The Moonlight by Nicholas Guild Page B

to steal it.  And the odds were that nobody was going to shoot him before he reached retirement age.  Small town police work had a lot to recommend it.
    Until somebody knocked off one of the old Dons.
    So Detective Lieutenant Spolino drank his diet Coke and ate his sandwich and reviewed the transcripts of Leo Galatina’s last few hours on earth, feeling like a weasel trapped in a cage.
    “George, you goddam fuck!  You useless, chiseling tavern keeper!”
    The old man’s words came right off the page for him.  He didn’t need tape recordings, he didn’t need anything.  He could hear it all, as if Leo Galatina were talking into his ear.
    “I thought we fixed that guy.”
    He had been maybe seven or eight the first time he heard that growling voice, like the guy had little pieces of broken stone in his larynx.  It was organized crime’s version of a company picnic, in the back yard of the Don’s house in Stamford—only the Don was Leo’s older brother Enrico, and Grandpa had been his bodyguard and Number One Trigger, dead since 1946, when he had walked into a bullet that was meant for the Boss.
    The son, who worked in a bakery to please his wife, had been invited with his family, just for old time’s sake—as a tribute to Lucio Spolino, who had been killed doing his job, and as a reminder that the Family looks after its own, even when they try to turn their backs.  Tom Spolino could remember his father’s nervousness, the way all afternoon he seemed to be trying to disappear, and it was such a good party too.
    And Leo, Enrico’s underboss, had caught little Tom stealing from the cannoli tray.
    “You want some?” he had asked, holding the kid up by his coat collar until his feet were no longer even touching the ground.  A small, angry-looking man in a blue suit that seemed too tight for him, he didn’t talk so much as snarl.  “Then have some—here, I give it to you.  One for now, one for later.  But take it like a man, and don’t snitch.  Now go find your mamma.”
    And little Tom had gone running off, a stick of canniloni in each hand, more scared than he had ever been in his life, or ever would be again.
    And it had worked, that single warning.  It had scotched forever any inclination towards a career in crime.  That Tom Spolino was a cop today was probably Leo Galatina’s fault.
    “I told Enrico not to trust no fuckin’ Yankee Doodle.  I said, ‘he turns on his own, he’ll turn on us.  Use him, but don’t trust him.’”
    Was George Patchmore the “fuckin’ Yankee Doodle”?  Or was it “that guy”?  Or was  “that guy” George?
    The rest, for a couple of hours—the entries were marked by time, with a note in the margin every half hour or so—was a series of complaints about his wife, who had been dead for ten years.
    And then:  “Charlie, you shit—you dead shit.  Get out o’ the fuckin’ car.  I kill you, Brush.  You fuck.”
    So who was Charlie Brush?
    If Galatina’s assailant was known to him, it figured he was local talent.  As far as anybody knew, Leo hadn’t even been outside Fairfield County in the past thirty years, not even to go into New York for a show.  Yet the name “Brush, Charles, alias Charlie” was showing up on nobody’s computer screen, not here, not in Stamford, not in Hartford, not even in Washington.
    Well, that wasn’t quite true.  Washington had actually found twelve Charles Brushes:  one was a C.P.A. in California; one was a librarian in Oklahoma; one was (no kidding) a records clerk with the FBI; one was an unemployed alcoholic living out of garbage cans in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; one was the sheriff of Darwin County, Colorado; two were on active military service, one stationed in Arnheim, Germany and the other aboard an aircraft carrier somewhere between Japan and the Philippines; one was the federal government’s permanent guest in Leavenworth, Kansas; four were still in high school.  None of them had the slightest