Moonlight Falls (3 page)

What choice did I have but to go along for the ride? Didn’t matter that I was trying to separate myself from policework; reinvent myself as a masseuse and maybe even a personal trainer down the road. I was still a detective … rather, a private detective still collecting a Council 82 Law Enforcement Union disability pension. Technically speaking, that meant the cops still owned my ass—private license or no private license. By law and by all that was morally right under God and country, I had no choice but to
heed the call
whenever the mighty trumpet sounded.

I said, “Wait for me in the cruiser while I put on a shirt.”

But Joy just stood there stiff as a plank, not saying a word, but somehow shouting volumes.

Why, oh, why had I answered that phone call?

I said, “Let me guess. You think I’m gonna forget you’re even here.”

“You shot yourself in the head,” he said, just as I began heading up the stairs. “People say you’re not the same.”

“It was an accident,” I explained on my way down the hall. “And it’s not memory that’s the problem.”

“Hey, Dick,” he jumped in. “Maybe you should explain it to somebody who understands.”

“The name’s Divine,” I said, as I slammed the bedroom door behind me.

3

LIKE A CHAUFFER, JOY opened the cruiser’s rear door for me.

I slipped inside, sat myself down beside Jake, my part-time superior in the Stormville P.D. I held my breath, tried to remain as calm and collected as possible. But how far away did I wish myself?

The first thing I noticed besides his sheer mass, was that he would not look at me. From the moment I sat down onto the springy back seat, he turned away, focused his solemn gaze outside onto the rain-soaked blacktop.

The cruiser smelled bad. A cross between worms and old tuna fish gone south.

Jake was dressed in gray slacks with matching suit jacket, white shirt underneath.

No tie.

The suit was wrinkled, as if he had just picked it up off the bedroom floor, threw it on. Maybe he had. His once jet black hair had developed some significant gray across the temples over recent years. It blended naturally with the metallic gray that sprinkled his mustache.

Nicky Joy sat up in the driver’s seat, blue eyes front, but on occasion sneaking their way into the rear view.

I had no idea what was thicker: the humidity or the tension. Until both were broken with the sound of the Police Captain’s baritone.

“They almost never leave notes,” he uttered in a voice that, like his size forty-five shoulders, seemed to bear the weight of the world. “Something like ten percent leave notes. That’s all.”

I swallowed my breath hoping that somehow it would slow my heart, relieve me of the incessant vibration that was growing louder and louder, like an orchestra warming up inside my brain.

In my mind, it dawned on me that maybe Scarlet had finally left him. That her walking out on him, once and for all, might be the reason behind all this. In my mind I saw my easy lover with suitcase in hand, closing the back door behind her, stepping out into the night …

I said, “She’ll contact you. Just give her a little time to get her head together.”

Jake grunted, like he’d been stabbed in the stomach.

He said, “At this point contact would be a miracle.”

I turned to him.

“What’s happened?”

“She’s dead,” he said. “And that’s all.”

Off in the near distance a streak of lightning followed by a slow, rolling thunder.

Me, picturing the light going on in Scarlet’s bedroom not seconds after I’d bolted the scene.

Had Jake seen me standing outside on the back lawn in the rain?

I repeated, “Tell me what happened.”

He told me to say nothing more. “Not a fucking word.”

Up front, Joy put the car in drive. As he pulled away from the curb, I crossed one hand over the other and for the first time felt the tacky, sticky, bloody residue that covered my palms and the underside of my fingers.

4

THE TEN MINUTE RIDE from my uptown home past the Stormville Airport and the brightly lit concrete walls of Green Haven Prison to the downtown precinct felt as though it lasted an entire hour—a day. The whole time I was rubbing my palms together as if to erase the thin layer of dried blood that covered them.

Holy Christ, where did blood come from?

Had something happened in the night that I could not recall?

I felt dizzy, so lightheaded I had to take slow, deep breaths. Do it without Jake being the wiser.

When Joy pulled up in front of the South Pearl Street precinct, not thirty feet away from the old stone and glass monstrosity that I once referred to as my home away from home, I thought for sure I would break out in tears.

The big Captain turned to me.

He said, “Consider yourself back on the clock. I want you to assist Cain and S.I.U. with this investigation. For the record, you’ll report directly to Cain. You’ll take his lead, corroborate Scarlet’s suicide. When it’s all over and your report is filed, I want you to forget that any of this ever happened. Which shouldn’t be too difficult for you.”

Memory is not exactly the problem,
I wanted to say.

Instead I pictured Scarlet’s face. Even in her death the S.O.B. was still dismissing her, not even giving her the benefit of a proper investigation. He was supposed to be her husband; her life
and
death partner.

I looked into his round brown eyes. I couldn’t help but recall the incident that resulted in my forced leave of absence from the cops. Not my attempted suicide, but the incident that occurred not long after my “recovery”—when after passing out on an eight-man drug stakeout, I suddenly regained consciousness only to order the raid of the wrong house. Imagine, if you will, eight cops barging into a cozy suburban home during the late night, drawing service side-arms, handcuffing a husband and wife and two teenaged daughters suspected of growing marijuana plants in their backyard when, in fact, they were harvesting elderberry bushes. Imagine the seven-figure false arrest lawsuit that followed.

“Since when do you ask me in on something this important?” I said. “I’ve been relegated to the nobodies that nobody will miss, remember? That is, when I’m working at all. Scarlet is a somebody. You should know that better than anyone.”

“She committed suicide, Divine,” he said. “She’s my wife. I want the case shut before it’s even opened. That’s why you’re here.”

But what if it’s not suicide?
I wanted to ask him.

In the end I decided not to. I was the fuck up who made all the wrong moves, took all the wrong turns. He was the Captain. Where the hell would I get with him in his present condition anyway?

I asked, “Am I back on the clock?”

He made a sour face.

“I just told you that.”

He was right. He had. The simplest things get by me sometimes.

Joy got out of the car, opened the door for me.

I could tell it wasn’t the night for long goodbyes.

I got out of the cruiser just as Joy got back in and pulled out into the rainy darkness of Stormville—the home of New York State’s only lethal injection machine. I lifted the collar on my leather coat, started up the stone stairs. Maybe I didn’t feel the need to empty my bladder. But as soon as I was through the glass doors, I headed directly for the men’s room.

5

AS SOON AS I was certain that no one else occupied the bathroom, I locked the door behind me. I took my place at the sink, positioned my hands beneath the faucet, allowed the hot water to pour down over them. Didn’t matter how hot the water was, how much it stung the skin. Bloody water was pouring into the bowl, disappearing down the drain.

Clean hands.

That’s all that counted.

I turned off the water, dried myself with the paper towels from the wall-mounted dispenser, discarded them into the trash bin. It was only then that I noticed how much I was sweating. My shirt underneath my jacket was wringing wet. Beads of sweat covered my brow. Turning the water back on, I splashed it onto my face and repeated the drying process.

Then I did something I dreaded.

I looked down at my hands. To my relief there were no cuts on the tops of them. No scratches, no abrasions. Nothing that could be construed as defensive wounds.

But then I turned them over.

My palms and finger-pads had seen better days. The cuts weren’t deep necessarily. Nor were they bleeding any longer. Still, they had been cut up pretty badly.

I swear you could have heard my heart beating inside the empty echo chamber of a men’s room.

Why couldn’t I recall having done that kind of damage to my hands?

What had happened between the time I arrived home from Scarlet’s house earlier and the arrival of Joy to my Stormville split-level at two-thirty in the morning? Had I slept-walked, stumbled and tripped? Had I fallen onto my face and not remembered a single detail about the mishap?

Or had something worse occurred?

Scarlet was dead.

Did I have something to do with it?

I looked at my face in the mirror. It didn’t seem to belong to me. It belonged to someone else. Someone who looked just like me. Someone with my face, my voice, my name, my life. Someone who was following me, trying to kill me. The man who had tried to kill me once before but failed. Maybe the same person who killed Scarlet. I had no way of knowing; of being sure about anything.

There was a knock at the door.

It startled the daylights out of me.

I took a deep breath, exhaled it.

Unlocking the door, I opened it onto an old man pushing a cleaning bucket and a mop.

“What the hell you doing in there?” he snapped.

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” I said before pushing past him.

6

IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE that my old partner, Mitch Cain, was waiting for me inside the hallowed stone walls of the Stormville P.D. booking room. Dressed in blue blazer and tan khakis, he was patiently sitting on the edge of one of a dozen identical metal desks set out equidistant from one another inside the wide-open space. Gripped in his right hand, a big white Styrofoam cup of Krispy Kreme coffee. In his free hand, a lit cigarette.

An identical coffee cup sat on top of the desk to his left. God bless him.

Without exchanging a single word, I picked up the second cup, cracked the plastic lid.

“Thought you quit,” I said.

He stole a quick glance down at the cigarette.

“The more Lynn tries to make me quit,” he said, “the more I feel compelled to do it.”

“What do you expect from a nurse?” I said, recalling the face of my ex-wife.

Cain smiled that tight, ironic smile I had come to recognize in most cops once they had been on the job for more years than anyone cared to count. A tight, pressed lip, corner of the mouth kind of thing. A smile that probably was no stranger to my face either. At least, before my accident.

I took a quick look around the dimly lit room.

The place was as hollow as a church.

Two or three comatose cops sitting at metal desks, hands positioned atop computer keyboards—chubby, static faces glowing in the radiant light that shot off their monitors.

Joy stepped in. He approached Cain and me, transparent rain gear still protecting his uniform blues like Saran Wrap.

“They’re ready for us, Detective,” he said.

When Cain shot Joy a silent look, the kid about-faced, exited the room by way of an unpainted solid metal door that led out into the parking garage.

Stamping out his cigarette in a metal ashtray, my old partner set down his coffee. He pulled the black-plated Smith & Wesson from his shoulder holster, sprung the clip with his thumb, then slapped it back home. Running his right hand through cropped hair and down a clean narrow face, he exhaled a breath, re-holstered the service weapon.

He said, “I see no need for briefings. You know the seriousness of the situation.”

“Dead serious,” I said. “Which is why I’m a little surprised you called me in.”

“Listen, Divine, we cannot give Internal Affairs or Prosecutor O’Connor an opportunity to plunge into a full blown investigation. It just wouldn’t …” He raised his right hand as though looking for the right words. “It just wouldn’t look … ‘
copastetic
.’”

“Co-pa-se-tic,” I corrected.

“What?”

“It’s copasetic, not
copastetic
.”

He smiled.

“That head of yours,” he said, “it’s working pretty good these days, old partner.”

“I’ve been taking better care of myself lately. Doctor’s orders.”

He added, “Well, then, just you follow my lead and you, me and Jake will get through this thing without a hitch.” Grinning. “Per the usual deal, there’ll be a little bit extra for your trouble.”

I listened like a good, pension collecting on-again/off-again cop should and sipped my coffee. Until my brain kicked in. I pictured Scarlet lying back on her bed, thick auburn hair fluffed up against her pillow, eyes wide open, lips smiling. Maybe I had become more than her masseuse; become her casual lover. Maybe the reality of her death hadn’t begun to sink in. But somehow I knew she deserved better than what I was hearing from both her husband and her husband’s second in command. And then there was the issue of my hands—the blood, the scrapes. Just what if I’d had something to do with Scarlet’s death? What if I was somehow blocking the memory?

I gazed into Cain’s slate-gray eyes and took a shot.

“You plan on booking Jake tonight?” I said. “Or is all this copasetic stuff about giving him a little head start?”

As stale as it was, the air inside the booking room was sucked out like starlight into a black hole. Cain’s cop grin suddenly morphed into a cop frown.

“You suddenly grow a conscience overnight, Divine?” he whispered, firing up another smoke. “This is an extremely sensitive situation which will require every bit of your professional talents and resources.”