Moonlight Falls (6 page)

The second goal was to turn off all the intimate feelings I might have harbored for Scarlet; ignore any potential outward signs of anxiety that might give away my personal involvement with the deceased.

It wouldn’t be easy.

Not with the low-to-medium velocity blood spatters that stained the baby blue walls and windowpane above the bed. Not with the blood that soaked the mattress, pillow and down comforter. Not with the odor—the sickly sweet smell that filled the twelve-by-fifteen foot bedroom telling me that Scarlet had definitely entered her second hour of death.

I approached the bed, feeling my feet shuffle across the surprisingly clean carpeting as though in slow motion.

Behold Scarlet’s body.

This was not the same woman I’d caressed with my fingertips just hours earlier. Now the human
she
had become an inhuman
it
. I had to believe in that one distinction if I was going to get through the procedure without passing out. She’d become a soulless shell with a thick, blood-encrusted gash that ran from ear to ear, and a kind of rough Y-shaped incision scraped into the dermis on her bared chest.

A body that once belonged to a beautiful woman with wide-open eyes, the whites of which were slowly fading to gray, the pupils fully dilated, the head cocked unnaturally to the left, the mouth slightly open in the right-hand corner as if she were about to issue one of her wry smiles.

Cain stepped up behind me. He pulled a cigarette from out of his left breast pocket—slid it out without having to remove the pack. Professional smoker that he was.

I stared down at the horizontal and vertical hesitation slits carved into Scarlet’s chest and stomach; at the many puncture wounds that marred her breasts; at the blue-tinted legs now marbleized with jagged purple and red spider veins. Then a second glance at the window before quickly about-facing to examine the doorjamb behind me.

“You’re right about one thing,” I said. “No sign of break-in.”

A cursory look at the room furniture—the unbroken table lamp, the tidy table still with its neatly placed Patterson novels, prescription bottle of Ambien and glass of what appeared to be water, but what I knew had to be Stoli.

“No sign of struggle,” he said, before popping the cigarette into his mouth, unlit.

“Not so much as a footprint or a smear,” I added while once more gazing over the tan carpeting.

“A clean scene, Gene,” Cain agreed, lighting up the smoke with a silver-plated Zippo. “A clean scene-a-reno.”

“Maybe
too
clean,” I said to myself.

Now Joy stood inside the open door.

Cain handed him the still lit, partially smoked cigarette.

“Would you mind?” he asked.

I wondered where Jake had disappeared to. I knew that the last place he’d want to be was here. I knew that the last thing Cain wanted was for me to demand an audience with him. But then, under the circumstances, it would have been the right thing to do.

Joy nervously took the smoking butt into his fingertips, preceded to carry it down the hall as if it were a lit bomb.

My head was beginning to pound inside its core; the invisible conductor striking up the band.

I asked Cain if I could get a drink as I raised my right hand, grabbed hold of it with my left, pinched the feeling back into it.

I opened up the top middle drawer on the large wooden chest pressed up against the far wall, rummaged around the underwear and socks. Maybe doing some real detective work would distract me from having to look at Scarlet and from going into another seizure. That’s when I found the tiny leather pouch. In the back of the drawer, underneath all that gentle cotton and silk. I’m not entirely sure what possessed me—what made me place so much importance on something so insignificant. But I gripped the little red pouch in my hand, carefully slid it into my jacket pocket.

Cain asked, “Hard or soft kind of drink?”

I closed the drawer, proceeded to look through the other five.

“More coffee,” I breathed. “And Advils.”

Cain had to chuckle.

Arms outstretched I had to steady myself against the dresser of drawers, regain my balance.

Joy came back into the room. He was wiping his hands off on his blue trousers.

Cain turned to him as I finished up the last drawer. He spit out an order for two large blacks, a small bottle of Advils and a pack of Marlboro Reds. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a considerable bankroll, peeled off a twenty, handed it to the young cop.

He said, “Bring me back the change, Joy kid.”

The baby-faced rookie never uttered a single word of objection, even though he’d have to find a place open in the middle of the night in Stormville. The town that always sleeps. A Stop-and-Shop maybe. Or a 7-Eleven.

I turned, breathed in the smell of death once more.

It was while walking back towards the bed that I noticed it. On the floor, rolled up under the box spring, almost entirely hidden by the bed stand. The gray t-shirt that I had worn to Scarlet’s just a few hours before.

“You gonna look at the body or what, old partner?” Cain asked.

I looked over my shoulder. His back was turned to me while he returned the bankroll to his pant’s pocket. I never hesitated. I just walked over to the bed, went down to my knees, grabbed the t-shirt, stuffed it into my jacket.

God willing, no one the wiser.

With heart beating in my temples, I pulled a pair of green rubber gloves from the right-hand pocket of my leather jacket, yanked them on. Then I leaned over Scarlet’s body, brought my face within inches of her face. As if for the very first time.

- - -

“So these screw heads put you in the middle of a pretty bad situation,” stocky agent says. “If you refused the job, you knew they’d come after you. Probably with some kind of evidence that would incriminate you; something that would prove you had sex with Scarlet only an hour or two before the hack job that killed her. But then, if you took the job you knew you’d have to lie for them.” Eyes wide. “Double fucking whammy … if you’ll excuse my French!”

I nod as if to agree. But then just as quickly, I shake my head like I’m disagreeing.

“Yes and no,” I say. “Yes, meaning they put me in a bad situation. Yes, they wanted me to do what they told me to do. Cain and Jake had always paid me a pretty good buck if I did what they told me to do.”

“By being a bad cop; by lying for them.”

“I didn’t know I was lying for them.”

“How can you not know, Divine?”

“After the accident …”

“What accident? How can suicide be interpreted as an accident?”

A pause, thicker than the concrete walls that surround me.

“Not long after my failed suicide attempt, I screwed up a drug bust pretty good. The department got sued for False Arrest. From that point on I worked for them part time, as an assistant to the Special Independent Unit. On cases they hand selected.”

“What kind of cases?”

“Nothing cases. Murdered drug dealers, accident victims, suicides. Stuff that didn’t require much investigation at all. Quick, turnkey stuff.”

“They told you what to put down in your reports?”

“Not specifically. But they gave me directives, told me what they expected from me. Time was always tight, so I carried out their orders, quick and painless.”

“Nice work if you can get it.”

“I got half a bullet in my brain. I wouldn’t have had any work at all if it weren’t for Mitch Cain. I did the jobs and, in turn, he gave me the cash I needed.”

“By corroborating their police reports,” stocky agent says while his thin partner merely stands on the opposite side of the room, listening, witnessing.

“I never found much reason not to corroborate their reports,” I say. “Until Scarlet died, of course. That’s when things got pretty crazy.”

“You couldn’t just maintain your status quo with Montana and Cain, do what they told you to do?”

“How could I? If I went along with the suicide just because they wanted me to, then where did that leave Scarlet? What if there really was a murderer out there? Somebody capable of cutting up a beautiful woman. What if that killer really turned out to be her husband? No amount of money could make me turn my head on something like that.”

Stocky agent pauses for a moment, as though to chew on my words. I see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his neck, hard. I guess my words are none too easy to swallow.

“But there’s a whole nother reason why you couldn’t go along with them, isn’t there?”

I slip out another cigarette from the pack, light it, exhale the smoke.

I say, “Listen, there’s nobody who wanted to go with the suicide more than me. Christ, I was the last man to sleep with her. The only physical connection to Scarlet’s death. If they were to find one, it wasn’t going to be Jake, it was going to be me. Don’t you see? I had no choice but to investigate in order to clear my name. Because if a Prosecuting Attorney and I.A. suddenly got involved and demanded a full-blown investigation, then suicide or no suicide, they were going to get to the bottom of her death. That happened, all forensic fingers would point to me.”

Stocky agent presses his lips together, shoots another glance to his partner, nods sympathetically.

“Now let me get this straight,” he continues. “They wanted you to sign off on a suicide, but they had no suicide weapon.”

“Here’s this brutally cut up woman whom I had only just slept with. She’s supposedly cut herself up bad, and yet, where’s the blade? She didn’t just get up, wash it off, return it to the drawer, get back in her bed to die.”

“Could it be that her husband disposed of it?”

“I could only assume he took it, did something with it. Hid it.”

“Which would point to him as a murderer, potentially.”

“Or as somebody who was so upset at the sight of his mutilated wife, he just had to dispose of the means of the mutilation.”

“People do fucked up things at fucked up times. Isn’t that right, Divine?”

Stocky agent raises his right hand, makes like a pistol with forefinger and thumb, presses the pretend barrel against his temple. When the thumb falls, he mouths the word, “Boom.”

I smile, but there’s nothing to smile about.

“Listen, I could have done exactly what they wanted me to. But how could I live with myself after that? I’d slept with the deceased. My semen was inside her. I’d left residual evidence lying around the house. Not just fingerprints, but footprints on the back lawn and a beer bottle with my name on it. Christ knows what they would have found just by taking a close look at the bedsheets. Hair follicles, D.N.A., who knows what else.”

“But this wasn’t all about you,” the agent continues, voice raised an octave or two. “Just like your old pal Mitch Cain said, you did go ahead and grow a conscience.”

Stamping out my cigarette, I sit back in my chair, look directly into the face of the agent. In my right hand, the pins and needles begin taking over once more, until I grab hold of it with my left.

“I was having a hard time accepting the fact that Scarlet would kill herself, let alone self-mutilate her body with a razor or a kitchen knife or however it was done. Plus I knew Jake and Mitch were not beyond manipulating a crime scene to suit their own purposes.”

Stocky agent’s face lights up; he busts out laughing.

He says, “Corrupt fucking cops. Well there’s something different.”

“Listen,” I say, “she wasn’t just another dead body. She was no rapist or drug dealer who was about to tie up a court system. Scarlet was a nice, lonely kid.”

“You’d grown attached to her.” A question the agent poses just when he’s beginning to calm down. “That why you got a masseuse license? To meet women?”

I didn’t answer the question. Because he wasn’t all wrong.

“Not attached,” I said instead. “But then not unattached either. She deserved better than what the head cops wanted to give her, whatever their reason, whatever their motive. As the independent field man in charge under Cain’s thumb, I knew I had at least some opportunity to control three things: first, keeping my name cleared of any and all false charges.”

“Second, Mr. Divine?”

“Finding out just who or what might have been responsible for her killing. Even if in the end, I had no choice but to call it a suicide. Just like the bastards wanted.”

“And finally?”

“By destroying any evidence that might prove the unthinkable.”

“What’s the unthinkable?”

“That I killed her, and for some reason couldn’t remember any of it.”

13

ON THE “COMPLIMENTARY” RIDE back to my house, Joy drove the cruiser so silently and cautiously it was as if the road was paved with eggs. In return I sat in the back seat feeling somewhat like the scolded child, running through the events of Scarlet’s physical examination over and over again in my mind.

My God …

Sitting there with the rain once more coming down steady and hard, I relived the whole thing in my brain. Placing the tips of my latex gloves to her cheeks, gently brushing the still warm flesh. I recalled how the facial skin turned purple where I touched it, the distinct imprint of my fingertip left behind where the dermis blanched, recalled how the sudden discoloration returned to its natural pale, consistent with the shock that always accompanies massive hemorrhage.

A dead body loses an average of a degree to a degree and a half of its heat per hour. In this case, it told me Cain hadn’t been all wrong with his E.T.D. I had conducted the examination (if you want to call it that) at about three-fifteen. The way I judged it, the body had to have been deceased for less than three hours. Probably no more than two, but definitely no more than three. So between one and two o’clock must have been a fairly good call.

Right hand clutched in left, I looked out the window onto the black wet night. I saw myself running my fingers down the length of Scarlet’s torso. From shoulder to pelvis (avoiding the blood leakage), down along the neck, alongside the rib cage, over the pancreatic region to the hip bone, removing for a moment the bit of blood-soaked bedsheet that covered her sex—pubic hair that looked stark and dark against blue-white skin. I had to look away for a beat or two, gaze instead at the blood spatters that stained the wall. As if this would calm me down.