Moonlight Falls by Vincent Zandri Page A

my order.
    “Bud,” I smiled.
    I took a look around the small bar. We were the only people to occupy the place.
    I asked, “So what’s with the airport?”
    The reporter grinned, took a drink of his beer.
    “Pretty much no one knows me here,” he said. “What I am, what I do. No one expects me to be working an angle if we get to chatting.”
    The bartender set my beer down atop a paper napkin. I took notice of the nameplate pinned to her purple uniform shirt. “Anna Mae,” it said. I drank some beer.
    “That what I am?” I asked. “Angle of the day?”
    Lyons pulled a pack of Merits from his shirt pocket, lit one.
    Why does everyone smoke after you quit?
    “Scarlet Montana,” he exhaled, along with the cigarette smoke.
    “How’d you find out I was working the case?”
    He said, “I called around, checked in with a few sources. Finally I got a cop who told me you were brought in to work the case in place of the nonexistent S.I.U.”
    “What cop?”
    Lyons pulled the cigarette from his lips.
    “You know the way the news beat works, Mr. Detective.”
    He was right, but it didn’t hurt to ask. Simple fact of the matter was the people on the inside talked. Their motive was almost always personal gain—for greenbacks. But then, there was also the occasional stab in the back—one pissed-off cop to another.
    We both drank some more beer.
    I asked, “So how can I help?”
    He never bothered to pull out a tape recorder or a steno pad. No pen or pencil. He just stamped out his cigarette into the glass ashtray and said, “I am going to make an assumption, Detective Divine. You believe that Scarlet Montana was murdered last night. Or else you would not be wasting your time with me right now.” He held his breath for a beat or two. “And, you believe that her husband—the esteemed Chief of our very own S.P.D.—has everything to do with that murder.”
    Sure it had been more or less my theory for more than twelve hours now. I’d even been toying with the idea that I might have had something to do with that murder. There was the issue of my hands after all. The scrapes, cuts, abrasions. But just hearing the word “murder” come from another’s mouth made it seem all the more based in reality.
    “Look, Mr. Lyons—”
    “Brendan.”
    “Brendan,” I said. “All I know is that I was brought in last night on a potential conflict-of-interest situation that Mitchell Cain and Jake Montana thought important enough to warrant my independent attention.”
    “What could be more important than the mutilation of one’s wife?”
    I looked into his face. It looked better in the flesh than in the grainy newsprint.
    I said, “Scarlet’s death was as gruesome as I’ve ever witnessed in my entire life. That includes the bodies my father sometimes took into his funeral home. Bodies no one else could or would work with.” A drink of beer. “I’m no stranger to the dead, Brendan. To just assume that Scarlet had committed suicide …” I threw up my hands. “Well, you get the point.”
    “So you’re saying it is murder.”
    Newspeople. Always putting words in your mouth .
    I could only imagine the orgasm he’d be having if he knew I’d been the last man to sleep with Scarlet, only minutes before her death.
    “No, you’re saying that,” I said. “That hasn’t been determined yet. Thus our little friendly conversation in the airport bar.”
    Lyons made this little crooked, kissing motion with his lips and nodded.
    “I’m not ruling anything out,” I said. “I’ve got the rules of engagement to pursue before I can determine anything.”
    He bit his lip.
    Outside the big picture window, the chopper body came alive as it bounced up and down on the tarmac, its scarlet, blue and white overhead and undercarriage lights flashing on and off. Beyond that, a U.S. Air 727 taking off on the main north-south runway.
    “My guess is that Cain must be having a real fit over your intention to investigate. Because