Innocent Monster (5 page)

He stood and threw his trench coat back on. “You go on over to your store. I’ll be over in a few minutes. I gotta get some stuff outta my car.”

I’d had much worse first dates, I thought, as he disappeared into the main dining room.

Back in the office of RWY, I spread out the paperwork McKenna gave me on one of the desks. I knew this wasn’t all of it, maybe not even most of it, but given that I was three weeks behind the curve, it was a lot to digest. It was no mystery to me why Detective McKenna had let me in the door without making me run the gauntlet. Good detectives have the knack of being able to balance their own necessarily strong egos against the public interest. McKenna’s equation was a simple one: his goal was to find Sashi and he didn’t give a shit what it took to do the job. He wasn’t interested in who got the credit and the kudos. He’d worry about bows and curtain calls after the girl was found and the smoke had cleared. It was always the weaklings and the climbers that put themselves ahead of the case. I’d known my share of the good, the bad, and the indifferent over the years. For now, at least, McKenna rated high on the list. I felt sure the detective would get through the night without worrying over my opinion of him. He had more important things to lose sleep over. We both did.

I set back out to Sea Cliff before sunup. I’m not exactly sure why I got such an early start. Maybe it was the buzz from working a case again or maybe it was that I wanted to travel under the cover afforded me by the veil of pre-dawn darkness. In the dark I could fool myself that I was going somewhere, anywhere other than Long Island. Long Island’s never been my favorite place. I suppose my antipathy started when I was around six or seven and some of my best friends disappeared from class and from the schoolyard; it was whispered that their parents had moved them to exotic places like Oyster Bay, Great Neck, Massapequa, and Ronkonkoma. Might just as well have been Siberia as far as I was concerned. In my kid’s mind, Long Island meant exile and punishment, a forbidden zone where friends went never to return. I mean, who would ever want to leave Brooklyn besides Walter O’Malley? Sometimes I think that prick’s only saving grace was that he didn’t move the Dodgers to Long Island.

But my rocky relationship with Long Island transcended my childhood visions of it as the briar patch. For almost nothing good beyond profit has ever come of my setting foot over the Queens-Nassau County border. Patrick Maloney went to school at Hofstra University on Long Island and I spent too much time there uncovering things about him, about his family and his relationships with women, one in particular, that made my skin crawl. It was five years later, however, after Katy and I were married and Sarah was just a little girl, that the first tentative steps in the long slow dance that led to Katy’s murder were taken.

It was at the wedding of a former wine store employee. She was a rich girl from Crocus Valley and her father, Thomas Geary, a star maker, bullied and extorted me into taking the case of one Steven Brightman. Brightman, a state senator, was the next fair-haired boy with Kennedy charm and working class credentials, but he had a big problem. One of his interns, a young woman named Moira Heaton, had disappeared from his community office on Thanksgiving Eve 1981. Although there was no evidence tying Brightman to Moira’s disappearance and in spite of his fully cooperating with the authorities, the whiff of scandal and suspicion put a hold on his once-meteoric ascendency. After two years in political purgatory, he needed someone to prove him innocent, to plunge him in the waters and have him come up pure and saved. That someone was me.

It almost worked too. I cleared him, but he came back up out of the purifying waters a little too clean and a little too easily. I found what had been planted for me to find: a patsy in a nasty package by the name of Ivan Alfonseca or, as the press had dubbed him, Ivan the Terrible, a convicted serial rapist. Already going away for life, he was paid to confess to Moira’s murder, clearing Brightman’s path to the Senate, if not to the White House. But I was no patsy and I kept digging. Problem was, the brother of one of Ivan’s real victims killed him in jail and with Ivan dead, I had a case as solid as air. So instead of going to the cops, I set Brightman up to spill his guts in front of two witnesses— his wife and Thomas Geary, the people in his life who could hurt him most. His wife left him and Geary withdrew his money and backing. Moira got whatever scraps of justice and shreds of revenge she was ever going to get. Then, seventeen years later, Brightman got his. He and his flunky, Ralph Barto, the man I wounded in Miami Beach, murdered Katy in front of me.

So here I was again, heading back to Long Island, the sun rising up before me, blinding me. I felt in my bones only darkness lay ahead. There were a lot of people I needed to speak to, people whose names appeared in the paperwork Detective McKenna had shared, and there were things I needed to see for myself. The day before, Candy had been with me, showing me Sashi’s room, the rest of the house and the property, walking with me along the length of the little beach across the road from the big Victorian, but when you’ve got a guide it’s hard to see things for yourself. You see things through their eyes. I didn’t know that I’d find anything or notice anything new. Nothing had jumped out at me, nothing got under my skin. Still, I had to look.

I stopped off at a deli and got myself a large coffee and a cholesterol special: two eggs scrambled, bacon, and cheese on a buttered roll. A steady diet of these had killed more cops than all the skels and mutts who’d ever lived. I laughed to myself thinking about the NRA’s PR team creating a new lobbying campaign.
Guns don’t kill cops. Egg sandwiches do.
I took my time eating, scanning the paper, waiting for a phone call I hoped would come before I got all the way into Sea Cliff. Whether Candy realized it or not, when she hired me—if you want to call it that—she got more than she bargained for. I was playing catchup and if I needed to take on some paid help or to call in some old markers, so be it. My job was to find Sashi and it wasn’t anybody’s business, not even her parents’, how I did it. That’s why I’d called Brian Doyle.

Brian Doyle wasn’t ever going to be mistaken for a theoretical physicist or a McKenna type of detective. He had been one of those cops who managed to hang on to the job by his fingernails. Back in his day, the NYPD wasn’t in as much of a rush to cut people loose as they currently seemed to be. A dumbass with a smart mouth who was too eager to use his fists, Brian depended too heavily on shortcuts to get the job done. He had no use for nuance or subtlety, but he was effective. Turned out that some of the things that worked against him on the job were pluses for him as a PI. Much to Carmella’s dismay, I took a chance on the dumb prick and we made him into a hell of a good investigator. He’d turned himself into the boss at his own firm. I hadn’t spoken to Doyle in years, but there were bonds that held regardless of the passage of time. Besides, he owed me. He owed me big time. The call came in just as I was pulling out of the deli parking lot.

“Hey, bossman, I just got your message.”

“That’s ex-bossman. You drove me into retirement.”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever you say. So what can I do you for?”

“You got room in your busy schedule to do some real work?” I asked.

“This gratis?”

“Gratis! Jesus Christ, Doyle, you been reading the dictionary or what?”

“Funny thing about owning a company instead of just working at one, you learn the word gratis quick. Everybody comes outta the freakin’ woodwork asking for all kinds of shit on the arm. Fuck that! You wanna play, you gotta pay.”

“You don’t have to lecture me on the subject. And no, this isn’t gratis. It’s pay for play.”

“Then what’s the play?” he asked. “Wait, just let me grab my pen here. Okay, shoot.”

“Max Bluntstone. That’s Bravo-Lima-Utah-November-Tango-Sierra-Tango-Oscar-November-Echo. And his wife, Candy Bluntstone nee Castleman—”

“Not for nothing, Moe, but is this about that missing girl, the artist?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You working cases again? I thought you was gonna—”

“Gonna what?”

“I thought after Katy and all... And then when you and Carm split up, I thought you were through with this shit.”

“Look, Brian, you want the job or what? I don’t need to get lectured to by you.”

“For fuck’s sake, Moe, take it easy. You don’t gotta bite my nuts off.”

“Sorry.”

“No biggie,” he said, not meaning it. “What you need?”

“Everything.”

“That all?”

We both had a laugh at that.

“No, what I need is for you to get me all you can on their finances and their sheets. Put Devo on it.”

“Hey, Moe, you’re the client here, remember. No need to tell me who should do what.”

“You’re right, Brian. Forgive me?”

“No, but I’ll pad your freakin’ bill for that, ya hump.”

“Fair enough, but I need it as soon as you can get it, okay?”

“Sure thing. So, you think the kid’s still alive?” he asked, worry in his voice. “I got kids now too. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to one of ‘em.”

“I’m with you there,” I said. “I’m with you there.”

“You know, Moe, while I got you on the phone...”

“What?”

“Maybe it’s nothing, but a few weeks ago we had kinda a weird phone inquiry from a PI in Vermont someplace.”

“What’s so weird about that?”

“It was about you and the guys you used to run with at the Six-O.”

“What did you tell him?”

“
Her.
She had a sexy voice, too. Anyways, I told her nothing that she didn’t already know about us working together and your police career. Nothing too personal. Didn’t give her any addresses or phone numbers or nothing. I never heard back from her and that was that. I put in a call to one of your stores to let you know. That’s why I thought you were calling me, but I guess you never got the message.”

“No.”

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

“Who the fuck knows? I got bigger troubles now.”

We chatted some more about sports and business and anything else other than what he really wanted to talk about. Brian Doyle was one of the few people who was close to me during the period stretching from the end of one marriage to the end of the other. Those were bad years: the steady drip, drip, drip of pain and disappointment interrupted only by thundering tragedy. When I got off the phone with him, I realized I resented Brian for knowing me then. It was irrational, but there it was. And the thing about it was, he knew it.

Although Detective McKenna had been generous in sharing information, I wasn’t operating under any illusions. I knew he’d left a lot of stuff out of the mix. Of course the stuff that was missing was conspicuous by its absence. Was that intentional? Did he just want to get my attention? I don’t know. More likely, it was unavoidable. For instance, there was almost nothing on Max and Candy: not a word on their finances, nothing about confirmation of their alibis for the day Sashi went missing, no transcripts of or notes from their interrogations. I mean, any novice knows that parents and/or siblings are the immediate and primary suspects in these situations unless there’s obvious evidence pointing in another direction. Physical evidence. That was something else McKenna had conveniently omitted. From what he gave me, I had no idea if there was any significant physical evidence or, if there was, what it might indicate. The only assumption about evidence I could safely make was that there wasn’t enough of it to arrest Max or Candy, or anyone else for that matter.

What I did have were several transcripts of interrogations or, to use the euphemism preferred by nine out of ten law enforcement officers,
interviews,
done over the course of the last three-plus weeks. Basically, these were the interviews that, for one reason or another, hadn’t gone anywhere. Detective McKenna gave me the transcripts because he knew I would probably reinterview all of these people and that I might shake something loose he’d been unable to. PIs do have certain advantages over the police when it comes to evidence gathering. PIs can ask the types of questions that cops might get called on the carpet for asking and we could ask them in a manner that cops couldn’t risk. Let’s just say that when Brian Doyle worked for me, he got a lot of answers even the best NYPD detective wouldn’t have been able to get. Being a cop has its limitations, shield and gun notwithstanding.

It was a little darker on the beach than the surrounding area because the cliff where the Bluntstones’ house was perched blocked out the rising sun. The absence of full sunlight didn’t actually make the beach any colder. That’s the trick of December, though, isn’t it? The sun looks just as bright and blinds you equally well, but it doesn’t warm your face or fulfill the hope it hints at. There was no hope to be found here anyway. At first, when I’d heard the story of an eleven-year-old girl going for a walk on a beach alone, my radar went up. I wouldn’t let Sarah go to Manhattan or Brighton Beach alone until she was fifteen and even then I was nervous as a cat, but this wasn’t New York City in the ‘80s. There weren’t two thousand homicides a year out here. Bernie Goetz wasn’t playing shoot ‘em up on the subway. No bands of roaming gangs were out
wilding
nor was Robert Chambers lurking at the local pub. This was still Howdy Doody-ville and the beach was literally just across the street from Sashi’s house.