The Moonlight (11 page)

Spolino sat at his desk in the day room at the Greenley police station, eating the chicken salad sandwich his wife had made for his lunch and sipping absent-mindedly at a diet Coke as he reread he old thug’s last earthly testament.

Leo Galatina had named his murderer and had cried down vengeance on his former partner, George Patchmore, for having sometime or other bungled something.  The two were somehow related in his wounded and moribund mind, but George Patchmore was dead and nobody—not police records clerks, not the FBI, nobody—knew anything about or had ever even heard of a “Charlie Brush.”

So, in the end the only thing Spolino knew for certain so far was that he hated this case.

It was the sort of case every policeman hates, where the odds of making a collar decrease with every passing hour and everyone is screaming to have the perpetrator locked up two days ago.

If it had been a simple hit-and-run the chances would have been better—the driver would probably be local, probably some kid out with his parents’ car and a bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, so you waited for the lab work to give you a fix on the car and then you started ringing doorbells.  It was a good bet the guy would probably walk into the station within a few days, after he’d seen a lawyer and gotten his story straight, and that would be that.

But this particular time it wasn’t going to go down so easy, because what we had here was Murder One.

To begin with, Leo Galatina had not been the sort of man who dies by accident.  He does not drown while out swimming in Long Island Sound, he is not struck by lightning, he does not get run over by some drunken teenager out in the family car.  These things do not happen to him.  Either he dies in his bed after a long illness or he is murdered.  There is no third possibility.  Leo Galatina had probably made his bones before Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino was even born.  Leo Galatina had been one hard-assed son-of-a-bitch, a righteous villain of the old school, the kind of man who is immune to chance.

So somebody put the touch on him.  It didn’t matter that for the past fifteen years he hadn’t been involved in anything shadier than forgetting now and then to put money in the downtown parking meters, somebody had wanted him dead.  And murderers in that league were hardly ever caught.

So who needed all this shit?  Why hadn’t whoever did it just bundle the old guy into the trunk of his car and arrange for him to disappear somewhere?  If it was Family business, why make work for the police?  Where was consideration?  Whatever happened to professional pride?  If there was anything Tom Spolino hated it was a sloppy hit man.

And Tom Spolino was in a position to judge, because his grandfather had been one of the best.

It was one of the little amenities of being a cop in Greenley that he had the day room practically to himself—at Manhattan South there would have been fifty guys at fifty desks, and the floor would have been a litter of crumpled paper and spilled coffee.  Police work in Greenley was mainly traffic control and visiting the schools to lecture all those upwardly mobile kids about keeping their noses clean.  There was a smaller than average drug problem in town, mostly cocaine, because the users made most of their buys in New York.  There was plenty of burglary, but if there was more than one homicide a year it was a crime wave.  Spolino was the senior detective, although business was so slow that he had never been promoted above lieutenant, and he got all the hairy stuff, which was just the way he liked it.  There wasn’t much hairy stuff.

There was a refrigerator in the day room—unheard of luxury—and when he brought to work one of the lunches his wife packed for him he could be sure, come twelve o’clock, that it would be right there waiting for him.  Nobody was going to steal it.  And the odds were that nobody was going to shoot him before he reached retirement age.  Small town police work had a lot to recommend it.

Until somebody knocked off one of the old Dons.

So Detective Lieutenant Spolino drank his diet Coke and ate his sandwich and reviewed the transcripts of Leo Galatina’s last few hours on earth, feeling like a weasel trapped in a cage.

“George, you goddam fuck!  You useless, chiseling tavern keeper!”

The old man’s words came right off the page for him.  He didn’t need tape recordings, he didn’t need anything.  He could hear it all, as if Leo Galatina were talking into his ear.

“I thought we fixed that guy.”

He had been maybe seven or eight the first time he heard that growling voice, like the guy had little pieces of broken stone in his larynx.  It was organized crime’s version of a company picnic, in the back yard of the Don’s house in Stamford—only the Don was Leo’s older brother Enrico, and Grandpa had been his bodyguard and Number One Trigger, dead since 1946, when he had walked into a bullet that was meant for the Boss.

The son, who worked in a bakery to please his wife, had been invited with his family, just for old time’s sake—as a tribute to Lucio Spolino, who had been killed doing his job, and as a reminder that the Family looks after its own, even when they try to turn their backs.  Tom Spolino could remember his father’s nervousness, the way all afternoon he seemed to be trying to disappear, and it was such a good party too.

And Leo, Enrico’s underboss, had caught little Tom stealing from the cannoli tray.

“You want some?” he had asked, holding the kid up by his coat collar until his feet were no longer even touching the ground.  A small, angry-looking man in a blue suit that seemed too tight for him, he didn’t talk so much as snarl.  “Then have some—here, I give it to you.  One for now, one for later.  But take it like a man, and don’t snitch.  Now go find your mamma.”

And little Tom had gone running off, a stick of canniloni in each hand, more scared than he had ever been in his life, or ever would be again.

And it had worked, that single warning.  It had scotched forever any inclination towards a career in crime.  That Tom Spolino was a cop today was probably Leo Galatina’s fault.

“I
told
Enrico not to trust no fuckin’ Yankee Doodle.  I said, ‘he turns on his own, he’ll turn on us. 
Use
him, but don’t
trust
him.’”

Was George Patchmore the “fuckin’ Yankee Doodle”?  Or was it “that guy”?  Or was  “that guy” George?

The rest, for a couple of hours—the entries were marked by time, with a note in the margin every half hour or so—was a series of complaints about his wife, who had been dead for ten years.

And then:  “Charlie, you shit—you dead shit.  Get out o’ the fuckin’ car.  I kill you, Brush.  You fuck.”

So who was Charlie Brush?

If Galatina’s assailant was known to him, it figured he was local talent.  As far as anybody knew, Leo hadn’t even been outside Fairfield County in the past thirty years, not even to go into New York for a show.  Yet the name “Brush, Charles,
alias
Charlie” was showing up on nobody’s computer screen, not here, not in Stamford, not in Hartford, not even in Washington.

Well, that wasn’t quite true.  Washington had actually found twelve Charles Brushes:  one was a C.P.A. in California; one was a librarian in Oklahoma; one was (no kidding) a records clerk with the FBI; one was an unemployed alcoholic living out of garbage cans in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; one was the sheriff of Darwin County, Colorado; two were on active military service, one stationed in Arnheim, Germany and the other aboard an aircraft carrier somewhere between Japan and the Philippines; one was the federal government’s permanent guest in Leavenworth, Kansas; four were still in high school.  None of them had the slightest connection with Leo Galatina or with organized crime in the Northeastern United States.  All of them were under investigation as to their movements over the past three days and all of them, doubtless, were going to turn out to have unimpeachable alibis.  Lieutenant Spolino knew that his Charlie Brush was not one of these.

So what kind of a hit man is it who has never been fingerprinted, does not have a driver’s license, a passport or a Social Security card, has never signed an income tax form or registered for the military draft?  Is he the master assassin of all time, the man who leaves no loose ends and disappears without a trace?  Then why had this artist made such a botch of killing Leo—who, after all, survived for over nine hours?  And where did Leo know him from, outer space?

And what did Charlie Brush, whoever he was, have to do with George Patchmore?

Maybe nothing.  Maybe the “useless, chiseling tavern keeper” who was also the “Yankee Doodle” against whom Leo had warned his brother Enrico, was some other George.  Maybe old Leo had just gotten his wires tangled.

Spolino didn’t believe it for a minute.

Leo Galatina, George Patchmore, and an unknown quantity who went under the name of “Charlie Brush”—this was the holy trinity Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino had to work with.  It was the best he was likely to get.

Alice, neat as always, packed his chicken salad sandwich in a square of saran wrap which was now spread out on his desk with hardly a wrinkle.  She was a tryer, was Alice.  By the time he came along, it seemed, she had given up any serious hope of snagging a husband, so she would have been grateful to have anyone, and Tom Spolino was not anyone.  She kept the house in perfect order, she never nagged him or asked questions about his work, she was a wonderful mother to their two children and, like a lot of women without obvious personal attractions, she was a good fuck.

Alice was one decision he had never regretted.  He could have married lots of prettier women and done much worse.

It was one of the advantages of his job that the police station was only about a ten-minute walk from his front door. In the summer he always walked to work and sometimes, when things weren’t busy, would go home for lunch.  On those occasions he would sit at the kitchen table with Alice and then, sometimes, if the kids were safely out of the house and he happened to feel like it, they would go upstairs for a quickie.  Alice could get a man up and over the top faster than any woman he had ever known—when called upon, she was the McDonald’s of sex, except you never had to wait in line.

And when they were finished, she would zip up his trousers for him, looking all flushed and happy, like he had done her the biggest favor ever.  Then he would walk back to work, carrying his little secret into the day room with him, feeling like King Kong.

But that was only when things weren’t busy at the station.  Alice never asked questions, but she scanned the
Greenley Times
as if were holy writ and always knew if he was working on something important and would be taking his lunch with him.  She was the best god damned woman on the Eastern Seaboard.

And, although not particularly horny, Detective Lieutenant Spolino would have loved just then to walk the eight blocks to his front door and to have a quick pop with his homely little wife.  Because, just at the moment, he wasn’t feeling a whole lot like King Kong.

Leo Galatina, George Patchmore, and Charlie Brush.  Two down, and one to go.

Just to be sure that nobody was getting cute, Spolino phoned the City Reports Department, which was only across the street, and asked for a copy of George Patchmore’s death certificate.  Five minutes later it was on his desk.

Nothing.  George Patchmore had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, a fact which was confirmed at autopsy.  No chance of foul play.

So what was the connection?

Like everyone else in town over the age of forty, Spolino knew all the stories about George Patchmore and the Moonlight Roadhouse.  The only difference was that, having Lucio Spolino for a grandfather and growing up with the children of other Family members, he knew that the stories were true.  Old George, while not a made man, had been someone who did favors for the right kind of people, and who received favors in his turn.  George was not invited to weddings and funerals—though crooked, George had been an outsider, in the same way that Spolino’s father, though just an honest baker, had been an insider.  But George had
intimità
.  He was up to his armpits in the Family shit.

But that had been thirty-five years ago, and nobody waits thirty-five years to get even.  Revenge or profit, those were the only two reasons why you killed a man like Leo Galatina, and the only people who stood to profit from Leo’s death were his children and grandchildren, who would know better.  That left revenge, but whoever was settling scores was a little slow off the mark.

Tom Spolino hated this case, if only because its logic eluded him.

So—when logic failed, you returned to the crime site and the physical evidence.

Spolino had received the call just as he and Alice were sitting down for
Murder, She Wrote
, which he watched every Sunday night for the sake of its touching naïveté.  He was in his car and up on Mill Road within ten minutes, the officer on the scene already had the area roped off to traffic, and there was still plenty of daylight.  Galatina was on his way to the hospital, but the blood and the tire marks were perfectly plain to see.

Of the two, the tire marks were the more interesting, because somebody had really put down the rubber.  A fast acceleration, a heavy foot on the brakes but not until well past the point of impact.  Then, instead of just taking off, which was what you’d expect, the guy had backed up and gone over Leo again—which pretty well ruled this out as a traffic accident.  Leo must have been one tough old bastard.  It was a miracle he even made it into the ambulance.