When you’re twenty and wake up in a sweat, you’ve had too much to drink. At my age, it’s probably lymphoma. Not this time. It hit me as soon as I woke up from my endless fall: there was more wrong with the accepted version of Sashi’s kidnapping and murder than the panties and the vandalism to my car. In his psychosis, John Tierney had blackened the eyes in every photograph and painting and drawing in his house. Tierney had even done it to paintings in portfolios and photo albums stored in boxes in his attic. Why did he do it? Maybe he did it for the same reason he turned the TV to the wall and cut off the utilities. Maybe it had some quasi-religious significance that only he understood. The reason was beside the point. What he hadn’t done was to blacken the eyes in the pictures of Sashi that were found on top of the altar. Why do it to the paintings and drawings and photos of Sashi that were in the collage on the wall behind the altar, but not to those on the altar?
If I hadn’t already burned both bridges, I would have been on the phone to McKenna and Dr. Ogologlu. Unfortunately, I had burned those bridges. There weren’t going to be any second looks at the evidence nor would there be any more polite philosophical conversations with the doctor. Both of them, McKenna and Ogologlu, were right about me, but they were wrong, too. I wasn’t going to a dark place. I was already there and I was there alone. I wasn’t sure I believed in undeniable facts, bumblebees notwithstanding. I was less and less convinced that John Tierney had anything to do with Sashi Bluntstone’s murder, no matter what all the hard evidence indicated. That was ice-cold comfort because there was the part of me that distrusted my own motives for believing in John Tierney. Because if Tierney was guilty, he really wasn’t. That’s what’d gotten lost in all of this heartache. Tier-ney wasn’t responsible for the chemical imbalance in his brain or for the genetic flaw in his DNA. If he killed Sashi, he was an innocent monster. And if he was, the only guilt left on the table would be my own.
Then, as if on cue, Declan Carney called and asked me to come get the paintings and the test results.
Dressed in carpenter pants, a paint-smeared Hunter College sweatshirt, and work boots, Declan Carney wasn’t quite as fancifully decked out as when we first met. Gone were the Hawaiian shirt, kilt, tube socks, and Birkenstocks. He’d also shaved his head of the Mohawk, side curls, Fu Manchu, and soul patch. But I found out soon enough that his newfound Bohemian look did not mean he had abandoned his idiosyncrasies. When I made to shake his hand, he backed away.
“Take no offense,” he said, “but on Skajit it is our holy month and physical contact with other sentient beings is forbidden.”
“No offense taken.”
Outside, on the street in front of his building, they were tearing up the pavement. And though the noise was far from unbearable, it was enough to get your attention. It certainly had Carney’s attention. He could not seem to stop himself from staring over his shoulder at the filthy windows that would have looked down on the work below.
“Mr. Carney, can I have the results, please?” He didn’t react immediately, apparently still distracted by the work noise. “Please,” I repeated.
“Yes, the results.”
Continuing to look over his shoulder, he walked over to a workbench and grabbed a bound report about an inch thick. “These are my findings. There is a detailed analysis of the tests I ran, the methods I used…” His voice drifted off as he handed me the file. He made sure our hands didn’t touch.
I flipped through the report. It seemed incredibly thorough, but frankly, I didn’t give a shit about anything other than his conclusions.
“So, what’s the verdict?”
“Excuse me,” he said, his attention elsewhere.
“What are your conclusions?”
“The results are there in the-”
“Look, Carney, no offense, but I’d like a few minutes of your time. I realize we didn’t agree on a price, but by the appearance of this report, it’s not gonna be cheap.”
“What?”
I repeated myself.
“I will send you the invoice. The paintings are there.” He pointed to a crate at the side of his workbench. You’ve got to love someone who returns things in better packaging than the packaging you delivered the goods in. “Please, just leave.”
“Will you go look out the goddamned window already so we can talk.”
He relented. “All right. What is it you want to know?”
“Did Sashi Bluntstone do those paintings?”
“Yes and no.”
“Well, that just clears everything up, doesn’t it? Did she or didn’t she?”
“The first painting shows a consistency of brush stroke, material-”
I was beginning to lose it. “For fuck’s sake, Carney, just give it to me in English, clear, concise English for idiots.”
“She did the first painting entirely on her own. The second painting she had some help with. The third painting was done almost entirely by the person who helped her do the second painting. Now that you have your answer, please leave.”
“The last time I was here, you warned me about monsters.”
“Yes.”
“Innocent monsters in particular.”
“Yes.” I seemed finally to have drawn his attention.
“I found one, you know?”
“I know, the man who murdered Sashi Bluntstone.”
“Him, yeah.”
“I was saddened to hear of the child’s death, but it is what you anticipated.”
“Yes and no,” I said, tweaking him a bit.
He smiled briefly. “But you expected she would already be dead, so what is the matter?”
“I did, but I was shocked-I am shocked by who they say did it.”
“You do not believe this man Tierney killed her?”
“I don’t want to believe it.”
He smiled again, but this time it looked like a gunshot wound. “It would seem you are his second victim, then.”
“You know I did a little checking up on you.”
“To what end?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I was a little curious and I felt sorry for you.”
“Your sorrow was misguided. Sorrow often is.”
“So are guilt and blame, Carney.”
“Oh, do you really think so, Mr. Prager? I think the guilty know exactly who they are. Goodbye.”
When I got downstairs with the paintings, a workman stopped me from going to my car as a yellow front-end loader scooped up huge bucketfuls of chopped-up asphalt and dropped them into the box of a Mack dump truck. I turned and looked up and saw an open third-floor window. Declan Carney was staring down intently at the commotion in the street, but I was fairly certain he was seeing and hearing very different things than was I. I tried to imagine what he was seeing and hearing, yet no matter how hard I tried to hear the screams of the Iraqi soldiers Carney had suffocated beneath the chuff and grunts of the bulldozer and desert sands, I could not hear them. I noticed Carney wiping his cheeks. I could not see his tears.
THIRTY-FIVE
I was never much of a New Year’s Eve kind of guy. I guess I’m not much on holidays all the way around. I never liked being told how to feel or when to feel it. Besides, holidays, all of them, not only Christmas, seemed either too commercial or artificial or both. I liked Passover. I liked everything about it because, even if you were in the most fucked-up mood imaginable, there’s no two ways to feel about being freed from slavery. Then again, if I was destined to like a holiday, Passover was going to be the one. My name is Moses.
Oddly enough, I found myself on the couch half watching football, drinking some more of Paul Stern’s single snob whiskey and missing the hell out of Mary Lambert. I started out mad, but by my third sip it was all just melting away into missing her. She lied to me. PIs are liars. I was a liar. I made a mental list of who I hadn’t lied to over the last few weeks. Very short list, that. But Mary and I had chemistry. I felt it. That couldn’t have been a lie. It just couldn’t. Can women fake
orgasms? The answer’s pretty obviously yes and I didn’t even like thinking about who might have acted her part in my bed. What pissed me off about the concept of faking it is that women assume we’re so fucking fragile that we need to feel the roof rafters shudder when they come. Well, no, that’s not what pissed me off. What pissed me off was that they were right. We are that fragile. There are things, however, that can’t be faked. That’s what got to me, her walking away from a rare kind of connection that no one should ever walk away from. But what did I know? Maybe I had been played for a love-hungry idiot. Maybe there wasn’t anything in the world that couldn’t be faked.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t live without someone to come home to, someone to need, and love. I functioned pretty well on my own the whole time I was on the job and I managed to dress and feed myself for the last seven years without someone packing my lunch and laying my clothes out on the bed-but I didn’t want to just manage or function anymore. My life always had more meaning when I was with Katy as it did during my brief time with Carmella. I didn’t want to die alone in a wheelchair-accessible apartment that Sarah and her husband-to-be-named-later set up for me in their house. Sixty might be the new forty, but there was no such thing as the new dead. Same as it ever was. There was no denying that I was closer to the end, a lot closer, than the beginning.
By my second glass of scotch, it dawned on me that I’d only felt the kind of connection and chemistry I had with Mary Lambert twice in my life. Now both those women were gone. That’s why I cursed Mary Lambert or whatever the hell her name was for walking away from it. You don’t just walk away from such a rare gift. That’s why people want to live forever, you know. Not to go through the daily grind and pain and bullshit, but for the hope of those few things that make your heart race. What’s the rest of it worth, really? And somehow, even with my Scrooge-ian take on holidays, I just knew Mary would have been the perfect woman to spend New Year’s Eve with. She would have made it fun. I saw in her someone to make the other stuff worth it.
I suppose I was in an especially grumpy mood because I’d hoped Sarah might go to dinner with me, but she said she’d already made plans. Then she rubbed salt in the wound by telling me she couldn’t come to Sashi’s memorial with me either. I didn’t press her for details. We were still making a comeback. We weren’t quite there yet. Even my newfound friend and scotch supplier, Paul Stern, turned me down. After I hung up the phone with him, I started grumbling to myself about him being just like Rico, and that was before I had anything to drink. Aaron invited me to spend the night with him and Cindy, but regardless of my love for them, I politely said no. For the last thirty years they’d gotten together with the same group of friends and played board games and watched the ball drop. It was tradition. Theirs, not mine. I would rather have gone to the dentist.
I actually did call Jimmy Palumbo and offered to meet him in the City or somewhere out on the Island and buy him a New Year’s steak dinner. He turned me down flat, but in the nicest possible way and it had nothing to do with his latest financial gains. Well, maybe it did, sort of.
“Sorry, man, I just can’t. I’d really like too, but I gotta say no.” In the background, I heard a young dog yapping for attention. “Excuse me for a second, Moe.” Then to the dog, “Okay, you, calm down. Atta girl, calm down. Good girl.”
“New puppy?”
“Had her a couple a weeks.”
“What about tonight?” I asked. “A family party or something?”
“Nah, I’m packing up and gettin’ outta here. There’s nothing for me here anymore except bad memories. I gave my notice to the museum yesterday and the house goes on the market later this week. I need a new start.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m puttin’ some stuff in storage, gettin’ on the boat with the pup, and going. I guess I’ll head south first with the shitty weather here and all. Then, who knows.”
“When you leaving?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“New year, new start,” I said. “Nice symmetry.”
“Maybe, but probably I’ll leave the day after tomorrow. Loose ends and shit. You know?”
“I know. Well, good luck, brother. I hope things work out for you.”
“Me too, but I got a good feeling about it. Things are different now. Thanks for everything, man.”
I’d thought about offering up some tired platitudes about there being no escape from yourself and that wherever a man goes, he takes his woes with him. No need to inflict my rotten mood on him, I thought, and just said goodbye.
Another scotch later, I actually found myself wondering what Dr. Ogologlu was doing, if his family was still in Amsterdam. My stubborn refusal to buy into the facts about Tierney’s role in Sashi Blunt-stone’s death had finally begun to fade. I think it was when Declan Carney implied that my desperately clinging to belief in Tierney’s innocence had made me yet another victim that I began to wake up as if from a fitful sleep. On my ride back from Long Island City, I’d gone over all the possible scenarios and the only one that made any sense involved John Tierney and Sashi. I could manage to implicate Randy Junction, Sonia Barrows-Willingham, Max, and even Candy in some of those scenarios, but I couldn’t see it ending up the way it had. I was tempted to call both McKenna and the doctor and swear that I’d finally seen the light. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! But what would they have cared? Besides, I was going to see McKenna soon enough.
When I woke up on the couch, the ball had dropped, the new year had come in without my notice, and the world had moved on. It always does.
THIRTY-SIX
There was a rather bizarre carnival-like atmosphere to the whole thing. Mrs. Sonia Barrows-Willingham had hired a valet parking service to handle the cars of the memorial attendees. And by the look of the makeshift parking lot, there were going to be more people here than at an April Mets game at Shea during the mid-’70s. I arrived at about the same time as Detective McKenna and he was in a fairly pissy mood to begin with. Maybe a little drunk too.
“Can you believe this shit?” he asked, pointing at all the cars already parked in neat rows on the east lawn. “So much for that intimate little memorial service, huh?”
“Let’s hang out here and maybe the MetLife blimp will show up for overhead coverage.”
“Too cloudy for that. Snow’s in the air.”
I looked up. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“Here are your claim checks, gentlemen,” a very polite, dark-skinned East Asian kid said, handing us our receipts.
The claim tags were playing card-size renderings of Sashi Bluntstone paintings. Just amazing. Inside, they probably had life-size Jell-O molds of Sashi’s paintings.
“You see these guys parking the cars, Prager? All freakin’ Indians and Chinks. What’d she do, hire the high school chess and math teams? Un-fuckin’-believable.”
I didn’t bother saying anything to him about his not so subtle racism. Some guys bring their racism to the job. Sometimes the job brings the racism to them. And no matter which way you were infected, alcohol made things worse.
“You think this thing’s catered?” he asked.
“Given that there’s valet parking, I’d say the chances are pretty good.”
“I hope they have those little hot dogs. It’s not a party without the little hot dogs.”
“It’s not a party,” I reminded him.
“You think?”
“Come on, let’s get inside before it starts snowing.”
I put my hand on McKenna’s shoulder and urged him forward. Closer to him now, I could smell the alcohol strong on his breath. He wasn’t staggering, but he was tight. Apparently I hadn’t been the only one struggling with his part in this whole ordeal.
A very large, head-shaven, well-dressed black man stood guard at the door. He kept his hands at his side and wore a practiced expression that walked the line between dispassion and threat. His suit jacket was cut loosely enough to hide the sidearm he was no doubt carryin
g beneath it, but given the circus atmosphere, I wasn’t sure whether he was here to keep the press in or out. McKenna took one look at the guy, blew air loudly through his lips, and shook his head in disdain. He did it specifically so the security man would notice. If he had noticed, he didn’t show it.
“What the fuck, Prager? They think a fight’s gonna break out here or what?”
“I think it’s just a precaution. Rich people can get pretty weird about security, especially if paparazzi are involved.”
“Who even gives a shit anymore?” he said. “The kid’s old news. You have any idea how many other little girls have been murdered over the last few weeks?”
It was a question that required no answer, but I answered anyway to try and move him off the subject: “Too many.”
“One is too many.”
“You’ll get no argument from me.”
“Gentlemen,” the security man said, politely nodding his head and opening the door.
We stepped in.
“They’re really gonna screw me, Moe.”
“Who is?”
“The fucking bosses. My rabbi says they want to stick me in IA and there’s nothing he can do to protect me. Me, in Internal Affairs! Jesus, I might as well put in my papers or eat my gun.”
“Don’t be an ass. Come on, let’s see what’s what.”
It was apparent pretty quickly what was what. There were bars set up in the main hallway at the base of each of the two staircases. At one of the bars, I recognized the faces of some local female TV reporters, their heavy makeup looking ridiculous under normal lighting. What was a circus without clowns, right? I guess the news vans were parked around the rear of the house. At least I didn’t see any cameras, but that didn’t mean the cameramen weren’t setting up in the room where the memorial was to be held. There was a small army of tuxedoed servers passing trays of hors d’oeuvres. None of the silver trays seemed to contain those little hot dogs. This didn’t much please McKenna nor did the presence of the media.
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