Authors: Mark Arsenault

Loot the Moon (13 page)

BOOK: Loot the Moon

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Oh, Jesus Christ,
Billy thought in horror.
She loved the judge.
Kit's face screamed it. She could barely force herself to acknowledge out loud that Gil Harmony had a wife. Billy felt the creep of the death smile on his face and turned his head to the sand.

“How could you know this, Billy?”

Billy concentrated on the pain in his ribs and obliterated the smile.

She waited for the answer, one hand on her hip like an impatient traveler at a bus stop. Her posture sent a subliminal message that the shovel would do no work until Billy admitted how he knew of the threat. She drilled him with her eyes.

Give it to her straight.
She was tough and had wanted Billy to know it. He would not embarrass her with mercy.

“I heard it from Mr. Smothers,” Billy said, “who heard it in New York from the judge's mistress, who had heard it from the judge.”

Kit stepped backward. Her lips silently formed the word
mistress
.
She looked away a moment, perhaps reconciling old memories and nagging questions with this new information. Then suddenly she returned to digging, faster and more violently than before.

Billy watched the flex of her muscles. She had not protested or probed for more information about this mistress.

Kit had not been the judge's lover, Billy decided. The revelation about Gil Harmony had obviously surprised her, and no mistress would be surprised by a second mistress. Though the cynic inside Billy warned him to be careful. Maybe she was playing him with that subtle twitch of rage at the corner of her mouth. As Martin liked to say, there were a lot of great actors in the world.

The flare sputtered. Kit cleared the sand from Billy without another word and then cast the shovel aside. She helped him crawl free.

Pain provoked ironic laughter from Billy that trailed off into a groan and a cough. He flexed his arms and legs in a quick self-diagnostic. Nothing broken, he confirmed. The bone bruises on both elbows and his shins would be with him for a few weeks. A dark red paste of congealed blood and sand smeared his raw wrists. He had not taken any blows to the head, probably because unconscious men keep their secrets, and the goons had needed Billy to talk.

I've taken worse beatings
, Billy thought with a trickle of pride.

He leaned against the side of the trench, grimaced at the deep pokes of pain in his rib cage. The duct tape around his wrists had lost its tackiness in the sand, and Billy slipped his hands from the cuff. Kit untied the binding from around his ankles.

“So how do we do it?” she asked, a hard starch in her voice. “How do we fucking take down Rhubarb Glanz?” She looked him up and down. “Can you walk?”

Billy waved off the last question. “In a minute.” He spat grit from his mouth. “We tried confronting Glanz to find a connection to the judge's death, but Glanz is too well protected.”

“Following Robbie never led me to the father,” she agreed.

“Until we find a weak spot in his defense, we should work on the shooter, Adam Rackers. We trace him backward to Glanz. There must have been some meeting, or a connection through a bagman. There was a payoff
somewhere
ânobody kills a judge for money without insisting first on a deposit.”

“What can we learn about Rackers that the police couldn't?”

Billy wiped a finger inside his armpit, then cleared the sand from under his lips. “The police get their information from good citizens,” Billy said. “We're not under those kinds of limitations.”

She shot him a sideways look as the flare sputtered out and abandoned them in a moonlit crater of sand. Without the hiss of the flare, the silence was more unsettling than the darkness.

“Do you know those kind of people?” she asked.

“I have sources,” Billy confessed. Another thought came suddenly to him and he wondered if his conscious mind had suppressed it until she had freed him from the sand. He told her straight:

“I sold you out to them.”

sixteen

M
artin nearly hurled himself at his assistant's feet.

“Thank
God
you're here,” he blurted. “Do you have my speech? You're smiling. That means you do? Is it any good? Will it read like I wrote it myself? I don't want people to think my employee had to write my speech for me. Don't look at me like that! Do you have my shoes?” His assistant held up a plastic grocery bag. “Oh, Christ, thankfully! Does it always echo in here like this? Son of a
bitch
, I hate that echo. Do I seem nervous? Is it humid in here? Christ, it's like a rain forest in this State House.” He blotted his forehead with his necktie.

Carol patted Martin's arm. “Easy, boss,” she comforted in a velvety voice that clashed with the stir of devil in her huge round eyes.

“What?” Martin said. “What's the grin?”

“I was mingling in the audience before I came up here. I saw the judge's
comatta
.”

He shushed her. “Not too loud!” Though he was sure nobody could hear them in the ricochet of voices, amped through a PA system, which echoed off marble floors and walls and careened through
the alcoves and stairways of the Rhode Island State House. This was where a young Gil Harmony, barely out of law school, served two terms in the state senate.

Carol inspected her boss. “Your shirttail is coming out.” She opened his jacket, one side and then the other, clicked her tongue, and pointed to a black spot on his shirt. “That silly fountain pen exploded in your pocket again, so keep this coat buttoned up.”

“Oh, fuck.” He jammed his shirttail into his pants.

“And don't worry about the speech. It'll sell.”

“Is it profound?”

“Makes the Gettysburg Address read like a dirty limerick.”

Was she joking? Would she joke with him a few minutes before Martin had to read a speech about his murdered mentor? Martin stuck his little pink hands on his hips. “Now quit that,” he ordered. “You know I have no ear for hyperbole.”

Carol pulled a pair of size 8
1/2
leather cap toe oxfords from a shopping bag. “Why can't you keep these at the office?” she asked.

“My wife can smell dead cow straight through a filing cabinet.”

Martin kicked off his hideous 100 percent nonanimal, faux leather plastic loafers. He paused a moment and glanced around unconsciously to make sure his militantly vegan wife was not around. The upper reaches of the state capitol were empty.
What makes a taboo so exciting?
he wondered. He enjoyed a tickle in his potbelly and felt the stretch of his grin as he slipped his feet into genuine cowhide shoes he would never dare bring near his own house.

Martin and Carol peered together over a third-floor balcony rail, into the State House rotunda. Far below, the memorial service for Justice Gilbert Harmony was under way. More than a hundred well-dressed people competed for standing room on four great staircases that led into the hall. The rotunda is a soaring space befitting a cathedral, built of pillars and balconies standing upon each other, from the brass seal of the state embedded in the white marble floor to the high
point of the capitol dome, 149 feet above. For a century, the rotunda has been the site of protests and celebrations, public announcements and government denouncements. More recently, it had become a backdrop for wedding photos.

As an indoor courtyard open to each floor of the building, the rotunda is bright, and seems built of equal parts air and rock. Veins of black swirl though the white marble pillars, the staircases, and the balcony rails polished as smooth as a beach stone. Four arches near the top of the space are gilded in gold, and decorated with murals of ladies in flowing gowns and laurel leaf crowns, holdings books and swords to represent literature and justice. The dome that caps the rotunda is 50 feet across, painted a blend of blue and white, like the sky.

Blue velvet ropes protect the ten-foot state seal in the rotunda floor, which is surrounded by ornamental brass streetlamps, each supporting ten frosted-glass globes of light. At a podium next to the seal, a retired senator mumbled at eighty decibels through a PA system that splashed his voice monstrously against the marble.

“ â¦ my goooood friend-d-d and colleeegggg â¦”

Martin wiggled his toes inside the glorious leather and asked Carol, “Did you see June Harmony?”

“Front row, protecting her territory,” Carol replied.

A dozen metal folding chairs had been set up in three rows before the podium. June Harmony was conspicuous in a long black dress. She sat at attention, yet gazed off as if she had not noticed the crowds, the podium, and the speaker. Her spectacular diamond earrings twinkled in the light.

“So you told her about Nelida?” Carol asked, gently prying for information.

“I felt like a little boy confessing to my mother that I had broken a family heirloom,” Martin admitted. “She didn't flinch.”

“Of course not. She knew. At some level, the wife always knows.”

Martin glanced at Carol and was relieved that she did not look
back at him. Carol was a generous soulâshe would not force Martin to acknowledge that June Harmony may have had the world's oldest motive to kill her husband: jealousy.

“June didn't try to bar Nelida from this event,” Martin said.

“To take action against the mistress would affirm that June considered Nelida a threat, and June Harmony is too proud for that,” Carol said. “Have they met eyes?”

“I fear for this building when they do.”

“Do you see where Nelida is standing?”

Martin could not miss her. “Behind the great seal,” he said.

The judge's mistress wore a navy blue pantsuit and a yellow shirt so bright a hunter might wear it to avoid getting shot in the woods. “She's certainly not in hiding.”

“She staked out territory as close to the podium as possible,” Carol said. “It's her first public claim on the judge's life. She waits just off to the side like a gathering army before an invasion. Is that her bodyguard with her?”

“That's her son, Jerod,” Martin said, feeling a squirt of embarrassment at the memory of meeting Jerod in New York while Martin was in a robe, briefly out of his briefs. Jerod looked impressive in an athletically tapered gray suit coat. “Nelida says Gil treated her son like his own blood.”

“I noticed Jerod when I was mingling earlier,” Carol said. “His eyes darted everywhere. He feels out of his element.”

“How was Brock?” Martin asked. He picked the kid out of the crowd, at his mother's side and mimicking her posture.

“Zombified.”

Martin's eyes drifted to a slender woman in a swishy black skirt: Kit Bass, the judge's clerk, carrying a legal pad and hurrying among the attendees like a worker bee in a crowded hive. She approached Gil Harmony's old friends one by one, landing with a whisper into
her hand cupped to their ears, probably telling each of them when they would speak. With a scratch on the legal pad, she would fly off again.

“Povich says that woman, Kit Bass, loved the judge too,” Martin said, more to himself than to Carol.

“Which one? There? The clerk?”

“Too young for him.”

Carol laughed. “From his perspective there was no âtoo young.' And from hers, nothing smooths wrinkles like money and power.”

Martin sighed. “I'm stuck with these wrinkles, and the oatmeal masks my wife wants me to wear.”

“Do you good, maybe.” She smiled and did the sexy little hair flip she liked to do when she teased him about his age.

He scoffed, “Oatmeal masks. Cucumbers on the eyes. She has a skin cream with carrots in it. Why do women put food on their faces? And why can't anybody make a shampoo that doesn't smell like dessert? With a beard like this, do you think I want it stinkin' like witch hazel and huckleberries?”

Martin spotted Lincoln Harmony. The judge's brother looked down on the memorial from the second-floor balcony. He leaned against a pillar, arms crossed, occasionally nodding to people to accept the condolences of politicians and lawyers who had caught his eye.

“Is the brother drunk?” Martin asked.

“He's anxious,” Carol said. “See the leg bouncing? Read that as impatient. Hmmm. And with his flat mouth-line and crossed arms, I'd say he's waiting for something.”

“Maybe he's just nervous about speaking to this crowd. No shame in that. I should head down there.”

They walked together down a side hall painted butterscotch and cluttered with the serious portraits of men who had served as Rhode Island governor. Each governor in history had a portrait somewhere
in the State House, regardless of whether his administration ended in success, failure, or incarceration.

Carol slipped Martin two typewritten pages. “Your speech,” she said. “Don't read it too fast. Breathe now and then. Pause at the spots I've indicated, and make sure you look up and make eye contact with somebody.”

Martin read the first line:

Long ago, as a young attorney, my friend Gil Harmony taught me that lawyers save as many lives as doctors, by serving the truth.

He sighed, folded the speech, and tucked it into his pocket. “A beautiful opening,” he said. “But I'm going to feel like a liar, knowing what I know about Gil.”

“He was a complicated man,” Carol said. “Pick the truth about him you loved, and serve that one.” Her hand, resting lightly on his shoulder, felt like an iron guyline that steadied him inside a hurricane.

They passed an oil portrait of former governor Ambrose Burnside, known for wearing a beard over his cheeks with a clean-shaven chin. The Civil War general didn't want to command the Army of the Potomacâhe warned President Lincoln he was no good for the job. But Burnside got stuck with the command anyway, nearly lost the war at Fredericksburg, and had to be talked out of a suicide charge at Confederate troops. Though a disaster on horseback as a general, he gave the world a new hairstyle, known as
burnsides
. Somehow, the dyslexia of history mangled the name into
sideburns
.

Martin was suddenly struck with new respect for Burnside. At least the general knew his limitations.
Do I know mine?
Martin's drive to find Gil Harmony's killer had succeeded only in killing the judge's reputation. Rumors of an out-of-town mistress bubbled through the legal community, and they carried the ugly, unspoken suggestion
that Gil's behavior might have been responsible for his murder. Martin felt he had strangled the judge in the grave. Plus he had nearly got Povich buried alive.

At the floor of the rotunda, Martin left Carol in the crowd and took the seat reserved for him behind June Harmony. He tried not to look at Nelida but could not resist. She stared back and lifted her chin an inch in a greeting nobody else would notice. Her son, Jerod, leaned in front of his mother, which Martin interpreted as a gesture of protection, as if he were ready to take a bullet for her.

The speaking program of earsplitting echoes continued. Martin read over his speech. With his leaky fountain pen, he edited a word here and there. Carol was brilliant and Martin dreaded her graduation from law school. She'd ace the bar, of course, and he'd immediately offer to make her his partner. But then they'd have to hire a new assistant, and they'd never find someone as good as she.

A man brushed roughly past Martin's elbow, dragging the scent of cigars. Martin looked up to see Lincoln Harmony leaning over June. She glared up at him. He smiled sweetly and handed her a white envelope, which she reluctantly accepted as she would a dead rat. He clapped her twice lightly on the shoulder, and then grinned at Martin and shot him with a finger gun. Then Linc staggered off into the crowd.

He's got to be fucking hammered!

June gripped the envelope in the middle, as if to tear it in half, but then changed her mind, slid a pinkie under the flap, and took out a document. Martin leaned forward and read over her shoulder.

A subpoena.

Linc Harmony was contesting his brother's will.

BOOK: Loot the Moon

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