The Moonlight (22 page)

She laughed and didn’t ask anymore more questions about the garage.  It was one of Beth’s great virtues, this capacity just to let a subject drop.

While she was changing into her waitress uniform, Phil hid the shotgun barrel under the rear seat of the car.  The whole operation took about twenty seconds, and there was no chance of Beth walking in and catching him at it, but he was terrified the entire time and for several minutes after.  What made it bad was the hopelessness of any explanation.

After he dropped Beth off at the Lobster Pot he went home.  Suddenly there was no hurry about getting rid of the shogun barrel.  He sat out on the patio for a while and then went upstairs and took a long shower.  The last thing he remembered was putting in his new brown suit.  Why?  Was he going somewhere special?

That night he was tormented by terrible dreams.  And after he woke up he went right on dreaming them, because they weren’t dreams but memories.  They were bad, as bad an anything he could imagine, full of blood and screaming and the sound of a twelve gauge shotgun being fired in an enclosed space.

This time he knew what had happened during the long waking sleep that had overcome him that afternoon.  It was floating back to him in bits and pieces, and it was horrible.

He even knew the name of the man he had killed—Sal Grazzi.  He just didn’t know why.

Had he done this thing?  Had
he
done it?  No, not really, not him.  He had been standing somehow outside it.  A witness, nothing more.

He remembered now how the Lincoln had gotten dented.  That old man . . .

He climbed out of bed as quietly as he could and went downstairs.  He didn’t want to awaken Beth—what could be tell her?—and he felt as if he was about to begin sobbing.

Yet he didn’t.  As he sat in the kitchen, nursing a cup of luke warm coffee, a terrible calm descended over him.  He knew now that he was in a trap, and he saw with perfect clarity how willingly he had walked into it.

He was damned.

Phil took his coffee with him into the old dining room.  He thought he would go outside and have a smoke.

All he had to do was to look out through the glass doors.

It was one of those nights when the moon washes the world in its silver light.  He could see everything quite clearly.

He could see the man sitting on one of the lawn chairs—a man dressed in a brown suit, smoking a cigarette.

The house was dark, but this stranger who was somehow so familiar knew Phil was there behind the glass doors.  He turned his head and smiled.

If Jim Phelan had taken better care of his teeth, the break in the case might never have come.

The grocery store near the bottom of Greenley Avenue had been a family enterprise for as long as anyone could remember.  Little Tommy Spolino had bought his Fruit Fizzes and his baseball cards from Jim’s grandfather, who died in 1951, and not even the arrival of the big chains had managed to put Phelan & Son out of business.  They delivered, for one thing, and they always got your order right, and, for another, if you happened to have left your wallet at home they would trust you for the price of an evening paper because they knew your name and knew you were coming back.  It was one of those places that define the life of a community and keep it, in some sense, a small town even if fifty or sixty thousand people live there.

So when Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino needed a box of licorice pieces—no man is so perfect as to be without a vice, and this was his—he went to Phelan & Son, out of long habit and because he knew they always stocked his brand.

The sound of the bell tinkling as he opened the door was so familiar he hardly noticed it, no more than the creak of the wooden floor or the faint smell of sawdust.  The store had only one other patron, which was not unusual at eight fifteen on a Monday morning—Spolino hadn’t even reported for work yet—and he stopped by the jams and jellies shelf and pretended to read all the labels while the middle-aged lady explained her shopping list to the not-quite-elderly man in the long white apron who was waiting on her.  When she swept past him and he heard the bell tinkle again, he turned to the counter and smiled.

“Morning, Tom,” the man said, taking off his glasses to clean them on the hem of his apron.  “You’re up early.”

“Morning, Mr. Phelan.  Jimmy off today?”

Gus Phelan nodded gravely.  He was one of those Irishmen who enter old age with a full head of white, slightly curly hair and a shrimp-pink complexion left unmarked, it seemed, by the sorrows of this world.  Everyone under the age of sixty called him “Mister” because, like Tom Spolino, they had been coming here since they were children.  Gus was perhaps seventy himself and had been retired for five years on the theory that his son, who had worked beside him for close to thirty years, was all grown up and had a right to run the business without interference.

“He has to see the dentist this morning—impacted molar.  His jaw is so swollen he can hardly eat.  It’s been driving him crazy all weekend.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“He’ll live,” Gus responded casually.  “And, besides, it gets me out of the house for a day.  Seems like only yesterday I started as my dad’s stock boy—never thought I’d miss clerkin’ store, but sometimes I do.”

He smiled, as if the irony pleased him.

And Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino had one of his famous inspirations.

“Mr. Phelan, did you ever hear the name ‘Charlie Brush’ before?”

For a split second Gus Phelan seemed to consider the question, and then he frowned, as if remembering some dental appointment of his own.

“Not for a long time.  If your interest is professional, Tom, you’re a little late.”

He laughed softly at his own joke and then picked up a feather duster, glancing about for something to clean with it.

“Who was he, Mr. Phelan?  And, yes, it is professional.”

Phelan & Son, as everyone knew, had the cleanest plate glass windows of any store in Greenley.  All you could see, looking through them from the inside, was the other side of the street:  Bixby’s Restaurant and Bar, the Lido Bakery, a clothing store for rich kids called the Yuppy Puppy, and one small corner of an antique store that seemed to change hands every two years.  Maybe it was because the glass was kept so clean, but in sixty years and more nothing had happened around this corner of town that Gus Phelan didn’t know about.

In a kind of ritual cleansing, he wiped a hand on his apron and pointed to the little cluster of empty tables in front of Bixby’s.

“Back in the Thirties it was called ‘Dink’s’,” he said, and then he paused for a moment, as if to check his memory, and then nodded.  “You could sit outside back then too.  I remember the day Roosevelt repealed the Volstead Act—it was the first really nice day of the year.  I came straight from school to help my dad in the store, right around that corner there, and I nearly tripped over Charlie Brush’s feet.

“He looked at me for a second, like he was trying to decide if he should cut my heart out, and then he said, ‘Kid, go get me a beer.’  Well, I got him his beer.  I came over here and snagged one of the bottles dad kept in behind the ice chest, and I had it on the table in front of Charlie inside of two minutes.  He said, ‘Thanks, kid,’ and flipped me a fifty-cent piece.  Hell, in those days, even when there was Prohibition, a beer only cost a nickel.  That was Charlie—a real high roller.  Very generous if he was in the right mood, but watch out.  That’s what he was like.”

The memory did not seem entirely pleasant.  After a moment, Gus shook his head and laughed.

“What was he?” Spolino asked.  “I mean, what did he do to get the money for fifty-cent tips?”

He smiled, although it was an effort.

“Everything.  You name it.  He and George Patchmore used to run booze, so it was said.  And even I knew they were into gambling because one time they rented the basement of this store for a poker game—maybe I shouldn’t tell you that, Tom.”

But Spolino smiled again and shook his head.  “Way past the Statute of Limitations, Mr. Phelan, so you’re safe.  What else?”

“Murder.”  Gus Phelan’s voice was bland as butter, as if the word had lost all power to shock him.  “He used to ride around with a sawed-off shotgun on the front seat of his car.  At least, that’s what I heard.  I never saw the shotgun, but I remember the car—a great big Lincoln, beautiful thing, dark red, always kept it polished up like a new apple.  Whenever you read in the newspapers that somebody ‘d been found with his face blown away, you always knew it was Charlie.”

Spolino looked out the polished windows at the tables in front of Bixby’s and thought about the last time he’d seen a dark red Lincoln, polished up like a new apple.

“Was he a local boy?” he asked.

“No.  He was a slicker.”

“Was he George’s partner?  I mean, in the Moonlight?”

“That’s what people said.”

“What happened to him?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Gus Phelan shrugged, as if the answer were not only unknown but unknowable.  “He just disappeared.  Maybe somebody killed him, or maybe he just figured they were about to and he took off.  I guess that must have been right before the War, because I was still living with my mom and dad.

“You know Lenore Pickart?”

“The old woman who lives in that house on Stanhope Street?  Sure.”

At least, he knew the house—everyone knew the house.  Spolino couldn’t be sure if he’d actually seen Lenore Pickart in thirty years.

“Charlie rented a couple of rooms from Lenore.  If anybody on earth knows what happened to Charlie, it’d be Lenore.  Go talk to her, Tom.  She wouldn’t bite a policeman, and she’ll be glad for the company.”

The little bell over the door tinkled again and a relentlessly stylish woman of about thirty came in, dragging an unhappy-looking little boy who was dressed like a five-year-old fashion model.  Gus put on his New Customer smile.

“Thanks, Mr. Phelan—I’ll do that.”

He was about halfway to the door when he heard his name.  He turned around and just caught a small object that came flying through the air at him.

“You forgot your licorice,” Gus Phelan called after him, grinning like a man who has the whole world under his protection.

. . . . .

“
Was he a local boy?
”

“
No.  He was a slicker.
”

And when somebody of Gus Phelan’s generation called anybody a ‘slicker,’ it only meant one thing.  Detective Lieutenant Spolino decided it was time to call in one or two favors still due from his time at Manhattan South.

“There’s a message from Stamford on your desk,” the department secretary said as he used his card key to get past her little sentry cage and into the working part of the station.

“Fine.  I’ll get to it.”

He knew what that was about—he had seen the morning paper before leaving the house—but he wasn’t ready to deal with it yet.

Instead, he called the home number of Captain Harry Gideon, N.Y.P.D.  The phone rang twice before the captain’s wife answered.

“He’s asleep, Tom.  You know he’s been posted to night duty.”

“Then wake him up, Juanita.  I need a favor, and it won’t keep.”

He heard a click as the receiver was set down on some hard surface, and he settled back to wait.  He wasn’t at all embarrassed to be dragging Harry Gideon out of bed, because Harry Gideon owed him.

“Yeah, what is it, you bastard?”  He really had been asleep, and probably for a couple of hours.  You could hear it in the disused quality of his voice.

That made Tom very happy.

“I want you to track down a very old file for me, Harry.  I want everything the city has got on a prehistoric hood by the name of Charlie Brush.”

“Char-lie Brush.”  Gideon repeated the name as, apparently, he wrote it down.  “How vintage?”

“Late Twenties to early Thirties.”

“Jesus, Tom!  You drag me from my bed for a fucking anthropology lesson?  What is this?”

“I want the book on this guy, Harry.  And I want it on my desk by lunch.  Just remember I’m the joker who risked his badge to get you out from under.”

“Yeah.  I remember.”

The line went dead, but Harry Gideon would come through.  When they had both been younger men, even before Juanita had come along, Harry Gideon had fallen in love with a very expensive hooker and had run up such a tab trying to persuade her to abandon a life of sin and become the wife of an honest cop that he was up to his eyebrows to a loan shark named Mario Tovis.  He couldn’t pay and was having to do some highly inappropriate favors to keep Tovis from foreclosing on his kneecaps.

When Tom Spolino found out he wasn’t very happy.  He listened to the excuses but not with a lot of sympathy, because he didn’t think there really were any excuses.  Gideon was well on his way to ending up a bad cop, and Spolino hated a bad cop.

But when your partner was in trouble you were supposed to do something.  You didn’t have to love the guy—if he was your partner you didn’t just stand back and let him go down the drain. So one night Tom Spolino broke into the loan shark’s office and found a second set of books hidden behind the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet.  He photographed the books, which proved beyond any doubt that Tovis was skimming maybe two or three thousand a week from his operation, and the next day he went back to the office during business hours to let Tovis know what he had done.  He told him that if his partner wasn’t squared off, and out of Tovis’ own pocket, then the photographs of that second set of books would find their way into the hands of the Gallo Family.  Tovis worked for Vito Gallo, who was notoriously hard on chiselers, and so he knew what he could expect.  That afternoon, by special messenger, Harry Gideon received his IOUs back.