The Moonlight (42 page)

He turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of his parking space.  Two minutes later they were on the Interstate.

There was no conversation.  Joey was too cowed, and DeLucia wanted him to stay that way because the consciousness of being in disgrace would keep him from growing suspicious.  For some reason it always seemed to work that way.  Besides, DeLucia wanted to think about the job.  You made fewer mistakes when you thought about the job.

He still could not bring himself to approve.  Granted, it was necessary to swat whoever killed Sal Grazzi—no loss in himself, but one had to think of the impression these things made—but it was the sort of routine matter that should have been given to a specialist.  Somebody comes in from Detroit, for instance, does the pop, and is back on a plane before the body is found.  It made no sense for Sonny to get involved like this. 

DeLucia had grown up in the sharp end of the business and therefore was free from romantic illusions.  When he had gone to see
The Godfather
he almost laughed his ass off.

But it didn’t pay to laugh too loud around Sonny.

So things would be arranged so that Sonny could personally cancel Philip Owings’ ticket and feel right about himself again, and the whole corny Italian opera would be staged with perfect safety.  All they had to do was to get the little son-of-a-bitch out of his house.

DeLucia parked the Chevy in front of the Brookville branch of the Union Trust bank, which at ten thirty at night looked as deserted as a burial vault, and walked across the street to use the pay phone at the Sunoco gas station.  He got an answer in the middle of the second ring.

“Yeah.”

“Is he there?”

“Nah.  He took off in his car about six fifteen.  No sign of him since.  The house is dark.  You want us to keep up the watch?”

“Until you hear different.”

DeLucia hung up the phone.  He was disappointed.  Now they would have to hang around waiting for Owings to come back, and the longer they waited the more chance there was for something to go wrong.

He went back to the car and ignored Joey’s inquiring look.

Old River Road did a little wiggle as it slid through Brookville and, when it straightened out again, heading back toward the safety of prosperous Greenley, there was a narrow offshoot to the right called Cedar Hill Lane.  It was too dark to tell if there were any cedars, but there certainly didn’t seem to be a hill.  The pavement ran straight and flat, with only a mailbox here and there to suggest a human presence.  DeLucia drove for about a mile and a half, until he found Number 326 on the righthand side, then he pulled into the long dark driveway.

After about sixty yards they came to the house.  It was dark too.  They parked and DeLucia got his automatic out of the glove compartment.  He left the car door open for a moment so he would have the interior lights to see by.  They weren’t much help.  There seemed to be woods on all sides.

“It’s about a quarter of a mile, straight through there,” DeLucia said, pointing into the black emptiness beyond the garage.  “I’m told we can’t miss it.”

“God, I hope there aren’t any snakes.  I hate snakes.”

DeLucia turned and gave Joey a hard look over the roof of the car, seriously considering whether he shouldn’t shoot the stupid ox right then and there.  But at last he thought, no—Joey could still dig the grave.

“Snakes go to sleep too,” he said.  “So relax, Rizzo.  You’re safe.”

In fact, DeLucia didn’t like the woods either.  They couldn’t risk using a flashlight out here in the open, and he didn’t fancy getting dangled in the undergrowth and falling down or stepping into some puddle of shit and ruining his shoes.  They were Gucci and had cost two hundred bucks.  His wife would have hysterics.

“Come on.”

But they were lucky.  There was a path of sorts, and enough moonlight to let them follow it.  They were gangsters, not fucking pioneers, but they could manage this.

And after about ten minutes the woods ended abruptly and they found themselves on a little patch of neglected lawn.  In front of them, at first as nothing more than a vague shape in the darkness, rose the old Moonlight Roadhouse.

Until a week ago DeLucia had never heard of the place, and his informants had not mentioned its gaudy history, but the minute he stepped onto the huge cement patio, and he could make out the outlines on the walls and roof, he was filled with a strange dread.  He couldn’t have explained it, but he knew with a kind of instinctive certainty that he had entered into hostile territory—not in the sense of being shared with an some enemy, but hostile in itself.  The Moonlight was an enemy.  The Moonlight, staring down at him from its dark, empty windows, resented his intrusion and would make him answer for it.

The urge to run away was almost overpowering.  Except for the presence of another man, he might have yielded to it.  But Joey prevented him, so he avenged himself by sharing his fear.

“Let’s hope Owings really isn’t here,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “because if he is, we’re meat on the table.”

He looked at the back on the house and almost wished that Owings was up there, watching him, a gun in his hand.  It would be nice to believe the danger which hung about the place like mist was that focused.

“Better have a look around.”

The garage was padlocked, and the windows on all sides of the house were dark.  DeLucia waited on the gravel driveway for a few minutes, watching the road, until he saw a car pass.  It slowed a little as it drove by, and then shot away.  The driver was one of his own people.  They would be coming by every five minutes or so, looking for a signal or a hint of trouble.  All he had to do was flick on his cigarette lighter and hold it up, and the next one would come right in.

Jimmy DeLucia had begun his professional career at fifteen, stealing television sets.  After a few years of unblemished success he surprised some idiot in his bedroom and had been forced to crack open his skull with a crowbar.  After that he decided that the profits from housebreaking were too small to justify the risks, and he had turned to the money-lending scheme that first brought him to the attention of Sonny Galatina.

Nevertheless, he had a natural talent for burglary, and he was simply too cautious to go blundering into a house without checking it out first.  Thus, before so much as touching a doorknob, he made a careful inspection of all the downstairs windows, looking around the frames with a pencil flashlight for spring switches or noise sensors, or any other evidence that Philip Owings had invested in an alarm system.  There was none.

Of course, that didn’t prove anything, not if the guy wanted to play it cute.  But they weren’t going to find out unless they went inside.

And getting in turned out to be no problem.  The back door was unlocked.  DeLucia opened it and went inside.  No sirens went off, but he found it impossible to overcome the suspicion that he was walking into some sort of trap.

Joey tried to turn on a light switch, but DeLucia caught him by the wrist.

“See if you can find the basement,” he said.  “And mind where you put your feet.”

There weren’t any key boxes in any of the obvious places and, when they went down into the basement, there was nothing that looked like an alarm box.  DeLucia turned on the light to check the floor beams, but none of them had flex sensors.  The place was clean.

“Jesus, what’s that smell?” Joey asked.  It was obvious the place was beginning to spook him.

DeLucia had noticed it too—hardly there at all to begin with, but growing stronger.

“One time my mother found a dead mouse behind the refrigerator, but it didn’t smell like that.”

“Shut up, Joey.  We’re going back upstairs anyway.”

The moron was right, though.  Something down there stank like a corpse.

They searched the upstairs and found what was probably Owings’ bedroom.  It looked like it had been cleared out, which was not a promising sign.  Did the guy know they were onto him?  Had he taken off?  But then they discovered his suitcase in the kitchen, closed but unlocked and resting on the table.  There was nothing in it you wouldn’t expect to find.

“What do we do now, Mr. DeLucia?”

“We find a good place to wait.”

Then he turned around and noticed a door.  There was a sliver of light coming from beneath the door, but the key was still in the lock.

“Why do you lock a room but leave the light on inside?” DeLucia asked out loud.

“Shit—
I
don’t know.”

“Then look and see.”

He took the automatic out of his jacket pocket and stood a little to one side.  If by some chance Owings was holed up in there, his first shot wasn’t going to get Jimmy DeLucia.

“Jesus, Mr. DeLucia, look at this.”

The room was almost completely filled by a large round table covered with gray-green felt, but that wasn’t what had attracted Joey’s attention.  Huddled in one corner, staring up at them over the knees of her grimy, dust-streaked trousers, was a woman.  Her eyes were tear-stained and wide with fear.

For a moment, DeLucia thought he might just lock the door again and leave her alone—what the hell, she had only had a glimpse of him over Joey’s shoulder and, anyway, tonight Joey was going to disappear forever.  She couldn’t really do anybody any harm.  And then he remembered that Joey, the dumb fuck, had spoken his name.

Okay then, the landfill was going to have to accommodate one more.

“You’d better come out of there, Miss,” he said.

By ten p.m., Tom Spolino had put in another twelve straight hours on the Carboni murder.  His squad had finished their preliminary investigation and the results, neatly typed, were resting on his desk.  They amounted to almost nothing—at least, nothing that could ever be brought to trial.  There had been no witnesses to the crime, and the physical evidence all pointed to a small-time gangster who had been dead for fifty years.  Everyone might as well have stayed home and watched television.

Spolino was about to quit in disgust—after all, Alice was leaving for her sister’s in the morning, and he had a right to a little time with his family before they went into hiding—when the stairway door opened and Hal Kirby walked in, grinning like a jack-o-lantern and waving a manila file folder over his head.

It was out of character.  As one of only five black officers in the department, and the first to make sergeant, he liked to be taken seriously.  He was the only member of the detective division who habitually wore a suit, and Spolino liked to send Kirby around whenever there was trouble on one of the big estates in the Back Country because he had the sober, slightly defensive manners of a corporation lawyer and seemed to go down very well with the gentry.

But tonight he was all lit up, as if he had just won the lottery.

“I think we’ve got something,” he said.  “The traffic stuff just came through processing, and look at this.”

Standing over Spolino’s desk, he opened the file folder and pulled out a long, canary-yellow strip of paper.  It was a parking ticket.

“Wine red Lincoln Town Car, dealer’s license number GH243078, registered to a Philip Owings.  Ring a bell?  It was ticketed at 9:03 p.m. yesterday on Gilroy Street, just a block from the nursing home.”

Spolino took the slip of paper from Kirby’s fingers and read it straight through twice.  The signature read “C. Herner.”  He didn’t know the people in Traffic very well, but he had a faint recollection of a slightly overweight brunette of about forty-five, first name Catherine.

“Get C. Herner down here,” he said.  “I want to hear about this.  And, Hal, if we get a righteous bust, you’ll be the one to make the collar.”

Hal Kirby went off to attack his phone, a happy man.

Five minutes later, Spolino was pouring Catherine Herner a cup of coffee.  She was on duty, so it had been a simple matter of putting through a call to her traffic cart and reeling her in.  She didn’t seem very happy about being called off her shift, but perhaps, Spolino thought, the source of her dissatisfaction was something a little more general, like life.  Her face was pouchy and joyless and her uniform looked uncomfortably tight.

He slid the parking ticket across his desk to her.

“You remember this one?”

Catherine picked it up and read the top two or three lines.  Then she set it down again, with an expression of something like pain.

“Sure, I remember.” she said.  “Another dissatisfied customer.”

“You
saw
him?”

“Oh yeah.”  Catherine shrugged, as if demonstrating her capacity to bear the day’s accumulated burden.  “I told him it was a no parking zone, but that didn’t satisfy him.  Some of them act like they’ve caught you trying to break into their car.”

Spolino found himself wondering, if he was walking back after having just cut someone’s throat, would he want to get into a big scene with the meter maid who was ticketing his car?  It didn’t seem likely.  A man who cared about getting away with murder would simply fade into the shadows until after she was gone.

But a man who cared about getting away with murder wouldn’t sign his work either.  He wouldn’t leave his fingerprints all over the scene of the crime, and he wouldn’t put the razor back in Vito Carboni’s shirt pocket.