Innocent Monster (25 page)

“You did. I thought you were working.”

“I got off at eight. I think we have something to celebrate this year and figured now that Mom’s not around, we could have a tree.”

“How’s the beagle?”

“She gives a whole new meaning to sick as a dog, but she’ll live.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Paul Stern, I’d like you to meet my daughter Sarah.”

He made to shake her hand and gave up. “Why don’t you come to dinner with us?” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Don’t be silly, kiddo. C’mon with us. I’ve been talking about my past all night and I think I might want to let Paul do some talking for a change.”

“I’ve got the keys, just let me drop this stuff off upstairs. You guys wait for me.”

Paul Stern grabbed the bag. “Let me help.”

I waited downstairs in contemplation of the smile on my daughter’s face and letting go of the emptiness that had haunted me for the last seven years.

The day after Christmas I met Jimmy Palumbo for breakfast at a diner on Sunrise Highway. He told me he’d spent the holiday with family and that it was an okay time. He barely ate his eggs, mostly pushing them around his plate. Nor was he in a particularly talkative mood. I could tell there was something on his mind and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what it was. I didn’t imagine the stultifying life at the museum was the future he had envisioned for himself when he was pancaking linebackers in the NFL. But now that the extracurricular work I had for him had dried up, the museum was all he had ahead of him. At least, Jimmy said, he didn’t have to go back to work until the second week in January. I considered offering him something at one of our stores, then thought better of it. It would have been a lateral move: trading in one life-draining job for another.

And, I suspected, there was something else eating at him. Didn’t take a genius to figure that one out either. He had no doubt heard the stories about the reward money. I could see him trying to work out how to broach the subject without pissing me off. He even made an abortive attempt at talking his way around to it.

“I guess I didn’t do a very good job when I searched that fucking lunatic’s house. If we’d brought a flashlight, it might have ended different.”

“That wasn’t your fault,” I said. “No matter what, I should’ve taken a look for myself. I told you that already. The cops said they would probably have missed seeing that room too in bad light. They also think Sashi was probably already dead by then.”

Jimmy got silent again. He understood as I did that the space between what the cops thought and what they knew for sure was the place where the gnawing questions lived. If only we could have known for certain that Sashi was already dead by the time we got to Tierney’s house. If... if... if... The sad refrain of so many lives. The silence and unspoken questions continued for another couple of minutes, when, mercifully, the waitress brought the check. I snatched it away from Jimmy, threw a five-buck tip on the table, and made to stand up.

“Shit! I almost forgot,” I said, handing Jimmy an envelope. “Merry Christmas.”

I slid back into the booth and watched him open it up.

“Holy shit, Moe!” His hands shook as he held the check. “This is—”

“—a lot of money. Yeah, Jimmy, but you earned it as much as I did and you sure as shit need it. Maybe it’ll give you time to find a new job or maybe you can fix up the house or work on the boat. Whatever you want. I wish I could’ve given it to you in cash.”

“No, that’s all right. Thanks, man. I don’t know what to say.”

“You already said it.”

This time I stood in earnest. Jimmy was still staring at the check when I left.

Detective Jordan McKenna looked as beat-up as I felt.

Sure, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day had gone great for me. Dinner with Paul and Sarah at a little Indian place in Park Slope was amazing. Park Slope, that’s the part of Brooklyn where people who aren’t from Brooklyn live in Brooklyn while pretending they live in Manhattan. We walked into the place just before they closed the kitchen and so the owner/chef, who felt as awkward about Christmas Eve as any Jew, fired up his Tandoor and baked up an array of breads and meat dishes the likes of which I had never seen or tasted. He gave us a round of Taj Mahal beers on the house. And when we got back to my condo, Sarah and Paul decorated the tiny Christmas tree and placed it on top of the stack of gifts my daughter had bought me. I drank a little bit more of the fancy scotch and decided it was pretty fucking good after all. The next morning, Sarah came back and we celebrated the guilty pleasure of our first Christmas by opening the presents and staring at photo albums for hours on end. That said, the questions about the costs of having Sarah back still remained. One child lost for one child found, could that ever be balanced out?

McKenna, on the other hand, had been forced to deal with the same sorts of questions without any of the benefits. The case had been his from day one; Sashi had been killed on his watch. At least I’d gotten close. He didn’t get close. He didn’t get a daughter back. He didn’t get reward money. I knew what he got.

“The brass is breaking your balls, huh?”

“Pretty much. Looks like I’m going to get reassigned.”

“But you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But I didn’t do anything particularly right either, Moe. Let’s face it, you come on the scene and within a week you track the guy down. I had the case for three weeks.”

“We both know that’s not how it works.”

“Doesn’t matter how it works,” he said. “It’s how it looks that matters to the bosses.”

“So what are they going to do to you?”

“You know the drill. They’re going to give me a bump up and stick me in an office somewhere. I’ll be a supervisor consulting on supervising on consulting or I’ll be like a community relations guy... some bullshit like that.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. So you wanna have a look-see at the evidence?”

“I do.”

“Come on with me.”

I followed McKenna down a hallway into what I supposed was a lunch room. There on the table were several cardboard evidence boxes.

“I don’t know what you hope to find,” he said, “but you’re welcome to it.”

“Like I said to you the other day, I don’t know what I hope to find. Some solace, maybe. I don’t know.”

“There may be solace someplace in this fucking world, but not in those boxes. Only more misery in there.”

“Maybe.”

“I have to stay in the room. It’s the rules.”

“No problem.”

I began sorting and sifting through the evidence and files. Most of the evidence came from John Tierney’s house. The early stuff with the files was what you’d expect, written reports, interviews, a lot of pictures of Sashi at different ages. Through all of this, I realized, it had been a long time since I’d looked at Sashi Bluntstone. I mean, really looked at her and thought of her as a person. She had been many things to me throughout these last weeks: a means to an end, an artist, an object, a goal, someone else’s kid. But I’d only really ever thought about her as a child, a pretty sad one at that, early on in the process. Now I stared at her, Cara the beagle snuggling next to her. Even with that goofy kid’s smile on her face and the dog she loved more than anything next to her, her eyes looked ancient and tired. No kid, I thought, should look like that.

McKenna was right, there was no solace to be had in those boxes. There was something in them—not misery exactly, regret maybe—but certainly not peace of mind. If anything, I had more questions now than when I left my condo that morning. And as I drove back to Brooklyn from McKenna’s office, I felt an itch. My mind was working on something, but on what I could not say. It didn’t really matter, for even if I solved all the riddles the universe laid at my feet, Sashi Blunt-stone would still be dead. Even I understood that all this rooting around in Jordan McKenna’s files and my conversation with Dr. Ogologlu were ways to come to terms with that one simple fact.

I trolled the aisles of my local big box pharmacy. This was how I did it. I’d wait till I needed nearly everything and then do a massive shop. Running out to pick up this or that just wasn’t my style. Besides, men of my generation are kind of lost about a lot of things. Oh, if I needed a suit, I was aces. I knew what I liked, what looked good on me, and how to get it. But when it came to things like socks and underwear, I was hopeless. So there I was, rummaging through shelves of briefs when that itch flared up again. Then, when I was standing there with a three-pack of white Hanes briefs in my hand, it hit me. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed McKenna.

“Moe Prager, Christ, what now? Didn’t I just see you yesterday?”

“Her panties!” I shouted into the phone. A young woman in the aisle next to me abruptly about-faced.

“Sashi Bluntstone’s?”

“Yeah.”

“What about them?”

“They’re different,” I said.

“Different than what?”

“Than the ones she was wearing when she was taken. The ones she was wearing in the pictures on the altar, the ones you found with the bones in them. Read your report.”

“I read the reports a hundred times. I know they’re different. So what?”

“So what? Come on, McKenna.”

“So Tierney either was prepared to hold on to her for a long time and bought some underwear for her before he grabbed her or he bought new stuff for her after he had her. I repeat, so what?”

“John Tierney strike you as the kind of guy to go on little shopping excursions?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. He was dead when we met.”

“Well, he wasn’t dead when I met him. In fact, I’m standing in the middle of one of those big pharmacies right now. It’s brightly lit, full of people and security cameras. I can’t picture John Tierney strolling down the aisles here whistling a happy tune.”

“So he went to a Pathmark or Stop & Shop at four in the morning or asked a neighbor or one of his freakazoid soul mates on the internet to do it. There’s a hundred ways he could have done it.”

I took a deep breath. Fact is, Detective McKenna was right. Still, I wasn’t buying it. “Maybe you’ve got a point.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“Doesn’t change a goddamned thing, Prager. Stop looking at the edges of the thing and look at the big picture. The kid’s dead and Tier-ney killed her. Nothing’s going to change that, so stop it.”

“You’re right. Sorry to have bugged you.”

He didn’t say goodbye.

When I got back to my condo, I made another call.

The house was a white Victorian on Westminster between Beverly Road and Cortelyou Road. Though certainly a big house by Brooklyn standards, it was nothing like the size of Max and Candy’s fussy Victorian on the hill in Sea Cliff. The lot was tiny by any but New York City standards, yet because nearly all the houses in the area were about this size and of the same era and built on exactly the same-sized lots, it worked somehow. Finding a legal parking spot on the street was something else again. After a few trips around the block, I pulled into the narrow driveway behind the blue Lexus SUV with the MD plates.

Mehmet Ogologlu didn’t seem especially pleased to see me coming up his front steps, though he had invited me over. During our rather terse conversation on the phone the doctor had reinforced his lack of enthusiasm for my curiosity and his continued reluctance to discuss John Tierney. Still, he was a man of his word and kept his promises. I couldn’t say that about many people these days. Maybe I was being naïve and people in the past were just more skilled at camouflaging their insincerity. These days it seemed people wore dishonor like a badge. God, I was sounding more crotchety by the minute and even I found my incremental slide towards citizenship in Curmud-geonville annoying.

At the threshold, I removed my shoes and though Dr. Ogologlu didn’t burst out in a song of praise, he did at least seemed pleased by my gesture of respect. He offered me his hand and asked me to follow him into a comfortably messy parlor.

“We may speak freely here. Would you care for a soft drink, some juice perhaps?” he called to me as he left the room.