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.
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
Maxed Out “Wagner’s Ring Ding” A Must Miss
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.
SEVEN
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?”
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