The Moonlight (29 page)

“Not now.”

“And why not?”

“Uncle George bought this place sometime back in the Thirties. . .”

“1936—yeah, that’s right.”

Phil swallowed dark and nerved himself up to speak the words.

“That was a long time ago,” he said.  “Either you don’t show your age much, or it figures I’m sitting here talking to a ghost.”

The guy never even blinked.

“Don’t be corny, Phil,” he said finally.  “You think I go around wearin’ a bedsheet?”

No, he didn’t look like a ghost.  But what does a ghost look like—really?  You couldn’t see through him, but he wasn’t like a living person.

“Am I going crazy?”
Phil thought. 
“Is this what it’s like to crack up?  Maybe I’m talking to a dead guy, and maybe I’m not.”
  He just didn’t know.

He didn’t even know if he was afraid.

“Are you dead?”

“Am I what?”

“Dead.”

Charlie Brush seemed to think about that for a minute.  He closed his eyes and then opened them again, but either way he looked just as dead.

“Depends how you figure it,” he said finally.  And then he flashed his grin and looked like the devil himself.  “Sal Grazzi, now that’s dead.”

The laughter came echoing forth again, the same hollow sound, as if it began in some airless space where no human voice had ever been heard.

“What’s the matter, pal?  Didn’t you think that was funny.  Didn’t you just love shootin’ that stupid guinea’s pills off?”

The trace of blood on his right ear lobe was now a line that reached halfway down his neck.  The moonlight caught it in a funny way, so that it looked almost black, as if it had long since dried and was only a scaling crust.

Phil sat very quietly, because he had the impression that if he tried to speak, or even move, he might begin sobbing uncontrollably.  Yes, he was afraid, but his fear took the almost unrecognizable form of a deep mistrust of himself.  Charlie Brush, the spectral presence, the upright, talking, laughing corpse, frightened him less that the gathering impulse to surrender himself to this ghastly visitor.  If Charlie Brush was dead, then he feared not death so much as the longing for it.

Charlie Brush, whispered some voice inside himself, was his fate, almost his own reflected image.  Charlie Brush was his only friend.

“You got any plans for the money?” Charlie asked abruptly, making it sound like an accusation, turning his head slowly until his merciless, dead eyes were on Phil, who, after a moment to gather his self control, was able to answer.

“I called a guy about having the driveway resurfaced.”

“Good.”  Charlie looked at his cigarette, which had burned down almost to his fingers, and pitched it away.  He seemed pleased.  “Get the place back to what it was.  Great.”

He lit another cigarette, and again the light from the flame played eerily across his face.

“But no businesses,” he went on.  “No restaurants, no motels, no whorehouses.  I’ve had it with that shit.  You want to live here, you live here—but alone.”

He took a drag and seemed to relax, and then he waved his hand in a gesture of easy dismissal.

“And don’t worry about money, ‘cause there’s plenty more where that come from.”

Was that the deal?  You sold your soul to Charlie Brush, and he fixed it so you could stay in the Moonlight forever?

He could still walk, Phil thought.  He could go upstairs and wake up Beth, and they could get out of here tonight.  Then they might have a life together—couldn’t he live without this house?

No.  He couldn’t.  He had already made his deal, it seemed.  Charlie Brush already owned him.

And he was full of despair, like a damned soul staring into the mouth of hell.  He wanted to weep, for Beth, for himself, for his lost chance at life.  But the one thing he did not want to do was to recant.

So instead of that, he asked a question.

“Why did you kill that guy?”

“Who?  Sal?”  Charlie shrugged, as if the matter didn’t interest him very much.  “You don’t think he needed killin’?  Is that all you worry about, why I do stuff like that?  If it bothers you so much, just tell yourself Charlie Brush is very civic minded.  Trust me, the world can’t help but be a better place without Sal Grazzi.”

That seemed to be all the answer anyone was going to get.  Charlie turned his head away so that the streak of blood showed, down all the way to his collar now.

“But it happened?”

“Sure it happened, pal.  Don’t be a chump.”  Charlie was still looking away, as if he were there alone in the darkness.  “You were there—you saw.”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t . . .  I thought maybe. . .”

“You dreamed it?”  Without turning his head, Charlie Brush smiled his demon’s smile.  “Fat chance.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”  Phil could hear his voice beginning to break as a ball of emotion rose in his throat as if to choke him.  “Why me?”

This, at least brought those dead eyes back to him.

“Because I like you, sport.  You’re my pal.”  He leaned forward and patted Phil twice on the face, not hard but with just a shade of menace.  “Your uncle Georgie was my pal too.  God, we were partners for years, real tight.  You’re like one of the family, Phil Boy  I can’t do enough for you.”

Phil wiped his cheek and then looked at the palm of his hand in the moonlight.  There were traces of pale gray dust.

Up close Charlie Brush even smelled like a corpse.

“I don’t much like strangers,” he said, the edge in his voice a little harder.  “I like the Moonlight just the way it is now, nice and quiet.

“Let me tell you a story.  You see, once there was this dumb jerk name of Harve Wickham, thought he’d rent the place to live in and run a garage.  George ’d been in the nursing home a long time by then and I guess, after all the fuss with the motel, the rental guys didn’t have people lining up to share space with the blood stains upstairs.  So they let Harve in.  The gas pumps out front are his.

“He was a good mechanic, I guess, but he was a twit.  His wife quit him, with a little push from behind”—Charlie grinned, to show what he meant, and the skin around the edges of his face seemed to crinkle like old paper—”and then he was in here by himself.  I tried to help him, to let him be a little useful, but oh no.  He couldn’t stand that.  I guess he couldn’t stand much of anything, because he ended up hanging himself from the awning over his gas pumps.  He seemed to think he was going out of his head.”

He laughed and threw his cigarette away.  It made a yellow arc through the darkness.

“Have you always been here?”

“Always.  Ever since June 27, 1941.  That was the day you might say I moved in.”

“And you were here when Uncle George was here?”

“Yeah.  One way or the other.”

“Is that why he would never sell?”

“Could be—I never really asked him.  Come on.  I want to show you something.”

Charlie Brush came out of his chair in a crouch and then straightened up.  Somehow he seemed taller.

“In the garage.  Come on.”

Phil followed along behind him on the gravel path that led to the front of the house and again, as on the stairs, the only footfalls he could hear were his own.  Charlie held himself very upright as he walked, but there was an old man’s stiffness in his gait.

When they reached the garage doors, Charlie took a key out of his pocket and sprang the lock.  Then he opened the right-hand door just shoulder width.

“Here, this is yours,” he said, handing the key back to Phil.  “Don’t lose it.”

He hit the switch, and the overheads bathed everything in a thick, yellowish light.

It was a shock to see him.  His skin was gray, the paper gray of an abandoned wasp’s nest, and the eyes were set so deeply in his face that they seemed almost to disappear.  There was a line, as irregular as a crack in a plaster wall, running from his left eye to his jaw.  He looked like he was breaking apart.

With fingers as wrinkled as talons, he pried open the fuse box against the back wall.

“I haven’t got a lot of time to waste with you, so listen.  You see this?”  He pointed to a breaker switch, the bottom one on the second of two banks.  It looked exactly like all the others, except there was a fleck of yellow paint on it.  “This is our insurance policy.”

He smiled, if you could call it that anymore.  It was painful to see.

“Harve rigged this up one time while he thought he was still making the decisions.  I guess he figured if it got too bad he could burn us all down together.  A good idea, but a little before its time.”

“What is it?”

“What is it?”  He seemed to like the question.  “I guess you could call it a sort of detonator.  It goes from the house current down to a couple of wires in the gasoline storage tank that’s buried out front.  You throw this switch and up it blows.”

He threw it.  There was a sharp snap and then nothing.  Phil could feel his heart pounding in his ears.

“A little joke—relax.”  Charlie pushed the switch again until it snapped back into place.  “Harve thought of everything and rigged it to a timer.  There’s a twenty-minute delay, in case he changed his mind.  He wanted to be able to throw it, go inside the house, sit down and think about whether that particular afternoon he felt like ending up a cinder.  Then, if he decided he didn’t, he could come back out here and reset it.

“Besides, there’s no gasoline in the tank anymore—they drained it after Harve checked himself out.  That’s where you come in.”

He closed the fuse box and moved over by the doors, to a little shelf that must once have held a telephone.  There was a connection terminal on the wall behind it, just below a yellowing list of names and numbers.

“Tomorrow morning, phone the fuel wholesaler.  Tell him you’ve got a thousand gallon tank and you need a fill-up.  Tell him to get his ass over here by tomorrow or the next day.  Offer to pay cash—that should do it.  If he gets nosey, let him think you’re gonna reopen the gas station.

“It’ll probably never come to that, but if anything goes wrong, we all dance out together.  You, me and the Moonlight—no goodbyes.”

His face seemed actually to be falling to pieces now, as if the gray, decaying flesh were rotting off the bone.  And his whole right shoulder seemed crusted with dried blood.

“You got all that, pal?”

It was only with the greatest difficulty that Phil could bring himself to nod his head.  He was in a trance of fascinated loathing which he could hardly break—which he hardly even wanted to break.  He was like a man listening to the history of the life that stretched before him into the future.

Except now the future seemed on the verge of obliteration.

Charlie Brush smiled his death’s head smile.

“Don’t look so worried, pal.  We gotta be ready, but there’s lots to do before we think about the grand finale.  For one thing, I still gotta get square.”

Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino had received a fairly complete preliminary report on the Grazzi killing.  He had everything except the autopsy findings, which, in cases of gunshot wounds, were usually not very helpful.

He had enough, in fact, to know whom he should arrest, but he also knew he had nowhere near enough for a conviction.  He was beginning to doubt he ever would.

Suppose, on the basis of the Devere woman’s identification, he were to obtain a search warrant for Philip Owings’ premises.  If he found the brown suit he could have it vacuumed for carpet fibers and hope to come up with a match from the brothel.  It was possible that the Stamford police would be able to match the suit with samples found at the scene—they might even get supremely lucky and find traces of burnt gunpowder on the sleeves.

But so what?  They would have made a fairly solid case that the suit had been there, but they still wouldn’t have Philip Owings inside it.  Just such physical evidence had sent more than one bad guy to the slammer, but this time it wasn’t enough.

They had the murder weapon, a hacked-down twelve gauge pump shotgun, and it was possible that with diligence they could run down the store from which it had been sold.  You didn’t have to provide identification to purchase a shotgun in this state, but they might stumble across a clerk who would remember Philip Owings.  The lab boys might even find some iron filings or something to suggest that Owings had modified the weapon at home.

The problem was that the fucking gun was covered with perfectly clear fingerprints, and none of them matched the ones belonging to Philip Owings that Spolino had received from the Department of Defense.  The prints on the gun matched those of a hard guy named Charles Brush, whom nobody had seen since a June evening in 1941 and who, if he was still above ground, would be something in the neighborhood of eighty-five years old.

The Devere woman had identified Philip Owings, but Spolino didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her under defense cross-examination.  Philip Owings was the guy she let in the door, but Philip Owings wasn’t the guy who wasted Sal Grazzi.  Charlie Brush was that guy.  And they both walked around in the same skin.  Great. Marvelous.  It would have the jury in stitches.