The Fall Moon Read online

  “The late ’90s model Cherokees are going to be worth a lot of money for my children and grandchildren. They were unique cars in their day. Like I said, I am a serious collector.” I gave her my most honest, genuine smile. “How high do I have to go?”

  Now she laughed more easily. “How high will you go?”

  “Well, so long as the condition is good on the inside and there are no later parts added…” I studied her face carefully. She raised her eyebrows in inquiry. I said, “Five grand?”

  “Tempting, but still not for sale.”

  I grinned. “Is the car yours or…?”

  “It’s my husband’s, but if you’ve checked the registration, you already know that, Mr…”

  “Stone. John Stone, from New York.”

  “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Stone. You don’t have Jeeps in New York?”

  I shrugged. “I had to retire early and this is my hobby. It’s an excuse to travel, and San Francisco has always been one of my favorite towns. So, here I am. I’m prepared to go a little higher if you’ll let me talk to Mr. Freeman.”

  “He’s at work.”

  “Can I come back?”

  She looked at her watch. “He’ll be back in about ten minutes if you want to wait.”

  “As long as I’m not intruding.”

  She studied my face for a long moment, then shook her head. “No, you’re not intruding. Come on in.” She raised her hand and waved across the road at the house opposite. “But if you don’t mind, we’ll leave the door open. We run a pretty tight neighborhood watch here, and if Maggie sees the door close, she’ll call the cops.”

  I nodded. “Smart. I wish more people in New York did that kid of thing.”

  She led me through the house to the back yard, where she had a round table on the lawn under a parasol. “Can I offer you anything, Mr. Stone?”

  “Nothing at all, thanks.”

  She sat and I sat too. “You been in Antioch long?”

  “All my life.”

  “It’s a nice place. Quiet. A haven. The birthplace of Christianity as we know it.”

  Her eyes were making small, darting movements over my face. “Do I know you from somewhere, Mr. Stone?”

  I made a face and gave a small laugh. “It’s possible, I suppose. They say that only five people separate any two people on the planet, don’t they?”

  “You seem to know a lot about me.”

  “Well, as I explained…”

  “And Antioch…?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “As a child, I used to dream of Antioch—the first Antioch—as a place of safety and protection, as the place where Christian compassion and salvation were born.”

  I nodded. “I see.”

  “Your comment…coincidence?”

  “Or synchronicity.”

  “Your face is familiar.”

  “I travel quite a bit. I suppose our paths may have crossed. Have you ever been to New York?”

  She hesitated. “Yes, I was there once.”

  “In the Bronx? I used to work in the Bronx.”

  “Really? You said you were retired. What did you do?”

  “I was a cop. A Detective at the 43rd Precinct.”

  A bird had started chattering in the pine at the corner of the lawn. She looked up for a while, as though searching for it. She asked, still staring into the branches, “How long have you been retired?”

  “Six years.”

  She relaxed back into her chair, glancing at her watch. “What happened?”

  “Oh, long story... Colleague of mine was shot. He’d been investigating the murder of a couple on Ellis Avenue.”

  She winced and frowned. “Oh, I’m sorry…”

  I gave a small laugh and a snort. “It was random. One of those random events. Had nothing to do with the case he was investigating. He happened to go into an all night store on his way home... Bang, got shot.”

  She was looking at her hands, removing soil from her fingers with her thumb. “But he was investigating something else.”

  “Yeah, it was an odd case. It was like two cases in one.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “There was a double homicide, and there was also a double disappearance, and what was driving us all crazy was, was it a quadruple homicide with two of the bodies missing, a triple homicide and one of the disappeared characters was the killer…we couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Finally, the case went cold.”

  “That must be frustrating.”

  We sat in silence for a while, listening to the chattering bird in the pine by the fence. Finally, I said, “I met your aunt Ingrid, Amy.”

  There was very little change. Her cheeks colored a little, but nothing else. After a moment, she looked up and met my eye.

  “Clearly you’re not here for the Cherokee.”

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You stole the Jeep and abandoned the Impala. That was clever. Perhaps cleverer than you realized at the time. It was found that night, burning, but nobody ever connected it with you—until a few days ago. Then it was assumed that you had both died in the crash, murdered by the Camacho gang. Because the two occupants of the car had been shot.”

  She took a deep breath, bit her lip and sighed.

  I went on, “But here’s what I am asking myself now. If the occupants of the car were not Amy Redfern and Charlie Albright, who were they? And who killed them? I need to know that, Amy.”

  A voice came to us from behind, and over to my left. It was a pleasant, affectionate voice, calling, “Honey? You know the front door is open? Where are…oh…”

  I turned and smiled at him.

  “Hello, Charlie. Perhaps you’d better close the door and come and sit down. We need to talk.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  He came out onto the lawn and stared at me. He was very like his photograph, a little older, stronger in the shoulders than he had appeared. He was wearing jeans and a light leather jacket and had car keys hanging from his right hand. There was a pair of aviators perched on the top of his head.

  “Who are you?”

  “Detective John Stone, of the NYPD. I head up a cold cases unit at the 43rd in the Bronx, and I am investigating your disappearance, and the murder of the Redferns.”

  “You have to leave.”

  “I can’t do that, Charlie. Right now, all I want is some answers. And believe me, you are better off talking to me unofficially than to the NYPD or the FBI officially, and they are both interested right now.”

  “Why are you here unofficially?” He shifted his gaze to Amy.

  She said, “You better sit down, Charlie. Let’s hear what he has to say.”

  He approached the table with hesitant steps, like he thought it might suddenly jump at him. He went to pull out the chair and asked, “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled out the chair and sat.

  Amy said, “If you are expecting a confession from us, it will never happen.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I want. All I want is to understand what happened.” I drew breath. “I think I do understand. We were on completely the wrong track, but it came to me this morning. We had been so caught up in where you were going, we forgot to think about where you were…”

  I trailed off, aware suddenly that I was talking gibberish and they were both staring at me like I was insane. Amy said, “So what did you think happened?”

  I turned to Charlie. “We tied it up with your mother’s friend, Feliciano. We thought there was some connection with drug trafficking.”

  Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Seriously?”

  “Two of his men showed up dead just before you disappeared. We discovered you had asked Feliciano for help and he had put you onto…” I thought for a moment. “Adolfo, Adolfo and Mateo. Six months later, they showed up dead. At first, we figured you approached them because you wanted to push drugs in your neighborhood…”

&nb
sp; His eyes went wide and Amy sat forward. “Us? Are you crazy?”

  Charlie was shaking his head. “Do you know how much we hate that shit?”

  I nodded. “I am beginning to get an idea. But all we had to go on were the traces of evidence you left behind, either on purpose or by accident. We didn’t even know whether you had been murdered and your bodies disposed of for some reason, whether you had been abducted, or whether you had managed to escape from whoever had murdered Amy’s parents.” I spread my hands. “Then we stumbled on the missing Impala. Where was it? Why had your aunt not reported it missing? And that took us to Garrison, where we found the Impala, and the corpses. Right now, the DNA tests are being carried out…”

  Charlie spoke up. “They won’t find anything. The bodies are too badly burned, and the jaws are too badly damaged for dental records…”

  “You saw to that.”

  “Yes.” He glanced sidelong at Amy and she gave her head a small shake.

  I went on as though I hadn’t noticed. “We assumed that the bodies were yours. I found the gunshot wounds…”

  “That’s a lie.” It was Charlie again.

  Amy sighed. “Don’t talk, Charlie.”

  I smiled at them both. “They had been shot through the eye with a small caliber handgun. There was no exit wound, which meant the slug had stayed in the cranium and melted.” I shrugged. “So as we were working on the theory that you had stolen something from the Camacho brothers, that the Camachos had killed your mom and dad, and that you had been escaping from the gang, it made perfect sense that we had found your bodies, in the car, dead.”

  I stopped and sank back in my chair.

  Amy was frowning at me. She asked, “So?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “So we chased the Camachos, the Camachos chased us and then we chased them back again, all the way from the Bronx to Arizona and Mexico…” I stared up at the sky and shook my head. “And the only thing they ever said about you was that you were nothing. You were insignificant, you didn’t exist.” I turned to Charlie. “They remembered your mother, but you, and Amy? You were nothing. That didn’t ring true at all. You steal from the Camachos, the Chupacabras, and you may be many things to them, but the one thing you are not is insignificant. And yet, apparently, they chased you to Iowa, and murdered you there.” I stared down at the grass, aware that I was feeling slightly lightheaded. “It was like there was this sequence of events that were connected in space and time, but had no shared meaning…”

  I frowned at them, and was surprised to see that they were frowning back, curious, even interested.

  “Then it struck me.” I said. “You both shared a lot of things in common.” They glanced at each other and smiled. I smiled too. “Amy et Charlie contra mundum. One of the things you shared was addictive parents. But Karl, as well as being an addict, had a record for violence and, most important, domestic violence. It was so obvious, it had been staring us in the face from the start, and when I understood that, I understood everything. He used to beat you up, didn’t he, Amy? And your mother.”

  She sighed, and she and Charlie sat awhile, staring at each other as though they were in silent, telepathic communication. After a bit, she drew breath and said, “I need some ginger tea. Let’s go inside.”

  She stood and I followed her and Charlie into the cool shade of the house. She went through a sliding door into a small kitchen and I heard the tap hiss as she filled a kettle. Charlie leaned on the doorjamb and watched me as I looked around.

  The living room ran from the front of the house to some French windows at the back. Most of the furniture was IKEA, and old. There were posters of paintings by Van Gogh on the walls and a couple of small bookcases with an eclectic mix of novels and books on natural food, reiki and UFOs. There were no fresh flowers. Those were all in the garden, but there was an earthenware vase of twigs.

  Charlie asked suddenly, “Are you going to arrest us?”

  “I told you, I’m here unofficially.”

  “But you were talking about you and your partner investigating Felix and his brother…”

  I sighed and sat in an armchair by the French window. “Yeah.” I sighed deeply. “She took down the gang, with the help of the FBI. The truth is, what I said to you earlier isn’t exactly correct. As of a couple of days ago, nobody is looking for you. Everybody assumes you’re dead. I just need to know, to satisfy my own professional curiosity.” I laughed and gestured at him. “You’re alive! So there can’t be many explanations for what happened. Right?”

  Amy came out of the kitchen with a bamboo tray holding a fat terra cotta teapot and three matching mugs. She filled them, gave one to Charlie, brought one to me and sat on the sofa with her feet curled up underneath her. She started speaking suddenly, with no particular inflection.

  “Karl was a violent drunk. He expressed his violence in many ways, by beating us, shouting at us, breaking things, threatening us… The list goes on and on. When I was very small, he would beat Christen and just scream at me, but as I got older, he would beat me too.” A small smile twitched her mouth and she gazed out at the back yard. “Older.” She said it like it was a ridiculous word. “I mean six or seven years old.” She blew on her tea for a bit, then sipped it. “People talk about hell. I have been there. And I can tell you that the key element of hell is that you cannot get out. Everything else is just pain. Hell is when you’re trapped.

  “And oddly enough, the worst bit was not the beating. It wasn’t even watching my mother being beaten until she bled. The worst bit was when they made up. You cannot imagine…” She paused, shaking her head. “You cannot begin to imagine, how much I hated him every time she forgave him, and I lay there in my bed, bruised and hurting, listening to him grunting next door, and her calling him ‘baby’. The hatred I felt, aged six and seven, was something so deep and black I can’t describe it.”

  She was quiet awhile. Her gaze was lost. Eventually, she blinked and seemed to return from somewhere. “Their reconciliations were disgusting, horrific, but mainly because somehow I knew, instinctively, that one day he would want a reconciliation with me.” She looked me straight in the eye when she said it, to make sure I understood.

  “But there was something else as well. I remember time and again, being beaten so that I was bruised on every inch of my body except my face and my arms. I felt tiny and brittle in his huge hands, and when he turned on Christen and started beating her, I held on to the belief, the faith, that now, after this time, she would hate him as much as I did, we would leave, she would take me away from him.” She stopped, gazing out the window. “But every time, without fail, they would have their grunting, disgusting reconciliation, and every time the despair I felt would be deeper and blacker. In spite of what he did to her, in spite of what he did to me, she still loved him more than she loved me. Unless you have lived through something like that, you cannot imagine it.”

  Charlie moved over from the kitchen door and sat in the other armchair. He seemed to be transfixed, listening to her as though he had never heard the story before.

  “Meeting Charlie, when I was at school, was the only thing that kept me more or less sane. He gave me somewhere to hide. And the hope which Christen had robbed from me, he gave me back. It went on for years, Mr. Stone. And then, when I was in my teens, they started doing coke. A ‘friend’ introduced them to it. They couldn’t afford it, but whenever they got together a bit of cash, they would blow it, if you’ll forgive the pun, on coke. Once he started snorting that stuff, he turned from an animal into something…” She seemed to withdraw into herself, her face expressed disgust and her eyes were hard. She shook her head. “Something subhuman. I tried to stay away from the apartment as much as I could, but one night I came in, I saw Christen bruised and sobbing on the sofa. He was naked and he went for me, tried to rape me. I escaped and ran. I went to Charlie and told him what had happened.”

  I asked her, “Was this in March?”

  “Yes, I think so.”
/>   I turned to Charlie. “So you tried talking to Feliciano Camacho, your mother’s friend.”

  “I had to do something. I had nowhere to take her where she would be safe. The cops couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t prove that he had committed a crime. I could smuggle her into my room for a few days, as long as my mother was drunk she wouldn’t notice, but we couldn’t do that indefinitely. I had to do something.”

  “So you asked them to put him in hospital.”

  “Yeah. That ass Feliciano thought I wanted to do business. He wouldn’t listen. He fobbed me off onto Adolfo and Mateo. I told them what I wanted. I was going to pay them, but they said it was a favor to my mom.”

  Amy’s voice had taken on a sudden warmth. “The next six months were the happiest I had ever known. Christen came back to life. She started making cakes and cookies. We talked and spent time together, went shopping. Charlie came over for dinner, didn’t you?”

  They smiled at each other and he nodded.

  “I begged her not to take him back. I begged her to move, or change the lock, get an injunction—anything. She promised she would.”

  I said, “But she didn’t.”

  She shook her head. “No. When he was released from hospital, she said she would just nurse him back to health and then make him leave. We both knew it was a lie. I guess I had known all along.”

  I nodded. “Because you and Charlie were stashing money away. You were planning to leave. You had a bank account out of state…?”

  Charlie said, “Here, in San Francisco, as Mr. Freeman.”

  “So what happened?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “If you try and prosecute us, you will never be able to prove any of this.”

  “I don’t want to prosecute you, Charlie. I told you that already.”

  Amy said, “They had one of their parties. Having a party meant they bought beer and vodka and coke, got stoned out of their skulls, played loud music and in the end, he beat her up and then they had noisy sex. I got home when the party was in full swing. He went for me. He was gripping my wrist, slapping me and telling me…” She faltered. “He was telling me what he was going to do to me, and what he was going to make me do to him. We struggled. I kicked him in the balls and ran.”