Moonlight Falls Page 16

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

  After I finished, I asked him if he’d seen anything about the fatal Montana house fire on TV.

  “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?”

  Stanley might have been a lawyer, but he was also a businessman. If a black market organ harvesting operation existed inside the A.P.D. and if I were being railroaded by one of its principal operators, then he’d definitely want in on the action. A case like that would no doubt make national headlines. 48 Hours or maybe Nancy Grace. National headlines would mean mucho exposure, mucho business. That’s what I was banking on, anyway.

  “First thing’s first, Moonlight,” he went on. “Your man, Cain. If he’s able to somehow prove you were involved in the organ harvesting 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’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 as a material witness.”

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

  “But you knew you were breaking the law.”

  “My superiors in the department were ordering me to break it.”

  Stanley cleared his throat. “Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go, Richard. You cannot plead ignorance in a court of law. You cannot rely on a perceived disability as a crutch. Maybe you have a little piece of bullet in your head but I believe your ability to determine right from wrong is pretty damned reliable. So let’s cut through the bullshit 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 A.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 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, 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, Moonlight, you know that?”

  I thought about the old man. Stanley never would have referred to him as a fuckup. Especially to his face. But then, dad didn’t have a problem with his brain. Nor did he have a damaged cerebral cortex. Okay, I’ll admit it, even if he did have a bullet lodged in his brain, he’d still be able to function on all cylinders. I, on the other hand, had always suffered from a faulty cylinder or two. Bullet to the brain or no bullet.

  “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’ll mortgage the house.”

  “There’s 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. “And I’m not in the business of making friends. You want sensitive, call Dr. Phil.”

  “Tell you what,” I said, knowing I was treading 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 Dad. He was smarter than me, more together. Didn’t matter that he was dead. He was still more on the ball. In the months immediately following my accident, it was painful even to work up a simple thought. Since then, my condition had steadily improved. But that didn’t mean I was out the woods. Or would be anytime soon. I had trouble with certain things now. Important things versus unimportant things. Right versus wrong; logical versus illogical.

  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.

  40

  I got out the phone book and looked up the Albany County tax assessor in the blue pages. When I got the woman who ran the department, I asked her what I needed to do in order to come up with a copy of the deed to my property. She told me I needed to come into the county courthouse where the county clerk would make a copy of the original, which should be on file. The copy would cost me twenty-five bucks. Cash. No credit.

  She asked me for my address. She could look it up for me on the computer, verify my information, then send word down to the clerk to begin processing the paperwork. Save me some time. I asked her if she would be so kind.

  “Is the property registered in your name?”

  “It was transferred in my name after my father’s death.”

  A moment or two passed. Long enough for me to have a quick swallow of whiskey.

  Suddenly I heard a deep sigh.

  “Oh my,” she said. “Mr. Moonlight, is it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Richard Moonlight.”

  “I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but a lien has been placed on your property.”

  My head. . . an invisible vice was squeezing it.

  “No one’s notified me of a lien.”

  She checked the date of the lien, told me it had gone into activation only this morning.

  “By whom?”

  “By the Property Tax Department, claiming a fifteen-thousand dollar back-tax deficit, Mr. Moonlight.”

  I sat back in my chair, trying to breathe even and steady. Had I paid my tax bills? I mean, my life wasn’t a complete train wreck. I recalled that I had paid the biannual bills, even recalled writing the checks at the kitchen table, stuffing the envelopes and licking the stamps. Maybe it was possible I was behind by a payment or two, but not fifteen Gs.

  “With whom do I speak to straighten this out?”

  “Well, that would be me,” she answered. “Oh, pardon me, I’ll have to put you on hold.”

  She did.

  I drank.

  The phone disconnected.

  I called back.

  The same woman answered. “Tax Assessor.”

  I told her who it was, that I had been disc
onnected. She hung up. I called back again. She hung up again without saying anything. I called back again. Nothing but a busy signal.

  Then Lola walked in through the back door off the kitchen.

  Standing in the frame of the still open door, her dark hair was wet with rain. Her somber face glowed in the dull white light that shined down from the light fixture.

  “Dr. Ross,” I said, lifting my glass high, “how’s about a drink?”

  She leaned against the doorframe, shooting me one of those tight-lipped slanty-eyed looks that spoke far louder than words. Without a whisper, she crossed the kitchen floor and grabbed a glass out of the cabinet above the sink. She rinsed the glass out with cold water, then dried it with the dishtowel draped over the faucet.

  Approaching the kitchen table, she leaned into me. For a quick and hopeful moment, I thought she was about to kiss me atop my head. Instead, she brushed her fingers gently over my scalp, then set the glass down, pouring herself a half shot. She beamed at me with a tan face draped by long brown hair and matching brown eyes, and downed the shot in one quick swallow. Placing the glass back down on the table, she poured another drink and sat herself down.

  “You’re about to become a prime suspect in a homicide case,” she whispered. “And you’re celebrating?”

  “Not celebrating,” I said to her. “Commiserating.”

  “With yourself,” she said. “How very pathetic of you, Moonlight.”

  I proceeded to tell her everything starting from the top, even retreading the stuff she already knew, and the hot-off-the-press stuff like the sudden lien on my property when in fact, I’d paid my tax bills. Or most of them, anyway. So I thought. When I was through, Lola sat back in her chair, staring into her glass.

  “On one hand I think you might be overreacting.” Her voice was soft, low, almost inaudible. “Despite the terrible unpleasantness between you two, Cain had always been a decent partner to you and a supportive stepfather to your son. But he also has a talent for manipulation.”

  “Like you said, my boy lives with him. In there lies his advantage.”

  “Yes, but after your forced leave of absence, when you needed money the most, you were ready and willing to do what he wanted you to do, no questions asked. You were going through a divorce. You had alimony and child support to contend with. You needed the cash. And he gave you the full authority to act in the name of the law so long as you took his or Jake’s lead. And don’t give me any nonsense about the A.P.D. making your life miserable if you didn’t go along, because they never told you that or else you would have told me. You made that up just to make things sound more dramatic for Stanley.”

  “I’m raising the stakes,” I said, biting my lip.

  “At whose expense?”

  “My own.”

  “Wrong,” the psychologist said. “Maybe you’ve sufficiently challenged Cain, but in the end, he believes that you will back down. You will do what he tells you to do, because that has always been the specific nature of your relationship. Your symbiosis. Cain is as much a control freak as you’re all over the place. He believes that sooner or later you will cave. Because in a very real and very strange way, he believes you need him. Not because he lives with your son, but because he actually sees through all the skull and gray matter, sees that bullet inside your head as clear as day. He believes it makes you vulnerable, naive, almost. Certainly, easily manipulated.”

  “But he’s mistaken,” I said. “I’m not backing down on this one.”

  “You’re breaking the pattern,” she replied. “Divorcing yourself from him in more ways than one for a good cause. I applaud you for it. But for a man in your condition, it will not be easy.”

  “He will try and put the finger on me,” I insisted. “His threats are serious.”

  “Take a minute to think about it, Moonlight. If he tries to implicate you in his body parts operation—if there is a body parts operation—he risks implicating himself. Inevitably, he would also be tied in with Scarlet’s murder and now Jake’s.”

  “Maybe he’s willing to take that chance. He’s now the top cop by default. I’m the part-time head case.”

  “But you are not invisible,” she insisted. “Even if yours is the only traceable name on the paper trail, it will lead to Cain, no matter what. He’s the one who hired you in the first place, even after Jake forced you into medical leave. That very connection will raise the red flag.”

  “Unless that is, he’s got all his excuses, smoke screens and alibis in order.”

  She got up from the table, went into the freezer, grabbed a couple of ice cubes, dropped them into her drink, and sat back down.

  “Cain is more afraid than you know,” she went on. “I think his world came crashing down when Scarlet suddenly showed up with her neck cut open from ear to ear.”

  “Assuming Jake was alone in killing her,” I said.

  “Then they invite you to come along for the ride, the one constant they think they can control and manipulate into supporting their conclusion of suicide. And yet, you suddenly turn on them.”

  I listened to the rhythm of the rain, looking at Lola’s face, at her dark teardrop eyes. I asked her what else she had spinning around inside that clinical brain of hers.

  “What if Jake and Scarlet were in on this organ thing more than you know?” she said.

  “Whaddaya mean more?” I asked. “My gut instinct is that Scarlet didn’t know about it at all.”

  “Suma already attested to witnessing Scarlet doing illicit drugs— snorting heroin, for God’s sake. She’d been involved with some albino man who’s been harassing you since Monday morning.”

  “Not exactly harassing,” I said. “But I am about to insist on a little face time with the pink-eyed Q-Tip in the next day or so, clear things up a little.”

  “Listen,” she went on, “what if, for whatever reason, both Jake and Scarlet wanted out? Or, even better, what if Montana didn’t kill anybody? What if he just wanted out of his deal with Cain now that he could see how wrong he’d been; how his involvement with this thing was just eating away at Scarlet? Perhaps he had become overwrought with guilt or maybe he found Jesus. Maybe he wanted to try and clean Scarlet up, get his marriage back before it was too late. Anyway, maybe when he confronted Cain with this all hell broke loose. Cain felt he had no choice but to get rid of them both just to shut them up.”

  “If that were the case, he’d have no choice but to place the blame on me and hope that Johnny Q. Public would buy into it. I’m the logical chump because it’s not only my name plastered all over the case synopses, I also had a track record of taking off-the-books cash from them.”

  Lola went tight-faced again.

  “And don’t forget,” she said, “you were sleeping with Scarlet.”

  I felt a lump in my chest. “Oh yeah,” I mumbled, “there was that too.”

  “What about the lien? Have you balanced your checkbook lately, Richard?”

  I smiled the smile of the guilty. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if I could find my checkbook.

  We didn’t say anything for a minute. Then Lola took one more sip of her whiskey, got up from the table and set her glass in the sink.

  “You said that the firemen found some old embalming solution containers in the burnt remains of Jake’s house.”

  “That’s what Cain told me.”

  “It’s your nature to take him at his word. But did you actually see the containers?”

  I shook my head. “They’re probably hidden inside the same closet along with Scarlet’s murder weapon and suicide note,” I joked.

  Lola didn’t laugh.

  “Your dad left a few cans of the stuff lying around downstairs along with his tools,” she pointed out. “Did it ever occur to you while you were having your little pity party to maybe check and see if any of them were missing?”

  “Kind of slipped my mind.”

  She shook her head and smiled. The first smile since arriving earlier. Not a cheery smile.
Sardonic, frustrated.

  “Shall we?” she asked, heading for the stairs.

  “Lola,” I said.

  She stopped, her back to me, inside the vestibule off the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry about getting you involved in this thing.”

  “Sometimes I’m sorry we ever met,” she said. “But only sometimes.”

  Then she walked downstairs.

  41

  We were standing inside the old embalming room, now turned TV room, just off the space reserved for laundry on the bottom floor of the split-level. In a far corner, inside a closet that ran the length of the narrow space, was located a stack of old five-gallon plastic embalming fluid containers my father left behind when he moved his business downtown back in the 1970s. The stuff was comprised primarily of formaldehyde, methanol and ethanol, along with a few other toxic carcinogens tossed in the mix. It made sense to use it as an accelerant. As it was, you might find the occasional pot smoker who liked to dip their ducktail joints into the pink fluid to make the bone burn longer and more intensely.

  At Lola’s insistence, I groggily went ahead and counted the containers, but it was really a wasted effort since I had never bothered to count them in the first place. Whether it was ten or twenty, I had no idea. It was simply a stack of toxic chemicals I had no way of getting rid of without having to find a dump that wouldn’t charge me both arms and a leg for disposal.

  We checked the room top to bottom for evidence of a break-in. We checked and rechecked the windows. Then we checked the back door that led out onto a concrete patio. We found no indication that suggested Cain or maybe Joy had somehow broken in and stolen a couple of cans of embalming solution. But if one of them had, the only way it would have been possible was by using a key to get in.

  The only people with keys were Lola and me.

  We went back up into the kitchen and sat back down at the table.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter if a can from your personal embalming fluid cache was used to start the blaze or not,” Lola pointed out. “How difficult can it be to get a hold of the stuff? You can probably locate it online just like anything else.”