Moonlight Falls (37 page)

As for the Prosecution, they had no choice but to rest. Rest in peace, that is.

The bad news was that the Judge referred all further investigations of my apparent complicity in the illegal body parts operation to a team of F.B.I. agents who were present at the convening.

It was at the conclusion of these proceedings that the portly, gray-haired Judge Hughes stood up, told me I was free to go. When he brought the gavel down hard against the wood block I thought my heart would explode through my chest. I felt that free, that relieved. As though God Himself had granted me a stay from eternal damnation.

Stanley stood up, grabbed hold of my hand, pulled me away from the table as if the judge might change his mind at any time. He led me down the center aisle of the courtroom out onto the marble steps where a wave of reporters, journalists and T.V. crews converged upon me.

“Mr. Divine, are you planning on bringing suit against New York State for Malicious Prosecution?”

“Mr. Divine, if you did not kill Scarlet Montana, can you offer us a theory as to who did and why?”

“Mr. Divine, where will you go now that you are a free man?”

Stanley continued to pull me away from the courthouse, through the media gauntlet, microphones jabbing me in the face, against my mouth, cameras flashing in my eyes, hands clawing at my shirt and jacket.

Until finally, Stanley stopped.

“Mr. Divine has no comment at this time as his ordeal has been very trying. For now, he wishes only to return home for a much deserved rest.”

I spotted her at the bottom of the stairs, out of the corner of my left eye.

Just a single woman dressed all in black with a matching black hat and veil covering her face. She stood on the sidewalk, a little girl beside her pressed up against her leg, holding tightly to the hem of her short skirt as if for dear life.

Listen, I didn’t even have to think about it.

I never was officially aware that Brendan Lyons had a little girl, or a wife for that matter. But my gut instinct told me right off that these two people had belonged to him.

When we reached the bottom of the courthouse steps, I stopped. Stanley nearly tore the sleeve off my jacket he was so anxious to leave.

“What are you doing, Divine?” he shouted above the collective roar of the reporters. “We have a car waiting for us.

But I pulled myself from his grip, made my way towards the woman and her little girl.

That’s when a funny thing happened.

The gang of reporters and T.V. people went suddenly quiet. Just like that. Without having to look for them, I knew that their cameras and spotlights were being focused on the exchange that was about to take place between the wrongly accused and the surviving family of a man murdered in his prime.

I stood before the woman.

She raised her black-netted veil, exposed a young pale face and sad brown eyes. Eyes that seemed like they would melt if so much as one more tear passed through them.

I stepped closer to her. As I did so, the little girl pressed herself into her mother even tighter. The kid trembled.

“Ask me anything,” I said, forcing my words not from my mouth and lips, but from the back of my throat.

She sniffled, not attempting to wipe away the brand new tears that bled from her eyes, ran down her pale cheeks.

She offered me three words.

“Did … he … suffer?”

I found myself exhaling a breath so deep, for a split second I thought I might pass out.

“No,” I said. “He didn’t suffer.”

Of course, I had no idea if he had suffered or not. After all, I hadn’t been there when Cain shot him in the head. But then, I also felt that a detailed and sequential explanation of events was not necessary. I’d already given her the answer she needed and wanted. Whether she believed me or not was a matter for her and God to decide.

First the woman nodded. Then she turned away from me.

Her husband had double-crossed me. That wasn’t her fault.

I found it almost impossible to move as she took hold of her daughter’s hand and led her back down the sidewalk towards an awaiting taxi.

91

AFTER MORE THAN A week of seclusion the reporters seemed to have gotten the message and decided to leave me alone. I wasn’t about to say a word to them. Not with the body parts investigation still pending.

Stanley’s orders.

One afternoon, the camera crews, photographers and newspaper people simply packed up and drove away. I have to admit it though, I felt kind of bad about their splitting the scene. Kind of lonely. But then I imagined that in terms of current events, the news of my innocence in the Scarlet Montana case was no longer fresh.

Lola took to making me three squares a day and, within a week, I put on some badly needed pounds. But that still didn’t mean I wouldn’t experience more seizures, more memory lapses, more bad decision making. Only time would tell.

Lola and I shared dinner almost every evening. Sometimes she slept over. But all that swiftly ended. Why? Suffice it to say that with the crisis behind me, we had a little more time to focus on our friendship. Too much time.

Case in point: one night, after dinner, we both went up to my bed to lie down, watch
Nip-Tuck
on the television. We held hands like teenagers. She cuddled into me. We kissed, kissed again. She tasted sweet. Her big brown eyes, soft brown hair and tan skin made her look as sweet as she tasted.

We had sex.

We broke the barrier from which neither one of us would ever return. And I loved every precious minute of it.

Would I ever learn?

The next morning, Lola was sullen, if not downright sad. Our friendship, our wonderful friendship. It was behind us.

“Everything will change now,” she said in her soft, deep voice, dark eyes tearing up. “Just wait and see, Divine.”

I told her to take some time to think it all over. She did.

That left me spending most of my days and nights alone.

I took advantage of the time by running and lifting weights sometimes twice a day. I made sure to regain my strength, even before I paid a visit to Dr. Mary Ellen Lane who removed the stitches from my arm, checked over my beat-up ribs. While it wasn’t quite yet the time for a full checkup, she made sure to give me a thorough going-over about being more responsible for my health.

“At least I’m not smoking,” I told her.

But she didn’t find the revelation the least bit humorous.

While Kevin Ryan was reburied without legal reprisals from his still grieving parents, so too were the Montanas. Because of his involvement with the body parts operation, Jake was refused a pomp and ceremony funeral. In fact, most of his department stayed away from the proceedings entirely. Or so I’m told. I too did not attend the ceremony.

The one person I did leave the house for was George Robb.

It turns out that he was well on the mend, his prognosis a good one. Although he had been knocked entirely unconscious by the close-range shot, the 9 mm round had only wounded him (however severely) when it entered his chest and lodged itself somewhere up inside his right shoulder. Considering his already fragile condition, the State had immediately approved him for more pharmaceutical marijuana.

I visited him inside his third floor private room at the Stormville Medical Center, having made sure to bring plenty of paperback mysteries and a surprise pint of Jack that I stuffed into the bottom of the paper bag. Together we downed a couple of shots apiece when the young, blond-haired nurse wasn’t looking. But I knew that eventually, George would be offering her a swig or two, along with a nice, warm, cozy spot for her to rest her feet on his hospital bed. If I knew George like I thought I did, I knew he wasn’t about to waste even a single moment of his ninth life.

He toked gently off a medical joint and tried to introduce us not long before I took my leave.

“This man here is my partner,” he said, a mild stoned-drunkenness already settling in to his bedridden skin and bones. “We fight crime together.”

The young full-figured nurse gave me the once-over. The blue-eyed gal wore a low cut, short white dress that came to mid thigh. I guessed her hair to be natural blond. The way it was pinned up under her little white hat showed off the smooth skin on the back of her neck.

“Which one are you?” she said, not without a sly smile. “Batman or Robin.”

“Superman,” I said, unable to resist the temptation.

“That’s funny,” she explained. “That’s what Skinny said.”

“Skinny,” Robb repeated with a Cheshire Cat grin. “I think she likes me.”

As for the black market operation: like I said, it was still in the hands of the F.B.I. Aside from a phone call or two, I had yet to be called in for an interview or an interrogation or whatever was being planned. But then, I knew that it was only a matter of time until my name came up. Until then, I wasn’t even going to think about looking for work. But sooner or later it would become a necessity since I pretty much could discount any further employment—part-time or otherwise—with the S.P.D.

The power was turned back on, the place cleaned up, my credit and cash accounts restored, the lien on 23 Hope Lane revoked. But I still had bills to pay, including the thirty Gs I owed Stanley from my divorce. Curiously he hadn’t been bothering me about it. Nor had he mentioned the Deed to the house. Not even the collection agencies were knocking down my door. What’s more, I hadn’t so much as received a bill for my more recent representation. But then, I knew it was only a matter of time until the invoices came rolling in.

Lawyers will be lawyers, after all …

There was still the matter of Scarlet’s death, which as far as the S.P.D.’s newly reinstated S.I.U. was concerned, was officially being classified as a suicide, especially in light of the Grand Jury’s decision. I have to say, although I also knew that she had killed herself, I still couldn’t help but feel slightly uncomfortable about the whole thing. There was something gnawing at me, like an itch I couldn’t relieve. I was convinced that there had to be more to her death, more than met the eye besides a woman who gave up her own life in order that she might trash a few others.

In my heart, I knew there had to be another reason behind it all—something she never shared with me that maybe only she knew, or perhaps just she and Jake knew. And if that were indeed the case—that Scarlet and Jake shared some horrible secret that caused her to take her own life—then by all means they had taken it with them to their separate graves.

Finally, a funeral was held for Mitch Cain.

The department also refused to offer him the standard twenty-one-gun send-off. But from what I understand, not even Lynn showed up for the event, making his farewell a fairly frigid one.

Frigid air: something that might come in handy where he was headed.

One thing I did notice, however, during one of my flybys in the Mercedes funeral coach, was that a For Sale sign had gone up outside the Cain house. Obviously, Lynn was making definite plans with her newfound widowhood. Which prompted me to place a call.

She picked up the phone the same time my son picked up on a separate extension.

“It’s okay, babe,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

“Okay, mom,” he said before clumsily hanging up.

She said, “Hello.”

First I I.D.’d myself. Then I dispensed with the pleasantries, asked her if she would consider granting me at least half custody to our son. Now might be a good time for me to share responsibilities. I can’t say why, but when I said it, I thought my entire insides were going to spill out onto the floor. Maybe my anxiety had something to do with the chance I was taking by calling her. I knew that she would probably say no. I realized that with Mitch gone, his pension denied and the house up for sale (the proceeds of which were almost surely going to be seized by both state and federal agencies) that the only thing she had to hold on to was our boy. Still, it was worth the shot.

I remember her reaction.

How at first she said nothing. She just sort of inhaled and exhaled. For a beat or two it was as if she no longer possessed the strength necessary to make words.

Maybe she didn’t.

So imagine my surprise when she told me she admired Scarlet for what she had done. Admired her courage, her guts. How she managed to extend the ultimate fuckoff to them all.

“As much as I despised Scarlet Montana for what she did to me, to my family,” she confessed, “I was only too glad to help … in my own small way.”

Of course, that’s when the realization sank in.

In my mind I shouted,
You gave Scarlet the Curare. Scarlet let you in on what she was planning and you gave her the Curare and the speed. You’re a nurse. You’d have the access. You hated her because she was sleeping with your husband
.

I shouted it out in my head instead of over the phone because I really did not want to know the truth. If my instincts were right on and Lynn had indeed assisted in Scarlet’s self demise, then I could not begin to face the reality of it all. We had a son together, after all. Lynn, no matter who she was or what she had become, would always be his mother. I would prefer to think of her as someone who would not assist in a killing, even if that killing did turn out to be a suicide.

I was relieved when after a few weighted silent beats, she proceeded to say something else. But then it didn’t have anything to do with the Curare or the speed. It had everything to do with our son. In no uncertain terms, she was transferring half custody to me. She was heading out to Los Angeles for a while, until this thing blew over. For the time being, she wanted me to look after our son. Upon arrival in the City of Angels she would e-mail me with her new telephone number. For now I could expect the proper papers to be drawn up by her lawyer and delivered to me for signature as soon as they were completed. As for the boy, he would be dropped off on the following Monday morning. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone. She had a lot of soul searching to do. But until she made it back to the east coast, the boy would remain with me full time.