The Moonlight (37 page)

“In my garage.  It won’t start.”

“What are you doing here, Phil?”

All he could do was to look at her.  He seemed to be trying to find the words, but they would not come.  His eyes began to fill with tears—it was terrible to see him like this.

She dropped down on the floor beside him and put her arms around him.

“It’s okay, baby,” she murmured, as if to sooth a frightened child.  She laid her hand on his wet hair and smoothed it into place.  “It’s okay.  You don’t have to say anything.”

But after a moment he pulled away from her.  With what was obviously a tremendous effort of will, he jammed his fists into his lap and forced himself to stop shaking.

“It’s not okay,” he said finally.  “It’s never going to be okay again.  Nothing will ever be the same again.”

He was calm now, even if it was only the calm of utter despair.  One got the impression that by merely pronouncing the words he had somehow broken the spell of his misery.  He took a deep breath and wiped his face with both hands.

“Have you got some tea?”

“Sure,” she answered, getting up from the floor.  “It’ll only take a second.”

Beth went into the kitchen, which was just a little alcove off the front entrance, and put about an inch and a half of water in the kettle.  She got down a pair of mugs and a couple of tea bags and waited for the water to boil.  Even though there wasn’t so much as a door separating it from the kitchen, she didn’t go back into the living room until everything was ready because she suspected that Phil probably needed a minute or two alone more than he needed the tea.

“Okay, here it is,” she called out, giving him those few seconds before she returned.  “Do you want milk and sugar?”

“No—nothing.”

He was still sitting on the floor, but he had gotten his shirt off and was drying his chest with a towel.  He took the mug she offered him and, without tasting it, wrapped his hands around the sides as if to warm them.  Beth didn’t know how he could stand it, because her own mug was too hot to touch.

Still, he sat there holding it, seeming not to notice.

“I didn’t just throw you out,” he said abruptly, not looking at her.  “It wasn’t like that.  You had to be out of there, but not because I didn’t want you.  It’s not something I can explain.”

Beth didn’t say anything.  There wasn’t anything she could say, so she waited.

Then all at once he did look at her.

“I hate that fucking house.”

The words seemed torn out of him, as if against his will.  And there was an edge of suppressed, whispering fury of his voice that made her believe he really did hate the Moonlight.  His hatred seemed to torment him, like a guilty secret—like fear.

“Something happened tonight,” he went on.  “Somebody died.  It wasn’t my fault.  I hardly even knew what was going on.  I hardly know now.  Can you understand that?”

“No.”  Beth shook her head.  “Maybe I don’t need to understand it.”

But if he had even heard her, he gave no sign.

“I’ve got to get away.  I’ve got to.”

At last he set the tea mug down on the floor, and then stared at the palms of his hands with kind a dumb astonishment.  They were lobster red, as if at any second blisters might begin to press up from their surface.

After a moment the redness faded to a lifeless white.

“I’ve got to get away,” he repeated.

“Are you in trouble?” Beth asked, resting a tentative arm upon his shoulder.  “That policeman. . .”

“I’m not worried about the police.”  He actually laughed for an instant, although the sound had almost the quality of a groan.  “It’s not the
police
who do these. . . these terrible things.”

He reached up and took her face in his hands—hands that were already once more cold as ice.  His eyes, as he looked into hers, were wild with anguish.

“You’re the only good thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said, the words stumbling over one another in their rush to get out.  “I couldn’t stand to lose you, Beth.  You’re all I have left, all that makes me human—all that makes me
want
to be human.  That house, Beth, there’s a part of me it
owns
.”

“You’re talking crazy, Phil.”

She started to take his hands down from her face, but instead, in a rush of tender pity, she took his head in her arms, cradling it against her breast.

“You have to tell me what’s wrong, Phil.”

“I can’t . . .  You wouldn’t believe me.”  He was weeping now, sobbing like a child even as she held him.

“Maybe I wouldn’t,” she murmured, somehow making it sound like a promise, if only of forgiveness.  “I don’t know what I’d believe by now.  But you have to try.”

It seemed to be a lot to ask because he kept shaking his head, denying mutely that such a thing was even possible—denying it, perhaps, even to himself, as if not to say the words was somehow to banish the thing itself from existence.

But in her own unspoken way Beth was insistent. 
I can protect you
, she said, with her arms, with the soft pressure of her body,
I can disarm the truth of all its terrors.  I can make it all right to speak it
.

And finally, when he was quiet, but with his head still buried against her, he could make at least a beginning.

“The Moonlight has never been empty,” he said, his voice drained and hollow.  “He’s always been there, waiting, all the time.”

“Charlie?”

“Yes.”

He lapsed into another silence, as if to absorb in private this strange new fact—that she knew already.  But perhaps he had lost the capacity to be surprised by anything, because he appeared to accept it without challenge.

“He made me get you out,” he went on.  “I never wanted you to go.  He would have killed you. . .”

“I know, baby.  I understand.”

“He’s stronger than I am, Beth.  He draws me to him.  He’s the devil.”

“He’s the devil
.
”
  She could not know in what sense he meant it, and there was no way she could ask.  But on some level, he knew, it was the simple truth.  “Charlie”—whoever or whatever he was, whether or not he had any reality except in Phil’s mind, inhabited the old Moonlight as his private hell.

“I’ll be okay again if I can just get away from him.”

“What do you want to do, Phil?”

It was such a simple and obvious question, but it had the effect of light breaking into a shadowed room.

Slowly, gently, Phil disengaged himself from Beth’s embrace.  He pulled himself erect and wiped his face again with his hands.  Then, as if just discovering its existence, he picked up his mug and drank off the tea with a greedy eagerness.  Then he set it back down on the floor and smiled, with seeming embarrassment.

“I want you to come away with me,” he said.  The idea seemed to fill him with happiness.  “There’s an airport in White Plains, not fifteen minutes from here.  We could take a plane out, to anywhere.  Just disappear, to where no one could ever find us.”

“And leave Charlie behind?”

“Yes—forever.”

Beth stood up and went to look out the window.  It had stopped raining and the parking lot, visible in the yellowish glow from the floodlight—inexplicably, never turned off—over Feenie’s back door, was a smooth, glistening black.  The haze, mysteriously, had departed.

She had to decide.  She could pack a suitcase and go with Phil, or she could abandon him to whatever fate the Moonlight had in store for him.  One thing she knew, he would never have the courage of go without her.

But would anything change if they did leave?  Was this terror which seemed to surround them really something in the atmosphere of an old house, or had Phil carried it in the door with him when he took possession?  Was he haunted, or was he just insane?

“Stay away from that place,”
Millie had told her. 
“Bad things happen at the Moonlight.”

Beth didn’t believe in ghosts or auras or any of the rest of it.  All that crap was just for frightening school children on Halloween.  Yet her skepticism felt slender and uncertain against the weight of everything she herself had seen and felt and known within those walls.

And if she abandoned Phil she knew she was consigning him to destruction.  Flight, after all, was his only chance.

Someone died
, Phil had said. 
It wasn’t my fault
.  She would have to take his word for that, and not inquire any further.  She would have to trust him.  It was perhaps best if she didn’t know.

And suddenly she understood that she had made up her mind—or, perhaps more accurately, that there had never really been any decision left for her to make.

“If that’s what you want, I can be ready to go in an hour,” she said, still looking out through the window.  When she did turn around, the expression on his face was that of a man reprieved at the last possible moment.

“You’ll really come?”

She nodded, and then smiled.  “Yes, I’ll really come.  What did you think?”

. . . . .

“We’ll need money,” he said.  “We won’t get very far on what I’ve got in my wallet.”

“I have a few hundred in the bank.  All we have to do is wait for it to open.”

“We’ll need more than that.”  Phil shook his head, as if banishing some inner question.  “I’ll have to go back.”

“To the Moonlight?”

“Yes.”

It was almost morning.  In two hours Millie would be off the graveyard shift at the Grand Union.  The power lines were etched black against a dull gray sky that looked like more rain.  Perhaps the sun would never shine again.

“Don’t do it, Phil.  Don’t go back there.”

“I have to.”  He gave her a strained smile that, under the circumstances, was almost heroic.  “I left my wallet behind—even my underwear is soaked through.”

And then the smile collapsed.

“There’s a lot of money at the Moonlight,” he said, as if confessing to some shameful weakness.  “My Uncle George squirreled away a fortune that nobody knew about.  I found it, and it’s mine.  I don’t plan to leave without it.”

“Then why didn’t you bring it last night?”

“I wasn’t thinking very clearly last thing.  All I knew last night was that I wanted to be with you.”

From the way he looked at her, Beth knew it was the simple truth.  Last night, probably, he had been running on instinct.

“We don’t need it.”

“Yes we do. 
I
need it.”

“Then we’ll go together.”

“No.”  He said it as a fact, nothing more.  She wasn’t coming.  “No, you’re staying here.  I won’t risk you in that house.”

He stood up and took his shirt from the back of a chair.  It was almost dry, so he put it on.

“I won’t be long—just a few hours to collect what’s mine.  Maybe I’ll be able to get the car started.”

It was hopeless.  She could see that, and it filled her with dread.  She knew somehow that she was about to lose him forever.

Her housecoat was held together in the front by a row of little snaps, and she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it.  She took the two lapels in her hands and pulled them apart.

“At least wait until daylight,” she said.

As usual when he had to work through the night, Lieutenant Spolino had a headache—nothing blinding, just enough to be a nuisance.  And no amount of coffee or aspirin seemed to have the slightest effect.  He suspected it was just nerves.

By four in the morning Vito Carboni’s corpse had been removed to the morgue, the technicians were just about finished with their work on the scene and all the preliminary interviews had concluded and were in the process of being typed up.  By dawn the Windermere Nursing Home would be back to normal operation and the only obvious sign of what had taken place last night would be the orange police seal over the door to Room 127.  Spolino was back at his desk at the station, sorting through the incoming paperwork, trying to convince himself that any of it could make the slightest difference.

His conversation with Sonny Galatina had depressed and frightened him.  He was, after all, a policeman.  He dealt in facts, and his basic assumption was that the experience of life in this world, no matter how chaotic and brutal, was at last intelligible.  You gathered your evidence, and you drew your conclusions and finally, sometimes, if your luck held, you made an arrest.  Things were supposed to make sense—or at least there was supposed to exist the possibility of their making sense.  But this time it wasn’t working out that way.

He could accept the idea that the murderer of Vito Carboni, Sal Grazzi and Leo Galatina would finally escape justice.  After all, it would not be the first time that the bad guys won.  In the old days, back at Manhattan South, it had practically been routine.  What he could not accept was the idea that these three men had died in a vendetta carried on by someone who had been dead for fifty years.  The whole thing had remained tolerable as long as he had been able to believe that Charlie Brush might be alive somewhere, back in business, the directing hand behind his own revenge.