Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls Read online

  The job involved a teenaged kid who, in a drunken stupor, rammed his motorcycle into a parked car killing both himself and the woman who was still belted into the driver’s seat.

  A clear case of vehicular manslaughter.

  That is, had the kid lived.

  But at Cain’s request I gave the scene a quick once-over, examining both the wreckage of the motorcycle and the car—the former a Harley Davidson and the latter a Volkswagen Beetle. In my estimation the kid had been killed instantly when he went through the side window and collided head to head with the driver, who was also killed instantly.

  Even now I recalled taking the time to check out their separate I.D.s—names, addresses, D.O.B.s and vitals. The fact that they were both organ donors (blood type B and A respectively), didn’t surprise me in the least.

  So far so good, as far as two unnecessary deaths went.

  But when I requested the scheduling of an autopsy with George Robb, Cain swore up and down that it would be waste of precious time. That if I went “easy on this one,” he’d see that I was well compensated. The force—especially S.I.U.—was overworked now, he claimed. That was back when Jake, in cooperation with the Mayor, had initiated a plan to rent cops out to private businesses as security guards. The result? The S.P.D. didn’t always have the manpower or the resources necessary to investigate every little accident or drug-related shooting that came their way.

  I remember standing there, little more than a year after my accident, nauseous as all hell from the anti-inflammatory drugs they were making me take on top of the motion sickness pills and prescription codeine. I recall thinking, Little? There are two dead people lying in the middle of the road and you’re calling the situation “little.”

  But Cain insisted: why did I think he had to resort to hiring back retired and disabled cops on a freelance basis to lessen the load? He just didn’t have the staff or the time. So if I could work it out with him at his request, things would go a lot smoother.

  “And who knows, old partner,” he said, “this is Stormville after all. I can give you a shitload of work on top of the disability scratch.”

  The golden carrot set before me in the hazy glow of the street lamps, Cain stated that in his own opinion, cause, manner and mechanism of death were obvious (crashed motorcycle; massive head trauma; accident). There was no reason to prolong both families’ agonies. Then, with his back to the parked cruisers and the accident wreckage, he proceeded to slide out ten, one-hundred dollar bills from the interior pocket of his blazer, stuffed them into the side pocket of my leather jacket.

  At the time, I was going through my divorce.

  With my mounting law bills and support payments, I never considered the possibility of not taking the cash. After all, I wasn’t a regular cop anymore. I was simply a part-timer living on the Union’s disability. They wanted to throw a little extra cash at me, I might find myself a little more cooperative in my methods of investigation.

  And cooperative I was.

  I simply reached out with my pen, signed off on the paperwork, then went home to draw up a full case synopsis of my own.

  The second job came a month later.

  A fifty-seven-year-old widow had jumped from the fifth floor window of her downtown apartment building onto the Grand Street cobblestones in what was once Stormville’s Little Italy. Murder as the manner of death had already been ruled out by on-site S.P.D. when no forcible entry and no fingerprints, latent or otherwise, other than the woman’s own were discovered at the scene.

  But when I was brought in, I could immediately see that the shattered body was found lying face down in the road only about twelve feet away from the building. Anyone having passed Forensics 101 will tell you that suicides always jump out of a window or off a ledge. Homicides, on the other hand, are almost always dropped so that they land right beside the wall or the concrete sidewalk below.

  Of course, I recalled not being particularly surprised by the fact that this woman was also an organ donor. I didn’t think twice about it while I watched Cain pull up to the scene in an unmarked cop cruiser, again with specific underhanded instructions for me to keep my mouth shut about the possibility of murder, despite the position and location of the body. Once more he offered me cash.

  Twenty-one-hundred big ones.

  This time however, in the interest of covering our asses, Cain agreed that I call on my friend George Robb to assist with what amounted to about a half-hour of bogus paperwork and signatures. For the sake of S.O.P.

  S.O.P. according to Cain.

  I took careful sips of the whiskey, moved through the stacks of notes, records and reports like a man possessed.

  The third job came just one week later in late September of 2000.

  A twenty-year-old black man was gunned down outside T.J.’s. Bar and Grille on South Pearl Street inside Stormville’s south end. Cain met me on the scene at two in the morning, again asking me to sign off on their case synopsis and, at the same time, seeing what I could do about securing the necessary paperwork without going to the bother of autopsy.

  “They’re just drug dealers anyway,” is how he put it, while handing me yet another envelope. This time a mouthwatering grand total of twenty-five hundred.

  I sat at the kitchen table and once more ran down the Xeroxed list of the dealer’s vitals. His height, weight, criminal record, and how the dealer bequeathed his body to science. The postmortem request was to take immediate effect upon his sudden death.

  “Bequeathed his body to science,” I whispered to myself.

  I guess that’s when the realization slapped me over the head.

  I flipped through the remaining stack of notes. I had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me earlier, or why I had never noticed it until now. Maybe it had something to do with my condition. Maybe it had something to do with sitting down and wading through the material all at once. Because it was only now that the pattern seemed crystal clear. Obvious even. Or was it just a coincidence that every single man and woman whose death I had, quote—investigated—unquote, had consented to organ donation?

  I looked through each and every case one more time, starting from the top.

  Like I said, all of them had organ donor status in common. And there was something else too. Every one of the victims had died a violent, unnatural death.

  I sat back and thought about it for a moment.

  If I were the M.E, would I have bothered to save what was left of those damaged bodies for science and/or medicine once I’d completed the autopsy?

  Probably not.

  More than likely, I would have handed over the battle-scarred bodies to the respective families for burial and left it at that.

  Christ, why hadn’t I bothered to step out of the forest before now?

  Was it possible that I had been so blind that I hadn’t even begun to recognize the part I had been playing in what now looked to me like a black market operation to sell body parts? Was my personal policy of asking no (or very few) questions about to backfire on me now that I had left my name on a paper trail that could be traced all over New York State? Was my brain that messed up?

  I took a drink, stared down at the pile of notes, records and papers.

  Paper tigers poised to bury their fangs and claws into my back.

  More than two dozen cases of suicides, gunshot and car crash victims, drowning deaths, you name it. Every single one of them organ donors and every one of their case synopses executed by me and in full agreement with S.P.D. findings.

  Dick Divine, part-time corroborator, big-time patsy, full-time head case.

  I thought a little more about Cain’s threat to make me the number one suspect in Scarlet’s suicide-cum-murder. He had copies of everything at his fingertip disposal, I was sure. You see Cain wasn’t the type to overlook things like that. He had been using me all along as the perfect chump for his operation and I hadn’t so much as asked a single question about why he wanted to use me.

  That is until the S.
P.D. Captain himself personally brought me in on Scarlet’s case. No wonder Cain and Montana seemed so caught off-guard when I refused to be their rubberstamp. For the first time in three years’ worth of cases, I was turning my back on them, refusing to follow their line.

  Maybe Cain was right when he said that I had suddenly grown a conscience. Maybe not. But then, he was right about one thing. He had the power to nail me to a wall.

  Power and paper.

  He had the ability to establish motive not only in the form of my on-again, off-again affair with Scarlet, but also for my having been seen in her home the very night of her murder. And Cain had the beer bottle with my D.N.A. on it to prove it. For all I knew, he had a secret videotape stashed away somewhere, showing Scarlet and me doing the wild thing.

  Shit!

  When I really thought about it, Cain could nail me with motive, opportunity, intent and means. It was as simple as all that.

  No murder weapon?

  Of course there was no murder weapon because I had been the one to dispose of it. I just had no recollection of it. That’s the absolute line they would take in a court of law, so help me God or fate.

  Okay, Divine old boy, take a breath … that’s it, breathe easy, get your head together.

  I knew then I needed a lawyer. Cain had been right about that too. There was no time to waste. What choice did I have? None, other than contacting the same man whose firm handled my divorce. My Dad’s one-time lawyer.

  Regardless of the thirty Gs I still owed him.

  48

  SEVEN GOD-AWFUL DIGITS I knew by heart.

  My lawyer, Stanley Rose. His direct office line.

  “You got a lot of nerve calling me, Divine,” he said.

  I tried to look on the bright side: at least he didn’t hang up on me.

  “I’m doing my best to pay you back,” I said, voice cool and calm. “I swear it.”

  It was the truth.

  Stanley said, “For more than a year now I’ve been asking you to take some kind of action on your bill. You haven’t so much as responded once. Tell me, Divine, what will it take to get this bill paid?”

  I pictured the fifty-something lawyer seated at his wide mahogany desk, horn-rimmed glasses sliding down his straight nose, full head of gray hair groomed to perfection, pale cheeks flushed with anger.

  I said, “Listen, Stanley, I’m working on something that will get you paid back in full plus plenty extra.”

  For a beat there was only his inhaling and exhaling into the receiver.

  “What do you need?”

  I started from the beginning, not holding anything back, trying not to repeat anything.

  After I finished, I asked him if he’d seen anything about the fatal Montana house fire on T.V.

  “Bits and pieces,” he admitted. I knew he had a flat-screened digital television inside his office. It told me he was holding back.

  “Then you already know something about my situation,” I said. “My predicament.”

  “A little,” he confirmed. “You mind if I call Miner to get his personal take?”

  “You don’t trust your own client?”

  “Who said you were still my client?”

  “Don’t sweat it, Stan,” I insisted. “Miner will confirm my story. Every last detail.”

  “Then we have no problem.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to help me?”

  You see, Stanley Rose might be a lawyer, but he was also a businessman. If a black market organ operation existed inside the S.P.D and if I was being set up by one of its principal operators, then he definitely wanted in on the action. A case like that would no doubt make national headlines. National headlines would mean mucho exposure, mucho business. At least, that’s what I was banking on.

  “First things first, Divine,” he went on. “This cop, Cain. If he’s able to somehow prove you were involved in the organ donor operation, no matter the level, you go down right along with him. And that’s aside from your involvement in Scarlet’s murder.”

  “Supposed involvement, Stan,” I corrected.

  “Scarlet Montana’s murder is a whole separate issue. The body parts scheme is another. Your best bet would be to cop a plea with the State for immunity.”

  “Listen, I had no idea what was going on behind the scenes when I signed off on their cases. Cain would call me in, give me my orders as a part-time investigator, and I did what he told me to do.”

  “But you knew you were breaking the law.”

  “My superior in the department was ordering me to break it.”

  Stanley cleared his throat.

  He said, “Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go, Divine. You cannot plead ignorance in a court of law. You cannot rely on a perceived disability as a crutch. Maybe you have a bullet in your head but I believe your ability to determine right from wrong is pretty damned reliable. So let’s cut through the gray matter right now.”

  There occurred one of those deadly pauses, like waiting for the executioner to slide the needle in the vein.

  He asked me if I had access to the original records.

  I told him that the originals would have to be stored in the S.P.D. warehouse. Microfilm copies would be available at the City Hall Office of Records. Not to mention Cain’s personal file.

  “Then it will be impossible to cover over the paper trail,” he surmised. “All you can hope for is that the State will buy your argument of being strong-armed into producing those phony case synopses.” He paused. “I’ll be truthful, Divine. Cain and Montana, I’ve always known them as pretty good guys. Honest, decent, hardworking.”

  I thought more about it.

  “They didn’t exactly put a gun to my head. But I also knew they could make my life pretty miserable if they didn’t get their way.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Stanley went on. “You didn’t take any off-the-books cash from either Cain or Jake, did you?”

  Me, once more staring into the whiskey glass.

  “Guess how you got paid for as long as you did during my divorce?”

  “You really are a fuckup, Divine, you know that?”

  I thought about my dad. Stanley never would have referred to dad as a fuckup. Especially to his face. But then, my dad didn’t have a problem with his brain. Nor did he have a damaged thalamus or an overly sensitive cerebral cortex.

  “You gonna help me or not, Stan?”

  “No more pro bono,” he said. “What do you plan on using for money?”

  “What ever happened to client contingency?”

  “Borderline clients that already owe me thirty large automatically relinquish contingency status.”

  For a moment I was stumped. Until I quickly glanced at the old wooden placard that hung above the old G.E. stove. The one that read, “God Bless This Home!”

  I said, “I’ll mortgage the house.”

  “There is a bullet in your head could shift position at any time,” he pointed out. “What’s the probability of the bank giving you a thirty year note?”

  I paused for a beat.

  “You know that’s what I’ve always liked about you, Stan. Your sensitivity.”

  “I’m a businessman,” he said. “Bizz-ness-man! You want sensitive, call Dr. Phil.”

  “Tell you what,” I said, knowing I was treading on micro-thin ice. “I’ll sign over the Deed.”

  He cleared his throat again.

  “Get the Deed to my office. I’ll be in touch after that.”

  He hung up.

  I tried to think like my father. If I were him, where would I have kept the Deed to the house? It was impossible to think like my Dad. He was smarter than me, more together. Didn’t matter that he was dead. He was still more on the ball. I had trouble with certain things now. Important things versus unimportant things.

  The Deed to 23 Hope Lane.

  Even if I had stored it in a safe place for just such an emergency, I would never be able to remember where I put it.

&nb
sp; 49

  “WHAT IF HE COMES around here asking questions?”

  Lynn Cain stood inside the narrow kitchen of the suburban home. In one hand she held a butter knife. In the other, a jar of Skippy peanut butter.

  “He’s got curbside drop-off, Lynn. He can’t come in. He’s violent. Remember?”

  Mitchell sat at a wood booth that had been built into the far wall beneath a double hung window. The window looked out onto the backyard where his scrappy-haired stepson was playing.

  “That’s never stopped him before.”

  “Something you want to tell me, Lynn?”

  She dug her knife into the jar. Stabbed into it to be more accurate, digging the knife in and out of the thick stuff like it was flesh and blood. When she pulled the knife back out it was covered in peanut butter.

  “Don’t even think of going there, Mitchell. Dick and I ended long before a divorce made it official.” Spreading the peanut butter onto a slice of white bread. “Besides, I think you’re trying to change the subject.”

  “So what is it you want from me, Lynn?”

  “I want to know what happens if Dick or anyone else starts asking questions? What am I supposed to tell them?”

  “The truth.”

  “Which truth? That Scarlet died because she knew too much about yours and her husband’s illegal business? Or that Scarlet died by her own hands because that’s what you want people to believe in order to protect your asses?”

  Cain pulled the pack of smokes from inside his leather jacket, went to pull one out. But the pack was empty.

  “You can be a real bitch sometimes, Lynn,” he groused, crushing the empty pack in his hand, tossing it onto the table.

  “Actually, Mitchell,” she said, “I used to be a nice girl. Until I got mixed up with one too many cops.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, you’re right. Now I’m a bitch and it is not all my fault.”

  Bringing the sandwich to her mouth, she bit down hard.

  Sliding himself out of the booth, Cain stood. He grabbed another pack of Marlboro Lights from the carton stored inside the cabinet over the sink. He slapped the top of the pack against the back of his hand compacting the cigs inside, then peeled off the clear plastic wrap.