“She didn’t run away!” She was emphatic and there was more than a little anger in her tone. That was fine. I wouldn’t have liked the maybe-you’re-bad-parents implications of the question either. “Someone took her.”
I dropped it and pointed at a lone canvas on the floor. “And this…”
The entire canvas was covered in a thick, textured coat of black acrylic paint. Looking more closely, I noticed a fine mist of crimson among the textured waves and folds of the black base. It was as if Sashi had put blood-colored paint in an atomizer and sprayed the air over the canvas, the tiny droplets falling where the air currents in the room took them. Christ, it was bleak.
“That’s what Sashi was working on when Max and I came downstairs to get her for dinner. We thought she went for a walk on the beach across the way, but she didn’t come home. When she didn’t come home, we went to look for her on the beach. Then we called the police. They said she probably ran away, but they came and we looked for her. Our neighbors helped, but we couldn’t find her. There were no signs of forced entry and there were no fingerprints that didn’t belong.”
I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. Candy was repeating the story verbatim. Her recitation had an eerie Manchurian Candidate feel to it. Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known. I didn’t ascribe any specific negative judgment to it beyond my original misgivings about a frequently repeated story taking on its own reality. I didn’t, for instance, think she was lying to me, though I suppose she might have been. Candy’s canned response had an upside, though. It would serve as a reminder to me to count as fact only those things I knew to be so. There had been too many times in the past that I had trusted too quickly, believed too easily. Watching my ex-wife get murdered before my eyes cured the shit out of that problem for me. Katy had been killed as much by my easy trust as by the bullets that severed her arteries.
“Where’s your husband?” I asked as we walked back up the stairs.
“I sent him out to do some errands.”
That set off some alarm bells. “He doesn’t know about my being here, does he?”
“No,” Candy confessed as we reached the first floor. “Come on upstairs. I guess you’ll want to see Sashi’s room.”
“I do.” I followed Candy up the more grand and beautifully restored main staircase. “Why didn’t you tell Max?”
“Because we’ve already hired three other investigators and it’s costing us a fortune. Max worries about those kinds of things.”
“And…”
“And because he remembers you hated him.”
“I didn’t know him. I hated him getting you pregnant and rushing you into marriage. I hated that.”
That stopped her in her tracks. Candy turned on her heel to face me and planted herself on one of the carpeted steps.
“ He didn’t get me pregnant, Mr. Prager.”
“Come on, Candy.”
“I got me pregnant.” You could have knocked me back down the steps with a whisper. “I needed to get out, to get away from my mother, away from… I knew Max would do the right thing. He loved me. He really loved me.”
“I can’t be hearing-”
But she wasn’t finished. “He was happy, Mr. Prager. He didn’t run because he knew he could have me forever.”
“Did you love him?”
“Enough, I guess. Enough to let him get me out of there.”
“I did the math last night, Candy,” I said. “Sashi isn’t that baby.”
She hung her head. “There wasn’t a baby. I went off my birth control pills and when I had my next heavy period, I told him I miscarried. Don’t hate me, Mr. Prager.” She was crying now, finally, for a baby that never was and a lie that would live forever.
“I couldn’t hate you and believe me, I’m in no position to chastise people for their secrets. Does Sarah know?”
“Oh, God, no. Please don’t tell her.”
“Listen to me, Candy. I won’t tell her, but this is where it ends. From this point on, I won’t keep any secrets for you except if they help me find Sashi. So don’t tell me anything else that doesn’t have to do with Sashi. She’s who I’m here about. Do we understand each other?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna have to talk to Max eventually, you know?”
“I know.”
“And this isn’t going to cost you anything, so you don’t have to worry about the extra money.”
“But-”
“-nothing. I have my reasons.”
“You want Sarah back,” she said.
“That’s right. You’re not the only one here who wants to bring a daughter home.”
FIVE
Detective Jordan McKenna of the Nassau County PD agreed to meet me for lunch at the Caan’s Kosher Deli on Glen Cove Road. Once nearly as ubiquitous as pizzerias, kosher delis were now headed the way of the passenger pigeon and the Sony Walkman. I loved the smell of Caan’s, the perfume of sour pickles and pastrami, but I loved it as much for the memories of my childhood it evoked as for its aromatic siren’s song. Yet the reason I picked Caan’s had far less to do with my desire to reminisce than with convenience and pragmatism. Not only was it less than ten minutes away from Sea Cliff, it also happened to be in the same upscale shopping plaza as our first Long Island wine store: Red, White and You.
Although RWY, as we called it, was a big money maker for Aaron and me, it was my least favorite store. It was the kind of store where most of the customers took more interest in a wine’s cachet than its bouquet. They always wanted what was hot, what was trendy, and that usually equated to overpriced, but what did they care? If you could afford to live in this area, it didn’t really matter. When Beaujolais Nouveau became the rage in the early ‘80s, our RWY customers were willing to pay absurd amounts of money to make sure they got the first off-loaded cases. Then later, when Pinot Noir and Zinfandel and then Malbec got hot, it was much the same. And the prices our customers would pay for the best years of Opus 1… my god, it was insane. To paraphrase my late friend and former Chief of Detectives of the NYPD Larry “Mac” McDonald, the parking lot here often resembled a Porsche dealership. The odd thing is that even though I could now afford to live out here and to drive a Porsche and to pray at the altar of Long Island’s holiest of holies, The Church of Conspicuous Consumption, the thought of it turned my stomach. No matter how much money was in my bank account or how much stock was in my portfolio, in my heart I would always be just a poor schmuck from Brooklyn, a broken down ex-cop and the son of a failed businessman. I guess I wouldn’t want it any other way.
The other reason I chose Caan’s was that I knew my brother Aaron would be at RWY all day and I needed to tell him in person that I’d taken a case. That was part of our deal. As far back as 1978 when we opened our first store, City On The Vine on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it was agreed that I could take on private cases at my leisure. I never wanted to be a shopkeeper and I certainly never intended on getting into the wine business. That was Aaron’s dream. All I did was hitch my cart onto it and go for the ride. Frankly, I hated the wine trade. As I’ve often said, there’s only so many times you can explain the difference between champagne and methode champenoise without going utterly mad. When I was on the cops, I was sure I was going to be a lifer, one of those guys you’d have to force off the job at gunpoint. Then in 1977, when I got back to the precinct house after doing crowd control at Son of Sam’s arraignment, I slipped on a piece of carbon paper and tore my knee to shreds. So much for the impact of my aspirations on a cold and random universe.
“What’s wrong?” Aaron said when I walked into the store. Some people say hello; Aaron says what’s wrong. It is his nature in the same way as having stripes is in a zebra’s nature. “Did the zoning board in Bridgehampton turn-”
“Nothing’s wrong and no, everything is going smoothly with the zoning board. Sunrise and Vine will open on schedule on budget.”
“Then
what?”
“I’m taking a case.”
“Of what, Sancerre Rouge?”
“No, shithead. I’m working a case… as an investigator.”
I braced myself for the inevitable backlash. Although my right to take on cases was part of our partnership agreement, Aaron rarely gave in without a fight. Even when I opened Prager amp; Melendez Investigations with Carmella, splitting my time between the two businesses, Aaron never tired of browbeating me for trying to be the PI Peter Pan, of not wanting to grow up. He was right, of course, but his tirades couldn’t stop me. I wasn’t easily stopped.
“What’s the case?” he asked.
“What?”
“What’s the case? Is your hearing going now?”
“Sarah spoke to you, didn’t she?” I said. “No, she didn’t.”
“You’re a lot of things, big brother. A good liar isn’t one of them.”
“Okay, yeah, we spoke. She told me about Candy’s kid and everything. Besides, when could I ever refuse my niece anything?”
“I think maybe this time you should have.”
“Why?”
“Because I got a bad feeling about this one.”
“A week, ten days tops,” he said in a feeble attempt to play the heavy.
“If the girl isn’t dead already. I doubt she’ll last that long.” Aaron had nothing to say to that.
Detective McKenna was in his late thirties. Dressed in an unbuttoned black trench coat, Payless shoes, a blue Sears suit, and an ill-matching Father’s Day tie, he was busy checking his watch when I walked up to him. I recognized his face from a photograph of him I’d seen online. I would have spotted him anyway. McKenna had cop written all over him. He looked tired, but as I got older I thought everyone looked tired. I think maybe I was tired.
“Detective McKenna?” I said as if I didn’t already know the answer, and offered my right hand.
“Mr. Prager.” He shook it, but with little enthusiasm. I recognized the vibe. This had all the ingredients of a bad first date, and there are few things as unpleasant and awkward as a bad first date. “You’re late.” He had the second generation map of Ireland on his puss and the first generation Long Island twang in his voice.
“Actually, I was early.”
I pointed at the wine store and explained. He rolled his eyes. I couldn’t blame him. McKenna probably thought this was all a waste of time, time better spent tracking down leads or knocking on doors than paying a courtesy call on some shopkeeper playing at Sherlock Holmes. No professional wants to deal with a hobbyist.
“Let’s have lunch,” I said, gesturing at Caan’s entrance.
Inside, the lunch crowd had waned and we were pretty much alone in the back room. I ordered pastrami and he ordered corned beef. A real shocker, that.
“For chrissakes, McKenna, give it a rest, it isn’t St. Paddy’s Day. You could’ve ordered some kishka or kasha varnishkes or maybe beef tongue on club.”
He stared at me blankly, a bit taken aback at my willingness to break his balls. Then he seemed to get it and the blank expression broke into a half smile.
“That’s better,” I said. “You know, I didn’t always own wine shops. I was on the job once too. I have a gun with real bullets and everything.”
“I know who you are. I read up on you. You got a hell of a track record. I respect that. That’s why I’m here. You think I’d waste my time dicking around with every schmo a missing kid’s parents want me to see? You’d be amazed at some of the clowns these people come up with. I call ‘em the psychics and psychos.”
“Desperation makes people do desperate things.”
“Stupid things.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “stupid things.”
“Like maybe involving an old family friend in something he shouldn’t be involved in.”
“Are you worried I’m too close to the situation to see what’s in front of me?”
“There’s that,” he said. “There’s also that your track record, as good as it is, is old. You ain’t been in the game for a long time. Kinda tough to hit a home run as a pinch hitter when you haven’t seen a good fastball for a while. And there was that thing with your ex-wife.”
“I can’t argue with you there, but look, I’m in the game whether you want me to be in or not. You can boo like an armchair manager or you can help me so I can help you. Anyway, I’m not a stupid man. Talking with you now, my guess is that if you had anywhere to go with finding Sashi, you wouldn’t be here, respect for my record or no respect.”
“No, I guess you’re not stupid. We’ve hit a wall.”
“Well, if the info in the newspapers is correct, you didn’t have much to go on.”
Hey, a little sympathy never hurt.
“We got some stuff to go on, but…”
“Some stuff, like what?”
He didn’t answer right away and spent the next few minutes eating his sandwich, so I ate mine too.
“Look, Prager, I can’t afford you getting in the way with an ongoing investigation. Do we understand each other?”
“Okay, Detective, you’ve given me my warning. I’ll keep out of your way and I’ll pass on anything I learn immediately. The only thing I’m interested in here is finding Sashi alive.”
“Fair enough,” he said and handed me his card. “Those are all my numbers. I’m available 24/7. I’m taking you at your word. If you find out anything at all, I want a call.”
The waitress came by and I took the check. “What now?”
He stood and threw his trench coat back on. “You go on over to your store. I’ll be over in a few minutes. I gotta get some stuff outta my car.”
I’d had much worse first dates, I thought, as he disappeared into the main dining room.
Back in the office of RWY, I spread out the paperwork McKenna gave me on one of the desks. I knew this wasn’t all of it, maybe not even most of it, but given that I was three weeks behind the curve, it was a lot to digest. It was no mystery to me why Detective McKenna had let me in the door without making me run the gauntlet. Good detectives have the knack of being able to balance their own necessarily strong egos against the public interest. McKenna’s equation was a simple one: his goal was to find Sashi and he didn’t give a shit what it took to do the job. He wasn’t interested in who got the credit and the kudos. He’d worry about bows and curtain calls after the girl was found and the smoke had cleared. It was always the weaklings and the climbers that put themselves ahead of the case. I’d known my share of the good, the bad, and the indifferent over the years. For now, at least, McKenna rated high on the list. I felt sure the detective would get through the night without worrying over my opinion of him. He had more important things to lose sleep over. We both did.
SIX
I set back out to Sea Cliff before sunup. I’m not exactly sure why I got such an early start. Maybe it was the buzz from working a case again or maybe it was that I wanted to travel under the cover afforded me by the veil of pre-dawn darkness. In the dark I could fool myself that I was going somewhere, anywhere other than Long Island. Long Island’s never been my favorite place. I suppose my antipathy started when I was around six or seven and some of my best friends disappeared from class and from the schoolyard; it was whispered that their parents had moved them to exotic places like Oyster Bay, Great Neck, Massapequa, and Ronkonkoma. Might just as well have been Siberia as far as I was concerned. In my kid’s mind, Long Island meant exile and punishment, a forbidden zone where friends went never to return. I mean, who would ever want to leave Brooklyn besides Walter O’Malley? Sometimes I think that prick’s only saving grace was that he didn’t move the Dodgers to Long Island.
But my rocky relationship with Long Island transcended my childhood visions of it as the briar patch. For almost nothing good beyond profit has ever come of my setting foot over the Queens-Nassau County border. Patrick Maloney went to school at Hofstra University on Long Island and I spent too much time there uncovering things about him, about his fam
ily and his relationships with women, one in particular, that made my skin crawl. It was five years later, however, after Katy and I were married and Sarah was just a little girl, that the first tentative steps in the long slow dance that led to Katy’s murder were taken.
It was at the wedding of a former wine store employee. She was a rich girl from Crocus Valley and her father, Thomas Geary, a star maker, bullied and extorted me into taking the case of one Steven Brightman. Brightman, a state senator, was the next fair-haired boy with Kennedy charm and working class credentials, but he had a big problem. One of his interns, a young woman named Moira Heaton, had disappeared from his community office on Thanksgiving Eve 1981. Although there was no evidence tying Brightman to Moira’s disappearance and in spite of his fully cooperating with the authorities, the whiff of scandal and suspicion put a hold on his once-meteoric ascendency. After two years in political purgatory, he needed someone to prove him innocent, to plunge him in the waters and have him come up pure and saved. That someone was me.
It almost worked too. I cleared him, but he came back up out of the purifying waters a little too clean and a little too easily. I found what had been planted for me to find: a patsy in a nasty package by the name of Ivan Alfonseca or, as the press had dubbed him, Ivan the Terrible, a convicted serial rapist. Already going away for life, he was paid to confess to Moira’s murder, clearing Brightman’s path to the Senate, if not to the White House. But I was no patsy and I kept digging. Problem was, the brother of one of Ivan’s real victims killed him in jail and with Ivan dead, I had a case as solid as air. So instead of going to the cops, I set Brightman up to spill his guts in front of two witnesses- his wife and Thomas Geary, the people in his life who could hurt him most. His wife left him and Geary withdrew his money and backing. Moira got whatever scraps of justice and shreds of revenge she was ever going to get. Then, seventeen years later, Brightman got his. He and his flunky, Ralph Barto, the man I wounded in Miami Beach, murdered Katy in front of me.
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