Moonlight Weeps: (A Dick Moonlight PI Thriller Book 8) Page 14

  No one else occupies the bar.

  “Excuse me,” I say grabbing the blonde’s attention. “Do you know if Kevin is working?”

  “Kevin Woods?” she says brightly. Maybe too brightly. “Sure, can I say who’s calling?’

  “Dick Moonlight.” I pull a card from my wallet, hand it to her.

  She glances down at it.

  “A private detective, huh? Wow, never met one of those before.”

  I smile.

  “I get that a lot.”

  “How exciting,” she adds, looking me up and down. “I’ll tell Kevin you’re here.”

  “I’d be forever grateful.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She starts making her way back around the bar, and, as she does, she issues me a quick parting glance over her right shoulder.

  You still got it Moonlight, whatever the hell it is you got . . .

  When she disappears in back, I steal a sip of my beer. After spending the past twenty minutes being chased by a pair of drugged up Russians bent on putting new holes in my head, the cold sudsy beer goes down smooth and easy.

  Then a slam nearly rocks me out of my combat boots.

  “Who’s your momma?!” barks the Marine, as he pounds the bar with an iron fist that resembles a sledgehammer.

  The old man to my right lights up, lets out a belly laugh.

  “Can’t hold those goddamned Marines down now, can you, Richie?!” he shouts, his voice old and wavering, but still somehow spunky. “I beat the goddamned life savings out of a Marine in Korea, early summer of ’53. But, he toughed it out and won it all back plus my back pay for three months. We went off to fight the goddamned Chinese on Pork Chop Hill a few days later. Never did see the son of a bitch again. Never got his name either.”

  I toss him a nod, out of respect. But he just goes back to staring into his beer bottle, those hands trembling, remembering the horrors of Pork Chop Hill.

  Blonde Bartender returns. This time, she has a young man in tow. He’s dressed from top to bottom in a black kitchen staff uniform. He’s tall, with black hair that’s gelled into a faux hawk. He’s got a lot of facial hair for his age, and a thick earring in his left lobe that isn’t a traditional earring. More like a thick round stone that’s been inserted into a gaping hole in the lobe, not unlike something you might see a tribal native wearing in his ear deep in the Amazon Jungle.

  “I’m Kevin,” he says.

  I hold out my hand.

  “Moonlight.”

  He takes the hand in his, shakes it hard but at the same time, lifelessly.

  “Go somewhere to talk?” I say.

  “I could use a beer,” he says. “You buying?”

  “You’re a little young for alcohol,” I say.

  “I’m twenty-one. Twenty-two next month.”

  “Thought you were still in high school?”

  “How about we go outside while I have a smoke?” he suggests, before whispering, “Beer,” to Blonde Bartender.

  She brings him his beer. “Take it out of here?” she asks, picking up the twenty I laid out earlier.

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I say, grabbing my still full beer off the bar.

  She cashes out the beers, leaves the change on the bar.

  Together, Kevin and I head outside. Not quite mano a mano, but close enough.

  We huddle together at the far end of the building’s exterior where a stockade fence has been constructed. The fence surrounds a small seating area that’s dedicated to Lanie’s smoking clientele. Kevin pulls out a smoke from a pack of Marlboro Reds, offers one up to me. I gladly accept. Stuffing the pack back into his trouser pockets, he pulls out a Bic butane, fires mine up first before firing up his own. What Kevin’s lacking in personality, he’s making up for in manners.

  “My high school career at the prestigious Albany Academy for Boys got cut short while I went down river for a while. Coxsackie Correctional.”

  “Not the nicest of prisons,” I say, taking a drag on the cigarette, exhaling blue smoke into the cool night air. Over the course of my law enforcement career, both public and private, I’d known of at least three different inmates who were shivved to their untimely deaths inside the concrete and razor-wire walls of the Catskill, New York, medium-security joint. Anyone who’s got it in their skull that medium security is less dangerous than maximum security had better think twice. Medium security simply means you’re doing a medium length sentence, like four or five years. Doesn’t mean the criminals you’re locked up with are any less dangerous than an iron house that houses inmates for life.

  “I got involved in a drug smuggling scheme,” Kevin says, staring not at me but up at the stars as if he appreciates all too well the celestial view from outside the joint than inside. And who the hell can blame him? “We were pushing all sorts of chemicals,” he goes on. “Pharmaceuticals mostly. Stuff my partner had easy access to. We made beaucoup bucks in my high school alone.”

  There’s the P word again. Pharmaceuticals.

  “Let me guess,” I say. “Your partner was Stephen.”

  “Brilliant,” he says. “But it doesn’t take a Sherlock to figure that one out.”

  “How long did you work with him?”

  “He was a freshman when I was introduced to him. I was a senior. By then he’d been selling for a long time.” He peels his eyes away from the sky, focuses his attention on my face. “Rumor had it that his dad introduced him to the business.”

  I smoke.

  “His dad is a brain surgeon. Why would he need to push dope?”

  Kevin smokes, shrugs his shoulders.

  “Beats the living shit out of me, Mr. Moonlight. Why does anyone start selling drugs?”

  “Money. Or, the lack of it. Need I go on?”

  “Not really.”

  “So what happened? How did you end up in jail and not Stephen?”

  “We were scheduled to make a drop one night four years ago. It wasn’t the usual deal-out-of- your-locker-in-the-basement kind of thing where half the fucking faculty was buying from me. This one took place outside a car wash on Central Avenue. The big one.”

  “The Hollywood Car Wash.”

  “That’s it. I was to pull up around the back, away from the entrance where people pay for their car washes, before driving up onto the automatic rollers. Stephen was going to meet me there. But somebody else met me instead.”

  “Who?”

  “The fucking APD.”

  “They were waiting for you?”

  “Yes, sir, led by a narcotics detective by the name of Nick Miller.”

  Lightning could have struck, and it wouldn’t have phased me as much as what the kid just told me.

  “I see,” I say. “And you still keep in touch with Stephen? I understand you were at his party last Friday night.”

  “I was. There was never any proof Stephen set me up in the first place. In fact, I’m told his dad did his best to see that I got the best lawyer in town and that I never wanted for anything while I was in the joint. They indicted me as an adult and wanted to put me away for twenty years in Green Haven, but Doctor Schroder’s lawyers copped a plea. I was to do four years in Coxsackie. Three if I showed good behavior. I got out in three and a half.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone came after me with a screwdriver after chow. But I was quicker than him. I pulled it out of his hand and stabbed him in the ear canal with it.”

  I can only wonder if Kevin can notice how wide my eyes just got.

  “Remind me not to piss you off, Kevin,” I say. Stealing a drag off the smoke, I take a moment to think. “Is it possible that the bust was a setup?”

  He nods.

  “It’s crossed my mind more than a few times.”

  He gives me this look with those dark eyes that feels like someone just filled my spine up with ice water.

  “The Schroder’s are nasty people,” I say. “Sounds to me like you were set up by them to take a fall that was
meant for Stephen. Instead, they gave you up. Then they might have tried to take you out while you were in the joint. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times before.”

  He finishes his smoke, drops the butt to the pavement, stamps it out.

  “I gotta get back to work,” he says, his face ashen in the moonlight. I’m convinced I’ve struck a chord he’s always been suspicious about but doesn’t like to contemplate.

  He pushes past me.

  “Kevin,” I say. “One more thing.”

  He turns back to me.

  “What is it?”

  “You were at the party the other night. Did Stephen and Amanda willingly go upstairs to his bedroom together? Or did he force or coerce her in any way?”

  He shakes his head, smiles. But it’s not a happy smile.

  “You gotta ask? She was as much trouble as he is. The two of them . . . They were a pair.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Fuck yeah, Moonlight. She was my goddamned girlfriend. Until pretty recently.”

  “So you’re the one,” I say. “I spoke with a friend of yours, Jill, a little while ago. She said that Amanda went upstairs that night with Stephen just to make you jealous.”

  He bites down so hard on his bottom lip I think it might bleed. Thank Christ, he’s not holding a screwdriver in his hand.

  I picture Stephen Schroder in his orange county lockup jumpsuit. Think about the shackles and cuffs on his wrists and ankles. Think about how protected he is behind all that iron and concrete.

  “It’s possible Stephen will make bail,” I reveal.

  He purses his lips, the left corner of his mouth forming a slight grin.

  “One can only hope,” he says, before disappearing back into the bar.

  There’s a ceramic bowl set out on the metal table. It’s filled with sand. Dozens of spent butts stick out of it. They look like miniature cancer-stick tombstones. I bury the butt, adding one more tombstone to the collection.

  “The Schroders have one hell of a talent for ruining people’s lives,” I whisper to no one in particular.

  Heading back inside the bar, I set down my half-consumed beer and eye Blonde Bartender.

  “Bourbon,” I say. “And make it double.”

  Chapter 48

  I wake up on my bed to the sound of my ringing cell phone with no memory of having gone to bed in the first place. Even a relatively small amount of Jack Daniels will do that to a man with damaged gray matter. Rolling over, I take a glance at my watch. Seven in the morning. I miss the long gone days of youth when I’d quite naturally sleep in until eleven after having spent a good portion of the night and early morning drinking Jack and beer.

  My head hurts.

  I slip out of bed, head into the bathroom, drain my bladder then wash my face, brush my teeth. In the kitchen, I down four Advil with an entire eight-ounce bottle of room temperature spring water. I glance at my phone and see that the call came from Georgie. My heartbeat picks up and a pit lodges inside my chest. I know he’s got news of Lola. Life or death news. I want to call him back, but I can’t. Not yet. I just can’t face either possibility.

  When the coffee’s made, I pour a dollop of two percent milk in it and take it out onto the back deck with me. As the morning sun shines down on my face, I begin to feel the blood resuming its slow and steady course through my arteries, veins, and capillaries. I’m fully aware that it’s time to get back to healthy living again. The running. The lifting. The no smoking. The minimal booze. But then, the death face of Lola enters into my head, and I want to swallow a deep drink of numbness — shaken not stirred. Add to that the face of a young girl who hanged herself in her parent’s basement and I’d just assume lock myself up in the hotel room along with Jack Daniels for a few days.

  My eyes on the steadily moving Hudson River, I can only wonder why I was so deeply affected by young Kevin Woods having lost his ex-girlfriend to suicide last weekend. Maybe it’s the fact that he not only lost her to suicide but also to Stephen prior to the suicide. Maybe it has something to do with my having something in common with the young man: My having lost Lola, and now having to deal with the possibility that she might be back from the dead. But then, no one comes back from the dead. No one, except me, that is. Only Moonlight rises. Again and again.

  In my head, I see the sweet, innocent photo of Amanda, and I realize that the more I find out about her, the less I know. About the only thing I do know is how much she resembles a young Lola. I’ve never seen the Facebook pictures that Stephen posted. Perhaps that would shed some light on why she decided to kill herself. The only way I can get access to those now is to place a call to Nick Miller. It’s time I called the narc turned homicide detective anyway.

  Pouring another cup of coffee, I dial Miller’s cell hoping he’ll be up.

  He answers after the first ring.

  “Up with the chickens?” I say.

  “The life is short but the nights are long, Moonlight,” he says. By the hollow sound of his voice, I can tell he’s put me on speaker phone and that he’s driving. “What’s on your mind?”

  I give him the short of it. About Schroder firing my ass after I lost my shit on him, about his drug smuggling/dealing partners in the Russian mob trying to exterminate me on Interstate 90, about my little liaison with Bates’ sister-in-law, about my meeting with Jill at Starbucks, and about my second meeting with Kevin at Lanie’s Bar. And finally about Doc Schroder facilitating his own son, along with Kevin and the now deceased Amanda Bates, in their own little Oxy dealing scheme.

  “Exactly the kind of intel I’m looking for,” Miller says. “Amanda wasn’t little Miss Innocent.”

  “It’s possible, if not probable, she wasn’t raped, Nick,” I say. “And as much as I despise the pudgy blond Scarface, you’re holding him on a phony charge.”

  “That’s your opinion. He took those pictures of her.”

  “I agree, that wasn’t cool. But how do you know she didn’t let him take them?”

  “Maybe she did. Still doesn’t give him the right to post them on Facebook.”

  “But does that give a court of law the right to peg him with murder in any form?”

  “Apparently not. I still say the kid needs to be locked up.”

  “I agree, but from what I’m hearing, Amanda was more than complicit in this thing. She, too, was selling Oxy with Stephen. I think her family knew all about it. Why else would Amanda’s own aunt get me directly in touch with those two kids? I’m sure she doesn’t like Stephen any more than we do, but you can’t justify one girl’s suicide by making someone else go to prison for something he didn’t do. Justice doesn’t work that way. Shouldn’t work that way, anyway.”

  In the back of my mind, I’m picturing Miller’s wife . . . how dead and hopelessly gone she must have appeared to him on the operating table. Like a great writer once said, The dead look really dead when their dead. Miller has his agenda, and it’s an emotionally fueled one.

  “Well, all this conversation is for naught, Moonlight,” he says.

  I sip my coffee, watch a kingfisher make a nose dive into the river where it snatches a small fish in its sharp beak.

  “I’m not reading you, Nick.”

  “I’m currently on my way to Albany County Lockup. Stephen’s made bail.”

  Talking about the possibility of his bail is one thing, but then hearing that it’s a reality is quite another.

  “What happened?”

  “It so happens, my gumshoe friend, that you’re right on the money. One young woman’s suicide does not constitute murder on the part of another in any form. The judge tossed the charge of reckless murder out at the kid’s arraignment last evening in county court. He also dropped the rape charges citing insufficient evidence since no seminal fluid was retrieved from her interior. ’Course, there’s probably a used condom that got flushed, but that’s not gonna help matters. In the end, the only thing the kid was pegged with was drunk and disorderly conduct. It’s possible there
could be some charges pending for him uploading the Facebook pictures, but that would have to do with an Internet crime, and that’s a Federal issue. I’m on my way to signature his release from county lockup, sad as it sounds.”

  “What about his father? The Oxy smuggling?”

  “To be honest, Moonlight, I’ve been all over that for a while now. Like you said, Stephen is involved, and that kid Woods was involved. Now we know Amanda could have been involved. Point is, this thing is only now just beginning to reveal its tangled web of scumbags. Also, I’m sure there’s more than just those two Russian clowns involved, and as soon as I know more about who and what is involved, I’m gonna bring the whole house down. But it calls for patience.”

  “So, you’re saying it’s too early to bust the doctor.”

  “Yup. If we can’t get Stephen on reckless murder, we’ll get him on dealing pharmaceuticals along with the old man. He won’t go away forever, but he’ll go away for long enough.”

  “That is, the kid lives long enough.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Last night when I mentioned the possibility of bail to Woods, he acted kind of strange.”

  “Like how strange? Like I’ll be waiting for him with an ax strange?”

  The image of a screwdriver crosses my mind.

  “Sort of. Woods shot me this look with his dark eyes. Gave me the willies.”

  He goes quiet for a moment so that only the sounds of the air rushing by his car fills the line.

  Then, “You working for anyone right now, Moonlight?”

  “Not exactly,” I say.

  “Good, meet me at County Lockup. I’ve got an idea.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now? I’m hung over as all fuck.”

  “So am I. Doesn’t stop me from serving and protecting.”