Innocent Monster (30 page)

The wind was more ferocious down here on the Great South Bay and it whipped the snow up so bad that it was hard to see more than half a block in front of me or hear anything more than the wind’s angry howl or my own labored breathing. I cut a parallel path to Jimmy’s street, but in the opposite direction. Up ahead of me and to my right, I could see the eerie soft glow of the cops’ colored lights reflecting off the blowing snowflakes. Wisely, they had set up choke points on two of the three north-south roads leading away from this stubby thumb of land that jutted slightly into the Great South Bay. They were far enough away so that Jimmy wouldn’t have been able to see their lights from his house, but if he tried to drive north from where his house was located to one of the main roads, he’d run smack into a wall of cops.

Now that I had moved far enough in the opposite direction, I changed my course from parallel to perpendicular. The cops hadn’t bothered blocking off the most easterly of the three north-south roads because there was no way for Jimmy to access it by car or on foot. To reach this last road, he’d have to swim the narrow channel I was now standing in front of. And unless human evolution took a sudden, unexpected turn and I miraculously sprouted wings, swimming was exactly what
I
would have to do. Problem was, I wasn’t much of a swimmer under the best conditions and these were pretty fucking far away from the best conditions. Like I said, I hadn’t thought ahead. I knew the channel was here, that I’d have to get across it and another one like it to reach Jimmy’s house. I guess I hoped I’d find a ladder or something so I wouldn’t have to go in the water, but there was no ladder, no something, and I still had to get across. It looked like I was about to join the Polar Bear Club and I had begun untying my shoes when I heard a loud knocking, wood against wood.

I got down on hands and knees in the snow and looked along the length of the channel. There, to my right, fifty or sixty feet behind me, was a dinghy that had broken loose in the storm and drifted up this channel. I’d walked right past it. I got up, went back the way I’d come, and stood over where the dinghy had caught on a wood piling. She was rocking pretty hard in the water, but I climbed down into her without going over. Shit! One of her oars was missing, so there was no way I’d be able to row all the way over to Jimmy Palumbo’s house. Given how choppy the water was and the size of the swales even in this narrow, sheltered channel, I probably wouldn’t have made it anyway. I used the one remaining oar to push the dinghy off the piling, paddled across the thin strip of water, and pulled myself up on the opposite side. One down, one to go.

I was running again, heading for the short block that ran parallel to Jimmy’s street. Other than the sounds of the ocean and the storm, it was strangely quiet. I slowed down, searching the street for a house with a backyard that faced across the channel at Jimmy’s dock. There was only one candidate on the right side of the street. The house was totally dark and the driveway was empty of cars. When I threw a snowball at the front window, no dogs barked, no alarms sounded, no lights flashed. I crept up the driveway and went through the unlocked gate into the backyard. And there, across the second narrow channel, was Jimmy’s dock. That’s where my luck ran out. This house, like all the houses down here, had a backyard dock too, but it was empty. No boat. This time there would be no dinghy to get me across the water.

I thought about just letting the police do what they wanted to do in the first place, but no. Jimmy Palumbo had made me an accomplice to at least one murder and maybe two. He was mine. If there was only an ounce of redemption for me in finding out where Sashi was buried, I was going to get it. Besides, I noticed the lights were on in Jimmy’s house, which was a good thing, but so too were the running lights on in his boat. That, and beneath the howl of the wind and the crash and slap of the surf, I could make out the low growl and purr of the boat’s idling twin engines. Fuck me, but I was going in. I was still a little boozy and figured the water couldn’t drown me any faster than my own raging guilt. Now I had three people’s blood on my hands: Katy’s, Sashi’s, and Tierney’s. I meant to wash some of it off or to die trying. I threw off my shoes and sports jacket, bundled up my parka for a makeshift flotation device, and dived into the black water.

It was worse than I ever thought it would be, much worse. The shock of the wet and the biting cold robbed me of my breath, my will, my ability to think. I flailed about, slapping at the water, but couldn’t find my bundled coat. Panic was as near to me as the pounding of my own heart and I felt it about to pull me under. Then I thought I heard a splash behind me. The distraction saved me for a brief moment as my increasingly heavy arms and legs kicked and pushed the dense, unforgiving water. But I could feel myself failing, slowing down, falling under the soulless water’s icy spell. There wasn’t enough adrenaline in all of Suffolk County to keep me afloat any longer. Then something grabbed me and just like a drowning victim in a Learning To Swim video, I went bonkers. I swung my arms wildly, striking out into the blackness. Something, the back of a hand, a clenched fist, something, slammed into my face and stunned me. I was no longer flailing.

“Moe, relax! I’ve got you. Relax!” a voice screamed to me from beyond the fog in my head. “Come on, we can do this.” It was Paul Stern. “Can you swim at all?”

“Yeah, I’m all right now.”

“Okay.”

He grabbed me by the belt and urged me forward. When I started stroking and kicking again, he let go and we made it to the opposite dock. He got out first and then helped me out of the frozen water. I was so cold, it burned. Now I knew what a steak forgotten at the back of the freezer felt like. Paul and I stood there shivering, teeth chattering. The surging water had pushed us a house or two north of Jimmy’s. This house was dark and quiet as well.

“I’m going in,” I said. “You stay here out of trouble.”

Paul showed me a Glock. “Detective McKenna gave it to me and went to stall the cops for time. I hope the damned thing works wet.” He looked down at his waterlogged watch. “We’ve got maybe ten more minutes.”

“
We
don’t have shit. You’re staying here.”

“We outgun him, don’t we?” There was that we again.

“Maybe not and neither of us is in any kind of shape to go toe to toe with him. He’s warm, dry, and gigantic. Plus, given the strain he’s been under for over a month, he’s probably about ready to explode.”

“Then you need me and I’m helping whether you want me to or not.”

I was in no position to argue and I needed to get out of the cold. “Okay.”

“How are you going to deal with him if, like you say, he’s ready to blow?”

“In his way, I think he’s expecting me. But it really doesn’t matter, does it? We’re here and I’m going after him. Cover me until I get around the side of the house, then take care of the boat. Do whatever you have to do to it, but just make sure he can’t use it to make a run.”

As I worked my way to the side door, back against the clapboards, ducking below the windows, I tried figuring out a play that would get me inside the house without Jimmy knowing about it. Who was I kidding? Even if I wasn’t soaked, frostbitten, and shoeless and hadn’t consumed a third of a bottle of scotch or had a fight or been punched in the face, I don’t think I could have figured out a reasonable plan. I wasn’t a goddamned cat burglar, so I did the only thing that made any sense at all: I knocked. I put my arms in the air high above my head, my old.38 in my hand, butt end out, and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

Jimmy Palumbo almost smiled at me when he answered the door. He grabbed my.38 and tossed it into the darkness and drifting snow behind me. He had a big, nasty-looking revolver in his hand and it was pointed right at my belly.

“Come on inside,” was all he said as he backed up into the house. “Close the door behind you.”

As cold and scared as I was, I did as he said without hesitation. I guess I didn’t care so much about getting killed as long as I could be warm when it happened.

“There’s a comforter on the couch over there.” He pointed with the gun. I went to the couch and had the comforter wrapped around my shoulders and the rest of me in a flash. “Sit,” he said. I sat.

The interior of the place looked as I imagined it would, like a well-decorated house that had been rented out to a couple of irresponsible frat boys. Dirty floors, dirty dishes, half-empty food containers, a big TV. Except for the lack of used needles and cotton balls, it kind of reminded me of Nathan Martyr’s place.

“No way to sell a house,” I said, my teeth still chattering. “The place is a mess.”

He ignored that, walking over to the front window and pushing the curtain aside with the muzzle of the revolver. “Fucking weather. I should have been long gone by now.” Jimmy let the curtain fall back into place.

“Probably wouldn’t’ve mattered.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I thought you might figure out it was me eventually, but not so soon.”

“You killed Tierney?”

“Hey, that’s on you, Moe.” Didn’t I know it? “You led me straight to him and paid me for the honor. He was perfect. Fucking crazy as a bedbug. He didn’t even put up too much of a fight. Who wasn’t gonna believe he did it?”

“Me.”

“Who else?” he asked.

“No one.”

Jimmy gloated. “See what I mean?”

“So you
did
find the altar room when you searched the house. You went back to Martyr’s house that night and planted those pictures of Sashi, her panties, the bones.”

“How’d you figure it out?” He was curious too.

“A lot of little things,” I said, happy he was willing to keep talking. More talk, less bullets. “I couldn’t accept that Tierney had it in him to plot and plan and carry out such a complicated scheme. People kept telling me I was nuts and I almost started believing them too. I noticed she was wearing different underclothes in the pictures on the altar than the ones she was wearing when she was taken. Tierney just wasn’t the type to shop for little girl’s panties. Then I realized that Tierney had blackened out the eyes in every photo and painting in his house, but not the ones you planted. I just couldn’t let it go. Then, tonight, I saw an old video of Sashi’s art shows and there you were, standing guard over her.”

“Shit!”

“It still all might have worked too if I hadn’t seen that video. That was just dumb luck.”

“Bad luck for me.”

“You vandalized my car, but why? It didn’t fit. That was another one of the things that really got in the way of me believing Tierney did it. Why didn’t you just split after you got the initial fifty grand?”

“Look, it was like my lucky day when you walked into the museum and hired me. Until then, I was thinking that it was only a matter of time till the cops came knocking at my door. It would’ve looked pretty bad if I cut and run before they showed up. They’d know I was guilty, and I’d be fucked. But you saved my ass. You brought me close to things, close enough so’s I could find a patsy and get away free and clear. No looking behind me, no waiting for a knock at my door. Besides, fifty grand wasn’t enough for me to make any kind of new start. I thought the Bluntstones were worth millions. I mean, I used to work Sashi’s shows and see people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at a clip on her stuff. How was I supposed to know her parents pissed all the money away and were broker than me?”

“But why fuck up my car and leave the bear?”

“It was a win-win for me. If it worked to scare you off, then great. If not, you’d keep paying me and keep me in the loop until I found the patsy. It worked, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, but it ends here, Jimmy. There’s a Suffolk Police boat waiting for you at Santapogue Point and they’ve got the roads out of here blocked off. That’s why I’m wet and frozen. I had to swim across the channel to get here without the cops noticing. Believe it or not, I’m trying to save your worthless fucking life.”

Oops
! That was a mistake. We were pals up till then.

“Fuck you! You don’t know about me, about who I am,” he shouted, tightening the grip on the big revolver, a grip that, until a few seconds ago, had been steadily relaxing. “Well, if I gotta go, I ain’t going alone.”

“Calm down, Jimmy. You still have a bargaining chip.”

He sneered. “You? Get out. Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Not me. The cops don’t give a shit about me. But you know something the cops want to know. That’s your play.”

“Yeah, and what do I know?”

“Where Sashi is buried.”

He seemed not to understand. “Huh?”

“They’ll make a deal if you can tell them where Sashi is buried.”

Again, he stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language, but that’s where the discussion came to an end. Things happened, everything happened, and, it seemed, all at once. There was a thump at the side door, then loud scratching, howling too, and not from the wind. A dog. The dog I’d heard on the phone the last time I’d spoken to Jimmy. Paul was shouting at someone in the backyard, “Go! Run! Faster! Run! That’s it, run! Faster! Run!” Jimmy’s face went from blank to panic to fury. Then a few beats later, the boat’s engines revved loudly and it sounded as if it was pulling away from the dock. Palumbo’s phone rang and we both startled. It rang and rang and rang.

I said, “Answer it.”

Jimmy was frozen, his attention and guts being tugged in a hundred different directions. He reached for the phone. It stopped ringing. Flashing red and blue lights strobed through the front window. The dog was howling louder now and scratching more fiercely. The boat crashed into something, groaning as it broke apart. Jimmy pointed the gun at my head.

“James Palumbo, this is the Suffolk County Police Department...”

Jimmy turned. I had no chance in a fight with him, but I did have a chance to get the gun out of his hand. I grabbed a crystal obelisk, about eight inches tall, off the end table and brought it down hard as I could on Jimmy’s wrist. The bones snapped and the gun fell to the floor. His bloodied hand hung down from his arm at an unnatural angle, exposed bone peeking through the skin. I nearly puked at the sight of it. Jimmy screamed, but didn’t freak. This was a man who had played NFL football. Talent, strength, size, and speed were parts of that equation, but the ability to withstand constant pain was another. He reached for the gun with his left hand. I kicked it away before he could grab it.