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Authors: Mark Arsenault

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BOOK: Loot the Moon
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“You have been chasing an interview with me for some time, Mr. Povich,” Glanz said. “You think I paid that kid to kill Gil Harmony.”
“Didn't you?”
Glanz bent down creakily, grunting and sighing, in painful human origami, and placed one knee on the ground. He laid the roses on his wife's grave. Then he brushed dust from her stone and seemed to forget that Billy was there.
“You threatened the judge,” Billy said. “His clerk was there. She heard it. Harmony put your son away for life. You told the judge you'd get even, and you did. You persuaded Rackers to accept June Harmony's diamonds as payment, and then you double-crossed him. You gave Rackers a phony combination for a wall safe that didn't exist. A great investment for you—you got your revenge, and it didn't cost you a penny. Then Rackers was killed trying to get away, which saved your goons the trouble of burying him in a sandpit.”
Glanz took a deep breath, put a hand on his knee, and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. “I told Robbie you were not to be killed,” he said. “That you were to be buried feetfirst until you told us what we needed to know.”
He smiled at Billy.
“I've been coming to this spot for nine years,” Glanz said. “Watch this … .” He fished a hand inside his coat pocket, pulled it out, and showed Billy a few kernels of dried yellow corn. He held the kernels to the sky in his open hand, and whistled twice between his teeth.
Then he balanced the kernels on his shoulder. “Don't move,” he whispered.
Within a few seconds, a crow swooped down to a nearby headstone. It hopped from stone to stone, eyeing Glanz, feinting toward him and then backing away. Then suddenly it flapped to his shoulder, landed there, pecked at the corn for a few seconds, and flapped off. Glanz laughed in delight, dug more corn from his pocket, and spread the kernels over the ground. The seed drew a dozen crows that cawed and pecked at each other in competition for the prize.
“Do you know what a group of crows is called?” Glanz asked.
“A murder.”
“Ah, very good. It's not a flock, as most people think; it's a murder of crows. Because crows sometimes gang up and kill a dying cow.” He sighed and rubbed his hands together. “I did not pay that kid to kill Gil Harmony.”
“I don't believe you.”
Glanz shrugged. “Who cares?”
“Take off your glasses,” Billy ordered.
Glanz hesitated. Then he nodded and pushed the glasses up on his head, and turned pale green eyes to Billy.
“Can you see the truth now in my eyes?” Glanz asked, mocking him. “Can you see what you're looking for? Or do you see only the crimes of a young man, and the regret and the pain of an old one? Can you see my
soul
, Povich?”
Billy turned away. “I see nothing.” He dropped to the ground, dejected. “I had expected you wouldn't see me as a threat, and wouldn't
care enough to lie. I want the truth, even if it can't stand up in court.”
Glanz rubbed his hands together again in the cold. He folded himself down, sat on the thick bluegrass, and leaned back against his own tombstone. After a few moments, he said to Billy, “This is going to be my eternal view. I can see the marsh from here. I like that. The crows will keep me company. Margery has lain here alone for a long time. But not much longer. I'm dying, Povich.”
“Dying? Dying how?”
“The cancer in me is as malignant as my nightmares.” He smiled sadly at Billy. “Six months, give or take, is the time I have left.”
What to say?
I'm sorry
didn't fit the moment. Billy had just accused him of ordering a murder. He said nothing.
“I'm about to meet the real Judge face-to-face,” Glanz said, casting his eyes skyward, “the one who doesn't need testimony to know everything you've ever done. He has felt every drop of blood I spilt in my life, and will hold those crimes against me. I did not increase my burden, this close to my judgment, by killing Gil Harmony.”
“But he put your son away. You threatened him.”
Glanz grimaced at a painful thought. He said, “David's sentence is an agony in my heart, second only to Margery's death. My greatest regret is that he took after me, and not his mother. But I can't say the sentence was unjust, and I told Gil Harmony that.”
“What you told him,” Billy corrected, with anger rising, “is that you'd have your revenge.”
“In the restaurant, yes, that's what I said,” Glanz conceded. “Gil and I had arranged that encounter over the telephone.”
“I don't believe you.”
He shrugged and gazed over the marsh. “Who cares?” he said again. But the tone was too soft; it seemed he
did
care if Billy believed him. “I had to make a show of it to avoid looking weak to my
employees
.
I need their loyalty. Forever. The men I employ must take care of Robbie after I'm gone.”
“And Gil agreed to go along with this?”
“Gil Harmony was a father. He understood what fathers must do.”
What Glanz claimed was
outrageous
, though in a funny way it made sense. Gil told Kit not to report the threat to the police. The judge had not taken it seriously.
All for show
, he had told her. Maybe that wasn't bluster; maybe the judge with the double life had told the truth. All for show.
Glanz stroked his wife's tombstone. “She could have been canonized, this woman.”
Billy felt a crack in his hatred of Rhubarb Glanz. The mobster had all but admitted being a murderer in his youth, so why lie about killing the judge? Even if he suspected Billy wore a wire, Glanz would be dead from cancer before a trial.
“You'll see your wife, soon, I guess,” Billy offered.
“Naw, not me; I'll not see heaven,” he said, sounding matter-of-fact about it. “Not after the life I've lived.”
“What about redemption? You've got six months to repent. You're lucky, in a way. Most people have no idea when the end will be.”
“It's too late,” Glanz said. “To plead for forgiveness now, as cancer eats me from the inside out, would be disrespectful.” He shut his eyes for a moment and seemed suddenly exhausted. “I'd be embarrassed to ask. No, Povich, I'll take what's coming. It's what I deserve.” A crow hopped near his feet. Glanz drew a few more seeds from his pocket and scattered them on the road.
Then he pulled up his sleeve and checked his wristwatch. “You were truthful about keeping Robbie busy,” he said. “Smart on your part—Robbie would shoot you where you sit.” His eyes narrowed. “He better damn well be okay.”
“We're not murderers, sir.”
Glanz looked at him with tight lips, and seemed to accept the
explanation. “Don't judge Robbie too harshly,” he advised. “What he did to you in that sandpit, he did to protect me. Are you a father, Povich?”
“I have a son.”
“Do you know what's the strongest and most complicated bond in the universe, by my experience?”
“Tell me.”
“The bond between father and son. No other relationship provokes such intense loyalty and pride. Or disappointment, competition, and even rage.”
“Rage?” Billy challenged.
“At a failure or a betrayal—rage, absolutely,” Glanz said. He tapped the back of his head against his own tombstone. “These feelings are larger than any individual. They go back a long way, not to our births—but to the birth of mankind. They are complicated feelings. Men don't talk about them; we speak through action.” He pointed at Billy. “Would you kill to save your son?”
“Of course,” Billy said. He surprised himself by how reflexively he had answered, and added, “If he were threatened.”
Glanz smiled. “You didn't even think about it. By instinct you know the relationship may require a moral man to kill.”
Billy picked at some grass and tossed the blades away. “My father is trying to kill himself.”
Did I just say that out loud?
“How so?”
“He's skipping his blood treatments. He's bored with his life, and with being too old and too sick to chase women in short skirts.”
“He's not bored with life,” Glanz said. “He is convinced of his own uselessness. Convince him otherwise and he will claw the earth to live.”
They sat together a few more minutes, watching the crows pick at the ground.
“I believe you,” Billy admitted.
“Who cares?” Glanz said weakly.
“But that leaves me further from the truth. I have no idea who paid Adam Rackers to kill the judge.”
“Reassess your assumptions,” Glanz advised. “One of them is wrong. When you find out which one, the truth will be obvious.”
T
he kitchen floor felt tacky under Billy's bare feet. “Somebody spilled something and didn't wipe it up,” he complained, though he had no mind to do anything about it at the moment. The cabinet had no clean mugs. Neither did the drying rack in the sink. He poured himself coffee in an old mason jar.
“You slept in,” the old man said. He had parked his wheelchair at his traditional place at the table. The newspaper comics lay spread before him.
“I've been awake in bed for a while, thinking about things.” Billy slurped ancient coffee and grimaced at the bitterness. At Bo's place on the table, disintegrating cornflakes floated in a bowl of milk.
“Bo at school?”
“I got him out the door, but that don't guarantee he got on the bus.”
“Thanks, Pop.”
The old man looked up in surprise from the funnies. “You're welcome.”
Billy pulled a chair from under the table, and found it occupied by
Mr. Albert Einstein. “Good morning, Al,” he said to the doll. “You had an IQ of a hundred eighty-five, but it's not smart to hide where you might get sat on.”
“We should talk about the doll,” the old man said.
Billy tossed Albert on the table and plopped down. “The way Bo was speaking, I thought we'd never see old Albert again,” he said. “I figured the kid had graduated to some new security blanket. Where'd you find Mr. Einstein?”
“Charlie Metts brought him up this morning after Bo left for school.”
“Hmm?”
The old man dithered with the newspaper for a few moments. He said, “Uh … Metts wanted to know how the twentieth century's greatest scientist wound up inside the casket of a nine-year-old boy who died of leukemia.”
“Oh, Jesus, Bo,” Billy whispered. He grabbed his own head … before it could explode.
“Charlie found the doll tucked shoulder to shoulder with the body, as if little Mr. Einstein here was keeping the dead boy company. Charlie loves Bo—as you know. So he ain't mad. But I'd say he's worried.”
This was Mr. Einstein's new mission. Top secret. Keep a dead boy company in a cold, dark grave.
Billy smeared tears on his palm. The kid's gesture was more
giving
to a family obliterated by disease than anything Billy could have done, despite Billy's grown-up mind and grown-up paycheck. He turned away from his father. “When's the funeral?”
“This afternoon.”
“Call Metts,” Billy directed. “Ask him to put the doll back in the casket, if the family doesn't mind. Tell him Mr. Einstein was a gift, from one lonely little boy to another.”
“Fine, Billy.”
“I have to meet Martin,” Billy said. “I've struck out on this case. I followed a one-way street to a dead end, and now there's no place to go. Rhubarb Glanz didn't pay to kill the judge.” He threw his head back, let out a long breath, and wrestled control of his tears. “It's over. Some truths are just unknowable. Harmony was Martin's friend. He won't be happy.”
“I'm taking the senior van to the hospital today,” the old man said. “Not for treatment—I'm done with that shit.”
Billy lacked the spirit to argue.
The old man explained, “But I thought, you know, I should say good-bye to Stu Tracy. I like the kid, and he's had a rough go of it. But he gets the bandages off his eyes in a few days … . At least he has a chance to get better and have a normal life, unlike some of us.”
The old man was trying to draw Billy into a conversation about speeding his death.
Suicide by inaction and procrastination.
“Not now,” Billy said. He left the table, adding ruefully on his way to the shower, “Stu's the one guy in this mess who can't see that I failed. But he's getting better, so even that's about to change.”
BOOK: Loot the Moon
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