The Moonlight (44 page)

Sonny watched her with an emotion very like hatred.  How dare she do her nails in his living room?  Trish would never had done that, but then Trish, whatever her other limitations, had at least known how to act like a lady.  But he had to acknowledge that there was a certain rough justice to the situation—this was what he got for divorcing his first wife just because her tits had begun to sag a little, he got to spend his middle years sitting around with a fake blonde he couldn’t even talk to, listening to her file her nails.

Finally, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he went outside.

The lights in the swimming pool somehow made the water appear sluggish and heavy, like molten glass.  A faint mist played over its surface as it evaporated into the hot summer night.  Sonny plugged the telephone he was carrying into an outlet in the wall of the changing cabaña and sat down on one of the lawn chairs.  He watched the pool, studying the little coils of light that played over the bottom, wishing Jimmy would hurry up and phone.

Jimmy had mounted the Owings hit like a military operation, and he had thought of everything that would keep his Don sealed off from any dangerous appearance of involvement.  The cars that were patrolling up and down Old River Road were all equipped with phones, so all Jimmy had to do was flag one down—and thus avoid using the phone at the Moonlight, which would put Sonny Galatina’s unlisted number on Owing’s monthly statement from Baby Bell.  The message would be simple, in case the Justice Department was still manning their taps:  either “have a nice evening” if everything had gone as planned and they would meet downtown, or “it looks like rain” if some complication meant that Jimmy would attend to things on his own and the Boss should make it an early night.  Sonny could understand and even approve his underboss’s caution, but that didn’t stop him from feeling some faint resentment over being treated like the Family’s invalid aunt.

He knew it might be hours before Jimmy called, but he wished the waiting would end.  It was getting on his nerves.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting there when he began to be aware of a peculiar silence, as if the night itself had gone to sleep.  Two windows on the upper story of the big house were still lit, and the pool glowed like the crater of a volcano, but everywhere else, all around the periphery, there was darkness and an eerie quiet.

For one thing, the dogs weren’t barking.  There were always two guards walking the dogs around the inside of the fence, one going clockwise and the other counterclockwise, so their paths crossed every eight or ten minutes.  Every time that happened the damn dobermans—nervous, vicious brutes—would bark for a second or two, all set to tear this strange mutt’s throat out, then take a sniff at each other’s asses, and pass on.  This went on all night, and after a while you got so used to the sound you didn’t even hear it anymore.

Except when it wasn’t there.

So what was the matter with the fucking dogs?  Had they suddenly gotten smart enough to just nod, or were they all down with laryngitis?

And then, where were the lights?  The guards carried flashlights and when they went around the west side of the property you could just make out a glow through the trees, there for a second and then gone.  It was another one of those things you didn’t notice until it was gone, and it was gone now.  Just guessing, Sonny figured there hadn’t been a sign of life out there in maybe twenty minutes.

He thought maybe he would have a look.  He was halfway out of his chair before he thought better of it and decided to phone the gatehouse instead.  They all kept in touch by walkie-talkie, and if something was wrong the guy at the gatehouse would know.

Sonny didn’t begin to get really scared until he picked up the telephone receiver, placed it against his ear, and didn’t hear anything.  Nothing—the line was dead.

He twisted around in his seat to look at the wall outlet, just to be sure he had plugged the god-damned thing in, and then he stood up.  What the hell, it wasn’t like he was cut off from the human race.

“Angelo!  Pete!  Anybody, get over here!”

He was shouting so loud he could feel the veins in his head bulging, but the sound of his voice died away and there was only silence.  As if the night had swallowed up the last trace.

There was a line of shrubbery just beside the path that led around the far side of the house.  He was sure he saw something move over there.

Slowly, each step a victory over the urge to flee, he began to move in that direction.

His gun was in his desk drawer—why the fuck hadn’t he taken it outside with him?  Because he was a business-suit Don, a phony, no kind of a bad guy at all, and he had never gotten into the habit of walking around armed.  Enrico never would have found himself in this fix, stuck outside without even a cigar cutter to defend himself with.

Near the side of the path, just where the lights from the pool died away into shadow, he found a man lying on his side in the grass, motionless, obviously dead.  Sonny turned him over with the tip of his shoe.  It was Angelo Mosconi, head of his bodyguard, with his eyes wide open, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened to him.  The whole front of his shirt was stained with blood, because his throat had been cut straight through.  The blood was still glistening and fresh—he couldn’t have been dead more than a few minutes.  The shotgun he should have been carrying was nowhere about.

That was why no one had answered.  Because they were all dead.  There couldn’t be a doubt about it, they were all dead.

Sonny broke into clumsy run.  He had to get into the house, where his gun was in a drawer—where he would have a chance.

Just as he came back around to the patio, the lights in the upper story went out.  First one, and then the other.  The house was dark.

Maybe Traci had decided to go to bed, he told himself—except that Traci never went to bed until around two in the morning and, anyway, why should she turn off the light in his dressing room?  Besides, Traci was afraid of the dark, and she wasn’t very conservation-minded either.  Traci would leave every light in the joint burning right straight through to morning.

It wasn’t his wife who was turning out lights.

All at once Sonny Galatina felt himself go sick with fear.  It was like a fist clenching his bowels.

“Oh God, baby,” he whispered, “where are you?”

Because, if there was a stranger in the house, by now Traci would have to know it.  So why wasn’t she screaming her head off?

As soon as he was inside the back door, standing there in the darkness, he became aware of the sound of his own breathing.  It was rapid and harsh, as if his lungs had been scoured out.  He had the terrible feeling it was loud enough to be heard all over the house, but when he tried to slow it down he found himself gasping for breath.

He realized he was beginning to panic, so he waited there for what seemed forever but was probably no more than two or three minutes, until he felt more in control.  Then he began to make his way through the house to his office.

This was home ground, he told himself—he lived here.  He could find his way around this house with his eyes shut.  He tried to stay close to the walls so that the floorboards wouldn’t creak as much.

He didn’t risk turning on a light until he had reached his office.  Then, after he had closed the door behind himself, he snicked on a table lamp and sat down behind his desk.  The gun, a snubnose .41 caliber revolver, was in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side.  Sonny took it out of its black leather holster, which he had never worn, cracked open the cylinder to make sure it was loaded, and dropped it into the pocket of his suit coat.

He tried the phone, but it was dead too—somebody had gotten the main line.  He put the receiver back down, as quietly as he could, then he turned out the light and left the room.

He hated the very idea of going upstairs, but that was where Traci would be and he had to see if she was okay.  You weren’t a man if you didn’t look out for your womenfolk.  Enrico wouldn’t have left his wife alone in her bedroom, not knowing whether she was alive or dead.

The stairs popped and crunched under his feet with every step—if somebody was upstairs, he couldn’t help but hear.  It was like strolling across a rifle range.

He found Traci lying across their bed.  Her head was at a peculiar angle and, when he turned on the light, he could see that her face had a slight bluish caste.  She was naked from the waist up—her green silk bathrobe looked as if it had fallen from her shoulders, although her arms were still in the sleeves.  Her nipples were erect and looked very pink against her white breasts.  Her eyes were wide open and bulging slightly.  There were dark bruises around her throat.  She had been strangled.

Sonny sat down beside her on the bed and took her hand, which was only just beginning to grow cold.  In spite of himself he felt a dreadful grief, and tears wet his face.  She had been so beautiful. . .

At last he pulled her bathrobe back up over her shoulders and covered her decently.  Whatever happened, he didn’t want anyone else to find her the way he had.

He understood now that he was a dead man.  In a little while he would go back downstairs, and whoever had done this to Traci would kill him too.  All that remained of his life were these few moments, sitting beside his wife’s corpse.  This was absolutely the last time he would have the chance to be quiet and to think about what it had all meant.

Nothing—that was what it meant.  Zero.  An unheroic waste of time.  The guy waiting for him downstairs would be doing him a favor.

Except that he had killed Traci.  Maybe it could all be redeemed if, before the lights went out forever, he could at least manage to get even for Traci.  One bullet was all it would take.  It didn’t seem like too much to ask from a squandered life.

He took the revolver out of his pocket and looked at it.  One squeeze of the trigger before he died and, in the utter unlikelihood of their meeting in some existence beyond this one, maybe he would be able to find the courage to look Enrico in the face.

He slipped the revolver into the waistband of his trousers.

Even as he came out into the second story hallway, he could see that the lights on the ground floor had been turned on.  He walked down the stairs, not even trying for stealth.  Whoever was down there knew all about him anyway.

He found him in the living room, sitting on the arm of a sofa, a spare, wiry-looking man in a brown suit, with a shotgun that could have been Angelo’s across his knees, his right hand resting lightly on the narrow part of the stock.  He bore more than a passing resemblance to the photograph of Philip Owings that had been in Tom’s file, but it wasn’t him.  Sonny had to admit to himself that this wasn’t anybody he knew.

“I take it you found her,” he said, showing a grin that disappeared almost at once.

“Yeah, I found her.”  Sonny discovered with genuine surprise that he wasn’t even angry anymore.  “I suppose you think you had to kill her.”

At first the man in the brown suit merely stared at him, with an expression of something like pitying contempt, and then, slowly, he moved his shoulders in a shrug.

“It was her own fault, the stupid broad.  I don’t normally lean on the women too hard, but she started to get all excited.  If she’d kept her mouth shut I might’ve just locked her in a closet or something.  But oh no—she had to start makin’ a lot of noise.”

Sonny had to acknowledge that was Traci all over.  She’d been a stupid broad all right, but that didn’t mean it was okay to strangle her.

“And Angelo?”

“That was different.  I enjoyed that.”  The grin came back, and this time it stayed.  “You ain’t been gettin’ value for your money, Galatina.  Your security system is a joke.  Anybody can just walk in if they know how—I knew how.  Your boys are all dead.”

“You killed the dogs too?”  For the first time, Sonny noticed that the man seemed to be bleeding from his right ear.

But whoever he was he didn’t even seem aware of it.  He shook his head and laughed.

“No, the dogs are fine.  They won’t bother us.  They’re all in their kennels, hidin’ their heads.  We won’t hear any more from them tonight.  It seems they got a look at the boogie man.”

He took up the shotgun and motioned with it toward the door.

“Why don’t we go outside?  It’s a nice night, and there’s no point in messin’ up the wallpaper.”

Sonny didn’t move at first.  It was almost as if he hadn’t heard.  He was trying to figure out where the stink of putrefying flesh was coming from.  It couldn’t be Traci, not already—she probably hadn’t been dead half an hour yet.

“Do I get to know what this is all about?” he said, simply because it was necessary to say something.  It wasn’t the question he really wanted to ask.

“You know what it’s about, Sonny.”  The man smile so tightly that his face almost seemed to crack.  “Come on—you mean to tell me Granddad Enrico never whispered the name ‘Charlie Brush’ in your ear?”

Sonny experienced the shock as a stab of cold that went through his chest like a sliver of ice.  He felt sick—the smell of decay was overpowering now.  He had to get out of there.

He just turned around and started walking back through the house, letting his hands dangle at his sides.  He had forgotten all about getting even for Traci and the revolver in his waistband.  He wasn’t even afraid of his own approaching death.  There was no room in his mind for such mundane considerations.