The Moonlight (45 page)

It wasn’t until he was outside, standing at the edge of the swimming pool, that he remembered his revenge.  He wondered if Charlie Brush knew about the revolver in his waistband—because that was who it was, the man his grandfather had watched die fifty years ago.

The night air felt cool and sweet after the house.  Sonny looked up at the stars and decided that this was as good a place as any to die.

“I know what you’re thinkin’ about,” Charlie Brush said.  “You’re thinkin’ about how you can get a shot off before I blow you away.  Okay—what the hell.  You never heard nobody say ol’ Charlie wasn’t a sport.”

He was holding the shotgun with both hands, and then he took his left away from the pump and let the muzzle drop until it was pointing at the cement patio.  Sonny couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the yellow pool lights, but Charlie Brush’s face looked positively gray.

No, it wasn’t the light.  The man was a walking corpse.  Even his eyes looked dead.

“Go ahead, tough guy.”  He grinned—it was like watching the flesh peel off a skull.  “Whenever you’re ready, make your play.”

In the last few seconds of his life, Sonny Galatina found himself remembering the words of the Rosary. 
Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed by the fruit of thy womb . . .

His hand went under his coat.  He cocked the revolver as he brought it out, but his eyes were so full of tears he could hardly see to aim.

“This is for you, Grandpa. . .”

The sound was terrible, loud enough to make the dogs forget their fear and set them barking, but there was no one else to hear.  Sonny certainly hadn’t heard it, because he was floating on his back in the swimming pool, in an ever-expanding halo of crimson water, his head torn away above the eyebrows.

And leading off into the darkness was a thin trail of blood spattered against the concrete patio.

“His line was busy,” Jimmy DeLucia said when he came back into the house.  “I guess I’ll have to decide on my own.  I guess when Owings finally comes home you and he are gonna have to shoot it out.”

Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino listened to this without surprise, since he had already figured out what DeLucia and his Neanderthal assistant had come to the Moonlight to do and that there was no way he was going to be allowed to walk away from it.

The part about Sonny not answering his phone sounded a little odd, though.

“Your boss will be disappointed,” Spolino answered.

DeLucia smiled, as if acknowledging a joke.  Nothing personal, the smile said.  I’m going to kill you, but it’s strictly business.

“Yes, he will be.  He was looking forward to topping the guy himself.”

He shrugged.  They both knew what Sonny was like.

“So Owings and I are going to annihilate each other in a hail of gunfire.”  Spolino, who was sitting on one of two dining room chairs that DeLucia had thoughtfully provided for the comfort of his captives, flashed a grin at the woman who was Owings’ girlfriend—not to worry, kid; these particular bad guys have got delusions of grandeur.  “And you really believe anybody is going to buy that?”

“Sure.  Why shouldn’t they buy it?  I notice you came out here without any backup.”   DeLucia raised his eyebrows.  “I figure you’ve got a bug up your ass about Owings and these murders.  I figure you came out here on your own to do a little out-of-court snooping.  A cop does a thing like that, nobody’s gonna be surprised if he gets his head blown off.  Nobody wants trouble.  Yeah, Spolino—I think they’ll buy it.”

“And, anyway, you’ve got Monser to make sure everybody swallows it without belching.”

He didn’t really know where that came from.  It was just one of those little flashes you get from time to time, but he knew that he had guessed right as soon as he saw the way DeLucia’s eyes froze.

“How long has he been on the pad, Jimmy?”

At first DeLucia didn’t answer, and then, finally, he cocked his head a little to one side, as if in recognition that what Detective Lieutenant Spolino knew or did not know could not by now make much difference.

“From day one,” he said, with the air of someone revealing a personal triumph.  “He had a little trouble back in Philly—the man likes the ponies and was in deep to the Bonfigli family.  When he came up here, we just took over the franchise.”

Spolino only nodded.  What else was new?

They were still in the Moonlight’s old dining room and the lights were still on, but anyone could tell the setup was beginning to make DeLucia nervous.  What if Owings came back?  Wouldn’t he be surprised.

“Shouldn’t we tie ’em up, Mr. DeLucia?” asked Joey, still looking as if he wanted to find somewhere to hide.

“Shut up!” DeLucia snapped.

“He’s worried about rope burns,” Spolino explained patiently.  It occurred to him to wonder if Joey could possibly be as stupid as he looked.  “You see, if Owings and I are supposed to shoot each other, it’ll look a little strange if I’ve got marks on my wrists and ankles.  Jimmy wants to keep me in mint condition—isn’t that right, Jimmy?”

DeLucia threw him an annoyed glance but said nothing.  What could he say?  What threats was he really in a position to make?

“What will you do with the girl, Jimmy?” Spolino went on, favoring the underboss with a benign smile.  “Have you got a hole already dug somewhere?  Maybe the one where you were intending to plant Owings?”

All at once the woman began to sob quietly.  Spolino hated himself for putting her through all this, but it wasn’t the moment for being squeamish.

“I hope you like her, Joey, because the two of you are going to be spending a lot of time together.”

Joey’s face creased, assuming another whole layer of anxiety, but there seemed to be no dawn of understanding.  Maybe he really was that stupid.  Anyway, it was clear that there were aspects to the situation that he was never going to figure out for himself.

DeLucia really looked angry now—so we were on the right track.

“Come on, Joey,” Spolino continued, almost laughing.  “You think he’s going to let you walk around loose when you can finger him for murdering a policeman?  You think Jimmy is that nice to little boys.  If you’re that trusting, I wonder your mommy lets you go out by yourself for an ice cream cone.”

“Mr. DeLucia, I. . .”

“Just—just shut up, Joey.”  DeLucia growled, without even glancing at his subordinate.  If looks could kill, Spolino figured he’d already be dead.  “You open your mouth again, Spolino, and. . .”

“And what, Jimmy?  Will I live to regret it?”

He threw back his head and laughed, hoping he could goad DeLucia into doing something stupid, but it didn’t work.  The underboss of the Galatina Family, who after all did not enjoy a reputation for making mistakes, just stood there, waiting for him to shut up.

“He’s just trying to ride you, Joey,” DeLucia said, after a moment of silence.

“Yeah, I figured that, Mr. DeLucia,” Joey answered—Joey, who had probably never figured anything in his whole life.  “You can’t trust a cop.  He doesn’t care what he says now.”

“Yeah.”

DeLucia, to give him credit, actually looked embarrassed to find himself having to agree with this moron.

“I think we’d better turn off the lights in here,” he said.  He went over to the windows and, one after the other, drew the shades.  “Why don’t you go check the grounds, Joey.”

Joey nodded quickly and was out of the room in such a hurry that he didn’t quite manage to close the patio door behind him.  The lock tongue just touched the brass plate and then slid off, so that the room light shimmered on the eight panes of glass that filled in the door’s outline.  It remained about an inch ajar.  DeLucia didn’t seem to notice.  He went over to stand by the light switches, but he didn’t touch them.

“Do you think he’ll be back?” Spolino asked tauntingly.

“He’ll be back.”  DeLucia he took a tiny flashlight from his coat pocket and seemed to weigh it in his hand.  “He isn’t quite that stupid.  He knows there isn’t any place to hide.”

“But at least he might live through the night.”

Instead of answering, DeLucia flicked his miniature flashlight on and off, as if to make sure it would work.

“This’ll be enough,” he said finally.  “I hope you understand, Spolino, that you make one bad move and I’ll blow your fucking head off, and to hell with making it look right.”

Still, he didn’t seem very eager to turn the lights off.  Something seemed to be bothering him.

“This guy Owings—what do you think, Spolino?  Is he the one?”

“The one what?”

“Did he kill Sal and the others?”

Spolino allowed himself a thin smile.  “That kind of depends on how you look at it.”

DeLucia didn’t appear to find this a very satisfying answer.  He seemed to be turning it over in his mind, and then, as if to keep himself from asking Spolino what he meant, he reached up and turned off the lights.

An instant later his flashlight came on with a sort of visual click, the beam, which was rather narrow but surprisingly strong, hitting Spolino square in the face.

For a long while they waited in silence.

“Maybe he won’t come back,” the woman said at last—Spolino had almost forgotten her existence, so that her voice actually startled him.

“Maybe not.”  His eyes by now had adjusted to the darkness, so that he could see the outline of DeLucia’s body behind his light.  He trained his gaze on the underboss’s invisible eyes, as if talking to him.  “How long’s he been out there—five, ten minutes now?”

“I don’t mean him.”

Spolino turned his head slightly to look at her, and her face had assumed that numb, exhausted expression that marks the final stage of fear, when you almost cease to care.

“Who then?” he asked.

“The other one.”  A perfectly involuntary shudder passed over her—she might not even have noticed it.  “I suppose I’m dead either way, but somehow I don’t like to think. . .”

Spolino knew exactly what she meant.  If you had to choose whether Charlie Brush or Jimmy DeLucia was going to be your murderer, at least Jimmy DeLucia was still human.

He felt a surge of pity for her, which he tried to ignore because he knew that kind of fear was contagious and he needed his wits about him.

Because he was afraid.  He didn’t want to end by getting shot in the back of the head by a hood in a seven-hundred-dollar suit.  He didn’t want to wind up as a structural flaw in the cement foundations of some office building, to disappear, as if he had dropped off the face of the earth.  The way Charlie Brush had disappeared.

But it didn’t do you any good to be afraid, and even less to show it.

So he thought about Charlie Brush, about how he had died, in this very room, cursing his murderers—and about the terrible anger that had somehow eluded death for fifty years.

And as he thought of these things, he noticed the vague shadow of a man, no more than a blur against the glass in the patio door, a thing hardly visible in the lustreless dark.

Spolino and the woman were on chairs in the center of the old dining room.  The door was perhaps forty feet away, and Jimmy DeLucia was still beside the light switch, perhaps fifteen feet from where Spolino was sitting.  They formed the three points of an unequal triangle—all DeLucia had to do was to turn his head a little and he too would see the shadow against the glass.

But Jimmy DeLucia’s attention was focused along his narrow beam of light.  He had no eyes except for the enemy in front of him as he waited, perhaps hoped, for Spolino to make his one bad move.

And Spolino realized—realized with a kind of dreadful shame—that his one chance of survival lay in making sure that Jimmy DeLucia did not turn his head.

“Your boy’s been out there a long time,” he said, calmly enough, although his tongue felt as dry as leather.  “You suppose he got lost, Jimmy?  Or maybe he just wandered away.”

“Don’t try to ride me, cop,” DeLucia answered, and the beam of light, which might have wavered a little before, came to rest on Spolino’s head and shoulders—just as he had known it would.

He smiled, hating the light in his face, feeling like a target.

“I don’t really care, Jimmy.  I was just curious.  Maybe you were right and he’s still around somewhere.  Maybe Owings got him.”

He tried not to look, but out of the corner of his eye he could see that the patio door was beginning to move, to swing silently open on its hinges.

DeLucia, still just a shape behind the light, all at once became very still.  Had he heard something?

“What do you think, Jimmy?  Maybe Joey . . .”

It was the loudest sound Spolino had ever heard.  It hit him in the face like the flat of someone’s hand, so much so that he didn’t even notice if there was a muzzle flash.  He knew instantly that it was a shotgun.

Without ever shutting off, DeLucia’s little flashlight did an awkward little somersault and bounced once on the floor, so that its thin beam of light ran across the carpet and seemed to pile up against the upper half of its owner’s body.  DeLucia was dead—that was obvious at once.  He had probably taken the whole load full in the chest.  His shiny automatic was still clutched in his right hand.