The Moonlight (35 page)

The man was spare of build and about average height.  Mr. Carboni did not recognize him.  He could have been anybody.  He wore a brown suit.

He smiled.  It was not a nice smile.

“Hiya, Fingers,” he said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Mr. Carboni asked, in a voice raspy with disuse.  Jesus.  Nobody had called him “Fingers” in the last twenty years.

The man didn’t answer, although the question seemed to amuse him.  For a while he merely continued to enjoy his little joke and his cigarette.

“What’s the matter with me?” he asked suddenly.  “I’m forgetting my manners—you want a smoke, Fingers?”

He held up his cigarette, as if he suspected Mr. Carboni might not know what he was talking about.

Mr. Carboni shook his head.  “Not supposed to,” he murmured, really afraid now, like a child in the presence of some awful taboo.  “Against the rules.”

“I didn’t ask you what the rules were.  I asked you if you wanted one.”

After a moment Mr. Carboni managed a wobbly nod and an “Okay,” and the man in the brown suit, who was somehow familiar but looked like no one he had ever seen before, pulled a pack of Benson & Hedges 100s from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and leaned forward for Mr. Carboni’s to take it.  They were sitting so close to one another that their knees were almost touching.

The unlit cigarette between his lips, Mr. Carboni looked out the window.  It was dark.  He could hear the crickets.  He was sick with fear.

He heard the sound of a match being struck and became aware of a ball of yellow light moving toward him.  The man was lighting his cigarette for him.

He took a drag—his first in maybe ten years—and it made him feel better.

“Is that you, Arnie?” he asked.

The man laughed.  “No,” he said.  “Whoever ‘Arnie’ is, trust me, it ain’t him.”

Mr. Carboni looked again—he preferred not to look, because for some reason the guy scared the shit out of him—and, no, it wasn’t Arnie.  Arnie was sixty-two his last birthday, and this one looked like he was still on the sunny side of forty.

The man was bleeding from his ear.  Except for the television screen, there was hardly any light, so the blood looked almost black.

“You must’a cut yourself,” Mr. Carboni said, thinking about how in the morning, after the nurse gave him his bath, she took the electric razor out of his medicine chest and shaved him.  It still seemed odd to be shaved by a woman—the bath he didn’t mind, but the shave somehow just wasn’t right.  She did a lousy job, too.  She always left his neck feeling scratchy.

“Well now, I wonder how that could have happened.”

The man didn’t move, didn’t reach up to touch the blood, to see if was really there.  He just smiled.  It was like he knew and didn’t give a fuck.

Where did he know this guy from?

“Leo send you?”

Why did he think that?  Because this one was a hard boy—you could tell.  Not one of the creampuffs like they all were these days, but the real thing.

“Leo?”  The man in the brown suit shook his head, and laughed again.  “No, Leo didn’t send me.  Leo ain’t sendin’ anybody anywhere, not anymore.  Leo got sent.  You didn’t hear about that?”

“No.”

“Leo had an accident.  Somebody used him for a driveway.”

The cigarette in Mr. Carboni’s mouth was beginning to make him wheeze.  He was gagging on smoke and a vague sense of dread, and he could feel his heart pounding.

The man who hadn’t come from Leo leaned forward and took the cigarette from between Mr. Carboni’s lips, gently, as if afraid of hurting him.

“It’s been a bad couple of weeks in the Family,” he went on.  “You heard about Sal Grazzi?  Eduardo’s grandkid?  You remember Eduardo—not very bright, but useful.  Good at holding somebody’s arms down while you worked ’em over.  Enjoyed the work.  People like that make enemies.

“Well, you know the saying—like father like son.  They put Sal in the ground today.  He was such a mess they couldn’t even open the casket.”

If Mr. Carboni screwed up his eyes, sometimes he almost thought he recognized the guy.  It was crazy, like he had two faces, one over the other, and one underneath was trying to poke through.  Like one face was a mask, and sometimes you could see through it to the other.

“I know you from someplace,” he said, his mouth dry—he couldn’t seem to find the spit to wet it.

“Yeah.  We met once.  But it was a long time ago, so you probably don’t remember.”

“So who are you?”

“I’m the barber.  You can call me Charlie.”

The barber named Charlie reached into his inside coat pocket and took something out.  At first it looked like a comb, but then he pried it open halfway to show the blade.  It was an old fashioned straight razor.

He laid it on the sofa beside him.

After a couple of tries, Mr. Carboni managed to bring the tips of his fingers up to his neck.  It felt scratchy.

“It’s a pity about Eduardo,” he said.

“Maybe it is, but it’s Sal that got chopped.  Try to pay attention, Fingers.”

Mr. Carboni did try.  With an effort that almost brought tears to his eyes, he focused his mind.  Once a week, on Thursdays, a man came to cut hair.  He did half the men one week and the other half the next, in a little room up on the third floor.  His name was Murray.  He was a Jewish guy, about sixty with a little moustache, and he liked to talk about sports.

“What’s today?” he asked.

“Your big day, Fingers.  The one you’ve been waiting for.”

The man who was not Murray smiled.  The light from the television played over his face so that he looked like a corpse.  Mr. Carboni wished he would stop smiling, because he was getting frightened again.

“You’re not Murray,” he said.  “And you can’t cut my hair.  It’s the wrong day.”

“Somehow it’s always the wrong day, Fingers.  And it’s not your hair I’m gonna cut.  This is Charlie, Fingers—try to remember.  I’d hate for you not to remember.”

The dream.  It came back to him now. 
“We pull the plug on Charlie Brush,”
the Don had said. 
“And then he disappears,”
Lucio Spolino had said.

Only it looked as if somehow he’d found his way back.

Mr. Carboni brought his hand up to his chest.  His heart was racing so fast it hurt.  He tried to say something but discovered he couldn’t.  He felt paralyzed.

“That’s good, Fingers.”

Charlie Brush nodded approvingly and picked up the straight razor from where it lay half open on the sofa.  He stood up and started to walk around Mr. Carboni’s chair, talking as he went.

“I knew it’d come to you if you just tried.  And now, Fingers, it’s time for a shave.”

At ten fifteen that night, when Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino arrived, there were already three black-and-white police cars parked in the driveway of the Windermere Nursing home.  Spolino could only hope that the men on the scene had obeyed orders and not tampered with anything.

“Just close the fucking door and keep everybody out,” he had said when he got the call.  “Don’t touch anything.  Don’t even let the coroner in there.  I’ll be with you in three minutes.”

Actually, it had taken him two and a half.

When he pushed through the double doors to the lobby, he saw two uniformed policemen arguing with a middle-aged woman dressed in white slacks and a particularly unbecoming blue rayon blouse.  There were about a dozen elderly people, mostly women, milling around in their bathrobes.  They looked confused and frightened—well, that figured—and a couple of nurses were trying to herd some of them off, presumably to bed.

One of the policemen gestured toward him, and the woman in the blue rayon blouse turned on Spolino like an avenging angel.

“Lieutenant, I must ask you to remind your men that this building is full of old people, most of whom are mercifully still asleep . . .”

“Who are you, please?” he asked, in his best cold cop’s voice—he gave her the full treatment, right down to the icy don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I’ll-strip-your-hide-off stare he had perfected as a detective of narcotics back in Manhattan.  It worked like a charm, but then it always had.

“I, er, I’m Mrs. Calloway.  I’m the director here.”

“Did you discover the body?” Spolino came back, before she had a chance to regain her self-possession.

“Why no, I . . .”

“Who did?”

The story arrived in pieces, how the floor nurse had gone in to put Mr. Carboni to bed and found him sitting in his chair with his throat cut.

“Did she touch anything?”

“Lieutenant, she was hysterical.”  Mrs. Calloway hugged herself and stared down at the carpet for a moment.  “I don’t think so—I think she just came in, turned on the light, saw him there, and ran out.”

“Has anyone else been in there?”

“No—yes.”

“Who?”

“I went in.  I had to make sure Mr. Carboni was . . .”

“Did you touch anything?”

“No.”

Spolino looked around the lobby with evident distaste.  Old women stared at him as if he were the devil—one of them was perched on the edge of her chair, sobbing with the distracted misery of someone not in her right mind.  Of all the places to conduct a homicide investigation.

“You’d better get these people out of here,” he said.  “I want no one walking around on this floor until you hear otherwise from me.”

“I’ll see to it, Lieutenant.”

She was trying s+o hard now that Spolino allowed a cool glimmer of approval to sneak into his professional manner.

“Was that
Vito
Carboni?”

“Why yes, uh . . .

Great—wonderful.  Of course it just had to be Fingers Carboni.  Who else?

With a twitch of his finger Spolino summoned one of the policemen.

“I want the whole downstairs secured,” he said.  “I want every entrance except the front door sealed, and you fellows watch where you put your feet—I don’t want any evidence destroyed, even if it’s just a print in the mud.  Call the station and tell them to muster every detective on my squad.  I want everybody here, in the lobby, in twenty minutes.  And get the lab team out here right away.”

“What about the coroner, Lieutenant?”

Right, the coroner—that moron.

“When he arrives, keep him parked out here.  Now, where’s the body?”

Spolino was directed down the hall.  There were name plates on every door and hand rails along both walls.  In front of Room 127 was a uniformed officer who came to attention the moment he saw the head of the Detective Division.

“Mr. Carboni” was carved on a little strip of plastic at about eye level.

Spolino opened the door for himself—hell, there weren’t going to be any useful prints on the knob, not after the nurse and the director had come barging in.  As soon as he stepped over the threshold, he was aware of the stench of death.

The policeman outside closed the door behind him, and Spolino stood for a moment just at the entrance, trying to learn as much as he could before he had to enter the crime scene.

Vito Carboni was still in his chair, slouched down a little and facing the windows.  Spolino could only see the top of his head.  There were three windows that looked out onto a patio, and the shades were up.  One of the windows was open about a foot and a half—had the murderer come in that way?  The television set was on with the sound turned down.  There was blood all over the place, but no signs of a struggle.

It was a warm night and the humidity from the open window did nothing to improve the atmosphere of carnage.  Spolino was almost sure the window had provided the point of entry, because all the doors except the front were probably kept locked and the murderer would not want to pass back and forth in full view of the receptionist.

Cautiously, like a man entering a mine field, Spolino came further into the room.  He circled around the chair and then crouched down in front for a close look at the body.

The spray of blood was probably six or seven feet, and the corpse itself was simply drenched.  Vito sat with his hands in his laps.  His head had rolled back so that the wound at his throat was open like a grisly mouth—it was cut literally from ear to ear, in what looked like a single stroke.  Somebody had done a good job, like +maybe he had had a little practice at this sort of thing.

Vito looked so surprised, but then people who died quickly usually did look surprised.  Maybe he hadn’t even seen it coming, or maybe he had just been too decrepit and dotty to do anything about it.  Spolino reminded himself to ask a few questions about the old boy’s mental condition.

An educated guess was that he hadn’t been dead more than about an hour and a half.  Somebody had been awfully cool to just waltz in here and do a thing like this.

For just an instant, when Spolino noticed the bloody straight razor sticking out of Vito’s shirt pocket, his breath caught.

“Slappy Beal, September 14, 1937,” he said quietly.  The extraordinarily clear police photograph taken in the back of the Greenley Theater over fifty years ago had shown the same thing—the razor closed and the metal thumb catch, tilted toward the center, peeking out of the blood-soaked pocket.  The artist signing his work.