Innocent Monster (6 page)

I was about to leave when I caught sight of someone coming up the beach in my direction. He was an old man dressed in washed-out jeans, a faded Mets hat, and sweater against the cold. White-skinned, thin as a sheet of paper, he walked along the water’s edge seemingly searching for something, something I could not see. Trailing behind him was a dog, a bleached-out retriever even more ancient than the man himself. I hesitated to approach him or to call to him for fear of breaking his concentration, but then he looked up as if sensing my presence and gave me a snappy wave.

“Morning,” he said, turning to me. He had bright blue eyes, a crooked mouth, and cigarette teeth more yellow than his dog’s coat. “Chilly day.”

“Cold, yeah.”

“I don’t know you.”

“No, you don’t.” I pointed back at the Bluntstones’ house. “I’m looking into the little girl’s disappearance.”

His yellow teeth disappeared behind taut lips. “Shame, that. I used to see her here all the time with that goofy beagle of hers. Sad little girl.”

“Moe Prager,” I said and thrust out my right hand.

He gave it a short, firm shake. “Ben Schare.”

“So, you guys talked.”

“Not really. We just used to sort of walk together along the beach with our dogs trailing behind us. We said hello and all and sometimes she might say that something was pretty or ugly, but not much else. Sometimes she’d be out here talking on her cell phone to her friends.”

“But you said she was sad. How do you know that if you didn’t talk?”

“Come on, son, you’ve lived a little. You know. It’s a feeling. She just seemed lonely and sad. Nothing I can point to directly, but when that beagle of hers croaked...”

“What about that?”

“Then it wasn’t guessing about her being sad. She was positively abandoned. I used to see her sometimes walking alone down here and when I would wave, she’d turn and go. I don’t think she could bear seeing me and the old lady back there.” He turned to look at the slow-moving dog behind him. “She don’t have much time left, but she still loves to be near the water. It’s a comfort to her, I think, even though she don’t go in anymore.”

“She remembers, you think?”

“She remembers. Come on, old girl,” he said and turned to head in the other direction. “Nice meeting you, son.”

“Take care, Ben.”

I watched Ben and his dog retreat slowly down the beach in the opposite direction. As they went, I thought about how Ben had described Sashi, how everyone seemed to describe her: a sad little girl. Thinking about that erased the thirty years that had passed since I was looking for Patrick Maloney. The thing of it is is that when you’re looking for someone, anyone, you get to know them only through other people’s eyes. As it was with Patrick, so it would be with Sashi: other people’s eyes. Yes, I’d watched the video of her painting, but I had seen too much in my life to mistake a snippet of someone’s life as their life or to believe that a camera has no point of view. There’s always someone standing behind a camera. When my vision blurred and Ben and his dog became indistinct shadows, I left the beach too.

East Village Vox February 21, 1994

BY EVANGELINE MANHEIM

Touted as the next great performance artist by devotees of the emerging Williamsburg scene, the rather unfortunately named Max Bluntstone lived down to his name and proved to be yet another Brooklyn import not quite ready for the bright lights of Manhattan. In fact, he proved not quite ready for the dim lights of Camden.

At last night’s premier of “Wagner’s Ring Ding” at the Out House on the Bowery, Bluntstone even failed at failing. No mean feat, that. I suppose the audience might have booed had Bluntstone given them a chance to react to his boorish, amateurish, and scarcely original rants. Instead, the crowd of unfortunates were left to ponder in abject silence about what mortal sin they had committed that they might be punished in this way.

Using a pastiche of canned still images, movie, and video clips of battle sequences, sex, simulated and real executions projected onto the walls of the small theater and onto large screens suspended at the rear of the stage, Blunt-stone sat strapped into an electric chair. The artist, and I use the term generously, would lead into his various diatribes by reciting well-known poems. Then, with a single phrase, he would veer off, launching into poli-psycho-pop culture-babble at the top of his rather grating voice. Oh, many were the moment I prayed the electric chair were not a prop.

Bluntstone’s only glimmers of success came at those points during his performance when he stopped raging and took to playing a variety of uncanny homemade instruments. This critic suspects that he could go much further opening a one-man fix-it shop than with his dreadful oneman show. He would almost certainly make more money and more fans.

I didn’t want Candy around if I could help it, so I sat down the block from the Bluntstones’ place and waited. This was the part of the job I didn’t miss, the waiting. Although there were many days I would have preferred sitting alone in a too-hot or too-cold car—and having to piss into the coffee cup from which I’d just been drinking—to tying frilly ribbons around the necks of gift bottles wrapped in flimsy silver foil. I especially hated it when customers would come rushing in, throw their black AmEx cards down on the counter, and demand, “Just get me something red and expensive. I’m in a hurry.” Nothing like a fivehundred-dollar bottle of wine in a two-cent gift bag to impress your friends.
Good night! Fuck you very much!

But whether Candy left the house or not, I was going to have a chat with Max, for whom I still had no use, in spite of his wife’s confession about using a fake pregnancy as a pretense for marriage and a means of escape. Max was just one of those people I took an immediate dislike to. Other than knocking up my kid’s best friend, role model, and babysitter, I mean, what was there to dislike about the guy, right? Okay, so the pregnancy was bullshit and maybe I felt more paternal about Candy than I realized, but that wasn’t all of it. Max was Eddie Haskell: handsome enough, charming, polite, and poison. Sometimes the way you feel about people has nothing to do with rationality, maybe most of the time, but that was only part of it when it came to Max. The minute I met him, my cop radar switched on and the arrow on my bullshitometer jumped into the red numbers. I just knew that nothing the guy said or did was pure. He was always performing; there was always a shadow motive, a hidden, less obvious agenda. Always. He was an emotional pickpocket and you had to watch both his hands, not just the one he wanted you to look at.

Candy did me the favor of leaving. Though she was made-up and well-dressed as she left the house, she looked broken and old as she made her way down the porch steps. I could relate. Her steps were robotic and it seemed to take all her strength just to pull open the door to the blue Honda CR-V parked on the stone driveway. I ducked as she drove past, though I needn’t have. She stared blankly, straight ahead. Stress had temporarily blinded her.

Max Bluntstone smirked when he answered the front doorbell, and didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“The Great White Father has arrived,” he said, showing me his back, but leaving the door open. “I knew you’d show up sooner or later. I’m in the kitchen.”

I closed the front and vestibule doors behind me and followed him into the kitchen. And as much as I wanted to continue to dislike him, the look of him made me heartsick. For as tired and broken and stressblind as his wife was, he was worse. He wasn’t broken. He was defeated. He was pale, gaunt, vacant. The bags under his eyes were bloated and purple, the corners of his eyes were crusted, and the eyes themselves were shot with blood. He hadn’t shaved in a while and his sweat stank of bourbon. His clothes were wrinkled as if he had slept in them for several days. I recognized the signs. Max Bluntstone was grieving. His hope was gone. In his head, in his gut, and maybe in his heart, he knew Sashi was dead. Candy wasn’t there yet.

I’d seen this happen before. People were simply different from each other. Just as they aged and grayed and gained weight at different rates, they reached emotional crossroads at different times. For as beat-up and old as Candy looked, there was still some hope in her tone, in her facial expressions, in her words.

“Coffee?” Max asked.

“Sure. Just milk.”

I watched him pour my cup, spilling some, adding milk and sugar. He wasn’t there.

“Here.”

“Thanks.” I hated sugar in my coffee, but I wasn’t going to piss and moan about it. “But if you’re gonna add some bourbon to yours, save some for me.”

He laughed, hollow as a carved pumpkin. “How’d you know?” he asked, pulling a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark out of a drawer and topping off my cup.

“I used to be a private detective, remember? Besides, you stink like the floor at a Kentucky distillery.”

Max shook his head in agreement. I decided to gut punch him and watch his reaction.

“You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

First, briefly, he swelled up defiantly, but he didn’t have energy or anger enough to fight the good fight and he caved in on himself before he said a word. “It’s been over three weeks. The cops try to be hopeful, but I can see it in their eyes. What do you think?”

She’s probably dead. “
I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion. That’s why I want to talk to you. I talked to Candy yesterday.”

“I figured something had happened.”

“How’s that?”

“She was a little upbeat last night. It didn’t last.”

“Yeah, I saw her leaving the house. What was she made up for?”

“You mean who, not what,” he said.

“Okay, who?”

“Randy Junction. He owns the gallery in town that shows Sashi’s work.”

“I know the name. I came across it in some stuff I was reading, but why go see him this early in the morning?”

“For a little comfort.” I purposefully kept my mouth closed and Max obliged my silence. “That’s right, Moe, comfort. The kind I don’t seem able to supply to my wife anymore, not that she’d want it from me. She’s been fucking him on and off for years. Until Sashi... Until lately, it had been off. I learned not to mind it so much when she would throw me a bone too every now and then. I suppose if I had the heart for it, I’d be looking for the same kind of comfort. Candy doesn’t want to face the reality of things yet, but it won’t last.”

I let it go because that was a time bomb I wasn’t prepared to dig around just yet. “Tell me about the day Sashi disappeared.”

Raymond Shaw is kindest, warmest, bravest
... It was the
Manchurian Candidate
all over again. Max’s story was nearly word for word what Candy had told me. Not only that, but his movements, his hand gestures, his intonation pattern were all startlingly similar. I didn’t like it any better this time than when Candy told it to me. There was definitely something they both knew that they weren’t telling, but badgering Max or Candy wouldn’t lead me to what it was. No, they would only circle the wagons and gird themselves. Now I was certain I knew what had motivated Detective McKenna to let me in on the case without having to jump through fiery hoops. He was hoping my presence might rock the boat a little and get Max or Candy to either confide in me or to tell an obvious lie. So far, the strategy was a failure, but it was early... for me. Not for Sashi. According to her father, it was late for her. Too late. I hoped like hell he was wrong and I hoped it was just a feeling he had and not something he knew for sure.

“Tell me about Sashi’s friends.”

“She didn’t have many friends.”

Didn’t.
Past tense.

“In a lot of the stories I read about her, there were often mentions of her playing with friends at shows,” I said.

“When she was little... Yeah, she had lots of friends, but she really became very much a prisoner of her work. I’m to blame for that. I encouraged her, maybe pushed her too hard. Most ten- or elevenyear-olds aren’t working on their version of the Mona Lisa. I was such a complete fuck-up at my art, I wanted her to succeed so bad. I guess I wanted it too much. Her friends just sort of fell away. And the criticism and exposés didn’t help. We tried to shield her from that, but you can’t protect kids, not when some guy on CNN calls you a fraud, not with the Net and social networks. She heard it. She felt the pressure.”

“She had to have some friends.”

“There’s Ming,” he said.

“Ming?”

“Ming Parson. Her and Sashi have been buddies forever, but in the last year or so...”

“I’ll want her address.”

“Sure.” Max scribbled something out on a pad, ripped the top sheet off, and handed it to me.

“Thanks. How are you guys doing financially?”

You throw enough punches, some are bound to land. This one landed square on his jaw and the Max I disliked suddenly reappeared out of the past. He shook his head in disgust and that familiar cocky curled lip returned, the grief and mourning vanishing as if I’d taken an eraser to his face.

“Fuck you! You and that cop, you’re both the same. Get the fuck out of my house. Now!”

Now it was my turn to oblige him. I left. Staying wouldn’t have done anything for either one of us and it almost certainly would have done my cause harm. I’d pissed the man off. I might have been pissed off, too, had someone implied my precious daughter’s disappearance was somehow about money. Clearly, McKenna had done more than imply it.