Innocent Monster (31 page)

“You prick! I was her only hope.” And with that, he landed a left hook to my jaw that would be felt by generations of Pragers yet to be born. My eyes shut.

When they fluttered open again, I was on the floor, blood pouring out of my mouth, the revolver gone, and Jimmy Palumbo heading out the side door at a run. The dog was yelping and someone was shouting for Jimmy to halt. It was Paul Stern.
Bang!
A shot.
Bang! Bang!
Two more, louder, much much louder than the first. Now I was running, lots of people were running. I got out to the backyard just in time to see Jimmy Palumbo dive off the dock, gun in hand, knocking Paul Stern backwards into the water with him. Cops were all around me, but, crazy and irrational as it was, the only thing I could think about was that I was going to lose Rico again, and that I would lose Sarah again too.

The snow was stained with blood, a lot of blood, steam rising off it. We all ran to the edge of the dock. Three of the cops ran ahead and dived in without hesitation. For reasons I can’t begin to explain, I started praying to Mr. Roth, asking him to talk to God on my behalf. Me praying to a dead Jew. Go figure! As Izzy was fond of saying, “God
does
answer prayers, only most of the time, the answer is no.” A man who had witnessed the things he’d seen in Auschwitz understood the limitations of prayer. But when I looked down into the water, there was Paul Stern, his arm around Jimmy Palumbo’s neck, keeping him from drowning. Then the cops grabbed on and helped.

“Get out of there!” I screamed at him in joy and anguish. “Anything happens to you, my daughter will kill me herself.”

Behind me, the dog was at it again, only this time, it was yelping and howling in joy. When I turned to look, I saw McKenna, tears streaming down his face, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Then I understood. Standing in front of him was a little girl with green eyes and nine fingers. She was kneeling down to pet her beagle puppy.

I was right to have used Mr. Roth as the intermediary between me and the Almighty, because, this one time, God said yes.

The minute they brought Jimmy up out of the water I knew I had never really understood anything about the world and thought that maybe I should stop pretending that I did. Sashi stopped petting the little beagle, ran over to Jimmy, crying as fiercely as McKenna had been only moments before, and screamed, “Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Jimmy, please be all right.”

He wasn’t all right and he wasn’t ever going to be all right again, even if he survived. Sashi could see that. That’s what the tears were about. That and maybe a lot more. Jimmy’s wrist was totally fucked, jagged bone sticking way the hell out, and it was hard to say whether his left thigh was soaked more with blood or water. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was crying too. Sashi was holding Jimmy’s good hand to her cheek even as the cops worked furiously to stanch the flow from his leg wound and deal with his wrist.

“Don’t worry, kid,” he said, pulling his hand away from her cheek, stroking her hair. “It’ll be okay.”

But she knew it was a lie. She knew the shapes and sounds of lies. Her parents had trained her in the art of the lie.

A gurney appeared and Jimmy was on it. As they carried him past me, he said, “You shoulda let us go, Prager. You shoulda let me save her.” Then he was gone.

“What was that about?” McKenna asked, more composed now.

“A failed rescue attempt, I think. One gone very wrong.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” is what I said.

“Come on, let’s get you and your partner over there to the hospital.” McKenna was pointing at Paul Stern being helped out of the water.

At the hospital, they examined us for hypothermia and frostbite, but both of us checked out okay. Thanks to McKenna’s intervention, they got us fixed up with some hospital scrubs to wear under the blankets instead of those ridiculous gowns. You want to suck the dignity out of a human being, make him wear a hospital gown.

“Thanks, Paul. You saved my life.”

He was horrified that I said it aloud. Talk about someone squirming in his seat, but he felt compelled to respond. “I did it for me.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re the closest thing I’ve got on this earth to my biological father. I couldn’t just stand there and lose you too. Not now. And then there’s Sarah. I never met anyone like her.”

“You’ll get no argument from me.”

We let it go at that for a few minutes, then I started up again.

“How’d you manage to find me in that storm? You don’t know the area and you weren’t right behind me. The visibility was terrible, sure, but if you were close, I would have seen you.”

“Easy,” he said. “I tracked you. Footprints in the snow. Remember, I’m from—”

“—Vermont. Yeah, I think I heard that once or twice already tonight.”

He blushed.

“So,” I said, “you used the dinghy to get across the first channel, huh?”

“Dinghy?”

“A dinghy, it’s a small boat that—”

“I know what a dinghy is, Moe.”

“Yeah, well, I found one stuck up against a piling and I—”

“I didn’t see a dinghy. All I saw was your footprints stop on one side of the channel and begin again on the other side, so I—”

“You swam across! Are you nuts? You could have been killed.”

“Well, I thought if a drunk, sixty-year-old man with bad knees could do it, I could.”

“Some prosecutor! If you saw me on the observation deck of the Empire State Building one minute and down on Thirty-fourth Street a few minutes later, would you assume I jumped?
Oy gevalt!
I like you, kid, but you’ve got a lot to learn.”

“Never said I didn’t.”

I changed subjects. “Were you trying to shoot Jimmy in the leg?”

“No. I was aiming at his torso, but I was so incredibly cold that I couldn’t stop my hand from shaking.”

“Cold, and maybe a little scared too?”

“More than a little, Moe.”

When he said those words, I knew that any resemblance to Rico was superficial. Rico Tripoli would never have been able to admit what his son had just confessed. One vote for nurture versus nature. For that matter, Rico would have let me drown and cried about it afterwards from the safety of shore. I didn’t tell that to Paul.

We may not have had frostbite or hypothermia, but they kept me in the hospital for two days. They let Paul go home that night. When I asked the doctor why Paul got to go and I had to stay, he mentioned something about the difference in our ages. People seemed to be fixated on my age lately. In the end, I was thankful they kept me there, not because I was worried about my health, but because they kept the press out of my hair and let me get some sleep. I slept for almost an entire day. I had never been that tired in my life, nor had my muscles, the few that I had left, ever felt so incredibly sore. To paraphrase the late great Edmund Kean: drowning is easy, almost drowning is hard.

Detective McKenna, who never went to IA, but got a bump up and was now scheduled to receive his department’s highest honor, came to visit me two weeks after I got out of the hospital. He came to tell me that the Suffolk crime scene guys had found some curious things in the basement of Jimmy’s house. Among other items, they’d discovered four original paintings signed by Sashi Bluntstone. Somewhere Sonia Barrows-Willingham and Randy Junction were having intense, simultaneous orgasms: four of them, to be exact. The cops had also found a cell phone, one of those Wal-Mart jobs that you just buy minutes for as needed. When they checked the records, they found that Sashi and Jimmy had been talking to each other for over a year. I told him what Ben Schare had told me about seeing Sashi on the beach sometimes talking on a cell phone. I could see on McKenna’s face that he’d come around to the same conclusion I’d come to the night we found Sashi alive. Neither of us said a word.

The fact was that even if we wanted to cobble together the truth of things, we would have been hard-pressed to do so. Sashi Bluntstone would have been of little help and Jimmy Palumbo none at all. At least Jimmy had a rock solid excuse: he was dead. He had been doing all right at first, huge blood loss and all, and looked like he might make it. Then he contracted one of those nasty hospital-bred bacterial infections that resist every drug known to mankind and lapsed into a coma. He didn’t last ten days. Besides, like I said, I don’t think either McKenna or I wanted to say the words aloud. What went on between Jimmy and Sashi was something, but it wasn’t a kidnapping.

I never returned to the house in Sea Cliff. I didn’t have the stomach for the inevitably halfhearted thank yous and insincere sorries. I had come into this mess with fond memories of Candy and hating Max. And now, while I didn’t hate Candy, I was much less fond of her. Whether or not she was the person who helped Sashi with her paintings, I couldn’t say. My guess was it was Max. Yet, at the very least, Candy was complicit in the deceit. Max was Max. I no longer despised him. There wasn’t enough there to hate, really. For the most part, I found myself feeling sorry for the both of them, that they had allowed themselves to become so woefully dependent on their daughter. Or, as Candy had put it, slaves to her career. In this case, the child was truly father to the man.

I did, however, have a nice little chat with Sonia Barrows-Willingham and Randy Junction. They had both read Carney’s report cover to cover and, in spite of their bluster, were scared shitless at the prospect of my releasing it to the media. Doing so would have ruined their credibility in the art world and decimated the value of their Sashi collections. That was the least of it. If it could be shown that either of them knew the paintings weren’t exclusively done by Sashi, it might have led to criminal charges and countless civil suits. And when I pointed that out to them, they were eager to reach an agreement. I proposed a deal: I would sit on the report if they would help pay off the Bluntstones’ debts and contribute a portion of the profits of Sashi’s resales to a trust fund for her. They couldn’t agree fast enough.

I never did get an invoice from Declan Carney. I tried, with no success, to contact him. His phone numbers were no longer valid and all my emails bounced back. So after a few weeks, armed with my checkbook, I went to his building in Long Island City. There was a foreclosure notice taped to the front door and there was no response to my insistent buzzing or repeated knocks. I walked around to the back side of the building. There, spray-painted on the back wall, were these words:

GONE HOME

Sarah was back in my life and we made a weekly date of meeting at New Carmens for breakfast or dinner. It all depended on her schedule. We talked a few times a week and we even talked about Katy and the stuff we did together as a family. She had forgiven me my sins. Still, the hurt of our estrangement has never gone away. I don’t know that it will. There was a seven-year gap between the time we buried Katy and the day Sarah asked me to be a part of the search for Sashi. Those years are impossible to recoup. She had grown into a woman without me there to be a part of it. Sure, I saw some of it at a distance. I’d been like a proud dad watching his kid play in a big game, but from the worst seat in the stadium.