Moonlight Falls (11 page)

“I’d say it’s our only hope. Because the alternative …” Cain raised up his hands, allowing his point to dangle.

“Because the alternative is to expose everything we’ve worked for with our Russian friends from the north.”

“That happens, Captain, we’re all no better off than Scarlet.”

25

SOME THIRTY MINUTES LATER I was pulling into short-term parking at Stormville Airport. At the video-monitored entrance gate, I rolled down the funeral coach window, snatched the ticket from the narrow mouth of the automated ticket vendor and parked as close to the U.S. Air terminal as I could manage.

I met up with Brendan Lyons inside the open bar on the second floor of the terminal, just a short walk from Gates B7 to B11. I recognized his face from the black-and-white portrait printed in the paper beside his byline. In person he was a tall, slim, somewhat balding man of about my age. He was wearing gray slacks and a black blazer over a pressed, olive-colored button-down.

No tie.

A black leather briefcase was set on the floor by his feet and set on the bar was the same morning edition of the
Times Union
newspaper that I had read earlier.

He’d already started on a bottle of Miller by the time I walked in at five minutes after five. As we shook, I took a quick look over his shoulder at the wide expanse of tarmac that was plainly visible through the floor to ceiling plate glass wall. Outside, a bright yellow turbo-prop helicopter was warming up its rotors, the giant blades spinning mirage-like circles above and at the tail end of the sleek craft.

While Brendan got the attention of the gray-haired woman tending bar, I sat myself down on one of the seven or so available stools. I didn’t mention the free, supposedly go-nowhere ticket and boarding pass. That was his business, his private arrangement with Miss Bea from the information booth.

The lady asked for my order.

“Bud,” I smiled.

I took a look around the small bar. We were the only people to occupy the place.

I asked, “So what’s with the airport?”

The reporter grinned, took a drink of his beer.

“Pretty much no one knows me here,” he said. “What I am, what I do. No one expects me to be working an angle if we get to chatting.”

The bartender set my beer down atop a paper napkin. I took notice of the nameplate pinned to her purple uniform shirt. “Anna Mae,” it said. I drank some beer.

“That what I am?” I asked. “Angle of the day?”

Lyons pulled a pack of Merits from his shirt pocket, lit one.

Why does everyone smoke after you quit?

“Scarlet Montana,” he exhaled, along with the cigarette smoke.

“How’d you find out I was working the case?”

He said, “I called around, checked in with a few sources. Finally I got a cop who told me you were brought in to work the case in place of the nonexistent S.I.U.”

“What cop?”

Lyons pulled the cigarette from his lips.

“You know the way the news beat works, Mr. Detective.”

He was right, but it didn’t hurt to ask. Simple fact of the matter was the people on the inside talked. Their motive was almost always personal gain—for greenbacks. But then, there was also the occasional stab in the back—one pissed-off cop to another.

We both drank some more beer.

I asked, “So how can I help?”

He never bothered to pull out a tape recorder or a steno pad. No pen or pencil. He just stamped out his cigarette into the glass ashtray and said, “I am going to make an assumption, Detective Divine. You believe that Scarlet Montana was murdered last night. Or else you would not be wasting your time with me right now.” He held his breath for a beat or two. “And, you believe that her husband—the esteemed Chief of our very own S.P.D.—has everything to do with that murder.”

Sure it had been more or less my theory for more than twelve hours now. I’d even been toying with the idea that I might have had something to do with that murder. There was the issue of my hands after all. The scrapes, cuts, abrasions. But just hearing the word “murder” come from another’s mouth made it seem all the more based in reality.

“Look, Mr. Lyons—”

“Brendan.”

“Brendan,” I said. “All I know is that I was brought in last night on a potential conflict-of-interest situation that Mitchell Cain and Jake Montana thought important enough to warrant my independent attention.”

“What could be more important than the mutilation of one’s wife?”

I looked into his face. It looked better in the flesh than in the grainy newsprint.

I said, “Scarlet’s death was as gruesome as I’ve ever witnessed in my entire life. That includes the bodies my father sometimes took into his funeral home. Bodies no one else could or would work with.” A drink of beer. “I’m no stranger to the dead, Brendan. To just assume that Scarlet had committed suicide …” I threw up my hands. “Well, you get the point.”

“So
you’re
saying it
is
murder.”

Newspeople. Always putting words in your mouth
.

I could only imagine the orgasm he’d be having if he knew I’d been the last man to sleep with Scarlet, only minutes before her death.

“No, you’re saying that,” I said. “That hasn’t been determined yet. Thus our little friendly conversation in the airport bar.”

Lyons made this little crooked, kissing motion with his lips and nodded.

“I’m not ruling anything out,” I said. “I’ve got the rules of engagement to pursue before I can determine anything.”

He bit his lip.

Outside the big picture window, the chopper body came alive as it bounced up and down on the tarmac, its scarlet, blue and white overhead and undercarriage lights flashing on and off. Beyond that, a U.S. Air 727 taking off on the main north-south runway.

“My guess is that Cain must be having a real fit over your intention to investigate. Because naturally, old man Montana has got to be pissing his pants.”

“His own wife,” I added. “No evidence of a break-in.”

“Montana can probably feel the County Prosecutor breathing down the back of his fat neck. And you know as well as I do that if O’Connor decides to pursue him, then I.A. will follow. They start pulling out cards at random, the whole place will tumble.”

I said, “The only thing they have going for them now is the suicide theory.”

“Right now, Divine, everyone is holding their water waiting to see how things are going to play out. Let’s face it, those stiffs at I.A. got no more loyalty than the prosecutor’s office. Only to themselves, their own advancement. They’re all politicians.”

“Go figure,” I said.

“Go figure,” Lyons chuckled.

Anna Mae brought us another round without our having to ask. Either she was a real good barkeep, or Lyons was somewhat of a regular. I guessed a little of both.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m gonna level with you. I’ve been ordered by my own Editor in Chief to lay off this one.”

“Screw the First Amendment,” I said.

“Lay off for
now
,” he said, firing up another smoke. “You have any idea what ‘lay off’ means to a city deskman?”

I pulled back on the beer.

“Lay off,” I said, picturing a giant red flag in my head. “Lot of that going around lately.”

We drank for a while. Not saying much of anything. In fact, I was contemplating heading out when Lyons suddenly perked up.

I said, “Anything else you wanna ask me?”

He slid off his stool, reached into his trouser pockets, came out with a twenty, laid it atop the bar.

“I have a small proposition for you.”

I finished up my beer, got up from the stool.

“In the course of your Scarlet Montana investigation,” he said, “if you should happen upon any evidence of a, let’s say, irrefutable nature that would somehow lead to murder, how’s about giving me a little heads up?”

He said it. Exactly what I wanted him to say.

“What about your boss?” I said. “The gag order?”

“A serious journalist has his integrity to think of.”

“And in return?”

“You see justice served.”

What more could I want? Moral payola.

I held out my hand. He shook it, then bent down, grabbed his briefcase.

He said, “Remember, irrefutable evidence or this whole thing will be shot.”

“We’re after the same thing,” I said, just as the giant chopper rotors went full blast. So loud you could hear them flapping, feel them vibrating through the soundproof glass.

I was happy on the solid ground.

Lyons started to leave. But then he stopped to look at me.

“Is it true what they say?” he asked. “About your … head? The bullet is still lodged inside there?”

“A fragment. I try not to think about it much,” I lied.

“S.P.D. placed you on disability over three years ago,” he said. “Why work at all?”

“T.V. sucks,” I said. “Besides, I’m learning to be a masseuse. But I’m also still a part-time cop. And I like a good mystery now and again.”

“Death,” he said. “Ain’t no mystery in being dead.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said, “soon as I get there.”

26

BACK ON THE FIRST floor of the terminal, I couldn’t help but take notice of the giant television that took up most of the building’s northwest wall. Actually not a single monitor, but dozens of digital flat screens joined together to form one giant electronic display.

The giant T.V. had been tuned to one of the local news channels. They were running a kind of photo montage of Scarlet Montana. From what I could tell, the montage was intended to tell the story of her life through pictures, beginning with when she was just a kid growing up in what I knew were the suburbs of L.A., to her graduation from high school (not long after both her parents had perished in a car crash in San Bernardino) to her commencement from Russell Sage College in Troy, New York—the very place she would meet up with Jake back when he was still an officer for the Troy P.D.

There were photographs of her working with disadvantaged youths in Stormville’s south end and even a photo taken of she and Jake as they walked arm in arm down the church aisle on their wedding day.

No photos of Scarlet drinking herself to sleep.

No photos of her and I having sex.

Standing there inside the terminal, with the extra long lines of people queued up two hours early to make it through added security, I wasn’t quite sure if I felt dumbstruck or just downright sad. I suppose in a way, I was no better than Jake. Because looking at her face, I never realized how beautiful she really was. Pretty, yes. Gorgeous even. But I mean beautiful. The kind of beautiful that makes you feel good just to be with her. But then, I also realized how little of her I really knew.

There she was again, alive, bright eyes looking out at me from a candid snapshot taken during her high school graduation, donning white cap and gown, clutching a rolled- up diploma tight to her chest. She seemed to have nothing but the future to look forward to.

But then suddenly the smiling face was replaced with a video clip of a body being pulled out the back end of a black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows and in through the rear doors of the Stormville Medical Arts Center basement morgue.

With the sound muted, I had no way of telling just what was being reported about Scarlet’s death. No idea what the official theories were at this point as to how she died and who or what might have been responsible, although I knew it couldn’t be that different from what Lyons had reported this morning.

Then I saw my own face plastered up on the screen.

The transmission had shifted from the photo montage to the television anchor. Broadcast up on the right-hand corner of the screen, besides the anchor’s face, a still photograph of me.

Maybe it was just me (my cerebral cortex playing tricks), but I was sure that when the giant broadcaster’s lips moved they made the word “suspect.” I was certain of it.

I thought my chest was going to open up, my insides spilling out onto the terrazzo.

The broadcast photo was one I remembered well. Snapped not long after I’d earned my detective’s badge. A nice, professional quality photo that showed me clean shaven and sporting a full head of thick black hair. I was standing in front of a pole-mounted American flag that was set beside the official yellow and navy blue flag representing the Stormville Police Department.

For just those few seconds I stood there paralyzed, sure that Jake and Cain had just announced me as their primary suspect. But then, underneath the photo appeared the words I wanted to see: “S.P.D. Special Detective Richard Divine: the independent investigator in charge of the Montana inquest.”

There,
I thought.
Breathe easy, Divine. Lyons wasn’t kidding. They were making my involvement public.

I wasn’t a suspect after all. I was just a paranoid part-timer with a guilty conscience.

My heartbeat was slowing. But the news report had served as a kind of lesson. A warning. The sooner I got to the bottom of Scarlet’s death, the sooner I could remove myself from the Montana equation, get down to the business of nailing the real killer.

I looked down at my scarred palms.

Maybe I couldn’t explain where they came from, but at the same time, I did not see myself capable of killing anyone. Not to mention Scarlet.

But if there was a killer out there, I was going to find him.

If the killer was Jake, I’d nail him to the wall.

In the meantime, if Cain and Jake had it in their mind to make me a suspect, I’d prove them wrong.

If there were any kind of justice for Scarlet, I would dig it up. Even if I had to take out the whole S.P.D. in the process.

- - -

I drove across the flat lot in the direction of the manned exit booths where I paid three dollars worth of short term parking fees. Pressing my receipt into the unused ashtray, I might have felt at relative peace had I not taken immediate notice of the Toyota Landcruiser making its way into the lot, just as I was making my way out.

The white-skinned man I’d had a run-in with earlier was driving the car. He made a right-hand turn into the parking lot. He was going so slow along the one-way road, I could plainly see how his red eyes were lit up in the glare from the illuminated dash. We eyed one another for the entire few seconds it took him to drive by.