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 exposes 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.
The Parsons’ house was rather more modest than the grand Victorian on the cliff. It was a cute, slightly worse-for-wear little bungalow on the same block as one of the two Russian Orthodox churches in town. The bungalow was on a small lot with a tiny front yard and a gravel driveway barely big enough for a full-size car to park on, but it looked cozy and lived in, comfortable as a pair of old jeans. I knocked on the front door and a woman answered. She was forty, on the short and heavy side, not pretty, yet attractive in the way her house was.
“Hello there.” Her voice was warm and welcoming. “How can I help you?”
“Hi. Mrs. Parson?”
“Dawn.”
“Dawn, my name’s Moe Prager. I’m an old friend of Candy Blunt-stone.”
That took the warmth and sparkle right out of her. She stepped out of the house, closing the door behind her. “Look, mister, I’ve talked to the police about this several times and I don’t want to discuss it anymore. My daughter talked to them too. She hasn’t slept well since Sashi disappeared. At this age they know enough to understand what might have happened, but not enough to make sense of it.”
“I don’t think we ever get old enough to make sense of it.”
“I’m sorry for Candy and I’m scared for Sashi, but I have my own child to protect.”
I didn’t say a word. Instead, I reached into my wallet, removed two items, and handed them to Dawn Parson. One of the items was an old card I kept to remind me of what I used to be. The other was a photo of Sarah that was taken when she was in fifth grade and was about the same age as Ming and Sashi. It was as manipulative as hell, but I’d worry about paying that bill later.
“She’s a beautiful little girl. My god, such amazing red hair.”
“Her name’s Sarah and she’s grown into a beautiful woman. The hair’s a little darker now,” I said. “Candy used to babysit for Sarah. She was like her big sister.”
“Like I said, I feel for them, but I have to worry about me and mine.”
“I know. How about you give me a few minutes and I’ll get out of your way?”
“I don’t know what I can tell you that I haven’t already said to the cops.”
“Different sets of ears hear different things,” I said. “I was a cop once myself a long time ago and, like the card says, a private investigator. Sometimes it’s not what you’re saying that makes the difference, but who’s hearing it. Please.”
“Sure.”
“Did Ming see Sashi that day, the day she went missing?”
Ming’s mom frowned, looked at the welcome mat, and rubbed her hands. “They hadn’t seen each other for a while. So, no, they didn’t see each other that day.”
“I heard they were really good friends.”
“They were. We adopted Ming from China and she was older than most of the kids who come over. She’d been in the orphanage a long time. It was very bewildering for her at first and she was sort of the odd man out. I guess Sashi kind of felt like that too. They both didn’t quite fit in and they became immediate allies, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“Well, they just took to each other. Went to dance class together, summer day camp, you know, all the stuff little girls do together. If it wasn’t for Sashi, it would have taken Ming much longer to learn English. They actually became pretty popular, the two of them, and had a whole group of friends.”
“What happened?”
“Sashi stopped being a little girl and started having to be a grownup somewhere along the way. She stopped doing the stuff the other girls did. Eventually, only Ming was left.”
“But something happened.”
“Well, no, not really. There wasn’t a fight or anything like that. Sashi became, I don’t know, more and more withdrawn. She
stopped calling Ming and Ming got tired of trying to do all the heavy lifting. My girl’s got lots of other friends and…”
“I understand. When was the last time they saw each other?”
“A few weeks before Sashi disappeared. We were in town at the dentist and Sashi was there too.”
“Did they talk?”
“Not much. It was awkward and kind of painful to watch.”
“What do you think of Max and Candy as parents?”
That question caught her off guard. She hemmed and hawed.
“Listen, Dawn, my old relationship with Candy isn’t as important as finding Sashi, so please don’t hold back.”
“I like Candy. She was always friendly and was really good with Sashi, but Max is…”
“Is what?”
“He pushed her too hard.”
“Dawn, I don’t like Max much myself, so don’t worry about it.”
“Kids grow up too fast anyway these days,” she said. “And Max, he just didn’t seem to understand that Sashi was just a little girl with a grown-up talent.”
“Thank you.”
I turned to walk away. I did it slowly, hoping Dawn Parson might call after me with some forgotten tidbit of information or an offer to talk with her daughter. Instead, I heard her front door open and close.
I drove slowly down Sea Cliff ‘s main street and saw that the Junction Gallery was closed. As it was just nine o’clock, the place probably would have been closed even if Candy weren’t looking for comfort and distraction in the arms of the eponymous Mr. Junction. I wasn’t going to judge her. That was somebody else’s job. Besides, judgmental people gave me a rash. You ever notice how judgmental bastards are always so fucking sure of themselves? Me, I stopped being sure of anything a long time ago.
I pulled to the curb and got out of the car. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through the plate glass windows. Sashi’s work covered the walls. In fact there was so much of her work on the walls, it looked like the Sashi Bluntstone Outlet Store. Displayed in one of the windows was an enlarged reproduction of a collection of very self-serving reviews. It was all breathless stuff:
Sashi Bluntstone is a genius!
Sashi Bluntstone is the Second Coming
Sashi Bluntstone cures cancer!
And it now seemed not only ridiculous, but morbid as well. I’d come back some other time.
EIGHT
If it sounds like I know what I’m doing, it’s bullshit. I’ve never really known what I was doing, certainly not in the wine business and not as a PI. What I said to Sarah at the restaurant was true: I’m more lucky than good. I’m a stumbler. Always have been. I fall into things, sometimes the right things. It isn’t in my nature to follow a set of rules even when I know the rules to follow. I’m the musician who plays it by ear, by feel, and once I get a sense of things, I stick with it. The only two places I ever felt comfortable or like I really understood how to do my job was on the basketball court and on my beat in the Six-O. My ankle having been shattered by a bullet when Katy was murdered, it had been seven years since I set foot on a basketball court. I’d been off the job since 1977.
When we went into business together, Carmella tried to show me how real investigators worked a case. She knew. She had learned the hard way, from the bottom up. And her bottom was several sub-basements below the detectives she learned from. Starting out, she had more strikes against her than a tall lightning rod in a flat field. She was young, female, Puerto Rican, and beautiful. Advantages in many lines of work, but not in the NYPD in the ‘80s. As she was wont to say, “It’s not about whether you stand or squat to pee. My gold shield is about being a good detective, not about my pussy or being Puerto Rican.” And she was a good detective, but I never learned to do it her way. I was always going to pee standing up and I was always going to be a stumbler. The one aspect of the process I was good at was people. I understood people. That’s why I didn’t ask the questions everyone else asked. And what good would it have done me to ask Candy or Max or Dawn Parson if they knew anybody who might want to harm Sashi? If they knew, the cops would already be on it. If they didn’t know, my asking wasn’t going to make them give a magical answer.
Frustrated by the lack of information from Max and Candy, I decided it was time to go off the map, to stray from the list of people McKenna intended for me to reinterview. That’s why, when I walked away from the Junction Gallery, I headed east, even more deeply into the enclaves of the rich and richer. The Cold Spring Harbor/Lloyd’s Neck area of Long Island’s North Shore was physically beautiful and a bit more isolated than the Sea Cliff/Glen Cove area I’d just come from. It was all little hidden inlets on the Sound, twisty private roads, hills, and old majestic trees. This was Movers-and-Shakersville, where, as my mom might say, all the big machas lived. Around these parts, the maids had their own cleaning ladies. Along the way I passed the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory-run by that brilliant lunatic and codiscoverer of the DNA double-helix, James Watson-a fish hatchery, a few exclusive marinas, and a horse farm or two.
The Cold Spring Harbor Museum of Modern Art was located on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound on one side and a small, treelined cove on another. It was a very dramatic structure that looked like a series of glass and steel blocks piled atop one another at odd angles. Too bad it was nearly impossible to find and harder to get into than Skull and Bones. You’ve got to love the rich. The museum was for the public, but their notion of the public and my notion of the public didn’t seem to overlap much. The parking lot was nearly empty but for a classic gull wing Mercedes Benz and a five-year-old Honda Civic parked in the spot furthest away from the main entrance. I parked close to the Mercedes, but not close enough to clip its wings.
When I tried to push in the front door, I nearly unhinged my wrist. Neither my cursing in pain nor the noise at the door seemed to rouse anyone’s attention, so I rapped hard on the glass with my good hand. That stirred the beast. A security guard who looked like an escapee from the Arnold Schwarzenegger School of Acting loomed before me. He was dressed in a neat blue blazer, gray slacks, and shiny black shoes. His impassive white face looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it. He pointed a huge index finger at the intercom to the left of the door.
“Are you a town resident, sir?” he asked, his deep voice only adding to his already serious intimidation factor.
I pressed the talk button. “No.”
“Do you have an appointment, sir?”
“An appointment? No. This is a public museum, right?”
“Yes, sir, but to town residents only at this hour. Non-residents do need an appointment before noon.” He had a bit of southern cooking in his voice, southern Brooklyn.
“I’m here to see Wallace Rusk, not the art.”
“Do you have an appointment, sir?”
“You’re kidding me, right? Don’t you have any other lines in this play?”
“Excuse me, sir, but do you have an appointment?”
I thought I saw the corner of his lip curl up a little.
“Funny man, huh?” I reached into my back pocket and did something that was either going to get me a face to face with Rusk or arrested… maybe both. I clanked my old NYPD badge hard against the door glass. “That’s my appointment, motherfucker. Now open the fucking door!”
His face remained impassive, but he unlocked the door and held it open for me ever so politely.
“Sorry,” he said, “just doing my job, you know?”
I didn’t push it. First, because he was right. Second, because I didn’t want him to take a closer look at my tin.
“Forget it.”
“I’ll get Mr. Rusk for you. What’s your name, Officer?”
“Prager, but I’d rather go surprise him.”
“He’s not gonna like that.”
“Too fucking bad.”
“Hey, I need this job and trust me, that man’ll can my ass if you go in unannounced.”
Then it hit me. “You’re Jim
my Palumbo, offensive tackle out of Rutgers,” I said, snapping my fingers. “The Jets drafted you third round ten years ago, right?”
But instead of smiling, the big man’s expression turned sour. “Eleven years ago. Might as well have been a million.”
“You went to New Utrecht High, right?”
“Lafayette.”
“I went to Lincoln when Lafayette was our big rival… a long time before you went to school. Really rare for a local guy to make it in the NFL.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You fucked up your knees, didn’t you?”
That didn’t improve his mood any. “Both of ‘em, yeah. You got a good memory for bad things, Officer.”
I rolled up my pants and showed him the maze of scars that covered my knee. I would have also showed him the scars on my ankle, but that was a road better left untraveled. Besides, these days, I only limped on the inside.
“Holy shit!”
“No arthroscopic surgery when I went down,” I said. “They used to cut you open like a fish and see what they could see. I had three surgeries, four weeks of PT with each one, and a pain script.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Me too. So why you working this gig?”
“Divorce,” he said as if it explained everything.
Maybe it did. My two trips down that path had been amicable, but that was more rare than you might think. Some of the work we did at Prager amp; Melendez had been for divorce lawyers. We didn’t handle the slimy end of things. We didn’t videotape or tap phones or entrap spouses out for the night with the boys or girls. No, we were usually hired after the papers were served, when motel bills, fancy gift receipts, and hidden assets needed to be tracked down. Divorce tended to get ugly and very expensive, emotionally and financially, for everyone involved.
“Kids?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Twin girls. The bitch moved ‘em out of state. Like cutting the heart right outta me, taking them from me that way. Things are a little better now.”
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