.”

  “Not on your life. But I appreciate the invite.”

  Closing the door behind me, I pick up the phone, dial 0 for the operator. When she comes on the line, I tell her to hook me up with Guard Sergeant Giovanni. The guard answers. I tell him I’m finished with my interview.

  “Be there in a jiff,” he says.

  I hang up, breathe in the good smells of cooking food, and contemplate an obvious possibility: Chris Parker axed his parents without the help of cousin Fireman Freddie.

  It’s going on happy hour by the time I get back to Albany. That is, if you consider 2:45 in the afternoon happy hour. At Terry Kindler, Esq.’s request, I meet him at the Lark Tavern in West Albany.

  I’m one of those guys who hates surprises.

  And surprise, surprise, Kindler’s got a guest with him.

  A tall young man. Solidly built. Blond hair cut close to the scalp. As I approach their position at the end of the bar, the kid eye
s me up and down with intense blue eyes. This might be a surprise, but I know who he is without Terry having to introduce us. I hold out my hand.

  “Sorry for your loss,” I offer. “My name is Moonlight.”

  Guess it doesn’t matter that I’m working on behalf of his brother. He takes hold of the hand like a lion bites at fresh meat. Fast and painfully hard. He isn’t trying to be friendly. He’s showing off, trying to prove he’s taller than me, stronger than me, tougher than me, and younger than me. The complete opposite of the other Parker males I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. He’s also trying to impress upon me that he can readily kick my ass if it ever comes to that. I’ve met the type before. Seems PIs do with some regularity. Type A with a little anger-derived-at-birth sprinkled in. If I were a physician, I might tell him that if he doesn’t lighten up, he’ll be dead of a heart attack by sixty. Somehow, I don’t think he’d take my advice.

  Kindler swallows a drink of his draft beer, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Upper-class esquire meets the barfly.

  “Moonlight, meet Jonathan Parker,” he says, his face more than a little stressed. “Jonathan’s taking an emergency shore leave to help out his mother and brother while we solicit the court for Christopher’s release on parole.”

  If I remember my facts correctly, Jonathan is twenty-four years of age. He wears a black leather jacket and a gray turtleneck, tight brand-new Levi’s, and black lace-up military combat boots that have been spit polished. His face is clean-shaven, but I doubt he can grow much of a beard in the first place. He’s no stranger to the weight room. Body fat maybe 14 or 15 percent at most. Judging from the way that he looks down into my eyes, he’s already formed an opinion of me. If I have to make a guess, that opinion is not a good one.

  “I have one question for you, Moonlight,” he says, his forearm resting on the bar while his right hand grips a beer bottle. “Do you think my brother killed my father and hacked up my mother?”

  His face is deadpan. He used the active verb “hack” effectively enough. But not to describe any action. He did it to shake me up. Why is he so interested in shaking me up? Intimidating me?