The Moonlight (2 page)

He ran the heel of his hand over his slicked-back hair and turned around to peer at Mrs. Patimkin, as if he could hardly believe such a creature existed.

“What do you do for laughs, Georgie?  I ain’t seen a pussy under a hundred years old since I got here.”

With a horrified sense of recognition, George looked from the man named Charlie to Mrs. Patimkin and then back to Charlie.  Mrs. Patimkin was still busy with her lace handkerchief.  She hadn’t heard a word.  She was pretty vague sometimes, but she wasn’t that far gone.  Charlie just didn’t exist for her.

“She doesn’t know he’s here,”
George thought, as the noise in his head slowly flooded his brain with a tormenting pain, as if pieces of broken glass were being rubbed into it. 
“He’s only here for me.”

“I’m gettin’ stronger, Georgie,” Charlie went on, the cruel smile returning to his lips—he was the kind who only smiled with his mouth.  “Years and years it took me, but I’ve always had plenty of time.  See?  Here I am out in broad day.  And before I’m done every one of you fuckers is gonna settle up with me for what he owes.”

“I didn’t, Charlie,” George whispered, so softly that Mrs. Patimkin didn’t even look up.  “I didn’t. . .”

His voice simply choked off.  He couldn’t seem to breathe.

“Yes you did, Georgie.  And you’re gonna pay for it.”

Charlie shook his head, and sighed loudly.

“Like I said, Georgie, you’re not lookin’ good—not good at all.  The years sure have taken their toll.  You want to see what they’ve done to me?”

The change was almost instantaneous.  The flesh in Charlie’s face seemed to wither and go gray and the eyes shriveled in their sockets.  All at once George was assailed with the overpowering smell of putrefying flesh.  Right in front of him, the man was rotting away.

The noise in George’s head became a scream of unbearable pain—he could almost feel the blood seeping out through the ruptured veins in his brain.

Charlie grinned, because with that face a smile would have been impossible.  His teeth were yellow, like ancient ivory.  Pieces of flesh, black and soft with decay, were falling away from his jawbone.  Maggots, fattened on corruption, were crawling through his hair.

“You have this coming, Georgie,” he said.  “You were . . .”

But George Patchmore never heard the end of it, because there was a terrible explosion inside his skull, and everything before his eyes turned red, and then black, as the emptiness of death overwhelmed him.

June 7, 1990

Anybody who wants to make a living in real estate learns to keep his mouth shut.  Sometimes people like a house with a little history, but they don’t want to hear ghost stories about the place where they plan to sleep at night.  It can put them right off a sale.

Besides, Jack Matheny didn’t know anything except the old ragbag of town gossip that was common property, so what could he have told Philip Owings that would have made any difference?  He didn’t know, but afterwards, when he remembered the way things turned out, he always wondered if he should have said something.

It wasn’t as if he would have had anything to lose, because Owings already owned the old Moonlight Roadhouse before he ever stepped off the train from New York.

It was a legacy, the roadhouse and a couple of thousand dollars, just enough to make it worth the inconvenience of coming all the way out from California.  So he was in this trouble before he even set foot in Greenley.  And it took about five seconds for Jack to figure out Owings needed this money too much to be warned off by anything he could have told him.

It was the first really hot day of the summer, the kind that seems to switch itself on about eleven thirty and catches you unaware.  Matheny’s car battery had been giving him trouble, so he was afraid to run the air conditioning and thought he might boil in his polyester sport coat.  The parking lot behind the railway station in Greenley was as open as a soccer field, no shade anywhere.  And the train was late.  He just stood there, wiping out the brim of his straw hat, thinking that his commission on this sale, assuming that he could find Owings a buyer, probably wouldn’t be enough to cover two weeks’ expenses.

But you can inherit obligations as well as real estate, and managing the Moonlight Roadhouse property, although it hadn’t been a real roadhouse for forty years, had been part of the business almost since the day Jack’s dad had first gotten his broker’s license.  George Patchmore had been a friend, so looking after the place and collecting the rent—when there was somebody to rent it—became one of those family favors that it is just about impossible to disown.

Matheny had hopes that he could find a builder who would tear the old place down and maybe put up condos or something, and that would be the end of that.  Besides, until the week before, he hadn’t known that Philip Owings even existed, so he figured he didn’t owe him spit.

Or maybe he did.  And maybe that was how it all came to grief.

Anyway, the one-fifteen finally made it in, twenty minutes late and crawling like a wounded snake, and this guy steps off with a suitcase that looks like he got it from the Goodwill, and right away Jack didn’t like him.  His suit was too big for him and his hair was too long, and he had “loser” written all over him.  A flake, Jack figured, and from California yet.  He was probably a vegetarian or something and had a fetish about preserving dilapidated old buildings.  Jack knew he’d be trouble; he just didn’t know what kind.

And, anyway, he didn’t like skinny guys.  Granted, Owings was probably fifteen or twenty years younger, but Jack just thought a man ought to begin to look a little comfortable when he starts pushing into his middle thirties, like he finds life easy to take and plans to stay.  Philip Owings looked as nervous as a whippet.

“Mr. Owings?  Jack Matheny—here, let me take that for you.”

He wrestled Owings’ suitcase away from him and shook his hand, which was long-fingered and cold to the touch, a little reminder that the train had probably been as cool as the inside of an ice chest.

“It’s about a fifteen minute drive,” he went on, trying not to hate the guy because the New Haven Railroad had its air conditioning working.  “I’ve had the electricity and water turned on, like you asked.  Nobody’s lived there for about five years now—you really plan to stay. . ?”

Philip Owings had his window rolled down and was watching the traffic, so Jack couldn’t see his face.  At first the only answer he got was a shrug.

“Since this may take a while,” Owings said finally, “I’d just as soon not pay a couple of month’s worth of motel bills.”

“Well, that makes sense.”

Shit, nobody had asked to look at his bank balance.

Owings went on staring out the window.  They seemed to have run out of conversation.

Jack just caught himself before asking if he had any family out here, because of course he hadn’t.  After old George died in a nursing home it took the lawyers two months to track down a next of kin—a nephew, since George’s boy had gotten himself killed in Korea.  Probably New England, or what passes for New England just an hour’s drive from Manhattan, was as alien as the planet Mars.

“I gather you don’t expect much of a sale.”

They were just nosing across the Post Road and, frankly, he took Jack by surprise.  He was a few seconds figuring out that Owings probably meant the Moonlight.

“Well, no—not much of one,” he said, feeling, as you always do on these occasions, as if he’d been asked to assess the marriage chances of someone’s ugly daughter.  “The land might fetch something by itself, but the buildings are derelict.  It’s been years since we’ve even been able to rent the place.”

“And this uncle of mine never wanted to sell?”

“No, he never would.”

Jack didn’t tell him that of course he’d tried, in every way he could think of, to get George to let him put the old place on the market before it fell to pieces—“let the developers knock it down,” he’d say, “and maybe put up a nice Pizza Hut or something”—but George would just grip the arms of his wheelchair, swallow hard, and shake his head.  One time, about a year before he died, he even started to cry, trembling all over, as if he’d lost the hope of heaven.

So Jack never asked him again.  He didn’t tell Owings any of this, because it wouldn’t do him any good to know which rat hole his inheritance had gone down.

Instead he just laughed and said, “Your uncle was a character.  I guess he never got over it when the town incorporated that far north and he couldn’t get by with paying off the county sheriff anymore.  The roadhouse didn’t make enough to let him bribe a whole police force, so he had to go legit—more or less.  That’s when the place began to slide, right after the war, when everything else started to pick up around here.”

Owings turned his head, letting Jack see his face for the first time since he’d started the car.  He smiled, sort of, and looked interested, like he’d just woke up.

“What was he, a gangster?” he asked.  Jack shook his head.

“Not exactly, not George.  He was just a guy running a business.  But there was always a business inside the business, if you follow me—and there was always something going on upstairs.  Bathtub gin until Prohibition ended, after that gambling and even women.  Always in a small way, but always something.  Hell, even when I was a kid you could still drive out there on a Sunday afternoon and get George to sell you a bottle of Scotch.  It was one of those things that everybody knew about and nobody really wanted to change.  A tradition, sort of—an institution.  Part of the town’s romantic past.  Then George had his stroke back in ’55, and that was that.  We’ve had four or five businesses in there since, but none of them really made a go.”

He didn’t tell Owings about how the place had been a motel back in the Sixties, and about how that came to grief when a little party in one of the upstairs rooms had gotten out of hand and a fellow with a snootful of LSD cut his girlfriend to pieces with a broken beer bottle.  And he didn’t tell him how, one time while the property was between tenants, some kidnappers had used it as a hiding place for their victim, and how, two months later, the little girl’s corpse had been found in the cellar.  And he didn’t tell him about Harve Wickham, who had tried to run a filling station out of the old roadhouse garage and had ended up one night hanging himself from one of his own gas pumps.  He left all that out—hell, the guy had to sleep there that night.

They drove through Shallow Creek, which was where Jack did most of his business.  It was a nice place, a bedroom community for all the corporation lawyers who took the 8:07 to New York five days a week, full of great big homes set well back from the road, mostly Tudor and Norman Stone that sold for five hundred thousand and up—he had sold one in there for a million two once, but he had had to split the commission with the listing broker.

He noticed that Owings was paying very close attention, but he just smiled and let him live a few minutes longer in his fool’s paradise, because once they got through Brookville, one of the little villages that Greenley had gobbled up back in the Fifties, things would start to change fast.

Brookville had a hardware store, a Grand Union, a place that rented video tapes, a bank, two liquor stores, a pharmacy, a dank little bar listed on its property tax records as The Brookville Tavern but known locally as Rumbles, a post office, a couple of gas stations and a restaurant and fish shop called the Lobster Pot.  That was it.  The Old River Road slipped through, made a shallow right turn at the traffic light, and kept on going past houses and vacant lots that somehow had been forgotten in the town’s relentless march towards gentrification.  Everybody who lived there had always lived there.  Pickup trucks with their wheels off rusted quietly in people’s front yards, and the fences had been so long without paint that the wood had gone gray as death.  The trees branches, which somehow the city never got around to pruning, met high over the road like the ribs of a cathedral vault.  It was a quiet place—as you drove through you could almost hear the exhausted sigh of collapsing property values.

And then, for about half a mile, there was nothing.  And then there was the old Moonlight Roadhouse.

The roadhouse was like an elderly aunt you visited twice a year.  You hated the old girl, but she was family so you had to go, and she always ended up telling you some nasty story about how a hundred years ago she had caught your grandfather in the woodshed with the hired girl.  The roadhouse was full of secrets—everybody’s secrets.  And you had the feeling that if you made the mistake of hanging around too long you would hear them all.

Jack had been there just three days before, to make sure that Mr. Owings didn’t get any excessively unpleasant surprises when he inspected his property, but he needn’t have bothered.  The roadhouse seemed to have reached a certain level of decay and then simply stopped, as if holding itself together by sheer force of will.  Once a quarter he drove out and had a walk around the perimeter, just to make sure no one had broken in, since empty buildings were a standing temptation to the world.  And the police patrols looked in pretty regularly—one of the advantages Jack could offer a client was a relative on the force.

But these were unnecessary precautions, because nobody used the back parking lot as a lover’s lane and no tramps tried to flop for the night in the coal cellar.  The locals knew better, and strangers learned.  One time, about three years ago, Jack had found the back door standing open and a broken pane of glass where somebody had reached inside to throw the bolt.  Whoever it was had walked about halfway into the house—you could still see his bootprints in the dust on the floor—and had turned right around and walked out.  He hadn’t even stopped to steal an ashtray.  Jack knew just how he must have felt.  He didn’t go inside unless he had to.