The Moonlight (32 page)

“The lab work is in,” Jerry Reilly told him as soon as he got on the phone, “and some of it is pretty weird.”

“I can imagine,” Spolino thought, before saying “Go on.”

“Well, for one thing we found a couple of brown fibers we guess probably came from the guy’s suit—thank God they had just vacuumed a couple of hours earlier, because you can imagine the fun we’d have trying to sort out the take from a whorehouse’s carpet.  Anyway, the dye lot matches nothing from any known manufacturer of men’s clothing, foreign or domestic.  How’s that?  You think our boy buys his suits on Mars?”

“How far back do your samples go, Jerry?”

“Twenty years.  We’re sending it to Washington to see if they can do any better.”

Spolino thought of the box down in Mrs. Pickart’s basement and made a bet with himself that he would find a match there.

“What else?” he asked.

“You remember the prints on the gun?  There was dust mixed in with the oil from the guy’s fingers.  At first we thought the slob just hadn’t washed his hands in a while, but that doesn’t seem to have been the problem.  It was grave dust, Tom—dried, pulverized human tissue, the stuff you’d find on a corpse that has mummified and is beginning to crumble.”

The second face could have belonged to a corpse.
  The Devere woman’s precise words.

“Did you find any other prints?”

“Nothing.  He carried the shotgun in a leather briefcase, but it was clean—wiped clean.  You know what I think, Tom?  I think he meant for us to find the prints on the gun.  I think he’s playing around with us.

“By the way, the madame told us she ID’d the guy for you.”

“Twice.  Two different pictures.  What does that tell you?”

“She’s screwy.”

“You still got her at the hospital?”

“She checked out last night.  We have her home address.”

Except that by now she was probably on her way to Cleveland or Memphis or God knows where.

“Tom, you think maybe it’s time you told me what’s going on?”

Spolino allowed himself perhaps a second of warning laughter.

“Why?  Are you eager to hear that my chief suspect is a man who’s supposed to have disappeared without a trace fifty years ago?”

“Forget I asked.”

When the conversation was over, and he had hung up the phone, Spolino braced himself for the next necessary step.  It was time for a talk with his captain.

Ed Monser was the effective head of all police operations in the Greenley department.  There was a chief, but he worried about budgets and public relations.  Monser ran the shop.

And he was good at it.  He had moved here five years before from Philadelphia, where he put in eleven years in the criminal division.  He had a degree in criminology, painstakingly earned in night courses from the University of Pennsylvania, which perhaps made him take himself a little too seriously, but he was a good cop.  Spolino respected him, although the two men had never really become friends.

Spolino knocked on the glass upper half of the chief’s door, dreading what was to come.

“You got a minute?” he asked, sticking his head into the tiny office.  “I need to talk to you about this Galatina thing.  It’s getting out of hand.”

Monser was in his shirtsleeves and seated behind his desk, his black suspenders like a badge of office.  The jacket of his elegantly tailored gray suit was on a wooden hanger suspended from a hook beside the door.  His wardrobe was an extravagance, even on a captain’s salary.

He was in his middle forties, with black hair that was going a little gray at the temples, and he had a wide, impassive, intelligent face.  His hands were folded and his eyebrows slightly raised, one of those calculated bureaucratic poses intended to indicate that you had his complete if skeptical attention.

“So what’s the problem, Tom?  Sit down.”

Spolino laid out the case for him:  the dented car, the fingerprints, Leo’s deathbed identification, even his suspicions about the money.  He told him everything, except the Devere woman’s statement, the grave dust and the note he had found in Charlie Brush’s suitcoat—he didn’t need to have Monser tell him he should take some time off and to see the department psychologist on his way out.

“It sounds like you’re working toward a double indictment, that Owings and Brush have conspired to commit murder and maybe tax fraud.”  Monser closed the file folder like God at the Last Judgment and tossed it back across the desk to Spolino.  “So prove a link and arrest them.”

“There’s just the one catch.  Charlie Brush was a one-man crime wave around here back in the Thirties.  He was a real bad boy and this kind of stuff would have suited him down to the ground, but he disappeared in June, 1941, and nobody was seen or heard from him since.”

It was interesting to watch Monser’s reaction—or, rather, his lack of one.  He never even blinked.  It was a wonderful exercise of self-control, because of course no cop likes to admit that he hasn’t seen it all already.

There was only a long silence during which he turned the thing over a few times in his mind.

“Tom, is this some kind of a gag?” he asked finally.

“I’m just giving you the facts, Ed—what I have.  I don’t make jokes about murder.”

“No.  I don’t suppose you do.”

Without unclasping his hands, Monser took them from his desk and parked them behind his head while he tilted back his chair as if to read something off the ceiling.  After a time he took a deep breath and let it out with a rush.

“So what’s next?” he asked.  It was less a question than a statement of incredulity.

“I want to toss the Moonlight,” Spolino answered, pulling the file folder back into his lap.  “I want a search team and a couple of people from the lab to take the place apart.”

“Looking for what?”  Monser’s eyes dropped from the ceiling to Spolino’s face, and instantly narrowed with suspicion.

“Anything I can find—money, weapons, evidence of Charlie Brush.  We have to put this guy away, Ed.  We’ve got a psycho on our hands.”

Monser let his gaze drift back up to the ceiling, a bad sign.

“First off, forget about the money,” he said.  “You have no probable cause—you have nothing at all that points to Owings.  And even if you did, it’s a federal beef.  We have no jurisdiction.

“For the rest, you have to be looking for specific evidence relating to a specific crime.  You know that, Tom.  No judge is going to give us a fishing license.”

“Then let me go out there with an arrest warrant for Charlie Brush.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”  Ed Monser pulled himself upright in his chair and laid his hands palm down on the desktop.  “You told me yourself, nobody’s heard from this guy in fifty years—you expect to walk in there and arrest him?

“Do you know what’ll happen if you’re wrong, Tom?  Owings will have your badge, that’s what’ll happen.  This is Greenley, Connecticut, not Lower Manhattan and not some suburb of Moscow.  Citizens have protection against illegal search and seizure, and they’re not the least little bit timid about hiring a lawyer to hang some cop’s guts out to dry.”

Behind his desk Monser was set and ready, like a bulldog guarding the front gate, but Spolino wasn’t going to give him an argument.  Spolino hadn’t heard anything except what he expected to hear—what he probably would have said himself if one of his sergeants had come to him with the same idea.  He had known the answer before he knocked on the door.  But some questions have to be asked anyway.

“This guy’s going to kill again,” he said quietly, just stating a fact.  “We have to do something.”

“The answer is no.  No search warrant, no arrest warrant.  No.”

Spolino got up from his chair, feeling old and tired and used up, wondering if Dick Tracy had ever had days like this.

“Fine,” he said.  “We’ve got a psychotic running around loose and you’re worried about legal niceties.”

“Stay away from Owings, Tom.”

“I don’t think so.”  Spolino gave his captain a ratty grin.  “I think I’ll take a drive out there—maybe he’ll invite me in for tea.  Anyway, the bastard ’ll know we’ve got him figured out.  Maybe he’ll decide to pick up his winnings and quit.”

“And maybe he’ll sue you and the department both.”

“Relax, will you?  I’m just gonna talk to him.  Or do you want me to clear it with the A.C.L.U. first?”

He closed the door with sufficient force to make the glass rattle.

. . . . .

When Spolino got to the Moonlight, he found he had to stop his car out on the road because the driveway was completely blocked off by a gigantic, shiny silver tank truck marked “Exxon”.  It was a good fifteen minutes before he saw the driver up in the truck’s cab and heard the low, fluttering rumble of the engine revving up.  When the Exxon truck finally jack-knifed its way out of the driveway, Spolino could see Philip Owings standing beside the gas pumps.

He drove in and parked in front of the garage doors.

“You going into the service station business?” he asked as he climbed out of his car and slammed the door behind him.

For a moment Owings stared at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.  And then he looked embarrassed.

“Yeah, I thought maybe . . .”  He let the sentence trail off, smiling rather foolishly.

“You put in for your retail sales license yet?”  Spolino could see from his reaction that that detail hadn’t even occurred to him.  “And garages have to have state clearance.  You’d better do it pretty quick, or you’ll end up using all that gas in your own car.  By the way, how’s the Lincoln?  Any more fender benders?”

Owings seemed about to deflect the question with another of his witless smiles, and then, apparently, he remembered the small matter of a felony investigation.  He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers and stared sullenly at the ground.

“Are we back to that?”

“Yes, we’re back to that—among other things.”

You could always tell when you were dealing with a hard case.  There was no outrage, no offended declarations of innocence, no failures of nerve.  Owings didn’t even seem surprised.  This wasn’t the same guy Spolino had talked to only a few days ago.

“You want to tell me where you were last Sunday night between the hours of eight and eleven?”

“Home, reading the paper.”  Philip Owings, the spotless citizen, gave Spolino an under-the-eyebrows look that would have done any two-time loser proud.  “I picked up my girlfriend from work at eleven.”

“But you’ve got no witnesses can put you here before that?”

“You got any can put me someplace else?”

Spolino didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to hear.

“That the lady I saw here last time?”

“Yeah.”

“You own a shotgun, Mr. Owings?”

The question seemed to take him by surprise—his glance wavered for just an instant and then, without his expression changing in any obvious way, he seemed to smile faintly.

“Sure.  I own a shotgun.”

“What kind?”

“A twelve gauge pump.”

“You have it on the premises?”

“Yeah.”

“Mind if I take a look at it?”

“No.  I don’t mind.”

That was it, the clever bastard—he knew he was safe.

“Why don’t you come inside,” he said.  “I’ll go get it.”

Spolino followed him toward the house and through the massive oak front door.  It was the first time he had been inside the Moonlight since the day after Harve Wickham hanged himself, and it gave him the authentic creeps.  Just standing there in the entrance hall made his flesh crawl.

“It’s up in my closet,” Owings said.  “I won’t be a minute.”

Spolino stood there, listening to Owings on the stairs, trying to account to himself for the peculiar sense of desolation he could feel in this place, like the damp cold of a room that has been left closed up too long.  The entrance hall was lined with windows along one side—little panes of rippled glass held together by a spider’s web of lead, the sort of thing you hardly saw anymore—but they did almost nothing to dissipate the gloom.  It was as if the light itself died as it entered within these walls.

“Here we are.”

Owings had returned, carrying a long brown plastic gun sleeve, obviously new.  He unzipped it along the wider end and pulled out the shotgun butt first.  He handed it to Spolino, who drew back the pump to make sure the chamber was empty.

“You a hunter?”

“From time to time,” Owings replied.  He had his confidence back now.  He was enjoying this.  “Here, if you’re going to look it over, we might as well go in the kitchen.”

“Let’s go back outside.”  Spolino gave him a hard look, as if he knew Owings had the edge as long as they were inside the Moonlight.  “I don’t suppose we’ll scare the neighbors.”

On his way out the door, he pressed the release catch for the pump lever, which he then slid all the way forward.  In a second he had the barrel unscrewed.  It was clean.  The chamber was glossy with new oil.  Spolino guessed that the gun had never even been fired.