The Moonlight (40 page)

For a moment he seemed to lose interest, as if there were nothing in the world for him except a deck of cards and the necessity of arranging them in descending rows.

“You know, Phil, you’ve got a bad habit,” he said finally, without raising his eyes from the table.  “You make people mad at you.  That business with the old man last night—that was just awful.  I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon the cops ’ll want to talk to you about that.”

All at once, and with a terrible clarity, Phil understood.  He saw that he was damned.  Without hope of mercy, he was damned.

“It wasn’t me.”  He shook his head, knowing perfectly well that denial was pointless.  “It wasn’t me.  It was you.”

“Was it?”

The game seemed to be over.  Charlie turned his hand over and let the remaining cards spill face up onto the table.  It was impossible to guess if he had won or lost.

“Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.  But you’re the one the cops are gonna be left with, not me.  Not Charlie Brush.  I’m beyond their reach.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Yes it was, pal.  I may have held you, but you held the razor.  You cut Vito’s throat.  I couldn’t have made you do it if you didn’t want to.  You wanted to.”

“I didn’t—I. . .”

“Okay, maybe not.”  Charlie grinned, and for the first time his face looked gray and corpselike, his eyes dead.  “What difference does it make?  You think the cops ’ll care what you
wanted
?  You think
I
care?  The point is, you’re gonna take the fall.”

With the tips of his fingers he began to push the scattered cards back into a pile.  His hands were wrinkled and fleshless.

“You killed Vito Carboni,” he went on, in a flat, expressionless voice, “and Leo Galatina, and Sal Grazzi.  And tonight you’re gonna kill Sonny Galatina.  And then it’s gonna be that cop’s turn—I think maybe you’ll do Spolino in broad daylight, in front of a dozen witnesses.  What ’d be nice.  And then you and I’ll come right back here to wait for the posse.  You gonna let ’em take you alive, pal?  Not if you know what’s good for you.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

Phil put his hands up to the sides of his head, as if to keep it from falling apart.  He felt out of control—not just his life, but his very mind.  He wondered if he was going mad.

“Why?” he repeated, almost whispering the word.  “Why?”

“I told you, pal—because you tried to chisel me.”  The cards were now neatly stacked, and Charlie picked them up and cut the deck with one hand.  “We had a deal, and you tried to run out on me.  Well, I’m gettin’ even.  Ask your Uncle Georgie.  Ask Fingers Carboni.  Charlie Brush always gets even.”

“I don’t understand.”

“So don’t understand—why should I give a fuck what you understand?  But understand this, pal.  There’s no way I’m ever gonna let you get away from me.”

“I got away.”  Phil was almost sobbing with despair and remorse.  “If only I’d stayed. . .”

“I let you go.  I knew you’d be back.  I knew you’d come back for the money.  That’s why the car works now and didn’t last night—I couldn’t have you wandering
too
far off.”

Charlie’s brutal, inhuman laugh filled the tiny room.  The gray flesh seemed paper thin over his skull.

“But this time it’s all over,” he went on, the words still rippling with suppressed laughter.  “I hope you’ve enjoyed the mornin’, pal, because you’re all finished.  Your life is over—it belongs to me now.  Right this minute is absolutely the last time when you’ll be you.”

“What will you do to me?”

“I’m gonna put you to sleep.”

By seven fifteen, when Millie got off the graveyard shift at the Grand Union, Beth had already showered and dressed and was busy packing.

“Don’t tell me you’re moving back in with that bum,” Millie exclaimed when she came into the bedroom and saw the open suitcase on the floor.  “He only just threw you out.”

“We’re going away together.”

Beth didn’t even look up when she said it.  She was on her knees arranging little bundles of underwear and, frankly, she had forgotten all about her roommate.

Millie crawled up on her bed, kicked off her work shoes and, with an exhausted sigh, started fishing around in her night table for the box of chocolate-covered caramels and the back issue of
Cosmopolitan
that were her after hours solace.

“Then I just hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, rustling the pages angrily.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.  I just know what I have to do it.”

Something in her voice drew Millie’s attention away from an article on Tom Cruise.  She peered over the top of her magazine and saw that Beth was no longer even pretending to be busy, but was curled up in a posture of the most abject misery.  Tears were coursing down her face.

“It’s okay,” she said, waving a hand distractedly to keep Millie from coming down off the bed to embrace her.  “It’ll go away in a couple of minutes.  It’s just. . .”

“You want to tell me what happened, sweetie?”

Beth shook her head.  “Nothing happened—it wasn’t like that.  He was just here, was all.  And. . .”

“And he asked you to go away with him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?  Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“No. . . yes.  I don’t know.  Trouble, yes, I don’t know what kind.”

With a little despairing shrug, Beth managed to convey the impression that this trouble was beyond her understanding—that perhaps it was beyond anyone’s understanding.

“Don’t to it,” Millie said, as if the conclusion were obvious, like the sum of two plus two.  “Don’t go with him.  If he’s running from something, you can bet it’ll catch him—it always does with a guy like that.  Don’t let it catch you too.”

“What he’s running from can’t come after him.”

Just by lifting her gaze, Beth confirmed the utter truth of what she had said.

“It’s the Moonlight, isn’t it.”

“That’s right—it’s the Moonlight.”  For just a moment Beth put her hand over her eyes, as if trying to shield them from something.  “I should have listened to you, Millie, because you were right all along.  Bad things happen in that place.”

. . . . .

They waited together for Phil to return, but by ten o’clock that morning Beth was sure he wasn’t coming back.

“I can’t keep my eyes open another minute,” Millie said.  “Wake me when he gets here.”

A moment later Beth happened to look at her, lying there in her bathrobe, with part of the bedspread pulled over her, and she could see from the way Millie was breathing that she was already asleep.

Beth got up and went into the kitchen to make herself a mug of tea.  She was glad to be alone again, because she had to think.

Phil had her telephone number.  If there was a problem, why didn’t he call?  Could he have decided to leave without her?  It occurred to her what maybe she had misread the guy from the beginning—maybe all he had wanted last night was another roll in the hay before he disappeared for good.

She couldn’t believe what she was thinking.  Not him, not her Phil.  Besides, he had been too upset.  A man who is coming apart like that doesn’t walk a mile through the rain just to get laid.

He had meant to come back for her.  She was sure of that—he had meant for the two of them to go away together.

She sat down on the couch in the living room, holding the tea mug against her lap so that she could feel its heat through her bathrobe.  She wanted to feel comfortable and quiet and safe within the familiar walls of her apartment.  She wanted to slow down so that she could figure out what to do.

Except that there were limits to what you could expect from a mug of tea, and everything was spinning out of control.  She kept having to fight down the impulse to just surrender and let out the great spasms of weeping she felt gathering inside her.

At last, simply because she had to do something, she went back into the kitchen, where the phone was, and dialed Phil’s number.

She let it ring for perhaps two minutes, long after she knew no one was going to answer.  Finally she hung up.

Usually, when nobody answers the phone, that means nobody’s home.  It had been over four hours since Phil left the apartment.  He had said he wouldn’t be long,
just a few hours to collect what’s mine.
  Probably he had been and gone, and the Moonlight was standing empty.

Or maybe he really was there and knew it was her calling.  Maybe he just didn’t want to talk to her.

She went back into the living room and sat down on the couch again.  By the time she remembered her tea it was cold.

It was twenty-five to eleven.  He might have just left and be on his way—that was at least possible.  From the Moonlight into Brookville was almost exactly a mile.  Even if he was carrying a suitcase, the walk couldn’t take him more than twenty minutes.

At eleven o’clock she went into the bathroom, where there was a window that looked out on Old River Road.  She watched several cars drive by, but none of them was a wine-red Lincoln.  The sidewalks were empty.

He wasn’t coming.  There wasn’t any way around it.  He just wasn’t coming back.

All right—she wasn’t the first girl in the world to have a man run out on her.  It wasn’t a disaster.  She wasn’t some pregnant teenager who had been abandoned at the church door.  Her life wasn’t over.  She would still be alive tomorrow morning, and in a month’s time she would have trouble remembering what he looked like.  To hell with Phil Owings.

She sat down on the toilet seat and wept like a child, holding a hand towel up against her face to muffle the sound of her sobbing.

When she was finished, she felt utterly drained.  There wasn’t anything left inside her except a dull ache in her throat that was more a physical discomfort than an emotion.  She washed her face and went back into the living room.  It was only when she lay down on the sofa that she remembered how tired she was.

. . . . .

She woke up with a start and realized immediately that it was already the middle of the afternoon.  Her watch said three ten, so she was already late for work.  Well, she was just going to have to miss work today, and if she got fired that was too bad.

She was going over to the Moonlight.  She didn’t make a decision about it—she simply knew she was going.

Maggie was still asleep.  Beth didn’t really think she would find anything at the Moonlight, so she would probably be back long before Maggie woke up and found the apartment empty.  And even if she wasn’t, Maggie would assume she was at work.

Fine.  It would save a lot of explanations.  Beth didn’t want to be told she was doing something stupid.  She knew that for herself.

She kept thinking about how scared Phil had been last night.  He had been half crazy with fear, and he had come to her.  He hadn’t run away—he had come to her.  It was impossible to believe that now he would just take off without a word.  So she had to go to the Moonlight, just to see if somehow he was still there.  It was the only thing left to do, and she had to do it.

It was not quite three thirty when she left the apartment.  She didn’t even take her handbag, just her keys, which she slipped into the pocket of the light gray slacks she was wearing.  She went the back way, through the parking lot behind Feenie’s hardware, so she wouldn’t have to walk past the restaurant where she worked.

It was the hottest part of the afternoon, and there was a lot of humidity from the rain the night before.  Within a quarter of a mile, Beth could feel her nylon blouse clinging to her shoulder blades.

People stared as they drove past her on Old River Road.  She knew it was just because she was on foot, but it made her feel exposed and humiliated, as if everyone in the world knew what she was up to, that she had cut work to chase after her lover like an infatuated schoolgirl.

As she got further away from town, the branches of the trees on either side of the road grew together overhead to create an ever-darkening shade.  It was like being in a tunnel, and the dampness of the air began to feel almost clammy.

Yet the Moonlight was in a pool of bright sun.  It fairly gleamed in its new paint, so that it looked slightly unreal, a mirage, a trick played on the senses.  As she left the road and started up the gravel driveway, Beth had the sense of leaving one level of existence for another—like Alice, stepping through the looking glass.

The garage was standing open, and Phil’s Lincoln as still parked inside.  Beth did no more than glance in through the doorway, just to make sure that no one was there.

The front door was locked, but the door off the patio was ajar by couple of inches.  Beth went inside and looked around at the cavernous space that had once been the dining room.  The few remaining pieces of furniture were still covered with sheets, and there was a general air of desolation.

“Phil!” she shouted, still just inside the threshold.  The sound echoed and died away, leaving behind a silence that was like a reproof.  It was several seconds before she could nerve herself to proceed any further.

She went up to the second floor.  Phil’s shaving things were gone from the bathroom.  The clothes he had been wearing that morning were in a soggy tangle in the bathtub.