The Moonlight (10 page)

“I just wondered if there was anything you could tell me about George Patchmore and Leo Galatina,” Tom said, with no preamble whatsoever.  “They were partners once, weren’t they?  I just figured if anybody would know, you would.”

Leo Galatina?  It took a minute to place the name, and then all Jack could dredge up from memory was an old man he had seen maybe half a dozen times over the last ten years—an old man up on Mill House Road, walking his arthritic poodle.  An old man of whom it was said that he had had a colorful life and, for all that he lived in a house with a screened-in front porch and less than forty feet of street frontage, would probably leave each of his numberless grandchildren a millionaire.

“Yeah—sure.”  Jack nodded vigorously, suddenly more than a little concerned for his commission on the Moonlight property.  “Partners, sure.  But that was back before the War, Tom.  Why?”

“Galatina was struck down in a hit-and-run last evening, about a quarter after seven.  He died nine hours ago.  We’re treating it as a homicide.”

He said it as if he were reading it off a card, but Jack knew this wasn’t just a routine investigation of a traffic accident.  Not if they were looking all the way back to George Patchmore.

What could he do except shrug?

“George couldn’t have done it,” he said.  “He’s been dead for three months.”

He smiled—it was a little joke, you see—but Tom looked as if he hadn’t been listening.

“Do you know what kind of dealings they might have been involved in, Jack?  You could save me a lot of work.”

And maybe avoid some unprofitable publicity for one of the firm’s listings, was the implication.  Jack suddenly understood why his brother-in-law was considered such a good cop:  he knew how to push the right buttons.

“In 1935, when George bought the Moonlight, Leo Galatina was somehow instrumental in getting him the money.  Leo Galatina was strictly a silent partner—he was never involved in running the business.  In 1941, George bought him out.  End of story.”

“And that’s all you know?”

“That’s all I know, Tom.  Maybe that’s all there is to know.”

Tom gave him a look, as if he couldn’t believe anyone was that stupid, and Jack remembered that Tom had sources he could turn to who were better informed than he would ever be about old doings at the Moonlight.  He wondered what they were telling him.

Or perhaps Tom didn’t like to ask.

“What has this got to do with George, Tom?  I mean,
really
?  I’d like to sell the Moonlight, Tom—if it’s okay with you.  I’d like to get shut of the whole god damned thing, and then you can drag all the skeletons out of the closet you want to.  But until then . . .”

Tom leaned forward, bringing his chair’s front legs down to the floor with a snap.  He handed his brother-in-law back his styrofoam cup, half empty.

“I read you, Jack,” he said, softly, like a mortician consoling the departed one’s family.  “No one is interested in dredging up a lot of old scandals.  But, as you might have guessed, it wasn’t just anybody who got run over last night.”

“I understand that.  I’ve told you everything I know, which is what’s in the paperwork.  I wasn’t George’s confessor, you know.”

“I know.”

Jesus, he looked tired.  Jack wondered what friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend had been on the phone to him that morning, calling in old debts and threatening God only knows what kind of trouble.  It was something Greenley people understand very well here in their little corner of the world, even if they didn’t happen to be Italian.

“Just keep it under your hat that we talked about this,” he said as he stood up.  “I figured you’d rather I asked you than somebody else.”

“You figured right, Tom.  And if I think of anything else, I’ll give you a call—at home, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.”

Tom stared toward the door and then, with his hand actually on the knob, turned around.

“George didn’t have anything except his social security, did he?”

“That and a little savings, now almost gone,” Jack answered.  “He died just in time.”

“Then who’s been paying the tab on the Moonlight all these years when you haven’t been able to rent it to anybody?  The property taxes alone should have wiped him out years ago.”

It was a good point, and one Jack kind of wished he hadn’t raised.

“I used to get a check—twice a year, regular as clockwork.  It was from a Delaware corporation as therefore as anonymous as an unmarked grave.  Don’t ask me who sent it, because I don’t know.”

“Sure.”

They shook hands again, and Jack found himself feeling sorry he had ever heard of the Moonlight Roadhouse, because now he felt like he had broken faith with family, which he hadn’t.  He didn’t know a single thing he hadn’t spelled out for Tom—
Tom
was the one who was holding something back, which, one supposed, as a policeman was his right and duty.  Still, as Tom closed the door behind him, he left him feeling bad.

And Jack went home for lunch, as he always did when he was not romancing a client, and he didn’t say anything to Kitty—that was Mrs. Matheny, whom he had also known since high school, except in this case in the Biblical sense as well.

But the woman you bagged for the first time nearly thirty-five years ago on the back seat of your Dad’s Oldsmobile, and who has been doing your laundry ever since, wasn’t all that easy to fool.  Kitty always knew when he had a bone stuck in his throat.  He could tell from the silence and so, probably, could she.  Yet Jack had always found Kitty good company to think by, so he made up his mind over her meatloaf sandwich and ice tea that maybe he would just take a drive out to the Moonlight before he went back to the office, just to see if the sight of the old place could shake a memory loose in one of the back rooms of his head.

If he had something to give to Tom, to help him off whatever hook he was on over this business, he knew he would feel better.

And, besides, it didn’t hurt to drop by a listed property every so often, because even if you didn’t have any buyers it at least gave the owner the illusion of forward movement.  He had been neglecting Owings, and he knew it.  The whole thing, you see, Owings and the Moonlight both, had inspired Jack Matheny with an uneasiness that made neglect seem almost a virtue.

He had his car window open, so he could hear the music even as he turned into the driveway—big band stuff, with lots of trombones.  He was surprised, because he wouldn’t have thought that sort of thing would be much to Owings’ taste.  But it was easy to be wrong about people.

He parked in front of the garage, which was unlocked.  He opened the double doors about six inches, just because all real estate people were born nosey, and saw the front end of a brand new Lincoln Town Car in a kind of dark burgundy red.  Very sharp.  Somehow it went with the trombones.

Except that the left headlight was broken and the fender had gotten crumpled.  Maybe Owings wasn’t much of a driver.

Jack knocked, but nobody answered the front door.  So he just followed the music around to the rear, noting with approval along the way that somebody had been busy with a scraping knife and sandpaper.  It looked like Owings was getting ready to do some painting.

Except that “getting ready” didn’t quite express it.  Jack found him in the back, on the old outdoor dance floor, up on a ladder.  He was barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts and a tee shirt, which was understandable considering the temperature was in the eighties, even here in the shade.  There were plastic dropcloths all around, and he had about half the wall finished.

“I admire your industry,” Jack shouted over the music, which was coming from an old wooden radio propped up on a lawn chair.  He must have startled him, because Owings almost fell off his ladder.  “A little fresh paint won’t hurt when I start bringing people around.”

Owings scrambled down and turned off the radio—you might have supposed he had been caught in the practice of some secret vice—and then he came over to offer Jack his hand, smiling a little foolishly.

“It’s for myself, really,” he said, as if the matter required an apology.  “I’ve never owned a home before and I figured, as long as I’m here . . .”

As the sentence trailed off, he let his eyes sweep over the side of the building with something like a lover’s fondness.  It was odd, and somehow a little disconcerting, to hear anyone refer to the old Moonlight as “home,” but then for Owings, probably, its past had only begun the day Jack had picked him up from the train station.

“Well, it’s good for business,” Jack said, and stepped back to admire his work.

“You finding it hard to get around out here?”

Owings looked at him a little strangely, like he was wondering if he had peeked into the garage.  And then he grinned, like a man with nothing to hide.

And what could he possibly have to hide?

“Solved that problem yesterday.”  He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his tee shirt, although he hadn’t appeared to be sweating.  “Like to see my new car?”

“Sure.  I always like a new car.”

“Except it isn’t quite new,” he said as they started walking back toward the garage.  Jack noticed Owings was being a little careful on the gravel driveway, which probably hurt if you weren’t wearing shoes.  “It’s a rental company sell-off, but it’s still got a few months on its warranty.  I just wish that covered body work.”

He swung open the garage door and made a flat-handed gesture at the headlight, as if to say,
see what I mean?

“I have the car about three hours, and this happens—some idiot in a parking lot, just bashed me and took off.  Didn’t even leave a note.”

On closer inspection, it wasn’t bad.  The metal wasn’t torn, the way it usually was in these rear-enders.  There was just a nice, soft dent.  And of course the headlamp.

“A couple of hundred,” Jack told him, running his fingers along the inside of the dent—around a car, it seemed, every man had to pretend he was an expert.  “They can just pound this out.”

“You think so?”

“Oh sure.”

He walked all the way around, opening a door to look at the upholstery, making a production out of admiring the hell out of it.  People didn’t show you their cars if they didn’t expect you to like them.  At least, most people didn’t.

“Nice,” Jack said, meaning it.  “Looks like they took good care of it.”

While they walked back, Jack told him about the newspaper ad and the inquiries he had had so far.

“It takes time with commercial property,” he said.  “You don’t have buyers coming at you from every side, but at least you don’t have to put up with the housewives who just want to kill an afternoon looking at other people’s houses.”

He laughed, and then Owings laughed, perhaps to cover the sound of a window being opened somewhere.  Very faintly, Jack could hear the noise of water running—perhaps a shower, up on the second floor.

Looked like Owings had himself a house guest, which might explain why he hadn’t invited his broker inside.  Jack wondered who she was, and if she was anyone he might have recognized.  It didn’t figure he was going to find out.

Why had Owings shown him the car, he wondered.  Because of her?  It didn’t figure.  Pride of ownership, perhaps?  Maybe, since that seemed to be why he was fixing up the Moonlight.  Or because he figured he had seen it already?  But a car wasn’t exactly a state secret.

“Well, I’d better be running along,” he said—one thing you learn in the real estate business is not to overstay your welcome.

“I wish you’d come and paint my house sometime.”  The smile was to let Owings know that he was just joking.  “You do nice work.”

Owings shrugged his shoulders, which somehow, under his tee shirt, looked impossibly weighed down.

“That’s the great advantage of white.  When you get sick of it, it covers so nicely.”

“And you’ve chosen a good color,” Jack went on, turning away with a little wave of hsi hand—thinking to himself what a waste of time it had been coming out here.  “That’s a nice shade of gray.  It goes well with the house.”

And it was the simple truth, too.

He was all the way out to his car before it hit him.  No wonder that color seemed so perfect—he remembered from when he was a kid, right after the war, when things were still under George Patchmore’s management and operation.

It was the restaurant people who had painted the place white.  In George’s time, the Moonlight had always been just that gray.

Detective Lieutenant Spolino had left a stenographer on duty in Leo Galatina’s hospital room, and she had taken down every word the old man said while he drifted in and out of consciousness.  He seemed to have a lot of say, if one only knew how to interpret it.  The transcript made for very interesting reading.

As the brain dies it appears to lose control over time, so that as it relives the events leading to its final few snatches of memory the past and present grow jumbled together.  Sometimes Leo was an old man, walking his dog as he had every evening for the past ten years, and sometimes he was a young hoodlum on the rise.  It was a tangled skein.  None of it was admissible in court and a lot of it was nearly unintelligible—which was probably just as well for certain people’s peace of mind, because Leo’s confession would have been enough to hang a dozen bad guys.