Shoot the Moonlight Out, page 26
“I met Max once. He’d screwed an old lady I know out of her money and she asked me to go talk to him. He mentioned getting Charlie French involved like I should be scared. I knew Charlie’s name from the papers. He supposedly killed his wife and got away with it. Her family had been loaded but there was nobody left except her, so Charlie got all that money. He came around as Max’s strong arm guy for revenge, but it was right after Amelia died and he saw he didn’t have to do anything to hurt me.”
Lily’s never heard Jack talk like this. It’s a different him. Something in his eyes too. She had Jack figured as only one thing, a guy who’d lost his daughter and his wife, and she’s realizing she doesn’t really know anything else about his experience in the world.
Jack goes on: “That was unusual. He’s pretty relentless generally from what I hear, Charlie French is. Bobby’s gonna have big trouble. Eventually, anyway.”
Francesca drinks more whiskey, shaking her head frantically at the burn in her throat.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have anymore?” Jack says. “That okay? I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I think you’ve had enough. Drink your coffee.”
Francesca puts her hand around the mug and brings it up to her mouth, slurping away. She wiggles her nose at the coffee. “I should go warn him to run away. Should call at least. We were going to run away together but then he said it’d be better to wait. He says he knows a guy who can sell the drugs, but it’ll take time. I don’t know. No matter what he did, I don’t want him to die. What if this Charlie guy finds him? I should stop talking. What am I gonna do?” Wiping tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands now. “Last week I was falling in love. Now I’m all tangled up in something I didn’t do. I have this weight on my chest. I just feel like I can’t fucking breathe.”
Mairéad reaches over and squeezes Francesca’s shoulder. “Don’t cry, love. It’ll be okay. You didn’t know. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Francesca tries to stand up and staggers, almost toppling. “I should go warn him.”
“Don’t try to go anywhere. Not right now anyway. You’ve had too much to drink. You need to have a lie down.”
“I think that’s for the best,” Jack says.
Francesca nods.
Mairéad takes her by the arm, guides her into the living room, and helps her settle on the couch. Lily follows, standing there, not doing anything. Francesca lies on her back, her head against the hard arm of the ragged green couch. Mairéad maneuvers her around until she’s on her side, and she helps her scooch down away from the arm, stuffing a fringed throw pillow under her head. Francesca makes a noise of contentment. Her eyes flutter closed. Mairéad covers her with a red and black checkered wool blanket that makes Lily think of playing checkers with her father. The way they’d set the board up on the floor. The way he’d let her win three out of every four games but he’d really wreck her in the one game he allowed himself to have. They shut off the light in the living room and leave Francesca snoring in the dark.
“Holy shit, that was wild,” Mairéad says when they’re back at the kitchen table. “You two do not disappoint. A memorable evening in-fucking-deed. When I see the story in the papers tomorrow, I can rest assured I have the inside scoop. Five years from now, I’ll tell everyone at a pub one night the whole mess and they’ll think I’m lying. Plus, we have Lily’s stalker dead in Poughkeepsie. Grand.”
“I can’t believe this,” Lily says.
“I’m at a loss,” Jack says.
“I’m not sure if it’s harder to believe that Bobby would kill someone or that a cute girl like her would fall for him.”
“I mean, she said he looked like Matt Dillon,” Mairéad says.
“A little bit he does, but there’s no emotion in his eyes. Not much of anything. The kid I knew had zero character. Maybe he’s changed drastically. That happens from the beginning of high school to the end, right? Maybe he got charming.”
“Maybe he got dangerous. Dangerous can be sexy.”
Lily never did see the blueprints for charming or dangerous in Bobby, though. She thinks of the boy she knew. Slamming into the apartment and flopping on the couch. Slugging Sunny Delight in front of the open fridge in the kitchen. Eating grapes and leaving the seeds on the counter. His boxers hanging from the back of the door in the bathroom. The way he always seemed to smear the bathroom sink with his blue toothpaste. The way he never turned off a light in the apartment. The cologne he started wearing when he was twelve. Polo Sport. The same kind all the boys he went to school with were using. Gross. Little Bobby. Unbelievable. She guesses that, even then, he had a life she didn’t know, couldn’t know.
“Fuck,” she says. “I feel like I should help him.”
BOBBY
Bobby had taken Max Berry’s address and telephone book in the hopes of finding Charlie French’s number in there. He was thinking he could go to a payphone somewhere, call Charlie, put on a deep voice, and say it was someone else who’d stolen his stuff. One of the Brancaccios. Some client of Max’s. Just anything to lead the trail away from the kid who worked in the office, in case that came up as an option. He thought he could then call the next day and the day after that, either talking to Charlie or leaving messages, and each time he’d pin it on someone else—a dirty cop, Max’s folks, whoever—just to create more chaos. He’d even had the thought of saying it was Jack Cornacchia, but that seemed too cruel. He imagined Charlie’s head spinning in all directions. He’d see everyone around him as the person who snagged his stash from the safe. The city itself would become a thief.
It was a good idea, except Bobby hadn’t acted on it. Charlie’s number was in the book, scrawled hastily in Max’s demonic chicken scratch print, but Bobby couldn’t bring himself to go outside and dial the number and hear Charlie’s voice, even if only on a message machine. He’s just been hiding in his room all week, tense, playing video games, waiting for the news to break, waiting for his father to ask why he hasn’t been going to work, wondering how he’d explain the coincidence of his stopping work and Max’s being found dead when the time comes.
Bobby’s reconnected with Zeke upstate, which is cool, and he’s planning on getting the drugs up there soon and then Zeke will sit on them for a while before slowly selling them off. Whatever’s made, they’ll split fifty-fifty. In addition, there’s all the other money. Fifty grand. He’s sitting on that too for now. It’s hidden, along with the drugs and the gun, in the bag up on the high shelf in his closet. He keeps trying to call Francesca, but she wants nothing to do with any of it. All those movies she loves—she lives in a world of fantasy. She’s cool with talking about going on the run, living like Bonnie and Clyde, but when it came down to it the shit was too real. He guesses he understands. He scared her. He scared himself. What he’s turned out to be capable of. Still, that week with her was the best of his life. He’s just become something he didn’t know he could be. He’s proven himself to himself. Maybe this is his calling, being a badass.
Holing up with his Nintendo 64 is about all that’s gotten him through the waiting. He’s sitting on his red bean bag chair in front of the TV, his eyes pissy from staring at the screen so much. He’s been eating cold pizza and cereal when he gets hungry, scrounging the cabinets for snacks that aren’t stale. His dad has a new girlfriend, which explains why he’s even more inattentive than usual. Her name’s Jessica. She’s from Midwood. They’ve gone out every night this week, which has worked out well. The timing’s good. His dad, Danny, is at his best when he’s just met a woman and he’s trying to throw a lay on her. He leaves money for food, though Bobby currently doesn’t need money for anything. He tries to act as if they’re a normal father and son, living it up sitcom-style in this shitty apartment. He tries to act as if one wife of his, Bobby’s mother, didn’t disappear like a ghost in the night, having divorce papers delivered, and that the next, Grace, hadn’t skedaddled once she had the real him figured out. He tries to act as if he’s a prize, as if they’re both prizes, when they’re the opposite of prizes.
He hears Danny get home now, rattling through the front door. Bobby’s not even sure what time it is. Probably after 10:00 P.M. He’s been staring at Donkey Kong 64 for at least five hours. His stomach’s rumbling. His mouth’s dry. The room smells of his bottled up funk. He should open the window and go out on the fire escape for a stretch.
“Bobby?” Danny calls out from the kitchen. Bobby can hear that he’s drunk. He can hear it in his voice but also in how he drops the keys on the table.
“Yeah?” Bobby says.
Danny comes thundering down the hall and knocks on his door. Hard. A cop knock. A drunk dad knock. “Bobby?” he says again.
“It’s fucking open, Danny,” Bobby says. “Take it easy.”
His father turns the knob and pushes the door open. He stands there in his best cheap suit, plaid tie undone, and a sauce stain on his wrinkled dress shirt. He wobbles a bit and then props himself up against the jamb. “Watch your mouth, huh?” he says. “And don’t call me Danny.”
Bobby shrugs. “Sorry. You went out with Jessica again? Where is she? I figured you’d bring her home.”
“I got her a car service and sent her back to her place.” He pauses, burps loudly. “Did you hear about Max? It’s been on the news all day.”
“No. What about Max?”
“He was killed. Right there in his own office. Jesus Christ. It’s terrible. His folks found him. They think it happened a few days ago, maybe even a week. The last time anybody saw him was at the bank eight days ago. When’s the last time you saw him? You haven’t been in to work, right?”
“He called me last week and told me he didn’t need me right now, not to come in for a while,” Bobby says, not taking his eyes off the screen, thumbing buttons on his controller.
“The cops haven’t called to talk to you?”
“Nope. I didn’t even know until you told me. I’ve been playing my game. And I don’t know if many people really know I work there. I mean, it’s all under the table.”
“They’ll come around. A few people must know. I know. He paid you off the books, right? You should call the cops. It doesn’t look good otherwise.” Danny comes in and sits down on Bobby’s unmade bed, the sheets and comforter crumpled against the wall. “Jesus Christ. Who would kill Max? He was shady, sure, but he was a harmless guy.”
“Yeah.”
“What was your impression working with him this last little while?”
“I don’t know. He was weird. He said weird things.”
“Weird like how?”
“Weird like he asked me what my shoe size was a few times. He also asked to watch me drink a carton of milk once.”
Danny scratches his head and then he undoes his tie and rips it off. Rumors had been out there that Max liked the boys who worked for him, that he said inappropriate things to them. Bobby’s thinking he could arouse his dad’s suspicions that Max might’ve been killed for a reason he hadn’t even considered. Anyhow, those things are true. Max had said plenty of things to Bobby that were strange, played initially as a goof. Like asking to watch him drink a carton of milk. That was, Bobby first figured, Max trying to be funny.
“I can’t believe he’s dead,” Danny says. “He was my partner in chem lab in high school. We worked stage crew and ran track together. He was a dork. That was it. A harmless dork.”
Bobby thinks about what happened after Francesca left the office to go outside, how—with Max taped helplessly in the chair—he held a yellow pages directory up to his head and shot him through it, the book muffling the noise of the shot slightly. Something he’d seen in a movie. It was the only way out he could think of. He hadn’t planned on it, not at first anyway, but then he knew it was the only option. Leaving Max alive meant losing the money and drugs. There was no way Max wouldn’t say it was him. Bobby never could’ve pictured himself shooting someone but then the gun was in his hand and he just found it incredibly easy, even thrilling. He didn’t think about Max as a man. It was easy not to think about him that way.
“Are you okay?” Danny asks. “I remember, when I was a kid, there was this guy I knew pretty well, Armond, who was killed in a hold-up. I must’ve been around twelve or thirteen. Since you’re older maybe you know how to deal with it. I remember being so scared. I didn’t sleep for months after that. I’d known old people who’d died of natural causes, but Armond was only in his forties and I was really naïve to the fact that something bad like that could happen to someone I know. I used to sit at my window every night, waiting, thinking it was going to happen to Grandma or Grandpa or even me at Uncle Jules’s hardware store, that one day someone would come in with a gun and that’d be that.”
“I’m fine,” Bobby says, really mashing buttons, pulsing along on his game, throwing pixelated barrels.
“You don’t want to talk about how you’re feeling at all?”
“Nope.”
His dad reaches out and takes the controller away. He gets up and manually switches off the TV. “Come on, I’m trying to talk to you here. The least you could do is stop playing.”
Bobby continues to stare at the black screen. “I don’t know. I’m fine. I’m nothing. I’m not scared. Max was involved with some sketchy people. He definitely knew mob guys.”
“Yeah?”
Bobby nods.
“Huh,” Danny says. “Whatever happened, it makes me scared that I got you a job there. What if you’d been there when this happened? What then? They might’ve killed you too. Maybe he knew he was in trouble. Maybe that’s why he told you not to come in. Truth is, I guess I know what he does—what he did—isn’t totally legal. He must’ve pissed off the wrong folks. I feel like I should call the cops. I feel like you need to talk to them. Maybe you can think of somebody who came around who might’ve been planning this.”
“Just let it go. I don’t know anything. They won’t come here for me.”
A loud knock on the front door jolts them both. “Maybe that’s them,” Danny says.
Bobby shrugs. His mouth goes dry. He’s sweating. Could be that he misjudged the situation and the cops found out about him and they’re poking around, asking questions of anyone who might have a lead. Has to be. People so rarely knock on their door, unless it’s the landlord or one of his dad’s girlfriends. He’s so stupid, believing that hardly anybody knew he worked at Max’s. Of course people knew. He went into Chico’s Market every day. He ran errands for Max at the bank and the post office and had to go to a law office on Fifth Avenue a few times. “Maybe it’s Jessica?” Bobby says.
“I don’t think so. I put her in a car. Probably the cops heard from somebody you worked at Max’s. Who else would come around this late?”
More knocking. Louder this time.
They go out together. Bobby stands by the kitchen counter as his dad looks through the front door peephole. “Who’s there?” Bobby asks his dad in a whisper.
“It’s the cops,” Danny says. He asks who it is just to make them say it, and they identify themselves as Detective Chen and Detective Rinaldi. They say they’re looking for Bobby.
Bobby’s panicking on the inside, trying to prepare himself for the questions these detectives might ask. He worries that he left something behind, that his prints were somewhere, and then he remembers that of course his prints would be everywhere because he worked there and that would lead the cops to him no matter what. He feels so stupid that he hadn’t thought of that. What else hasn’t he thought of?
He knows he just has to play it cool. No way they have anything on him. He just has to say Max was being weird and fired him last week. Maybe he can make it seem like he thought Max was in big trouble.
Danny takes the chain off the door, opens up, and lets the two detectives in. Chen identifies himself. Rinaldi doesn’t. Danny seems sober now. He does the talking. He says they heard about Max. How goddamn awful. He says that Bobby didn’t work there that long. He says that he went to high school with Max. He’s the one who got Bobby the job. Bobby’s taking a year off to figure things out after graduating from OLN. He seems to realize that he’s rambling. He stops talking, blows on the back of his hand, and smells it, trying to confirm to himself that he’s not coming off like an alkie.
The detectives turn their attention to Bobby. They ask when he was last at the office, if anything unusual had happened that they should know about.
Bobby looks past them and lies. He says Max told him to stop coming around. He says a strange guy came by and gave Max some trouble. He says the guy’s name was Charlie Something. Charlie French.
The detectives both nod. One of them is taking notes on a small lined pad.
“What was in the safe Max had?” Rinaldi asks.
“I was never allowed to see,” Bobby says. “Max always sent me out when he put stuff in or took stuff out of the safe.”
“My son’s not a suspect, right?” Danny asks. “Look at him. He couldn’t hurt a fly. His prints are probably everywhere, but he worked there, so that’s why.”
“We’re just asking questions right now,” Rinaldi says.
They ask a few more. Nothing too difficult. Nothing that makes Bobby uneasy. Maybe they’re just trying to get a read on him. He relaxes as the questioning winds down. Chen gives him a card and tells him to call if he thinks of anything else. He tells him not to go anywhere since they’re probably going to need to talk to him again tomorrow. Danny goes and stands next to Bobby and takes the card. He laughs and says his son will definitely lose it so he had better hang onto it. Chen and Rinaldi leave.
Danny closes the door behind them. “It’s so nerve-racking talking to cops,” he says. “Imagine how it feels if you actually did something.”
“Yeah,” Bobby says.
“Were you scared? It’s normal. It’s okay.”
“I wasn’t really scared. I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t there. I don’t care about Max.”
“That’s not nice. Max was my friend. We weren’t super close or anything, but I knew him a long time. You should be asking me how I feel. Am I doing okay? My friend was murdered.”
