Murder by Moonlight Read online

  “Jeepers,” I say.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know you. So I kinda figured ‘jeepers’ is more polite than ‘no shit,’ for instance.”

  Now he’s smiling using only half his mouth, as if he’s not sure how to react to the witty private dick. Happens to me a lot. Moonlight, the wiseass.

  “My opinion on the matter is this: the kid did it.” Shaking his head with vehemence. “No doubt about it.”

  “You were there with him inside the house when it happened?”

  His eyes go wide. For a fleeting second I think steam might start shooting out his ears. “Wow, you really gotta ask a question like that?”

  “It’s my job to ask difficult questions. Some people get so pissed off when I ask them, they take a poke at me. You wanna take a poke at me, Maxwell?”

  He just gives me a look.

  “Just what I thought, Maxwell. So then, if you weren’t there when the murder took place, how do you know the kid did it?”

  His Adam’s apple is bobbing up and down. Like a turkey awaiting the hatchet. “Because his Jeep was parked outside the house.”

  “Jeep.” It’s a question.

  He nods once more. With vehemence. “Traffic-light-yellow 2002 Jeep Wrangler. Easy to spot. What I told the police, anyway.”

  “Jeepers, guess I better call his mother, tell her she no longer requires my private detection services…as brilliant as they are.”

  The mechanical engineer stares at me silently. It’s like he’s trying to reverse engineer me in his brain.

  I reach out, pat his arm. Show my neighborly appreciation. “Listen, tell you what, Maxwell. You don’t mind I call you Maxwell, do you, Maxwell?”

  He shakes his head. Without vehemence.

  “Let’s just say that for craps and giggles you were mistaken in your sighting of a traffic-light-yellow Jeep. Or perhaps the Jeep people manufactured more than one traffic-light-yellow Jeep Wrangler back in 2002, and that the one you spotted outside the Parker residence on the morning of September 15th belongs to someone else—”

  “Hey, I know what I saw, Mr. Moonlight. A 2002 yellow Jeep with the top off. Plus a patch of mud on the back fender. I pay attention to these things. Like that coffin carrier you drive.” Shooting a glance over his shoulder. “You got a death wish or something?”

  If only he knew the God’s honest truth. “It’s a classic and it runs like a charm and it’s none of your business.”

  “Well pardon me, Mr. Moonlight.” He squints his eyes and smirks like he doesn’t really mean it.

  “Back to the Jeep. I know you know what you saw, Maxwell. So do a million and a half people who swear they’ve seen a hairy, eight-foot, bipedal, apelike man roaming the Adirondack wilderness. But that doesn’t make them all correct, now does it?”

  Now he frowns. With vehemence.

  “Guess I’d better be going,” he says and sighs.

  As he turns to leave, I kind of feel sorry for him. Kind of like some chubby kid just got bullied on the playground. But he isn’t halfway down the drive when he about-faces.

  “You should know that I swore under oath to the Bethlehem police about what I saw, Mr. Moonlight,” he barks. “And I believe it was Christopher’s Jeep, and that he is guilty as sin.”

  “Jeepers. I didn’t know sin to be so full of guilt.”

  “Indeed it is. To most of the God-fearing world, that is.”

  “From what I hear, Maxwell, most of the world’s inhabitants could give a shit about God.”

  “That kind of thinking should make the devil very, very happy, don’t you think, Mr. Moonlight?”

  He shoots me yet one more of his ear-to-ear smiles.

  It makes my insides turn to ice.

  Detective Charles Bowman is in his late fifties. Slim. Not in bad shape for a cop closing in on retirement. Total opposite of his heart-attack-in-the-making half brother, Chief Daly. Stoic and distinguished in appearance, he looks more like an English professor at the state university than a dick feeding off the public trough. As if to accentuate the aesthetic, he sports round wireless glasses that don’t look very shatterproof should he get himself into a scuffle with a bad guy, and his thick gray hair is parted anal-neatly on the side over his right eye. The hair screams: Do not disturb! Its silver color matches perfectly his trim mustache. You can tell he likes his suits because the solid navy-blue job he’s wearing this afternoon appears professionally cleaned and pressed, and it’s not an off-the-rack Men’s Warehouse mass-produced rag. The burgundy striped rep tie that tops off the ensemble reminds me of Harvard University.

  Like, sure, he went to Harvard!

  This isn’t the first time I’ve had dealings with the dapper cop. Not too long ago, acting as an independent contractor for an overtaxed Albany County Division of Parole, I represented one of the “parole-proof” perps he put away for murdering her child. Our dealings over the would-be killer amounted to a few e-mails, brief phone conversations, and court appearances over the course of a couple of years; this is the first time we’ve actually met one another for an intimate one-on-one. The two of us occupy his cramped Bethlehem precinct office, he seated dominant in the swivel chair behind his desk, and I resting subserviently and puppylike at his feet in a narrow metal desk chair.

  “You a Harvard grad?” I ask. It’s an icebreaker.

  He doesn’t answer right away. He just eyes me, unblinking. He’s using his thumb and index finger to twist and turn the round face on his silver-plated wristwatch. He decides to work up a defensive grin. But I know he’s not the least bit happy. “That’s funny,” he says after a long, hard beat. “I never would have guessed what a funny guy you are, Moonlight, despite your, ah, tragic history.”

  “Jeepers, you really think so?” I think it wise to use the same polite demeanor I used with Okey, regardless of the nasty understated comment about my botched suicide and the bullet frag lodged in my brain.

  Somebody knocks at his door. It opens just enough for a blue-uniformed black woman to pop her head inside. “You want coffee, Chief?”

  “Not for me, thanks.” Then, shooting me a glare. “Well, how’s about you?”

  I shake my head.

  “No thanks, Darleen. No more interruptions for now, if that’s OK.”

  “Suit yourself, sugar,” Darleen says before removing her head, shutting the door behind her.

  “Let me know if you change your mind,” Bowman offers, eyes back on me.

  “I hate to drink alone, sugar.”

  “Can it with the Mickey fucking Spillane,” he warns. “And before you say another word: this police unit is satisfied without a doubt that Christopher Parker murdered his father with a fireman’s axe and then tried to murder his mother in the same manner.”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what Marshal Okey says, too. You know him?”

  Bowman sits back in his swivel chair, exhales, folds his hands in his lap. “Yes, I know Mr. Okey.”

  “Okey is a mechanical engineer. Anyone knows who done it, it would be him…being a mechanical engineer and all. And a nosy busybody.”

  The dick starts twiddling his thumbs. After a time, he poses, “You got some kind of problem with organized law enforcement, Moonlight?” His voice is low and controlled. But his face has gone stop-sign red. “You know, I haven’t forgotten the stink you put up over Megan Riley and what she did to her daughter a few years ago.”

  The woman he’s speaking of is the same “parole-proof” woman I referred to earlier. She’s since died all alone in a prison cell of malnutrition after starving herself for months. But if you were to ask me, I would say she died of grief after having been accused of murdering her daughter and covering the whole thing up with a fake abduction story. I represented her on the parole board even though there was no real chance for her ever getting parole. See what I mean? Parole-proof.

  “I still think Megan Riley didn’t do it, Detective.”
<
br />   “We’re all entitled to our opinions. But that conviction stood due to excellent police investigative techniques and forensic practices. Again, for which you have zero regard.”

  Me, exhaling.

  “Detective Bowman, I have the utmost respect for police and the important job you, and others like you, do. I used to be one of you myself prior to my, um, difficulties. I understand the unpleasantness and frustrations that surround your profession. But I also understand how people, despite having enjoyed a good if not privileged upbringing, can suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the law.”

  “Then you understand what a young person like Christopher Parker is capable of, despite his Bethlehem upbringing.”

  “I understand that young people in particular are up against things that you and I weren’t when we were growing up. I understand that they don’t always measure up to the images portrayed on MTV or American Idol. Or that the images of themselves they portray publicly on Facebook might become a source of terrible ridicule and bullying at school.”

  “Poor, poor, misunderstood Chris. You’ve no doubt met Mrs. Parker.”

  “I’ve been retained by her. She’s convinced of her son’s innocence.”

  “She also pointed him out as the killer. I have a roomful of witnesses who will testify to that fact.”

  “Her head had just been crushed with an axe.”

  “She was cognizant.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I hear the sound of him clenching his teeth from all the way across the desk.

  “Mr. Moonlight, I’m under no legal obligation to tell you this, but when we arrived at the murder scene on the morning of September 15th, we found that the front door had been opened with a spare key normally hidden inside a flowerpot by the door. Only a family member would be privy to that hiding spot. Nothing in the house had been upset. No drawers overturned, nothing ransacked. Not even Joan’s pocketbook had been lifted from the scene.”

  I look him in the eye. “So?”

  His face goes redder. “So we feel it was an inside job. Taken along with Joan’s confession, well…” Unfolding his hands, raising them up to imitate a slam dunk.

  “And maybe Peter lived long enough to trace Christopher’s name on the wall in blood?”

  “Not exactly, Moonlight. But he did live long enough with a crushed skull to somehow retrieve the morning paper and make the coffee.”

  I know all about Parker’s strange behavior post-axe attack. It was creepy to read it in the paper and then imagine the fatally wounded man attempting to go through his morning routine. But hearing it firsthand from one of the first people to visit the scene of the crime makes the image of a blood-soaked man with a bashed-in skull and exposed brains making the coffee downright disturbing. Makes me glad I decided to turn down Darleen’s coffee offer. It also makes me want to shift the direction of my questioning to something a little more academic.

  “What about blood-spatter patterns?”

  “On the floor, on the walls, on the lamp shades. Consistent with a right-handed individual. Consistent with a single individual.”

  I stand, zip up my leather jacket. “Any chance of my getting inside the house?”

  He stands. He’s taller than me. Leaner. A long-distance runner, maybe. “Place is still under police jurisdiction. But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Seeing as you’re the police.”

  He snickers.

  “I’m also going to try to talk with Christopher,” I reveal. “His mother and his lawyer have their way, he’ll be out on bail within a couple of days.”

  “Best not to get too far ahead of yourself, Moonlight,” Bowman says. “You got a pretty steep hill to climb before any judge worth his robe is going to sign off on Chris’s parole.”

  “You know of the vet clinic he worked at during school vacations?”

  “Pet Sounds,” he reveals. “You really gotta bother Doc Robinson with all this? He’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Hark! Discouragement masked as encouragement.”

  “Cut the shit, Moonlight. Watch your step in Bethlehem. People around here live life peacefully. They’re not used to murder in the first, and their wounds are still fresh from what Megan Riley did to her little girl. They’d all like to put these sad affairs behind them, move on.”

  “Ah yes, the Great Pilgrim Society,” I remark, going for the door. “Untouched by murder and people of color. Or allow me to rephrase: in denial over murder and people of color.”

  “Watch your mouth. We have people of color right here on the force.”

  “Oh yes, Darleen. We can put the subject of color behind us now. And looks like you wouldn’t mind putting Peter Parker’s murder behind you ASAP either, Bowman.”

  “Get out before I toss you out!” he barks. In his shape, he probably could toss me out.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice, sugar.”

  Like I said, this isn’t my first trip to Bethlehem. Here’s why: Three years back, a four-year-old child, Christina Riley, was reported abducted right out of the backseat of her mother’s idling Subaru. News of the incident got smeared all over the local papers and on TV. Even a national cable crime-news network picked up on it and began running hourly reports. You know, boost the drama and inject some crack cocaine into the ratings.

  The MC of the program, a big-breasted bleach-blonde with a Southern drawl, interviewed the detective in charge of the investigation—a middle-aged, well-dressed, tall man with sad eyes by the name of Bowman. He spoke about combing the woods behind the house, about his police force scouring the surrounding neighborhoods, schools, shopping malls, fast food joints…You know the score.

  Big Blonde Hair also interviewed the child’s distraught mother, a twenty-five-year-old, unmarried Bethlehem resident and former bartender by the name of Megan Riley. Naturally, she was shattered and terrified by Christina’s sudden disappearance, and the nation picked up on her agony and felt pity for her.

  So did I. I was the father of a little boy, after all.

  Everyone in the surrounding community was upset, and the cable television program really played the drama up. Everyone begged for whoever took the little girl to just please give her back. It was as if the town expected the animal who abducted the innocent kid to suddenly change his mind, drive her out to the spot of the press conference, and set her right back in the arms of her mother. I guess people get stupid when they get desperate. Take it from me.

  Photographs and video clips of the child were broadcast night and day. Stuff was tough to look at, believe you me. The little girl dressed in a ballerina outfit, dancing in the living room of her home. The girl wearing a party hat, trying to blow out the four candles on a birthday cake. The little girl falling asleep in the safe and sound arms of her mother. The little girl wide-eyed with wonder at Disneyland…Seemed like the whole country couldn’t stop crying over this abducted little girl and her devastated mother. Including me.

  But then, something changed drastically.

  Pictures surfaced that didn’t place Megan in a good light. Photos shot before she became pregnant with Christina showing her dressed in a micro-miniskirt, dirty dancing with another young miniskirted hottie inside some downtown juke joint. They were both fisting tall beers, laughing, and whooping it up for the cameras and for the half dozen drunk guys who surrounded them on the dance floor. On one occasion, the girls were seen kissing each other passionately, drunkenly. It was a sight to see.

  Months passed.

  People grew frustrated at the lack of leads generated by the Bethlehem police. But the people, including Big Blonde Hair, were also growing suspicious of the party-animal mother, even if her partying had been done prior to her child’s birth. So was Bowman. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time until he arrested her and put her in jail. Which is exactly what he did immediately after a startling discovery was made in the woods behind Megan’s home.

  Portions of a child’s body, including a piece of lower jawbone,
were discovered in a dried-up swampy section of woods not one hundred yards behind the single-story residence. The jaw still bore a piece of gray duct tape that must have been wrapped around the little girl’s mouth. Forensic experts matched fingerprints on the duct tape to Megan’s. They also traced the duct tape to a roll that still resided inside her kitchen junk drawer. DNA evidence proved the remains were Christina’s. Damning evidence in hand, Bowman was now convinced Megan killed her own daughter, then covered it up by saying she was abducted.

  Megan swore she did not kill her little girl. Christina had been abducted, she insisted. If Megan was guilty of anything, it was of leaving the child alone, asleep in the car while it was parked in the driveway. She’d only run back into the house for a moment to retrieve her cell phone. But when her landline rang, she picked it up. The caller was an old boyfriend she’d been trying to reconnect with via some online dating service. She was so excited to hear from him, she forgot all about her daughter. By the time she remembered, she ran out of the house and into the driveway, only to discover the worst.

  Her daughter was gone. Vanished. No trace of her anywhere.

  But after those remains were discovered along with the duct tape, there would be no turning back for the prosecutors. From that point on, Megan never had a chance. Bowman publicly crucified the young woman, accusing her of murder in the first. After accepting a plea, she was charged with second-degree homicide and sentenced to thirty years in the joint.

  After things calmed down, I was assigned to Megan’s case as a parole officer acting as an independent contractor for Albany County, even though the possibility of parole was decades away. But I visited her from time to time at Bedford Hills’ women’s penitentiary across the train tracks from Sing Sing. I was worried about her. Seemed like I was the only one on earth worried about her. On each visit, she’d grown more gaunt and thin than she’d been on my previous visit. She was starving herself. But she was also suffering from the loss of her daughter. Dying from it, as if her broken heart were literally bleeding out. Eventually she died in her sleep in a gray prison cell. Not even the plastic feeding tube they forced down her throat could save her life. Grief had killed her and, in my mind, there was only one way for that to have happened: she’d been wrongly accused.