The Moonlight (18 page)

When he had the parcel open he discovered that it contained four bundles of twenty-dollar bills, each held together by a disintegrating rubber band and each about half an inch thick.

Jesus.

Phil pulled off one of the rubber bands, which broke at the first touch, and started to count the money.  The bundle contained twenty-five hundred dollars—he had ten thousand dollars lying here on the kitchen table.

And there were twenty-five or thirty parcels still in the safe.

He took one of the bills and looked it over carefully.  It seemed quite new, but then he noticed that it was marked “Series 1952”.  None of the others was dated later than 1953.  The whole wad had probably been in that safe for close to forty years.

Phil thought of his uncle George, sitting helpless in his nursing home through all those years, knowing he had a fortune hidden back at the Moonlight and not able to touch it.  No wonder he had never been willing to sell.

But why just leave it here?  Why not tell someone he could trust and have the money put in the bank, where it could do him some good?  Surely life could have been made a little more comfortable for him by something in excess of a quarter of a million dollars.

Except if he didn’t dare.  Except if he had never declared it because he wasn’t eager to put down on an income tax form how he had come by it.  Jack Matheny had said George was something of a crook—”a business inside the business” was the way he had put it.  No wonder he preferred to keep his little secret.

And there was no reason, Phil decided, why his nephew shouldn’t go right on keeping it.  There were inheritance taxes—or the government might just decide that Uncle George had been delinquent in not reporting and confiscate the whole bundle.  No, he wasn’t going to tell anyone about this.

He could spend it a little at a time.  If anybody asked about his windfall, he could say he’d had a good day at Atlantic City.  And why should anybody ask?

Two hundred and fifty, maybe three hundred thousand dollars.  Money like that could solve a lot of problems.  For one thing, it meant he could keep the Moonlight.

For nearly forty years that money had been sitting there—nearly forty years during which the house had been occupied by perhaps half a dozen different businesses.  It had had a good hiding place, but that was still a long time.  Why hadn’t anyone found it before this?

The answer came into his mind with the sudden clarity of revelation:  because they hadn’t been meant to find it.

That money had been waiting for him—just him.  The house, or whatever possessed the house, the way a soul possesses a body, knew how of guard its secrets and had preserved this one against his coming.

He was meant to stay here.  The house was claiming him as its own.

In the terms that apply in ordinary life, nothing that had happened made any sense.  The only explanation which served was that the house was endowed with some quality of will unique to it, that there was some presence here with him, that he was not alone within these walls.  The idea astonished but, strangely, did not frighten him.  It was even comforting, like the consciousness of being loved.

“It’s mine,” he thought—he might even have said it out loud, he wasn’t sure.  “It’s mine, all of it.  The house, the money, the things that go bump in the night, it’s mine.  All mine.”

In a kind of panic, he gathered up the loose pile of twenty-dollar bills and started back toward the pantry with them.  He had to put this shit back before anybody walked in and found it, he had to. . .

But he got no further than the door.  The bills slipped from between his fingers and drifted to the floor.  He had forgotten them.  He could only stare at the gaming table with a kind of awe, a terror too impersonal to leave room for fear.

There, written in the dust that covered the green felt like a dirty, wrinkled skin—written in the same childish block letters he had seen on the postcard only a few days before—were two words:

ALL YOURS.

There were, as it turned out, over two hundred wine red ’88 or ’89 Lincoln Town Cars registered in Fairfield County.  It seemed to be a very popular color.  Granted, only seventy-three of these belonged to the Greenley-Stamford area, but a request to the New York MVD turned up another hundred and twenty just in Port Chester, Rye and White Plains.  Since this was a homicide investigation, the police from surrounding areas were cooperating, but Detective Lieutenant Spolino’s instinct told him that the car he was looking for was right here in Greenley.  He had a list with twenty-seven names of it and he was checking them all himself, in what struck him as a descending order of probability.  He was down to the last five, and so far he had exactly one dented fender.

It wasn’t a very promising lead.  Miss Jessica Wilton was sixteen years old, and her parents, who apparently had more money than sense, had given her the car three months ago for her birthday.  Spolino had talked not to her—Miss Wilton was in school— but to her mother, who said the accident had happened on the preceding Thursday, when her daughter had hit a fence post while trying to get out of their driveway.  Sure enough, the fence post was leaning at an eccentric angle and showed clear evidence of wine red paint.  Just as a precaution, however, Spolino had had the lab boys over from Stamford to examine the fender, but they weren’t going to find anything.

Mrs. Wilton just about had a fit.

Leo Galatina hadn’t been killed by a sixteen-year-old high school girl out for a drive in her birthday car.  He had been murdered, presumably by a man named Charlie Brush, and Charlie Brush, Spolino would have given odds, wouldn’t be the type to be on car-borrowing terms with any sixteen-year-old Greenley high school girls.

That left the Galatina homicide investigation with five cars.

No—six.  The girl who babysat the fax machine drifted trancelike past his desk and left him a report from the Connecticut MVD that a certain Philip L. Owings of 637 Old River Road in Greenley had, as of Thursday last, taken possession of a wine red Lincoln Town Car, formerly the property of Aristocar Leasing.

It took Lieutenant Spolino several seconds to realize why that address sounded so familiar—it was the old Moonlight.

And Thursday had been the day Leo Galatina was murdered.

A major criminal investigation, as everyone knew, was always filled with coincidences.  It was merely the occasional sports in the Law of Averages that made some men look guilty just because they frequented certain bars or got their hair cut on alternate Tuesdays or favored a particular brand of running shoes, because probably so did half the human race.  You could drive yourself crazy with that sort of thing.  But this was different.  This was just too perfect a fit not to work.

He couldn’t have said why he knew, but Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino knew with the certainty of revelation that, one way or the other, he had found his murderer.

He picked up the phone and dialed Research.

“Amy, I want everything there is to know about Philip L. Owings, 637 Old River Road.  Call the Bureau.  Find out where he lived before he came here, and call them.  Call everyone.  I want him right back to the Year One.”

When he was finished he didn’t put the receiver down.  Instead, he dialed his brother-in-law’s realty office.

“How are you, Jack?  Listen, I thought I might go out to the Moonlight and have a look around.”

“Not anymore, Tom—the place is occupied.”

“Is that so?”  Spolino tried to sound surprised, but the inflection did not come naturally.  “What’s the tenant’s name?  Do you think he’d let me in?”

“It’s the heir, a fellow named Owings.  He might, if his girlfriend isn’t taking a shower.  He seems to be a fast worker with the ladies.”

“I didn’t know George Patchmore had any family left.”

“Owings seems to be it, and it came as a surprise to him too.  The lawyers were a long time finding him—all the way out in California.”

“From California, is he?  What did he do, drive out?”

Spolino hoped the question didn’t sound as artificial to Jack as it did to him, but the answer came back smoothly enough.

“No, he flew.  But he’s got a car now.” Jack laughed with good natured contempt.  “He’s even managed to dimple the fender.  Like I said, he’s a fast worker.”

Spolino’s heart was racing.  He had to swallow hard before he could manage an off-hand, “Well thanks, Jack.  I’ll drop around and see if he’ll let me in.”

So Philip Owings had dimpled his fender.  It was clear that the Lord loved His detective lieutenants.

It was now eleven fifteen in the morning.  Spolino decided he would wait until the early afternoon, on the theory that people are more cooperative and less on their guard after lunch.  He considered taking an arrest warrant with him but decided he hadn’t established sufficient probable cause—after all, what did he have except a dented fender?  He hadn’t arrested Jessica Wilton.

“Amy, the guy turns out to be from California.  Call them first.”

. . . . .

Computers were wonderful.  Within an hour, Spolino had reports on his desk from the FBI, the Department of Defense, the California Department of Justice and the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, and they all came to precisely the same thing.  The guy was clean.  He seemed thus far to have passed through the world without a black mark against his name.

Four years in the Navy after a year in college, and no brig time.  The California police couldn’t even find a parking ticket on him.

If there was one thing Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino had learned to mistrust, it was a model citizen.

So.  Philip Owings, with no ties to the area and no apparent connection with organized crime, inherits the Moonlight from an unknown relative, comes out by plane, buys a car, and tops Leo Galatina.  It made no sense whatever.

Still, that had to be the way it had happened.

The drive to Brookville was always pleasant because it took you through some of the older parts of town, dating back to the period when the gentry from New York first started to build their country houses in what was then still the country.  The Rockefellers had always had their great estates in the back country, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that ordinary garden-variety millionaires began to think of putting up humble little fifteen-room cottages on just an acre or two of carefully manicured lawn surrounded by, say, an eight-foot stone wall.  After all, the Common Man had to have his weekend place when he wanted to get away from Manhattan for a little of the simple life and maybe some tennis.

Lieutenant Spolino liked such areas, less for their aesthetic qualities than for the reassuring conviction they inspired that the people who lived behind these gracious if slightly inauthentic façades were never going to give him any trouble.  This was not a place where anybody was ever murdered, except perhaps at bridge, and if the children got caught with the wrong kind of candy in their pockets they were invariably shipped off to discretely expensive rehabilitation centers in Vermont.  Things simply were not allowed to get messy, and it was only when things got messy that anyone thought of the police.

Brookville itself, however, was different.  Brookville, with its supermarkets and its second-story apartments, was on the fringes of real life, where anything was possible.

And the Moonlight, not two hundred yards from the New York state line, was a place where crime enjoyed the respectability of ancient tradition.

In conformity with long established habit, Spolino parked in front of the garage—suspects tended to be more susceptible to pressure when they knew they didn’t have immediate access to their cars.  Of course in this case it hardly made any difference, since the garage was padlocked.  He slammed his door shut to give everyone fair warning of his arrival, but he knew from the settled quiet of the place that no one was home.  He rang the bell and waited for the answer that wouldn’t be coming, and then he went around to the back.

Owings apparently hadn’t gotten around to the garage yet, but the paint on the main house still had that shine that never lasts past the first rain storm.  The lawns were cut and green, and there were no leaves on the gravel.  Somebody had been sprucing things up.

On the back patio Spolino found an old wooden stepladder and some painting paraphernalia covered by a plastic dropcloth.  There was no paint spattered on the concrete and there was still some masking tape around the edges of the windows.  Owings, it seemed, was the careful type.

Which was a pity.  Nothing about this case, it seemed, was destined to be easy.

Spolino had driven by the Moonlight dozens of times over the years, but he had set foot on the property only twice in his life.  Now he looked at the old roadhouse, shining like a harlot’s smile under its fresh paint, and remembered the day, twelve years before, when they had found the little Hoffman girl in the cellar, her arms and legs tied with bailing wire and her face already half covered with fine gray mold.  They might not have found her for years if a neighbor’s dog hadn’t been irresistibly drawn by the smell of decay.  The men who went in to bring out the body had had to wear gas masks.

And then, five years ago, he had come to search the premises after Harve Wickham hanged himself.  He had spent perhaps twenty minutes in that little third-floor apartment—just time enough to determine that Harve hadn’t left a note and that there was nothing on the premises that would upset his ex-wife when she came to clean out his effects.  But twenty minutes was enough.  He never wanted to go inside that house again.