Murder by Moonlight Read online

  I’ll begin by interviewing Terry Kindler in the morning.

  The major question on my list: How much are the Parkers worth dead?

  Up before the dawn, head spinning from Jack and senseless nightmares that all somehow revolve around the Bear. The one that wakes me:

  A dark, anonymous city street surrounded by abandoned warehouses. Concrete, macadam, lifeless. I’m running, being chased, but I can’t tell by whom or why. Up ahead, standing in the road, my son. He’s little again, with bushy brown hair blowing in the wind, and a chubby little body dressed in baggy farmer’s overalls.

  I reach out for him, but I feel myself moving backward. Floating helplessly is more like it. I see my son turn. He shakes his head, extends his hands, and waves me away.

  Then I see a man appear.

  He’s wearing a dark hood pulled over his face. He grabs hold of the Bear, starts dragging him away. I’m not floating anymore. I’m standing again in the street, all alone. I’m crying, trying to scream, but no sound will come out…

  I lie in bed for a while listening to the river and the gulls.

  I wish for the sound of a ship’s bell. Or maybe a horn and the metal-on-metal clash of a ship’s anchor being pulled out of the brine. Something that signifies moving away from this place. Away from the past. Away from dreams and faces that haunt me.

  Soon as the sun breaks over the blue mountains of Massachusetts to the east of the river, I crawl out of bed, make the coffee, take it out with me onto a wooden deck that I built onto the old brick building not long after I finally got up the nerve to sell Dad’s old house and Moonlight Funeral Home.

  Another cold, gray day.

  But I like the look of the river from here. There’s a tug moving slowly north against the tide, probably to pick up one of the empty garbage barges outside the docks in Troy. From there they’ll bring the empty barge south to New York City where they’ll pick up a load of refuse, then haul it back up north to some out-of-the-way landfill.

  Albany, New York: give us your tired, your restless, your garbage.

  I take a shot and toss a wave at one of the longshoremen standing on the bow. Some big, burly, bearded guy in a black turtleneck and wool skullcap. He looks like the Gorton’s Fisherman.

  Damn if he doesn’t wave back at me. Makes me feel warm and cozy inside. Chances are if I wave at somebody in the South End of Albany, they flip me off, or point a gun at me.

  Back inside the loft, the phone machine is blinking the number 1. Means I’ve got a business message. I make my way to the kitchen counter, press the play button.

  “Hello Mr. Moonlight,” says the low, subdued voice. “My name is Steve Ferrance. I work the crime desk at the Times Union newspaper. I was wondering if I could steal a half hour of your time later today. Say six o’clock, Matty’s bar right next door to the Greyhound bus station on Broadway. Same building, actually. Hope to see you there.”

  He hangs up.

  I play the message again. It doesn’t change. I delete it and make a mental note of the six o’clock meeting in my head. Not that I know for certain I’m going to make the appointment. But I recall Ferrance’s reports about the Parker attacks. I just read them. All of them. Ferrance is an investigative reporter. That means he knows more about the case than I’ll ever know. Means he also harbors strong opinions regarding that inside, investigative knowledge. Not a bad resource to tap into on behalf of my new employer and assignment. How Ferrance knows I’m working the case for Christopher and his mother, I have no idea. Maybe Detective Bowman and his mouth have something to do with it.

  Setting my empty coffee cup in the sink, I make my way across the loft’s thick wood-plank floor, past the couch, past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, past the long chest that might support a television if I had one, past the floor-to-ceiling chicken-wire window walls.

  The only area that’s not exposed in the loft is the bathroom, including the shower. Good thing, too. Not that I’d care about the pigeons gazing in at me through the industrial plate glass. But if what they say about heaven is true, then it only makes sense that Peter Parker is looking down on me. Might be a good idea to spare him and me the shower shot.

  But I do think about the law clerk trying to size me up, see if I have what it takes to find out who really killed him.

  I’m not sure he’d like what he sees.

  But then, I’m not sure he wouldn’t, either.

  Terry Kindler, Esq., is a throwback to the days when a lawyer was considered saintly in the eyes of the common working man, and his three-story downtown Troy brownstone reflects that haughty attitude. As I enter through the thick wooden door, I’m greeted by a dimly lit vestibule that supports a mahogany desk and stand-alone lamps. The cherry-paneled wall to my immediate right supports dozens of black-and-white portraits of the firm’s partners, beginning with the present Mr. K himself, and then going back some one hundred years to some stiff upper lip with a tall white collar and bow tie. I make my way past the desk and glance at the many stern faces until I return to the number one man: Kindler. His narrow, clean-shaven face exudes authority and clarity of voice, even though it’s just a photograph. Makes me want to pay him three hundred and fifty dollars an hour and like it.

  “Can I help you?” comes a woman’s voice.

  I turn, face the receptionist. She’s a slim, well-built young woman of maybe twenty-five or thirty. Shoulder-length blonde hair, green eyes, lovely lashes. My kind of woman. But then, they’re all my kind of woman.

  I paint a bright Pepsodent smile for her benefit. “I have an appointment with Mr. Kindler…Esquire.”

  She furrows her brow adorably, peers south at her appointment book, slowly sits herself down while she’s doing it. When she’s fully seated I can’t help but get a slight look at her cleavage and the black, see-through, lace lingerie she’s wearing to support it.

  “Mr. Kindler is expecting you, Mr. Moonlight,” she says, voice soft, sultry. Then, looking up. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  “No, thanks, I’ve had mine,” I say in my best Bogart To Have and Have Not. But she just looks at me like I’m a computer screen that’s just frozen up.

  “OK then. Please take a seat in the waiting room,” she offers, gesturing to the large parlor directly ahead of me.

  “I trust you have the latest Albany Law Review?” I pose with a wink.

  “Thank you for trusting,” she says.

  Quick and hot. She’s really growing on me.

  I walk into the parlor, sit my glutes down on a couch that has to be fifty years older than my long-dead grandmother. Sure enough, there’s a copy of the latest Law Review staring me in the face.

  I don’t even pretend to read it. I’ll just have to trust that it’s a great issue.

  A few minutes later, Kindler appears just beyond the reception desk. He’s everything I expect from a guy who uses “esquire” at the end of his name. He’s wearing a gray wool suit the founding father of the firm might have owned at one time, pressed all-cotton Oxford, hand-tied bow tie, and, of course, round horn-rimmed glasses. He peers at me with a face that’s as clean-shaven and intense as the photograph hanging on the wall. Also as emotionless.

  He nods as if I should follow him, turns, and starts up a staircase that begins inside the vestibule and wraps around the interior of the building.

  When I make it past the reception desk, I toss another smile at the receptionist. She smiles back.

  Maybe it’s possible we’re falling in love.

  Kindler’s office is square, with two big windows overlooking River Street in the historic, riverside district of downtown Troy. Just about all the wall space is taken up by bookcases, law volumes crammed into them. Like everything else in the building, his desk is old, rich, mahogany. Every inch of the desktop is covered with paper. There’s a banker’s lamp for light and a black phone with three or four extensions and not much else in terms of mod cons. Conspicuously missing is a computer. Laptop or old-fashioned desktop.

&n
bsp; “Please make yourself at home,” the old lawyer offers, walking around the desk to his swivel chair.

  I sit down in one of the leather chairs. Most of the spring is gone out of it, causing me to sink in deep. I might need the adorable receptionist’s help to pull myself back out.

  We spend an uncomfortable moment or two staring at one another while the stuffy silence of the old building entombs us. There have got to be other lawyers practicing in the place, right? But I wonder where. And whether they are, in fact, alive.

  “So,” he sighs, clasping his hands tightly together on the desktop. I guess it’s his way of saying, You go first!

  “Why are you so convinced Christopher Parker didn’t fuck up his father and didn’t attempt to fuck up his mother?”

  Kindler works up a grin. “Refreshing to find a man who gets right to the point and who sees the value in shock.”

  “I can see that you’re real busy. Plus, I can die at any time.”

  He blinks, grin melting into a frown. “The Bethlehem police have cooked up some rather flimsy circumstantial evidence against the kid,” he explains, speaking more blue-collar street shark than educated esquire.

  “How can you be sure? I’ve been to that bloodbath of a house. I’ve spoken to Bowman and that nosy mechanical engineer lives across the street. What’s his name, Okey. I have to say, at this point, I tend to agree with the pro dick. Looks like an inside job.”

  Kindler gives his head a shake, sits back hard in his chair. “I’m aware of the evidence found at the crime scene. It’s precisely this evidence that makes me believe it could not have been Christopher.”

  “Such as…”

  “Such as a lone fingerprint that was discovered just inches from where the telephone wires were cut.”

  I recall looking at the cut connection the night before. I also recall my immediate reaction: that only a pro would know how to cut it without frying him- or herself. “That’s a possible red flag,” I agree. “Could very well belong to the guy who cut the line or the guy who installed it in the first place.”

  Kindler clears his throat. “Mr. Moonlight, are you aware of a law professor by the name of Jim O’Connor?”

  “This is Albany, Mr. Kindler. It’s more Irish than Dublin. I know at least a dozen Jim O’Connors.”

  “Well, this one is fiftyish or thereabouts, teaches law at Albany Law School. He’s acting as the prosecution’s sole expert witness.”

  “Not exactly a field guy.”

  “Not exactly is right. More of an academic attuned to theory and conjecture.”

  “I imagine circumstantial evidence would seem quite attractive to him. Theory over practicality. Academics over common sense.”

  “In terms of logic, yes it would. In other words, if it appears that Christopher could’ve been at the scene of the crime on the morning of September 15th, then by all means he must have been.”

  “But just because it looks like an apple, tastes like an apple, and acts like an apple, doesn’t always mean it’s an apple.”

  “Precisely, Mr. Moonlight.”

  “So in your mind, Mr. Kindler, what’s the police accusation boil down to?”

  “What links Christopher to this crime is the malignant imagination of the police department, which decided within the first five minutes of investigation that Chris was the person who killed his father and attacked his mother.”

  Like the lawyer, I clear my throat, even though it doesn’t require clearing. Makes me feel smarter. Maybe not Law Review smart, but smart-ass-ish, anyway. “That would of course be based upon the rather misguided belief that Joan knew precisely what she was doing when she ID’d her son as the killer with a nod.” I raise both of my hands, make quotation marks with my middle and index fingers around the words “misguided belief” for effect.

  “My neurological expert in Rochester says it’s quite possible that Joan would be able to follow simple instructions, given the terrible condition she was in,” Kindler adds. “But these instructions would have nothing to do with memory. In fact, these simple motor functions would not require any kind of memory whatsoever, would function outside that portion of the brain that remembers things…long- or short-term.”

  “Peter made the morning coffee while suffering from his fresh head injuries,” I say. “He also retrieved the morning paper.”

  Kindler nods. Right again, Moonlight.

  “Wouldn’t tasks like that require memory?” I try to recall the period immediately following my botched suicide. Had I performed any normal routine tasks while a piece of .22-caliber hollow-point was taking up residence inside my brain? It’s possible, but I simply don’t remember.

  Kindler waves away my question like he would an annoying housefly. “Simple rote tasks. Simple routines, hard-wired into Peter’s brain like a computer hard drive. Requiring no analysis of remembered events or anything else. Performed automatically—nonsensically, in fact. A cup of morning coffee was among the last things Peter needed at that moment.”

  Lawyer’s got a point. “Then I guess what you and your expert are saying is that Joan could have followed commands like ‘Raise your arm’ or ‘Move your leg,’ and she could respond. But if you were to ask her something requiring memory, that would have come from a different portion of the brain. Somewhere around the cerebral cortex, perhaps.”

  “Totally different function, Mr. Moonlight. In fact, it’s memory that is universally disrupted after a traumatic brain injury.”

  He smiles. I know what’s coming next. “Perhaps you are familiar with the variety and type of head trauma I’m referring to.”

  I bite my lip, raise my right hand to my head, make like a pistol, bring the thumb down. “Bang,” I whisper. Was a time I used to deny my botched suicide attempt. Now, with so many people being aware of it and so willing to bring it up, I simply go with it. “You were saying?” I add, lowering my finger pistol.

  “In nodding her head the way she purportedly did,” Kindler goes on, “Joan could have simply been responding to the name Christopher.”

  This makes sense to me, despite the circumstantial evidence linking the kid to the crime.

  “Can I ask you another question?”

  “That’s why you’re here.” More polite grins.

  “You think the police and the prosecutors are relying on Joan’s nod because there’s a major flaw in their case? Or, said another way, because they don’t have a single fucking shred of forensic evidence to link the kid to the crime?”

  “Not a fucking shred,” Kindler agrees. “No bloody footprints matching Chris’s, no bloody fingerprints matching Chris’s, no smears that could have come from the kid’s hands, fingers, arms, legs, feet, or fucking forehead. Only smears and prints that came from Peter. Otherwise, nothing was discovered that would link Chris directly to the scene. And I think you’re well aware of how much blood would have gotten on him.”

  “The place is covered in it. Maybe that’s why the cops left the joint exactly the way they found it. To keep on trying to match up Chris’s prints with prints left at the scene.”

  “Even if they do manage to uncover some prints, print identification isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anymore. Modern-day forensic studies prove our individual prints aren’t as unique as we once thought. I’ve seen the Parker residence firsthand. And the print evidence is entirely contaminated with the prints of a half dozen EMTs, another dozen cops, and who knows who the hell else. And by the way, I’m not ever going back there if I don’t have to.”

  “Well, somebody played in the blood. It’s like a scene out of Dark Shadows.”

  “You’re dating yourself, Mr. Moonlight. It had to be Peter himself. He bled all over the house. He wasn’t aware of what was happening to him.”

  “No other fingerprints were lifted off the scene that can’t be accounted for?”

  “All I know is that Christopher’s were not. Not yet, anyway. Or, if a print has been lifted, the police aren’t saying so, and why wouldn’t they say s
o?”

  “Not much in the way of evidence was removed from the place at all.”

  “The police are using the house itself as one big evidence depository. Prosecutor plans on escorting a jury to the place for a firsthand look if it comes to that.” Just as I thought. “You…we had better hope your prints aren’t lifted from the scene, by the way.”

  “I’m very careful when I commit my break-ins,” I attest. “But I will tell you this, Terry; thus far I’m not seeing anything that tells me the kid didn’t do it. Except for one thing.”

  He shoots me a look from across the desk. Well, what is it?

  “Takes a lot of effort to sink a fireman’s axe into somebody’s head repeatedly,” I say. “A lot of strength. Chris played basketball, and he was active in the Scouts, but I’m telling you, multiple back-to-back blows from a heavy fireman’s axe isn’t a job for the weak.”

  As if I’ve lit a match under him, Kindler bounds up out of his chair, raises his right foot high, sets the sole of his cordovan on the edge of the desk. Then he holds both his clutched hands out, acting the role of a man holding an axe handle.

  “Allow me to demonstrate something,” he offers up. “Whoever landed those axe blows had to prop his right foot on the Parkers’ queen-sized mattress in order work up the leverage necessary to free the blade. He’d have to yank it back out of Peter’s head, just like you would do if you were chopping firewood.” Looking me in the eye. “You see, when you land an axe head into someone’s brain, there is most definitely a suction element.”

  “I’ll have to remember that,” I say. “A suction element.” My stomach does a flip at the thought of an axe blade buried that deep in a man’s head, at the thought of yanking it out, fighting the suction.

  “So we do have footprints,” I press.

  “But nothing matching Christopher’s, other than the size ten D. The most common shoe size on the planet.”

  “More than one set of ten Ds?”

  “Almost definitely.”

  “What kind of shoes? Loafers, work boots, sneakers, high heels?”