Murder by Moonlight Read online

  I kill the media player, switch over to the Web, click on the URL for the Times Union newspaper. I go to Archives, type in “September 15, 2009,” the day of the Parker murder and attempted murder. The story, written by crime desk reporter Steve Ferrance, will refresh my memory. But in all honesty, you had to be living under a very heavy boulder in Albany not to have known something about it.

  Axe Attack Leaves Man Dead, Wife Critical

  It’s a reporter’s dream of a story, and Ferrance does right by it. Here’s my version in a nutshell: sleeping middle-aged suburban couple attacked in the predawn hours by an intruder who wields a fireman’s axe. After taking out Peter with several point-blank blows to the skull, the perp then performs a similar hack job on the supposedly still asleep Joan. When the job is thought to be finished, said intruder simply drops the axe and exits the premises.

  It proves to be a suspicious attack with a suspicious motive.

  No robbery is committed. No turning over of drawers, no ransacking the house for money or jewelry. Not even Joan’s purse is stolen, though it’s sitting in plain sight on the dining room table, the keys to her white Honda Civic laid beside it.

  Despite a telephone line that’s been cut, and an exterior window screen that’s been sliced with a knife or a razor blade, no windows are jimmied, no door locks smashed. Whoever’s broken and entered knows enough to use the spare house key hidden inside the flowerpot by the front door. “An inside job,” the Bethlehem cops call it. Makes sense, too.

  When the police first enter the house, they discover Peter’s body at the bottom of the stairs, crumpled in a heap at the landing, just inches from the front door. The axe blows didn’t kill him immediately. Even with his skull crushed, and half his brain exposed, he somehow worked up enough life to make the morning coffee.

  Heading upstairs, they find a blood-caked Joan still lying on her side in the bed. She’s nearly completely bled out and as still and chalky white as a statue. Assuming she’s also dead, they call in the EMTs. But she stirs when they begin to poke at her, and the shock of her stirring nearly sends the cops diving out of the bedroom window.

  Not only is she alive, but she is conscious.

  The officer in charge of the investigation—a veteran by the name of Bowman—already knows the Parkers. He was summoned to the house a year earlier in the case of two stolen laptops. He also knows that the couple shares two sons.

  Apparently Bowman is going with his gut when he bends down in front of a barely alive Joan, asks her straight up if the person who did this to her and her husband might be her oldest son, Jonathan. According to the half dozen other assorted cops and EMTs who also occupy the master bedroom, Joan demonstrates “clarity of mind” when she shakes her head as if to say no.

  But when Bowman asks her if the person who did this is her son Christopher, she clearly nods yes. The same crowd of cops and medical techies attest to that.

  At that point, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about the identity of the perp. It all fits together. Nothing stolen, nothing broken, the key from the flowerpot hiding spot utilized to open the front door.

  For the Bethlehem police, the axe murder and attempted axe murder of the Parkers is an open-and-shut case even before the twenty-two-year-old college student is arraigned in Albany County court. But all that will change in a week’s time when Joan recovers enough from her wounds to state publicly that her son is not guilty of homicide. That she, in fact, has no recollection of the attacks, and that, considering her massive head and facial trauma, she can’t possibly have accused her son of anything.

  Thus begins the battle between the Bethlehem cops and the surviving victim. Thus my employ in the matter of finding a way to prove that the accusations of murder and attempted murder against Christopher Parker are not valid.

  I pick up the phone, dial 411, ask for Troy, New York, and Terry Kindler, attorney at law. I listen to the gulls while I wait, think about pouring another Jack because, after all, the days can be long but the life is short. Moonlight, the contemplative.

  When Kindler’s secretary answers, I strap on my professional voice. “Mr. Kindler, please.”

  “And whom should I say is calling?”

  “Dick Moonlight.”

  She asks the nature of my business.

  “Crime and punishment.”

  No response.

  “I’m a private detective.”

  “Oh.” She hesitates. “I’ll see if Mr. Kindler is available.”

  She puts me on hold. I wait. Me and the gulls and my deep, head-case thoughts.

  Kindler picks up.

  “Mr. Moonlight,” he announces. “Pleasure.”

  “I heard Christopher Parker highly recommended me.”

  “Chief Daly at APD gave his OK on you, too, not that he’s got much of a choice in the matter. Says you’re not a half-bad private dick. Especially in light of that job you did cleaning out the department a couple years ago when you exposed that Russian mob scam to harvest illegal body parts. I’m also aware you’ve been subbing for the parole department on occasion—some of the parolees, as I understand it, have been underage cases treated as adults. Could be you know the youth of the world better than most PIs I know.”

  “Empathy goes a long way. Plus, parole work is all a head case like me can get sometimes. Is it me or did I hear once that Chief Daly is Detective Bowman’s brother or half brother?”

  “Half brother. That’d be right.”

  I picture Daly in my head. A tall, beer-gutted, red-faced man of few words and even fewer degrees of tolerance for bad guys. One of those lifer cops who never marries, never has the time or the urge to buy a three-bedroom house in the burbs, never harbors dreams of travel and escape. Just a nose-to-the-concrete professional blue knight who lives, breathes, and eats the job with a cold-hearted obsession that will one day kill him. I’m just glad I never had to work for him directly.

  “You and Daly golf partners, Kindler? Seems to me he’d be ignoring your calls since part of my job…that is, if I decide to take this job…will be to prove what fuckups the cops are. Bethlehem and Albany.”

  “Business is business, and Daly is well aware that it’s in his and brother’s best interest to get along with me.”

  “You could make things difficult for him, am I right? Hope I’m not stepping into the middle of something I can’t step out of without my feet stinking up the joint.”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Why did the kid recommend me? Why would he care? When I was his age all I cared about was beer, broads, and the Ramones.”

  “Who are the Ramones, Moonlight?”

  “Never mind, Kindler. Before your time.”

  “Listen, Christopher might be a young man, but he’s a sensitive and intelligent young man. He feels for you…what you’ve been through with your, ah…”

  There it is: the dreaded pause I get all the time.

  “You can say it, Kindler. Suicide.”

  “You said it for me. Anyway, kids can be sensitive like that. Nobody gives them enough credit. A lot of high-schoolers aren’t as lucky as you. They succeed with their suicide attempts.”

  “Yup, my middle name is Lucky. But Chris Parker isn’t a kid anymore, and he might very well have axed his mom and dad. You wanna give him credit?”

  “OK, he’s not a child, but he is young and sensitive, and I believe he’s been railroaded. The boy’s an Eagle Scout, works in a vet clinic during his school vacations helping sick little puppies and kittens get better. That sound like an axe murderer to you?”

  “That’s laying it on a little thick. ‘Sick puppies’?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “So we talking revenge here, Kindler? Revenge for Peter ratting on his cousin Freddie? That what this shit storm is all about?”

  “On the contrary, Freddie is doing a few short years in a country club. This isn’t a mob hit at all. It’s about poor police work that spiraled into even poorer police work and false accus
ations.”

  “Yeah, I get it: the poor misunderstood child didn’t do it. You looking for me to find the real killer, or just come up with something that suggests it might have been someone other than the sick-puppy kid?”

  “That latter will do, Moonlight.”

  I listen to the gulls for a second or two, think about how you can be sleeping with sweet dreams dancing in your head one second, and then a fireman’s axe buried inside it the next.

  Kindler adds, “I trust you met the mother. Face to face, so to speak.”

  “Hell of a way to put it, counselor. Brave woman. Not many people like her would even venture out of the house.”

  “Woman’s been through a lot. She’s frail in appearance, but very strong willed.”

  “She fingered her own son, Kindler.”

  The counselor clears his throat. Impatiently. “That is in dispute, Moonlight. Or should I call you Dick?”

  “Moonlight. ‘Dick’ sounds kind of funny coming from your mouth.”

  “If you could have seen the condition she was in…the condition the police found her in.”

  I swallow something bitter, something that feels like it’s peeling itself from the back of my throat. I picture that patch over her eye, the purple scar. “Guess it’s time for me to get off the horn,” I say. “Make a pilgrimage to Bethlehem and start doing some detecting.”

  “I could not agree more.”

  The lawyer hangs up before I get a chance to discuss my fee.

  There’s an old wooden sign mounted to a pole at the east entrance to the little town of Bethlehem. It says that the community was founded in 1695 and that the “pilgrims” who settled the place were members of the “Great Society.” Whatever that was. But if I have to guess, said Pilgrims probably left their homes in Europe to escape some kind of religious persecution. Better to take a chance on getting killed by disease, Indians, starvation, or all three than be burned at the stake for being a heretic.

  What I know for sure is that Bethlehem is located five miles west of the Albany city limits, but it is still contained within the Albany County jurisdiction, which means two things: the Bethlehem cops are really a weak branch of the far stronger APD, and the city assessor can send residents a property tax bill and force them to pay it, Great Society or no Great Society.

  Although I’m no stranger to Bethlehem, it’s not a place I come to very often. The town looks more like a quaint New England hamlet than a suburb, with cute little brick and wood-clapboard homes dotting both sides of the rural road. There’s a family-run deli that doubles as a drugstore. A two-bay firehouse, a combination bookstore/craft store, a grocery store, a Peter Harris clothing outlet, a coffee shop, a wooden Protestant church that has to be more than one hundred years old, and a junior/senior high school housed inside an ivy-covered, four-story, common brick building.

  There are also a lot of SUVs parked in the driveways of the homes, along with the occasional Mercedes-Benz, BMW, or Lexus. Not many pickups or rusted-out Chevy Novas from the 1970s. No gangs of Latinos, or black youths with baggy jeans hanging off narrow hips trying to come off as suburban ghetto. No Bloods, no Crips. No Asians—Indian, Chinese, Korean, or otherwise. Just the Great Society.

  Fact is, there isn’t a whole lot about Bethlehem that doesn’t scream young, white bread, upward, and very rooted-in-Protestant suburban professionalism. Doesn’t look like the place for an axe murder, anyway. But then, neither did Lizzy Borden’s downtown Fall River, Massachusetts.

  Across the street from the school is the Bethlehem police headquarters. It’s converted from an old brick house, with a large, concrete-block and steel-enclosed extension tacked onto the back that must contain a couple of jail cells and maybe a small arraignment court. Even though a face-to-face with Detective Bowman is on my list of things to do, I’m not quite ready to see him yet. Instead, I decide to make my way to the scene of the crime.

  36 Brockley Drive.

  ____

  Being the ever-resourceful detective, I printed MapQuest directions to the place off my computer before leaving the office in Dad’s pristine, black 1978 Cadillac Moonlight Funeral Home hearse. Call me ancient and petrified, but I haven’t yet invested in a GPS device. And I’m not sure it would go well with the hearse’s eight-track tape player, anyway. Which means I locate the street the old-fashioned way, about a mile up from the police station. Toe-tapping the brakes on the big Caddy, I hook a left, drive slowly, eyeing the dozens of 1970s-era pastel-colored split-levels and colonials. Cookie-cutter jobs. On the left are the odd numbers. So I concentrate only on the right-hand side.

  It doesn’t take long for me to find it. Number 36. The site of an axe murder.

  I pull over, get out.

  From the edge of the empty driveway, the place is nondescript. Just a plain, yellow, tin-sided colonial, built of plywood and Sheetrock, asphalt shingles covering the roof. A home that probably cost somewhere around eight or ten grand when it was built maybe thirty-five years ago but that now would go for two-and-a-half-hundred large.

  The landscaping is just as sparse as the house itself. A couple of overtrimmed shrubs in front, the lawn closely cropped, but now, in winter, browned and dead. No big oaks or pine trees. There isn’t much of a front porch. Just a kind of extended concrete landing that services a front door that’s painted black. The front exterior features a long, triple-sash window that provides a view from what would be a living room. The second floor has two separate double-hung windows that must go with two separate bedrooms. Staring at them from where I stand on the blacktop, I wonder which one accesses the Parker bedroom.

  The home’s been unoccupied since the attacks of September 15th. But the yellow crime scene ribbon has not been removed, which tells me the place has been left relatively untouched since then. Other than the yellow ribbon and the lockbox hanging off the front door, there’s nothing to indicate that teams of cops, EMTs, reporters, and who-knows-whats were once traipsing over this lawn for more than a month.

  But now the place is quiet.

  Dead as the man who owned it.

  I make my way up the driveway to the garage and follow the asphalt walk to the concrete landing. Standing before the front door, I bend down, try to get a look in through a narrow glass light embedded in the frame. There isn’t a hell of a lot to see through the smoked glass. Just a dark, narrow vestibule that extends toward what I guess is the kitchen. On the immediate left, a staircase that leads to the second level.

  I feel my heartbeat pick up a little. I’m recalling the Times Union newspaper reports. On the floor, just a couple feet in front of me, is the very place the hacked-up body of Peter Parker was discovered by a courthouse security man by the name of Mitchell Hart.

  I’m not sure if I expect blood to still be visible from where I stand outside the front door, but if I inch my face up any closer to the glass, my twice-broken nose would be pressed up against it. When I feel the tap on my back, I turn quickly, sliding my right hand inside my leather jacket for the inverted pistol grip.

  “Sorry!” the man barks. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  I exhale, wait for my heart to dislodge itself from the back of my throat. A wave of dizziness overtakes me for a few seconds. The residual effects of a sudden shot of adrenaline shooting through my fragile brain. The kind of sudden adrenaline rush that can cause the sliver of bullet lodged inside my gray matter to press up against my cerebral cortex, and me to pass out.

  But not this time.

  He’s a stocky, middle-aged man in jeans, Timberland work boots, green L.L.Bean parka zippered all the way up to the neck, and a New York Yankees baseball cap. His face is clean-shaven, puffy, and round.

  I slowly slide my hand back out of my jacket.

  “You the caretaker?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m Maxwell,” he says with a smile. “Maxwell Okey, as in okeydokey.” Raising his right hand, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder. “Live across the street.”

  I follow his
thumb with my eyes. His house is identical in every way to the Parkers’, except that it’s sided in brown tin. The place is better landscaped, too, with some mature white birch trees. Also, a ceramic donkey with attached cart that’s probably filled with colorful flowers during the warm months. Suburban lawn ornaments. Stylish. My dad used to keep one on our front lawn when I was growing up in our West Albany funeral home. On occasion, I used to get up on its back and pretend to ride it like Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. As opposed to the Parker residence, Okey’s house is alive.

  “You a writer or reporter?” he probes.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Lots of them been poking their nose around here. Everybody wants to write a book about what happened here. Kind of morbid, you ask me.” He smiles, baring gray-brown teeth. He doesn’t smell like smoke, so I peg him for a former addict.

  I pull a card from my hip pocket, hand it to him. “My name is Moonlight. I’m a private detective. I was hired by Mrs. Parker.”

  He takes the card, grows an even bigger smile. Friendly. Neighborly. “I’m not sure I’ve ever met a real private detective before. Only on TV and the used paperbacks they sell off the cart in the library for a buck.”

  “We thrive where all good people thrive. You just don’t know it.”

  He nods. Agreeable and neighborly. “What’s your mission?” he poses, pocketing the card in his parka. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Doesn’t seem any harm in my telling him. Besides, his smile is positively infectious.

  “Mrs. Parker doesn’t believe her son is guilty of the killing and attempted killing that went on here. What’s your opinion on the matter, Mr. Okey?”

  I feign a super-friendly grin to match his big-ass friendly one. I know that if he’s nosy enough to watch over the empty house so closely, he must have formed an opinion about the crimes that occurred inside it.

  He slides both hands into the pockets of his parka. Nervous reaction. “I was up and on my way to work when the murders took place,” he explains. “I’m a mechanical engineer at the General Electric Company in Selkirk, not far from here.”