The Moonlight (46 page)

Spolino didn’t wait.  He simply threw himself forward from his chair and made a dive for the gun.  There wasn’t a chance, he knew, but he had to try.

Somehow he was still alive when he wrenched the automatic from Jimmy DeLucia’s dead fingers.  Letting his momentum carry him, he rolled away from the patch of light that spread narrowly across the floor, expecting any second to hear the harsh blast of the shotgun—or, perhaps, not to be alive to hear it—but there was nothing.

He came to a stop, landing painfully on his elbows, so that he lay prone on the floor.  He braced himself, aimed in the general direction of the patio door, and squeezed off four rounds.

Pop, pop, pop, pop.  They blurred together—a pathetic noise, like someone shuffling a deck of cards.

Then he waited for a moment, and allowed himself to breathe.  He heard something—the sound of a body slumping to the floor.

The silence seemed to go on forever.

“You got lousy aim, Spolino.”

This, followed by a weary laugh.  It was not a voice he had ever heard before.

“Four shots, and you never even nicked me.  Jesus.  Turn on the lights—I promise not to hurt you.”

Spolino lined up on the sound on the man’s voice, but somehow he couldn’t quite bring himself to pull the trigger.

There was a cough, a liquid, gurgling sound.

“Don’t be an asshole, Spolino.  Turn on the fuckin’ lights.”

Did the guy think he was crazy?  He. . .

And then, all at once, Spolino heard the snap of an electric switch, and then another, and then two more together, and the room flooded with light.

It was the woman.  She was standing beside the panel, leaning against the wall for support.

What did she want to do, get them killed?

But as soon as Spolino glanced back toward the patio door he saw that that wasn’t going to happen.  A man in a brown suit was sitting on the floor, his back against the doorframe, a shotgun lying uselessly across his knees.  His shirt and the whole right side of his suitcoat were soaked in blood, so that it was a wonder he was alive at all.

The man raised his head a little and grinned.  It was Philip Owings’ face, but it wasn’t quite Philip Owings.

“How are you, Tommy boy?  You know me, Sport?  I’ll give you two guesses.”

Spolino rose to a crouch.  He still held DeLucia’s automatic in both hands, keeping it trained on Charlie Brush’s chest.  Because that was who it was.

The man in the brown suit glanced down at his bloodstained chest, and then something seemed to strike him funny and he looked up at Spolino and laughed.

“It was your hoodlum friend Sonny Galatina did this,” he said, almost proudly.  “The little creep got me, right when I blew his head off.  Who woulda thought it.”

“Sonny’s dead?”

Spolino experienced a surge of almost overpowering grief—he couldn’t possibly have explained why.

“Yeah.  I don’t envy the guy who has to clean his pool tomorrow.”  The laughter, when it came again, was lost almost at once in another gasping, fluid cough.  I’m not gonna be far behind him, looks like.  I’m not worried about dyin’, though.  I’ve done it before.”

With his gun still trained on Charlie Brush, Spolino came close enough to kick the shotgun off his knees and out of reach.  Charlie didn’t seem to notice.  He looked up at the girl and smiled.

“You still here, Baby?  Sure—I guess you would be.  Just in time to say goodbye.”

“What did you do with Joey?” Spolino asked, crouching down to pick up the shotgun.

“Was that his name?  Don’t worry about him.”

He turned his weary gaze to Spolino, and his face seemed to have lost some of its cynical edginess.  It was as though, as Charlie Brush’s life was fading away, Philip Owings was somehow coming back to life.

“I missed you, didn’t I, Spolino.  Well, maybe next time.”

He took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds, as if testing to see if it did him any good.  Then he let it go with a sigh of disappointment.

“Anyway, stick around.  We’ll talk, have a drink and a few laughs.  Maybe we’ll even have a barbecue later.”

This was followed by a fit of wheezing laughter.  Charlie Brush seemed to think he had made an exquisite joke.

By now the woman was kneeling beside him.  She even took his hand in a tentative way—she seemed to be trying to reclaim whatever was left of her haunted lover.

Charlie Brush—or Philip Owings, or whoever he was at that moment—glanced at her, and for the first time his eyes showed a kind of suffering fear.

“Beth,” he whispered.  “Beth, get out . . .”

And then, quite suddenly, he was dead.  The woman, whose name, after all this, Spolino had now heard for the first time, staying beside him, still cradling his hand, weeping hot, silent tears.

The outside lights were blazing—Beth must have hit every switch on the board.  Spolino figured that someone in one of the neighboring houses must have heard the shots and phoned the police by now.  In a minute or two, he might even be able to hear the sirens.  He went over to the patio door and pushed it open.

That was when it hit him.  Outside, the smell of gasoline was like a dank poison in the air.  He remembered the Exxon truck he had seen in the driveway a couple of days ago.

“Stick around . . .Maybe we’ll have a barbecue.”

It came together for him in an instant—Charlie Brush wasn’t giving up that easily.

“Get up,” he said.  Spolino grabbed the girl by the wrist and half dragged her to her feet.  “There’s nothing you can do for him.  We’re getting out of here—now.”

She tried of say something, to offer some little protest perhaps, but when they reached the door she smelled the gasoline the same as he.

By this time it almost burned your eyes.

“My car’s in front,” Spolino murmured, trying to encourage her to action.  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

On the gravel walkway between the house and the garage, they found Joey, lying face down, his head cradled in blood.  Spolino hardly glanced at him—there was no time.

When they reached the front of the house, Spolino saw that his car was standing in a pool of gasoline, one edge of which was already sliding toward the house.  They had to splash across it, like children running through a puddle of rainwater.

The bastard had left the pump hoses going.  If he turned the ignition key, his car would go up in an instant.

“Run!” he shouted, yanking Beth along by the arm.  “He’s set us a trap—run!”

They had just reached the stone fence when there was a low boom.  Spolino looked quickly over his shoulder and saw the garage disappear in a wave of gaudy orange-black flame.  He knew what was coming next.

He got down behind the protection of the fence, dragging Beth with him and covering her body with his own.  When the gasoline tanks blew there was a terrific explosion, so that part of the fence actually collapsed under the impact.

A stone the size of a loaf of bread hit Spolino between the shoulder blades.  He could feel the heat now—it was like lying in front of an oven door.

When at last he dared to look up, he saw that the Moonlight was already half engulfed in flames.  There would be no saving her now.

The Brookville fire station was only a mile down the road and trucks were on the scene within five minutes, but it hardly made any difference.  The gasoline fire burned with ferocious intensity, consuming the Moonlight as quickly as if it had been made of paper.  All that was left for the firemen to do was to hose down the surrounding trees and, after a while, to search the blackened ruins for bodies.  The three corpses they found were burned beyond any possibility of identification.

The next morning a two-column piece about the fire appeared on the inside pages of
The Greenley Examiner
and it was not picked up by the out-of-town papers, which were full of stories about the bizarre murder of the notorious crime boss Ernest “Sonny” Galatina, killed with his wife on his own heavily guarded property.  Just before noon, however, the wire services carried reports of a press conference in which Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino of the Greenley Police Department identified one Philip Owings as the murderer of Leo Galatina, Salvatore Grazzi and Vito Carboni, and as the principal suspect in the murder of Ernest Galatina.  Mr. Owings was described as having died in the Moonlight fire.  An hour later the New Canaan police confirmed that they too were satisfied with the evidence against Philip Owings.  All four murder investigations were declared closed.  That night the story got a minute and a half of air time on the
CBS Evening News
.  Three days later
Newsweek
carried the whole story, along with a color photograph of Lieutenant Spolino at Sonny Galatina’s funeral.

What was not reported, or even noticed, was that on the afternoon following Sonny’s last rites Lieutenant Spolino used an unmarked car to drive an unidentified woman to Kennedy Airport for the 4:15 flight to California.  Beth Saunders’ name had never been mentioned in press coverage of the Owings case, but if she hung around sooner or later some enterprising journalist would discover her existence.  She had a right to be protected from that, particularly in light of her testimony concerning events at the Moonlight on the last night of Philip Owings’ life.  When Ed Monser read the transcript, with Jimmy DeLucia’s remarks about him outlined in blue pencil, he even put up two thousand dollars of his own money to give her a fresh start on the Pacific Coast.

Thus no one thought to make any connection when, two weeks after the Moonlight fire, the Greenley Police Department announced that, for reasons of health and effective immediately, its Head of Operations, Edward Monser, was resigning and, until the Board of Selectmen named a permanent successor, the vacancy would be filled by Thomas Spolino, who would hold the rank of acting captain.  The choice was greeted with general approval, and an editorial appearing the next day in the
Greenley Examiner
urged that Spolino’s appointment be made permanent.

Jack Matheny still had the newspaper on his office desk when he looked up and saw Tom Spolino standing in the doorway.

“How are you, Captain?” he asked, going over to take his brother-in-law by the hand.  “Will you fix my parking tickets for me.”

Spolino laughed, made a remark about his name being only scotch-taped to his office door, and asked if Jack would care to come along to the Brookville Union Trust.

“The bank manager told me that Owings kept a safety deposit box there,” he said, “and I’ve got a search warrant to open it.  Since you’re still handling the property, I thought you might be interested.”

They drove in Tom’s car, and the bank manager and a locksmith were waiting for them when they arrived—since the box key had not been recovered, the lock would have to be drilled.

There was nothing in the box except a copy of Owing’s will, naming Elizabeth Saunders, of 112 Old River Road, Apartment A, as his sole heir.

“Who is Elizabeth Saunders?” Jack inquired.

“His girlfriend.  When you’ve sold the place let me know, and I’ll see she gets the check.”

Then, instead of going back to town, Spolino and his brother-in-law drove up the road to where all that was left of the old Moonlight was a single chimney, broken off about three quarters of the way up, and a rubble of blackened timbers.

“It’ll be easier to sell now,” Jack said.  “A haunted house is one thing, but who ever heard of a haunted vacant lot?  Even with the soft market, this’ll gross two hundred thousand easy.”

They were standing at the edge of the old dance floor, where the heat of the fire had left the concrete with a network of deep cracks.  It was hard to imagine how the place could have suffered a more complete destruction.

“Fine—you sell it.  I just want to be here when the bulldozers start up.”

Jack looked away, a little embarrassed by the strange hardness that had come into his brother-in-law’s face.  It was as if he hated the very ground on which the Moonlight had stood.

A month later he sold the property for two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars to a developer who wanted to put up a small office building.  There were no financing problems and they closed the deal in record time because the developer wanted to get his crews started while the fine weather lasted.

The very first day after the huge steel refuge containers were set in place, while men with sledge hammers were still knocking down the few wooden beams that had been left standing, a backhoe was trucked in and began clawing at the old concrete dance floor.

And Thomas Spolino was there, leaning against the fender of his car, drinking coffee out of a thermos.  The contractor couldn’t understand what he wanted, but you didn’t tell a captain of detectives to run along and mind his own business.

It was twenty minutes of two in the afternoon when one of the workmen gave a shout, and suddenly the terrible grinding of the backhoe’s engine fell silent.

Spolino didn’t need to be told.  He put his coffee cup down and walked over to where everyone was gathered in a silent little cluster around a chunk of concrete about the size and shape of a dinette table top, one side of which was held up by the backhoe’s scoop.