Moonlight Falls Read online

  Maybe the general public isn’t aware of it, but many so-called “child suicides” are really just accidents. The “suicides” often involve teenage boys who have hanged themselves while trying to enhance their solitary sexual experience. They realize that by hanging themselves from the neck while masturbating, they can achieve one powerful orgasm. Ugly to contemplate, but a fact all the same.

  I guess it all starts somewhere in the adolescent experience (and possibly the World Wide Web). Kids somehow discover that by applying pressure to the carotid artery you severely diminish the oxygen supply to the brain. The more oxygen that gets cut off, the better the climax. Which is exactly why so many of these kids end up dead. The grief- stricken parents, not wanting to live with the pain and stigma attached to “death by experimental self-gratification” almost always opt for the no less tragic, but more understanding, suicide. Some are even willing to pay a cop like Cain for the slight change in the manner of death.

  Suburbanites have their reputations to think about. Which, as far as I was concerned, is exactly what Cain had been counting on when he called me in on the job. I remember looking at the eighteen-year-old’s body, which had been hanging from an attic rafter for less than an hour when his father discovered him.

  Cain insisted I call it a suicide, despite the evidence—his entire lower body was naked, his right hand raised high overhead, clutching the leather belt he’d wrapped around his neck and buckled to the overhead rafter while his left hand was still grasping his organ.

  “Fuck the autopsy,” is how he put it. “Just get George to sign away.”

  When I asked him why the presiding A.P.D. officer on duty didn’t sign it himself, he said he had his reasons. In the end he simply insisted on utilizing my part-time “expertise” on this one, backed up by a pathologist’s signature as well as a comprehensive C.S. for which he was prepared to pay handsomely in cold, hard scratch. The department was crazy, backed-up with pending cases.

  The usual Cain-Montana police story.

  I took a look around the lot to make sure we weren’t being followed. That’s when a strange feeling began to swim over me. A cold up-and-down-my-backbone sensation that told me maybe we hadn’t been careful enough; that it would only be a matter of time until I was connected with George; until somebody discovered that he hadn’t shown up for work today; that the now missing bodies of the Montanas hadn’t made it to the Fitzgerald funeral home after all.

  As strange as it sounded, I had to wonder what the hell Cain was doing with his time. Why hadn’t he picked up on me yet? Albany wasn’t big. Maybe forty thousand souls. Maybe he was so busy reassuring his body part buyers that he wasn’t paying attention to the chase, the re-apprehension of Albany’s “most wanted.”

  The rush of ice-cold anxiety was so bad I couldn’t feel my feet. I locked the car doors. Turning the keyed ignition, I powered up the dash. It was the top of the four o’clock hour.

  It didn’t take a lot of searching to find an AM station that played only news. After a commercial for a place called the Tire Warehouse, they read the lead story.

  “The search for escaped A.P.D. officer-turned-murderer Richard Moonlight intensified late this afternoon. State Police, in cooperation with U.S. Marshals and FBI, have set up perimeter checkpoints within a fifteen-mile radius of Albany city limits. Traffic along the Thruway and Interstate 90 has begun to back up in all directions while choppers are combing the rural and outlying areas for any signs of the forty-year-old detective officially charged in the gruesome killing of thirty-eight-year-old Scarlet Montana.

  “Speaking from outside the sealed off doors to the Albany Medical Center autopsy room, Albany P.D. detective Mitchell Cain was quoted as saying, ‘We are closing in on Mr. Moonlight. We know he was here in this hospital within the past hour because we’ve recovered both a t-shirt and a stolen Kevlar vest with his blood on it. The materials had been discarded as refuse inside a medical waste bin. We now also suspect that Dr. George Phillips, hospital pathologist, may, in fact, be aiding and abetting Moonlight.’

  “This afternoon a shocked Albany remains on full alert while a man accused of first-degree homicide roams the streets and byways.

  This is Megan Baker reporting— “

  I turned off the radio and killed the ignition. So that’s what Cain was doing. He hadn’t been bluffing when he told George that the

  Montana bodies better make it to Fitzgerald’s funeral home by noon or else face the consequences.

  My brain was buzzing. Too much adrenaline, too much blood. Synapses and nerve endings overheating, glowing. I made a fist with my right hand, then released it.

  I knew then that we had to go back and get the Montana bodies before the police obtained the warrant necessary to raid George’s home. We’d have to grab up the bodies, exhume Ryan, then get the hell out of Albany. That is, we’d have to leave town long enough to put our case together. When that was done, I was fully prepared to turn myself in, not as the state’s number one suspect, but as the state’s number one witness.

  I wiped the steam off the windshield, watching for George. What was taking him so long?

  For a split second, I pictured his cuffed and shackled body being yanked out the front double doors of the Home Depot, a pair of gun- toting cops on either side of him. But it was my imagination playing tricks on me again.

  Lola. . . I had to talk with Lola.

  We had no cell phone. That meant getting out of the car and exposing myself in broad daylight. It was raining again. I had that advantage. There was a payphone mounted to the side of the building. I could see it from where I was sitting. No one was standing near it. No one in their right mind would want to be outside on a day like today. Only head cases who don’t know enough to get out of the rain.

  I opened the door, exited the car, and felt the cool, hard spray on my face.

  61

  I slipped the quarters into the slot and waited for the dial tone. Then I dialed the number for Lola’s office at the university. She answered almost immediately.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  No voice, just breathing, the sound of chairs and furniture sliding around in the background. Like her laboratory office was being ransacked.

  “Not now,” she said.

  “Cain,” I guessed. “Cain is there, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  I’m not certain how I knew that Cain would come snooping. But then, having worked with him almost my entire adult life, I wasn’t entirely unaware of his M.O. And then there was my intuition; my built- in shit detector.

  “Did he present a formal warrant?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew that Cain and Lola had met a couple of times before, however briefly, during my post-accident treatment. Their business together had been of an official nature. I also knew that Lola never quite took a liking to Cain. You might say she saw right through him, or at the very least saw another more black or sinister side of him that I didn’t see until way too late.

  I turned away from the wall, gazing out upon the parking lot. Just scattered trucks and cars pulling in and out. People running, not walking towards the doors, jacket collars pulled up over their heads. Nature’s wrath; Cain’s rage.

  The senior detective (and now “acting” South Pearl Street chief by default) had produced the warrants he needed in record time. Who knew what judges he had stuffed in his hip pocket? Maybe even Hughes.

  “Don’t tell him anything,” I said. “Call Stanley, tell him what’s happened; what they’re doing to you.”

  “Richard. . . ”

  “What is it?”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  Lola, always thinking of me, my health. Not thinking of her own well-being.

  “Never better,” I lied. “What about you? Can you handle this?”

  “He’s coming back in,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “You won’t hear from me until this thing is over. One way or another.”

  “Live,�
�� she said and hung up.

  62

  As soon as George got back in the car I told him exactly what I knew. Did it as calm and collected as possible. There was no time for panic. Now that George had been fingered by Cain, we had to get off the road. That didn’t stop him from racing out of the parking lot.

  We drove back to his townhouse as fast as we could without running the risk of a pull-over. The home’s brownstone exterior was quiet and calm, but that didn’t mean we weren’t walking into a trap.

  Pulling out the .38, I followed George up the back steps to the rear entrance. Once inside we scanned the place up and down. No one was there. No cops in the closets; no marshals on the rooftop; no troopers in the basement. Just the dead bodies in the bathtubs.

  Immediately we loaded the Montanas into the cargo bay of the Ryder rental van, salvaging what we could of the ice, tossing it all into the mix. The whole operation took about twenty minutes. As George locked the joint back up, we began to hear sirens in the distance. We had no way of knowing if the sirens were intended for us. Neither of us wanted to wait around long enough to find out.

  “You take the van, I’ll take the El Camino,” George said. “I need you to follow me downtown to a guy I know who owes me a favor. He’ll put my car up for a while, give it a fresh coat of paint while we take care of business.”

  We were off, each of us behind the wheel of our respective rides heading downtown in the direction of the river. I didn’t say anything about it, but I could see that George was careful to drive the minor roads, keeping away from the main avenues and thoroughfares. If we got nailed now, with the bodies in the back of the van, we’d be toast.

  Soon we came to a downtown warehouse area that was situated maybe a hundred feet from the river. Just one of those old brick monsters that used to serve as an industrial mill in its prime.

  George pulled up in front of a pair of roll-up doors and got out. He walked up to a metal door that was positioned beside the roll-ups and pressed the bell. After a beat or two, a man dressed in oil-stained overalls showed himself. The man was wearing an old Yankees baseball cap and was holding a towel in his grease-stained hands.

  I watched them talk for a minute. Then I saw them both turn around, getting a look at me. I felt weird. Paranoid and weird. I saw the man nod his head while he wiped his hands with a towel. He closed the door behind him. As George made his way back to the car, the overhead door began to roll up.

  George got back in and threw the El Camino in drive. “Don’t say anything to these people, Moonlight. Doesn’t matter that you’re a fugitive. You’re still a cop and they know it. Just stand off to the side while they do their work. My thinking is we chill out here for a while until full dark. Then we can go to work.”

  He pulled the car into a mechanic’s garage. Behind us, the roll-up went back down.

  The place was brightly lit with two separate bays that contained hydraulic jacks and grease pits underneath. There was a fire-engine-red Porsche Carrara situated on a raised rack to our right. The guy with the Yankees cap was working underneath it. There were racks and stacks of tools and tires piled one atop the other. The walls were covered with old Sunoco and Mobile tin signboards and posters of half-naked busty models, wrenches gripped in hand like big metal phalluses, the words “Sears Tough” printed below their bare feet.

  We drove straight over our empty bay and into a separate wing behind the pits. When I got out of the car, I could see that the concrete floor was stained with layers of paint. There were so many colors of paint, it all seemed to blend into a kind of orange-gray. I wasn’t out the door before two equally paint-stained grease monkeys began taping black plastic to the windshield and side windows.

  George told me to grab a cup of coffee in the outer office. He said to wait there with the door closed until his people were done.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “Haircut,” he said before walking out of the shop.

  63

  What shocked me was not the new dark blue paint job on the El Camino. What shocked me was George’s new ‘do.’ But then ‘do’ wasn’t the right word for it.

  His head had been shaved bald, his thin beard trimmed down to just a goatee and mustache. The jean jacket was gone as were the jeans, replaced now with a black turtleneck sweater, black wool pants, and black cowboy boots. In his left ear was a diamond stud earring. Strapped to his belt was a small holster or sheath that housed two black-plated scalpels.

  Standing outside the shop office, he opened up his wallet to show me a new driver’s license, the name Gerry Horn printed under the photo ID.

  “It’ll take us forty-five minutes to get into Poughkeepsie and over to the hospital,” he said. “There’s roadblocks and checkpoints going in and out of the city—off the Thruway, off the Taconic. We get stopped, I don’t come close to matching the description of Dr. Phillips. They would have cut your hair too but.” He didn’t finish his thought because there’s not much you can do with a bald head.

  I took a look around the shop, at the man still working on the Porsche, and the separate men pulling the black plastic off the El Camino’s windows, scraping off the old registration and inspection stickers, slapping on the new.

  “We’re gonna store the El Camino here until this thing is done,” George added while shooting a glance at his watch. “Time to resurrect that kid.”

  I exhaled a breath, making my way toward the Ryder van parked inside the garage.

  “You’re driving,” I said, tossing him the keys.

  “You can ride up front for now, Moon,” George said. “It’s not the back roads I’m worried about. It’s the highway.”

  I opened the passenger-side door, hopped up inside, and closed the door behind me. George got in behind the wheel. The overhead door was raised.

  Taking a glance at himself in the rearview, George threw the tranny in reverse.

  “Let’s hope this works,” he murmured.

  “No choice but to work,” I told him.

  We backed out.

  64

  I knew that Kevin Ryan’s plot was located five miles inside the dark, heavily wooded Albany Rural Cemetery. It was set beside a newly transplanted catalpa tree that was now in full spring bloom with big white flowers. I knew the tree was meant as a metaphor for Kevin’s life. Rather, the memory of his life—the memory that would never die.

  Some of the petals from the tree had fallen in the wind and the rain. The leaves had scattered about the newly laid sod. In the dark, they looked like big snowflakes. Ryan’s headstone had been recently quarried. It was polished smooth. It glistened from the rain and from the handheld battery-powered lamp that I shined upon it. It rose out of the ground maybe two and one-half feet high. An inscription read:

  Kevin Dubin Ryan

  September 2, 1988 - June 6, 2006

  Loving Son

  May Your Spirit Bloom Forever

  I knew I couldn’t have been wrong about that tree.

  George had temporarily traded in his new black cowboy boots for a pair of rubber lineman boots, his black trench coat for a yellow rain slicker. I had on the same getup and for good reason. Pretty soon we’d be playing in the mud. He was carrying a pickaxe in one hand and a shovel in the other. Tools I’d asked him to pick up at the Home Depot.

  He tossed them onto the grass.

  “We’re gonna need more than this, Moon,” he pointed out.

  I told him I was banking on a backhoe that would surely be on site. I knew from firsthand experience that it had to be housed inside the maintenance garage not far from where we were standing. No cemetery was complete without a backhoe. That was a given.

  “You have the keys to said backhoe, little brother?”

  “Key should be on the wall.”

  “What if it’s not?”

  “What’d you do prior to taking up shop with Harold Moonlight?”

  Some rain dripped off his nose onto his chin beard.

  “My little hot
-wiring career almost cost me seven-to-ten in Green Haven,” he said. “Thank God for Viet Nam.”

  “At least the government was kind enough to give you a choice,” I said. “Or else you’d be scrubbing down pathology instead of working it.”

  He might have asked me where the garage was located, but having worked for the old man for as long as he did, he knew exactly where to find it. It was our good fortune that nothing much ever changed in these old cemeteries.

  George and I had been trained in the art of proper burial procedure and, along with it, the art of proper exhumation. In our time as employees of the Harold Moonlight Funeral Home, we’d performed at least a couple dozen exhumations on bodies that had to be relocated due to eminent domain issues or bodies that required further examination by the police and/or FBI.

  Fact is, working both the burial and exhumation detail had been a good way for one-time rookies like George and I to “get our feet dirty.” Or so the old man liked to say with a sly smile. For reasons of cemetery protocol, almost the entirety of the burial/exhumations we’d worked on at the Albany Rural Cemetery were performed during nighttime hours under artificial lamplight.

  With all this in mind, I had no doubt that George and I could safely exhume the body of Ryan, have the casket loaded into the rental van, have the hole filled back in and be back on the road in an hour’s time. That is, if we hadn’t lost our touch.

  I stood there for a while with the light turned off, just listening to the rain that fell on the plots until the rattle and hum of a tractor engine filled the night. The cemetery backhoe.

  Thank God for George. He had talent in those fingers. More talent than the hospital administration gave him credit for. He pulled up to the plot and pushed down a lever that retracted and set in place the two hydraulic stabilizers.