You didn’t need a PhD in clinical psychology to figure out that John Tierney was schizophrenic and that, if he had meds, he hadn’t taken them recently. The house, his mad ramblings, all went a long way in explaining the wild, meandering comments Tierney posted following Nathan Martyr’s blog entries. Tierney’s posts often alluded to the ritual mutilation of Sashi Bluntstone and the use of her blood like that of a Passover lamb to ward off the angel of death. His psychosis didn’t mean he didn’t have Sashi or hadn’t had her or hadn’t killed her, but I doubted it. I could see that Jimmy’s presence in particular was making Tierney want to crawl out of his own skin. The last thing I needed was for him to go apeshit and for any of us to get hurt.
“Jimmy, why don’t you go take a look around, okay? John and I have to talk about some stuff that you can’t hear.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, and close the door behind you.”
That calmed Tierney down a little bit, but once Jimmy left, he seemed only vaguely aware of my presence. He was in a very different place than me and his odd affect gave new meaning to the phrase you can’t get there from here. I tried reaching him anyway.
“John,” I said, “you’ve written some pretty awful things about Sashi Bluntstone.”
“Satan.”
That was promising. “Is Sashi Satan?”
“Hamas is coming through the printers. Can’t you see them?”
So much for promising.
“Does Sashi have anything to do with the printers? If you killed Sashi, would her blood stop Hamas from coming through the printers?”
“St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter,” Tierney said, making the sign of the cross at me. Then he mumbled something I couldn’t make out at all. He got off the chair and kissed the floor at my feet. “St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter.”
We kept going round and round like that for another twenty minutes or so, but it got me nothing but a few more blessings and foot kisses. I found myself feeling nothing but sorry for John Tierney. Jimmy knocked.
“Come in,” I said.
“It’s pretty dark in the house, but I didn’t find anything but more crucifixes and paintings.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
I nodded for Jimmy to go first.
“Sorry to bother you, John,” I said. “I hope you find some peace or whatever it is you’re looking for. I just have to find Sashi.”
He didn’t move a muscle, his eyes still in that other place, but when I got to his bedroom door, he called to me.
“I didn’t take her,” he said in a calm coherent voice. “Her blood remains in the vessel of her body.”
I made sure not to turn back around and then just let myself out.
Back in my car, I was quiet. Jimmy wasn’t.
“Do me a favor and take me home. You don’t gotta pay me, but I’m freezing my balls off and I got work tomorrow.”
“Sure, no problem. I’m shot for the night anyway,” I said. “And don’t worry about the cash. You earned it. You up for this tomorrow night?”
“No problem, except maybe I’ll bring a Speedo and some extra clothes.”
Neither one of us said much after that.
TWENTY-ONE
The drive back from Babylon was the most hopeless hour I’d spent in a very very long time and it served as a cruel reminder of why I got out of the business of poking around in other people’s lives. Lives, even the ones that looked so orderly and beautiful from the outside, were messy, complicated things, often very ugly and painful things. And then there was the miraculous and the magical. Most people never experience either one. I’d had my brush with the miraculous on an April day over thirty years ago when I looked up and saw a rooftop water tank and thought, That’s where she is! That’s where Marina Conseco will be! In one of those. I was right that one time, but there wasn’t going to be a water tank miracle this go-round. I saw the futility of what I was trying to do reflected in the hopelessly lost eyes of John Tierney. What the hell was I doing looking for Sashi Bluntstone in such a place as that? She was dead. McKenna knew it. Even Max and Candy seemed to know. Was I the only one who refused to see the obvious?
When I dragged myself out of my car, my head throbbing from where it banged against the side porch railing, I was ready to pack it all in. So I had come to my senses and realized, what, that I wasn’t going to set the world right with some singularly miraculous redemptive act? Who was I kidding? What did I have to go back to? What was ahead of me, endless and endlessly boring days of hiding myself in my office? Days of planning new grand openings? Days of arguing with municipalities over the size of our store signage? Shopkeeping, is that really what I longed to return to? I was old and I was as lost in my way as poor John Tierney. At least he had enemies, real or imagined. My enemy was me. Then I heard Mary Lambert’s voice and all the selfpity receded.
“God, Moe, what happened to you?”
“Come on upstairs and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Except I didn’t, not at first. First I let Mary hold me in her arms and tell me everything was going to be all right. I was so smitten, I think I almost believed her. Then, when I cleaned myself up and put some ice to my head and had a drink, I told her about the case. I told her about who I was, who I really was.
“You see, Mary, the thing is, I’ve been selfish my whole life. I wanted life to be exciting. I wanted it to be about more than making money and settling down. I talked to you about Larry and Rico, but I didn’t talk much about me. I didn’t tell you about how I got my first wife killed or how I lost my daughter and a son that never had a chance to know me.”
“Now you’re just beating yourself up.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am.”
“Sure you are,” she said. “You’re frustrated. You think there’s a dead girl out there somewhere that needed saving and you couldn’t save her.”
“I don’t know where I would have been tonight if you didn’t show up at my door.”
She stepped very close to me and put her hand over my mouth. “Let’s not talk anymore, not now. Can’t we just be happy I’m here?”
I shook my head yes, but as she turned to the bedroom I saw that thing in her eyes again and this time I was sure it was guilt. Then I fell so deeply into her that I didn’t question it.
In the morning, the sheets were cold on her side of the bed. Mary Lambert was gone. And though I couldn’t possibly explain how I knew she would be, I knew she would be. The sex wasn’t any less satisfying. On the contrary, there was a depth and complexity to it that we hadn’t achieved during the previous night’s awkward unfamiliarity. Yet it was the sort of depth and complexity that only comes from pain. I knew something about that. It was a major feature of sex with Carmella. She made physical art of her pain and anguish and it was intoxicating. Even now, seven years removed from her touch, I found myself craving her, but what made her so addictive in bed also made her impossible to live with in the light of day. I didn’t know Mary Lambert well enough to make that judgment about her. Now I felt I never would. There was an air of permanence in her leaving. What there wasn’t was a note. I was at least thankful for that. It gave me hope, fragile and torturous as it was.
I showered and got dressed and decided that I needed to keep myself busy. Jews don’t generally buy into those rather puritanical adages about idle hands and the devil. I certainly didn’t, but today was an exception. I knew I had to keep moving or I wouldn’t be able to keep it all from crashing in on me. I needed to push away the feel of Mary Lambert’s kisses, the easy lock-and-key way I slid inside her, her scent. I needed to run away from John Tierney’s eyes. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. John Donne never met John Tierney. And the only way I knew to keep busy, to keep myself moving, was to work the case. I certainly wasn’t going to sit in my office and stare at old pictures of dead rock stars.
TWENTY-TWO
Jeff Fisher was more like it. He wasn’t schizophrenic. He wasn’t lost. He was just an asshole. And
he insisted upon proving it with nearly every word that came out of his mouth. Fisher was an adjunct professor in figure drawing and art history at Pratt who had a website that made Nathan Martyr’s seem like a Sashi Bluntstone fan site. He was exactly the type of frustrated, resentful scumbag Sonia Barrows-Willingham had described. A man who had envisioned himself as the next great thing to come down the pike, but who wound up teaching the next generation of resentful bastards instead. The problem was, Fisher was nearly as big as Jimmy Palumbo and not nearly as friendly.
“Get the fuck away from me, dickhead,” he said, when I asked if I could step inside his basement apartment in Greenpoint.
“What’s the problem, your mommy and daddy don’t let you have visitors?”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s quite a vocabulary you got there, Professor Fisher. You pick that up at the Rhode Island School of Design?”
Knowing where he went to school got his attention, but not so that he was going to let me in to talk.
“Big deal. You could get that info off the school website. Now get the fuck outta here or I’ll have to make you.”
“You think so, huh?”
His answer was a stiff arm to my chest that knocked me back to the steps. My response was to show him my. 38.
“You wanna try that again?” I asked.
He eyes looked scared, but the rest of him remained pretty calm. “No, I think I’ll just call the cops.”
“Do that. I used to be a cop and trust me, they’ll take my word over yours.”
“Gee, I’m just shaking in my shoes.”
“You’re not wearing shoes, Mr. Fisher.”
He actually looked down, then put his hand on the door. “Get outta here.”
“I wouldn’t do that. Shut the door, I mean. Because if you do, I think I might have to let your dean at Pratt and your neighbors know about your record.”
His hand stopped. His face went from angry to blank to scared, very scared. Now I had his attention.
“I think this is where you invite me in. Or maybe I should start screaming about what a bad boy you used to be at the top of my lungs. What do you think? She was what, thirteen years old?”
“I was thirteen too, goddammit!” he growled. “We were just exploring and kissing. It was a mutual thing. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel any girls up before you were eighteen.”
“We aren’t talking about me.”
“Besides, how the fuck did you-”
“In or out, Professor Fisher?”
He opened the door and retreated into the apartment. It wasn’t a bad place: a mix of modern and Scandinavian furniture, bare wood floors, a drawing table in the center of the living room, art supplies scattered all around it, walls covered in art that wasn’t all that different from Sashi’s.
“Those records are supposed to be sealed,” he said, lighting up a cigarette.
“Sealed, not expunged, Professor. Ain’t technology grand?”
“What do you want?”
“Where’s Sashi Bluntstone?”
He choked with laughter, little puffs of smoke giving form to his amusement. “You’re kidding me, right? Look around. Where do you think I’m keeping her, in my fucking pocket? This place consists of this room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. I got people upstairs who never leave. I don’t have a car. Go, take a look around while I finish my cigarette.”
I looked. Nothing.
“You happy now?”
“No,” I said, and introduced his testicles to my right foot. “Now I’m happy, asshole. Take that website down or I’ll create one of my own about you. Understand?” He shook his head yes. “Today!”
I waited around until he started breathing again, then I left.
The next two stops involved less violence, but got me to the same place. Nowhere. I hated to admit it, Sonia Barrows-Willingham was right. The antipathy for Sashi was founded on the study, hard work, and sacrifice her detractors had invested in careers that barely put food in their mouths or paid the rent.
My fourth stop of the day was my last stop. It was at a tenth-floor pigsty in a big faceless apartment house in Alphabet City on the lower East Side of Manhattan. The person who lived here used the screen name Leonardo when posting comments on Martyr’s blog, but the information Devo got me showed the name on the lease was Delia Parker. Whoever lived here, Delia, Leonardo, or Michelangelo, he or she didn’t have much love for Sashi Bluntstone. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of love for her anywhere in this world.
I pushed the black, rectangular doorbell just below the peephole on the metal door to the apartment. No one stirred, but I sensed someone was home. Muted music drifted under the door riding piggyback on the stink of cigarette smoke and dirty diapers. I put my knuckles to the door and the rapping echoed along the hallway. Feet shuffled on the other side of the door and I felt an eye on me. I showed it my old badge.
“Open it, now!” I wasn’t in the mood for coaxing and cajoling.
Locks clicked. The door pulled back.
“Delia Parker?”
“Yeah, yeah, what is it, Officer?” she twitched more than asked between nervous puffs on her cigarette. “I got a sick baby to take care of here.”
Nearly six feet tall and weighing no more than ninety pounds, Delia Parker was a human scarecrow. Her blond hair was dull and lifeless, uncleaned and unbrushed. Her skin was red and blotchy and her gums had so receded that her smoke-yellowed teeth looked enormous in her hollow head. She was dressed in dirty, loose jeans and a t-shirt. She didn’t even try to hide the raw track marks running up and down both her arms. Delia Parker was a tweaker, a crystal meth addict and, by the look of her, she wasn’t going to be one for very much longer. She smelled like death and the next person who showed up at her door holding official credentials was apt to be from the medical examiner. At that moment, I couldn’t have known just how horribly right I was going to be. I put my badge away.
“May I come in? I’m not here to bust your chops about the crank.”
She almost seemed disappointed by that. I think she knew she was beyond helping herself and wanted desperately to be rescued. But we all want that, don’t we? What must it have been like, I wondered, to watch yourself drowning? Delia stepped back and shut the door when I stepped in.
“What then?”
“Sashi Bluntstone.”
She began laughing wildly, her whole body shaking. The laugh became a cough and the cough became vomit. The vomit was mostly yellowy-green mucus and blood. She fell to her knees. I found a towel, the least dirty one in the bathroom, and wiped her up. I put her down on her side to rest. Then I realized that that much noise would have woken up almost any baby. I left Delia where she laid and ran through the apartment looking for the baby. I found it in a filthy crib in the corner of the bedroom. The baby boy, blue and unbreathing, cold to the touch, was dead. His mother wasn’t the only soul in this place beyond help. I dialed 911, then sat down on the bed and waited, too numb to cry.
TWENTY-THREE
I didn’t listen to the press conference. I guess I couldn’t have even if I wanted to or had the strength to listen. I was too busy explaining myself to the long list of New York City officials who drifted in and out of the tenth-floor apartment. First there were the two uniforms, then the EMTs, then the detectives, then the ME’s man, then the housing rep, then it was the detectives again and again and again. That I was a retired cop and a lapsed-license PI helped, but not so much. The days of a badge getting you a pass were over. The necessity and art of ass covering had always been part of the job, but now with intense media scrutiny, cell phone cameras, and Gotcha! blogs, a smart cop didn’t give too many breaks to anyone just because he was once on the job. Maybe a little courtesy, but no breaks. That was probably a good thing, but it sure as shit didn’t feel like it to me.
Delia Parker’s story wasn’t much different than the rest of the Sashi haters. She was a promising artist who had come to New York after 9/11 to find out if she could make
it on the main stage. She was an MICA graduate. I’d found her diploma on the floor next to her bed under some used condoms. It wasn’t tough to figure out what she’d been doing for drug money and, by the wasted look of her, she’d been doing a lot of it and not for very much a pop. Beneath the diploma I found photographs of the pre-meth Delia and her family. She was pretty once. She had been someone’s daughter and sister. She looked like her mom. Her sister looked more like her dad. I wondered about them. What did they think had become of their girl? Did they even know about the baby? They would know soon enough.
It’s a stretch to say that on the day you find a neglected, malnourished, and dead child in its filthy crib that things could get worse. A stretch, but not impossible. Because when I got back home to Sheepshead Bay, there was an envelope wedged between the jamb and my front door just above the knob. This was the note that had been missing this morning in the wake of Mary Lambert’s leaving.
Dear Moe,
›I came to tell you last night that I had been promoted and called back to the home office, but when I saw the shape you were in, I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. These last few days together have been some of the best of my life, certainly the best in the last ten years. You are a wonderful, trusting, and tender man, Moe Prager, and I know I will regret not chasing our relationship where it would have gone. But there are things about me you didn’t know. Things, that if you knew them, would have stopped us in our tracks. So please think of me with a smile and not anger. I will always think of you that way and I will always think of you. Please don’t come looking for me. It will ruin what we had and hurt us both. Goodbye.
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