The Moonlight (36 page)

Spolino rose to his feet.  He had seen enough and there was no percentage in making problems for the lab boys—who, in any case, would find nothing except fibers from an untraceable dye lot and the fingerprints of a minor hoodlum who had probably been dead for fifty years.

When he returned to the lobby, it was cleared of civilians and most of the detective squad was waiting for him.  The coroner, who was parked on a loveseat by the door, gave him a black look.

“Nobody gets any sleep tonight,” he told his men.  “I want everything.  Get statements from all the staff who have been on duty since this afternoon—get their names and roust them out of bed if you have to.  We’re not likely to get anything useful from the residents, so they can wait until tomorrow morning when they’ll be clearer anyway.  Comb the area, but be careful what you touch until every doorknob and window in the place has been dusted.  I want to know how this joker got in.  Get the traffic reports for a ten-block radius.”

Spolino was on his way out when he ran into Julius Berger, who ran the lab, and two of his technicians.

“What do you want besides the room, Tom?” he asked.

“Every door and window on the ground floor.  Try to have it all on my desk by morning, will you, Julius?”

“And where are you going to be?”

“Up in New Canaan, hearing confession.”

. . . . .

The men on duty at Sonny Galatina’s front gate were surprised when a powder blue Chevy rolled up and sounded a long blast on its horn.  They were even more surprised when a large, fair-haired man got out on the driver’s side and showed a badge.

“Mr. Galatina isn’t expecting any visitors,” said the man who came out of the guard house to send him on his way.  He was carrying a hunting rifle, and he wasn’t about to be rattled by some cop flashing his tin.  “In the morning, you can phone . . .”

“You know there’s an ordinance against carrying a loaded weapon inside the city limits?  Here, give me that.”

Two quick strides, and Spolino was close enough to simply reach out and snatch the rifle from the guard’s hands.  He pulled the clip and threw the bolt to eject the shell in the chamber.  Then he tossed the rifle off into the bushes.

“Get on the horn, punk,” he said, in a voice filled with quiet menace.  “Tell your boss that Lieutenant Spolino won’t wait, because if that gate isn’t open in thirty seconds you’re going to be spending the night downtown.”

The guard retreated fast.  There was a hurried conference and, presumably, a phone call up to the house, and then the gates swung open.

Spolino got back into his car and drove through.

When he reached the house the whole area was flood lit, and Spolino saw someone with an assault rifle slung from his shoulder holding the leash on a huge, snarling Doberman.  Sonny was standing in front of his door, his hands in the pockets of a red silk bathrobe worn over his pajamas.

“It’s eleven o’clock at night, Tom.  I’ve had a long day, and I was looking forward to a little sleep.”

For a moment Spolino just glared at him.

“Vito Carboni is sleeping fine,” he said at last.  “About two hours ago somebody slit his throat.”

The change in Sonny’s face was immediate and drastic.  For a few seconds he didn’t move, and then one hand came out of the pocket of his bathrobe and he made a nervous gesture of summons.

“Come inside.”

The house was dark, and Sonny didn’t turn on any lights.  They went into a small room that was probably his private office and he switched on a little desk lamp.

“What happened?” he asked, sitting down in one of two chairs that faced each other across a small table.

“Like I said, somebody did Vito Carboni.”  Spolino took the other chair without being asked.  “Somebody walked into his room while he was waiting to be put to bed and lowered his smile.”

He had a manila envelope with him.  He opened it up and took out a photograph, which he handed to Sonny.  Sonny looked at it for about four seconds and then dropped it on the table.

“You tryin’ to scare me, Tom?  I’ve seen worse.  Besides, that isn’t even Vito.”

“No, that’s some clown named Slappy Beal,” Spolino answered, picking up the photograph and putting it back in its envelope.  “He was just a loser who died suddenly back in the Thirties while watching a movie.  I don’t have any idea why he was killed, but I know who did it.  Did you see the razor in his pocket?  There was a razor in Vito’s pocket too.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, letting Sonny feel the weight of his cold stare.  At that moment, more than at any other time in his life, he was Lucio’s grandson.

“I’m going to ask you again, Bob, and this time you’re going to tell me.  What happened to Charlie Brush?”

. . . . .

It was a long story, and Sonny appeared to take a peculiar kind of pleasure in telling it—if only because it was part of his inheritance, something handed down to him from his grandfather, Don Enrico Galatina.

“You remember Enrico’s house down on the Sound in Riverside, Tom?  You remember the screened-in porch in back, where you could see the water through the pine trees?  After he retired, he liked to sit out there.  He had two rocking chairs, one for him and one for company, and there was a plain wooden table that always seemed to have a pitcher of lemonade on it—best lemonade I ever tasted.  To this day I never drink anything but lemonade.

“My father was a good Don, but Enrico was a kind of genius.  When I became underboss, I used to go visit him whenever I had a chance.  I wanted to learn from him.”

A peculiar look came into Sonny’s eyes.  It was the look of a man, full of ambition, who has at last taken the full measure of his failure.

“Anyway, he liked to tell stories.  I think he wanted to give me the benefit of all the experience he knew I would never get on my own.  One day he told me about Charlie Brush.

“You know the career.”  The Don shrugged his shoulders in dismissal.  “I’ll just tell you about the end.  They got Frank Marcello, who was handling narcotics for the Luciano people, to arrange a truce, to guarantee Charlie Brush’s safety if he would sit down and talk business, but even Marcello knew it was a setup.  The guy was crazy.  Everyone agreed, he had to go.

“The meeting was supposed to be at the Moonlight, because Charlie had been George Patchmore’s partner and trusted him—he didn’t know that we owned George’s liquor license, that we provided protection for his gambling operation, that he had dropped a bundle on some hare-brained real estate deal and was into us for heavy points.  They only way clear for George was to sell us Charlie, and that’s just what he did.

“It was late in June, 1941, and everything went exactly as planned.  George was putting in that outdoor dance floor of his, and the cement trucks were coming the next day, so it was perfect.

“The Don and Uncle Leo were there with three of their men, and they braced Charlie even before he had a chance to get out of his car.

“It wouldn’t have been enough to just kill him then and there, because Enrico was really steamed and he wanted him to know fear as well as death.  He told me that Charlie Brush was the only man in his life he had ever hated like that.  So they worked him over real good, and then they tied him to a chair in the big dining room and told him just exactly what they planned to do.”

It played back in Spolino’s head like a tape recording—Jerry Reilly on the Devere woman:  “She’s said a few things that don’t make a lot of sense . . . Like the guy was bleeding from his ear, but the blood was already dried.”

“Like the guy was bleeding from his ear.”

“What did they do to him, Bob?” he asked, knowing the answer already because it sat in his gut like a lead weight.  “Did they stab him in the ear, to show lack of respect?”

Sonny Galatina didn’t move for a minute and then he wiped his hand on his red bathrobe, leaving a stain of sweat.

“That’s just exactly what they did,” he said.  “They used an ice pick, and they weren’t in any hurry about it.  Charlie Brush died a quarter of an inch at a time.

“And when it was over, they took him outside, out to where the boards were already up to mark off the area for the dance floor, and they dug a grave.  Enrico said he was buried in a hole that wasn’t more than two feet deep.

“After that it was simply a matter of getting rid of the traces.  Somebody got a rake and blended in the earth so nobody would notice any signs of digging.  The next morning the contractor showed up and poured the concrete for George’s dance floor.  It was just a routine construction job to him.  He had no idea he was building a tomb.

“Charlie’s car was taken over the state line, given a paint job and then driven down to South Carolina to be sold.  He just vanished, like he’d never existed.”

But no one dies that quietly, and certainly not Charlie Brush.  There was more—Spolino could see it.  The words were still ringing in Sonny’s ears.

“A guy gets crazy when he knows he’s got five minutes to live.”  Sonny looked away, as if ashamed.  “Enrico said that Charlie Brush shouted vengeance, claimed it wouldn’t end until each of them had paid him a life for a life, cursed him even as the ice pick went into his brain.  It made a big impression on the Don—I think he was as just as afraid of Charlie after the guy was dead.

“But Enrico Galatina passed away in his sleep.”  Sonny managed a wan little smile.  “I was at his bedside when he took the final sacrament—he even beat the devil, so I guess he beat Charlie Brush too.”

“Who else was there?”

Sonny frowned, as if he didn’t understand the question.

“Where?”

“At the Moonlight.”

“I told you.”

“You told me the Don and Uncle Leo—who were the other three men?”

“Tom, you really want me to tell you that?”  Sonny shook his head, as if to warn him that the answer should be no.

“I really do.”

“Okay—there was Vito, and Eduardo Grazzi, and Lucio Spolino.  Now you know.”

Tom Spolino couldn’t account for the little thrill of horror that ran through him at the mention of his grandfather’s name.  Because who else would have been there?  Who else would Enrico have trusted with something like this?

Who else would have held Charlie Brush’s head in the crook of his arm while he made a long job of pushing the point of an ice pick into his ear?

“Don’t worry about it, Tom.”  It was impossible to tell whether Sonny was angry, or impatient, or just scared.  “It was fifty years ago, and Charlie Brush is dead.  He’s under the concrete back at the old Moonlight, and he’s dead.  No doubt about it.  Whoever got Vito and Uncle Leo, it wasn’t Charlie Brush.”

“Let’s hope so, pal.  Because whoever it was seems willing to settle for grandsons, and that just leaves you and me.”

Beth looked at the illuminated face of the clock radio on her dresser and discovered with something between horror and outrage that it was three fifteen in the morning.  The whole apartment seemed to be filled with noise.  Somebody was pounding on the front door like they wanted to break it down.

On the second try she managed to heave herself out of bed and grabbed out of the closet the housecoat that served her for a bathrobe.  She was half asleep, so that when she put on her slippers she had to brace one hand against the wall to keep from falling over.

Millie kept a baseball bat leaned up against her night table, which, considering some of her boyfriends, was probably a reasonable precaution, but it never occurred to Beth to fetch it.  Whoever it was out there, she was going to kill him with her bare hands, and she wasn’t worried about intruders.  Intruders didn’t make that much noise.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” she shouted, knowing perfectly well that nobody would be able to hear her over the racket from the front door.  She didn’t so much walk as stumble out into the living room.

There was a peephole, but she forgot it was there.  She just threw the bolt and opened the door.  She was surprised and annoyed when the safety chain rattled taut.  The knob almost slipped out of her hand and she had to peer outside through a two-inch crack.

It was Phil.

He was standing there in his shirtsleeves, his shoulders hunched in an attitude of the most extreme misery, dripping wet from the rain she could hear beating down outside on the street.  His eyes looked as if he might have been sobbing, but he was so drenched that it was impossible to know.  He looked so pathetic that she even forgot to be mad at him.

“You’d better come in,” Beth said.  “I’ll get you a towel.”

While she dried his hair, he sat in the middle of the living room floor trying to unbutton his shirt, but without much success.  His fingers didn’t seem to know how anymore.  He was trembling, and his skin felt like ice.

Beth got up and looked out the window at the parking lot behind Feenie’s Hardware.  Phil’s car was nowhere in sight.  Even in the rain there was a dense haze of humidity over the asphalt. Four hours ago, when she had gotten off work, the temperature had still been in the low eighties.

“How long has it been raining?” she asked.

“About ten minutes, I guess.  It caught me when I was about halfway here.”

“You walked?”  She turned around to look at him.  “Where’s your car?”