Moonlight Falls (39 page)

Standing in the backyard, I pulled the leather pouch from my pocket, opened it, took out the diagram. I flashed the light upon it. It was obvious that the drawing mimicked the layout of the yard and the perimeter of the property. Judging from where I was standing, I calculated that if I took maybe twenty steps in the direction of the back property line, I would be standing upon—you guessed it—the spot marked X.

With shovel in one hand and flashlight in the other, I began walking out across the lawn, counting the steps as I went, until I came to twenty. I stuck the shovel into the soft, sandy ground, pressed the blade in with my foot. It took some time, with me neatly cutting away the wet sod, setting it aside and digging maybe five or six different holes before the soft earth gave way to something rigid. Not like a stone, but more like the metal box I expected.

Clearing the earth away I reached down, pulled the strongbox out with my hands, set it before me on the grass. As I stuck my fingers into the leather bag I realized how badly my now-healed hands were trembling. The trembling, soil-stained fingers rummaged inside the pouch for the key.

I pulled the key out of the bag, stared at the white moonlight that reflected off its smooth shiny surface.

Just a little silver key.

I slid it into the keyhole and twisted. The lid released. I opened it all the way and shined the flashlight inside. That’s when I saw it. Two items, actually. The first, a black videocassette that had been placed inside a plastic Ziploc bag; and the second, an unrecognizable bundle wrapped in cotton cloth.

I took the video out and immediately stuffed it into the right-hand pocket of my leather jacket. Then, placing the flashlight on the ground so that it shined on the tiny bundle, I began to unwrap it. Slowly, gently, I peeled away each gray cotton layer bit by bit until I came to a set of closed eyes. The littlest eyes you ever saw. Like doll’s eyes, only more fragile. My hands went from trembling to outright shaking as I peeled away another layer to reveal little feet and hands, the skin that covered them darkened the color of leather, but still supple to the touch, as if this baby had been born yesterday. There was a little mouth and nose and even a full head of strawberry blond hair, just like his mother. It was the strangest sensation, me just positioned there on my knees staring down at Scarlet’s baby, amazed at its mummified body, my tears distorting my vision.

I didn’t know what to see in this baby, this prematurely deceased James Montana.

Rather, I wasn’t sure if what I saw was a miracle nearly perfectly preserved in the sandy soil, or if I saw the pain Scarlet had borne for so long or the relief she surely now had in death. Maybe I saw all three. In any event, I knew there was only one thing to do. I wrapped James back up, placed him once more inside the lockbox, buried him for all eternity.

If anyone knew enough not to disturb the dead, it was me.

Not long after I filled in the rest of the holes and replaced the sod, a set of headlights pulled up out front. I killed the flashlight, gazed in their direction.

Lola’s Humvee.

She must have followed me here. I had no idea how much she might have witnessed, no idea how long she’d been out there watching me in the dark before she decided to pull up front. I guess it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was her presence.

I picked up the shovel, carried it back to the funeral coach, tossed it inside. Then I went over to where she parked herself along the curb.

When she rolled down the window I was struck at how beautiful she was with her long black hair, brown teardrop eyes and soft red lips. For a change, she wasn’t wearing her lab coat.

She whispered, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

I smiled, wiped my eyes with my muddy hands.

I said, “There are some questions better left unanswered.”

She said, “Some questions are better left unposed.”

I got back in the Mercedes and followed her home.

- - -

… which I guess, pretty much brings me to where I am now.

I am seated at a long metal table inside a windowless interrogation room in the downtown, unmarked F.B.I. building, not two blocks from where State meets Broadway, down a ways from the old abandoned Hotel Wellington.

Just as they have been for more than three hours, the short stocky agent is seated next to me, while his tall thin partner stands in the far corner, witness to the exchange.

I put out my cigarette, sit back in my chair.

“Did you look at the video?”

“Yes,” I say. “It was me and Scarlet. No sex, just sleeping.”

“Sleeping,” he says. “That’s it?”

“Maybe there were other tapes. Maybe they were different. But all this tape showed was me sleeping. That’s it. That’s the big surprise.”

The two agents exchange glances. They’ve got that blank F.B.I. look going. I can’t tell whether they’re disgruntled or not. Feds are good at hiding their feelings. From what I’m told there’s an entire course on emotion suppression at Quantico.

“And you think that could be the reason why she slipped you the Ambien Mickey Finn—so she could film you sleeping?”

“You’d have to ask her,” I say. “That is, you want the real truth. But then, maybe it made her feel good just to have a collection of taped memories.”

Stocky agent just stares at me.

He says, “Maybe it was her way of snatching up a little control in her life.”

I say, “I’m not seeing the relevance the tape or tapes has to your body parts investigation.”

Stocky agent looks me in the eye.

He says, “Everything is relevant to everything.”

I notice a very real boldness in his voice. Or is it righteousness?

Still, I have to laugh. “Whoa, heavy. I guess that’s why I’m sitting here and you’re sitting there.”

“And where is this tape today?” the agent presses.

“I told you. I destroyed it.”

“You destroyed it,” he says as though disbelieving. “But you said there’s nothing on it but sleeping?”

“Sleeping is enough.”

Stocky agent sits back in his chair, sighs.

“Jeez,” he says. “I guess maybe, in the end, you have learned your lesson after all, Mr. Divine. You’re not the head case you make yourself out to be.”

I cross my arms at my chest, exhale.

Stocky agent stands.

“That’s it,” he says, turning towards the giant mirror, running his right index finger across his neck in a slashing motion—an all-too-innocent gesture that, for the briefest of moments, transports me back to Scarlet and the first time I stepped into her bedroom to gaze upon her mutilated body.

I ask, “So you’re not going to book me for anything?”

“You’ve cooperated,” the agent tells me, while his partner moves away from the wall, stands beside him. “Besides, you’ve done nothing wrong. No charges are to be filed. You’re a free man, pending further questioning of course.”

“You have no one to arrest now,” I add. “The way I learned it, someone always has to pay when it comes to murder. Especially a cop’s murder. Where’s the payoff?”

“Believe me, Mr. Divine,” the agent says, “someone will pay. Sooner or later, justice will be served and someone will go down for this mess. The body parts op alone extends way beyond the boundaries of Stormville and Woodstock.” He rolls his eyes. “And of course, there is the inevitable hellfire.”

Stocky agent is a God-fearing man.

“Cain and Montana were just cogs in a much larger machine, weren’t they?”

“Cain and Montana tapped into a lucrative market,” the agent offers. “Still in all, you took a real chance getting so close to them. They were dangerous men who risked directly connecting themselves with a mob-sponsored black market operation.”

“I guess I’m not afraid of dying after all,” I say.

“I imagine you can’t be as close to death as you’ve been and still be afraid of dying.”

I find myself nodding, as if finally, someone understands. But I know he doesn’t.

“Let me tell you something,” I say. “The closer you come to meeting your maker, the more it scares the living daylights out of you.”

Standing, I make for the exit, but turn back around when the agent calls out my name once more.

“Yeah?”

“You forgot your cigarettes,” he says, holding up the pack.

“I’m the last jerk on the earth who should be smoking. How ‘bout you keep ‘em.”

“I quit three years ago,” stocky agent says with a grin. “But I suppose I can find the second-to-last jerk.”

Going for the door, I get this cold feeling in my feet, a numbness in my right hand, a pressure in the center of my head. The sensations speak to me, alarm me. They tell me these F.B.I. agents will never see me alive again.

EPILOGUE

OUTSIDE, IT WAS RAINING again.

I wondered if it would ever stop for more than three or four days at a time.

Pulling the collar up on my leather jacket, I started walking towards my dad’s Mercedes. It was parked up against the curb on Broadway. From where I stood I could make out Lola in the passenger side seat. Seated beside her was my boy. I wasn’t really certain, but it looked like they were playing some sort of tickle game. She was smiling and laughing, waving her hands up and down. I couldn’t see it of course, but deep in my head I imagined their smiling faces, their laughter.

The rain intensified.

So much rain I was practically blinded. For a few seconds all I could make out was the blurry red and blue light that shined off the brick and concrete wall-mounted neon signs that hung over the doors and windows of the gin mills that peppered the downtown.

More doors and signs than I could count.

But then I saw it lying in the road, directly beside a storm sewer drain that had backed up and was overflowing in the heavy rain. A red robin lying on its side on the soaked macadam. The bird was struggling to lift its wings, its beak opening and closing helplessly, black marble eye reflecting the street light. I stood there watching the bird watch me. He was all alone in the open road, suffering, its scarlet feathers trembling, as though begging me for help.

For just a split second I was tempted to walk into the road, pick the bird up with my bare hands, wrap it in my jacket.

But I did nothing.

What could I possibly do for this creature other than put it out of its misery? And somehow the thought of killing, no matter how easy, just did not seem like the right thing to do. Because all that’s born dies, one way or another. It’s just a matter of how much time you’ve got.

There was, however, one thing I could do.

Stepping out into the road, I reached into my pants pocket, pulled out my wallet. Unfolding it, I slipped out the razor blade that had been pulled off the t-shirt I snatched from the floor in Scarlet’s bedroom the night she killed herself. Just one of those loose razors construction people use for scraping old wallpaper. A paper-thin, super-light blade that Scarlet Montana used to kill herself with in the most brutal manner possible—a blood-soaked blade that somehow must have stuck to my t-shirt not to reappear again until last week’s laundry day when I discovered it at the bottom of the washing machine.

I guess stranger things have happened.

For now I held the blade in my fingertips, felt its near weightlessness. Even the rain that puddled in my palm seemed to weigh more. Until I bent down, dropped it through the sewer grate.

All’s well that ends …

Standing there in the downpour, I made the decision to do something else.

Bending at the waist, I cupped my hands under the injured bird, lifted it up in the palms of my hands. I felt her feathery, wet heat against my skin, her little rapid heart beating against my fingers as I made my way back across the sidewalk, set her down onto a dry piece of awning-protected concrete.

Making my way further up the sidewalk, I made sure not to look back.

In the near distance, my new family awaited me inside my dad’s pride and joy Mercedes funeral coach. With a heavy heart, I moved towards them.

Just another helpless creature, caught in the rain.

BONUS MATERIAL

Interview in
MORE
magazine.

A NEW BOOK FOR HITCHCOCK FANS

Vincent Zandri’s dark thriller. by Dorothy Thompson • More.com Member

Anyone remember those old Hitchcock thrillers?  My favorite was The Birds back in ’63.  I never looked at another black bird the same after that.

There’s a new book out called
Moonlight Falls
(R.J. Buckley Publishing) by Vincent Zandri that will just blow you away.  If you are a Hitchcock fan, you’ll absolutely love this book.  The setting is Albany, New York, where Richard “Dick” Moonlight, former APD detective turned private investigator/massage therapist (I kid you not), who believed he killed Scarlet Montana, his illicit lover and wife of his ex-boss Chief of Detectives Jake Montana.  The dilemma is Moonlight doesn’t remember what happened.  After surviving a botched suicide attempt, he lived precariously on the fence between life and death due to the remnant of a .22 caliber bullet lodged in his brain.  With the little piece of lead pressing up against his cerebral cortex, he knew he couldn’t always trust himself to make the correct decisions.  He also couldn’t trust his short-term memory.

When his sometimes lover, the beautiful Scarlet Montana, called him up one night, he knew he should have resisted, but the temptation was too strong.  Later that same night, when Scarlet’s body was discovered, Moonlight received a call by her police chief husband to oversee a special investigation into a murder Moonlight may well have committed.

It’s an exciting fast-paced thriller that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Vincent Zandri is an award-winning novelist, essayist and freelance photojournalist.  Besides Moonlight Falls, he also wrote and published As Catch Can (Delacorte) and was touted in two pre-publication articles by Publishers Weekly and was called “brilliant” upon its publication by The New York Post.  The Boston Herald attributed it as “the most arresting first crime novel to break into print this season.”