“Sorry, I’m not feeling great today.”
“You left a message…”
“I did. I don’t know if you’ll be able to help, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
“Ask?”
“I might need some paintings authenticated,” I said.
“That’s not an issue. I’d be glad to recommend someone and if she’s not to your liking, any of the major auction houses-”
I cut him off. “They’re Sashi Bluntstone’s paintings.”
“Oh, I see. That is a bit more problematic. Let me think… Okay, yes, I have someone for you. His name is Declan Carney. Wait, let me get you his number.”
“Is he any good?” I asked, scribbling down the number and address. “For what you want, yes, the best, but I should warn you his services will not come inexpensively and he’s a bit… let us say… idiosyncratic.”
“I don’t care if eats mosquitos on toast for lunch as long as he can do the work.”
“Now, Mr. Prager, if that is all…”
“One last thing.”
“Yes.”
“Is Nathan Martyr a liar?”
There was a sudden and profound silence on the other end of the line and it spoke well of Wallace Rusk. He was actually thinking about the question and not dismissing it out of hand.
“I don’t think very highly of his work and I think he’s a detestable human being, but in my thankfully limited dealings with the man I have never known him to lie or renege on his word. Why do you ask?”
“He’s promised me something and I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t being jerked around.”
“Very well then. Good morning to you.”
I liked Wallace Rusk in spite of himself. I didn’t think we’d be going to a sports bar to catch a Jets’ game together any time soon, but he seemed an honorable sort. Old-fashioned as it may be, I admired that in a person. Honor seemed to be a commodity in very limited supply these days.
FOURTEEN
Candy said she had the paintings for me, but didn’t exactly sound happy about it. Tough shit for her, I thought. Besides, a little anger never hurt anyone and stuffing her guts with feelings other than guilt, panic, and grief would do her good. I didn’t question her about how she managed to get the paintings because I didn’t care about how. Nor did I ask her if there was any fallout from my telling her that Max knew about her affair. No matter how any of this turned out, even if we somehow managed to find Sashi alive and relatively well, their world was never going to be the same. Whether they chose to blow it apart or to plow it over and begin again was up to them and them alone. But when I told Candy I would be over in an hour or two to collect the paintings, she said I should get them from the gallery, that Randy Junction had them wrapped and ready for me. She hung up on me before I could ask why he was involved. That was just as well.
It was a particularly bleak day, cold and threatening, gray clouds churning, snow showers here and there. So when I walked in, the gallery was empty except for Randy Junction himself. He was busily dusting dust that wasn’t there and straightening already straight paintings. He gave me a big smile when he saw me and that knocked me off my game there for a second. Then it occurred to me that he didn’t know who I was, not really. He thought I was that investor come back to snatch up some of Sashi’s works at pre-death prices.
“Hello again,” he said with dollar sign eyes and a glad hand. “You’ve come back for some paintings.”
“That I have, but not any of these.” I gestured at the walls.
“I’m afraid I’m at a loss.”
“That’s probably true.”
His glad hand turned frigid and his smile went nearly as cold. “Look, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but-”
“I’m not playing at all. My name’s Moe Prager. Candy sent me over to collect some paintings.”
If I expected him to get all weak-kneed and weepy, I had something else coming.
“You’re a prick, you know that, Prager? Why the hell did you tell Candy that Max knew about us?”
“Because I needed her full attention. I’ve got my eye on one thing here and that’s getting Sashi back. What you and Candy and Max do is up to the three of you. But I’m gonna do what I’ve gotta do and I don’t give a shit whose feelings get hurt in the process.”
“Very nice.”
“Nice! Are you fucking kidding me? You think I wasn’t paying attention to your sales pitch yesterday? You think I didn’t see you nearly come in your pants after Sonia Barrows-Willingham handed you that check? Give me a break, Junction, all right, and get down off that high horse. It doesn’t suit you.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but just turned on his heel and disappeared. When he returned he was carrying four bubblewrapped paintings.
“What do you need these paintings for?”
“For kindling.” The guy actually grimaced. “Take it easy,” I said. “I’m kidding. Let’s just call it bait.”
“Do you think they could-”
“I’m not thinking anything right now except about getting Sashi back. If I somehow manage to do that, you and me, we can sit down and have a chat. Right now, just give me the paintings.”
He did without hesitation. “You know, Prager,” he said once I had the paintings in my arms, “you are walking into a situation you don’t understand.”
“That’s true. I’m always late to the party and too stupid to get the inside jokes. I’m always playing catch-up because people come to me late in the game. But, you know, sometimes it’s a big advantage not to be on the inside.”
“Nice speech. You ought to get it carved in stone and put on your grave, but you don’t fool me.”
“How’s that?”
“You don’t even know Sashi and you haven’t seen Candy in a hundred years. No, there’s something else at play here. There’s something in it for you. I just can’t see what it is.”
“Candy came to me,” I said, sounding defensive as hell.
Junction smiled at that. “I know all about how Candy came to you. Moe Prager ex machina: you were going to come in out of the blue and save the day. You were going to come in off the bench and hit a walk-off home run. What a load of crap. You’re just going to make it all worse. What am I saying? You already have.”
I wanted to disagree with him, but he was right, up to a point. I had walked into a situation I didn’t understand. I didn’t know Sashi except through videos and I hadn’t seen Candy since her wedding day. I did have a separate agenda in wanting to regain my daughter’s love and, as far as Candy and Junction were concerned, I had made things worse. I took the paintings and left.
As was the norm with this case, I didn’t get very far. All four of my tires were slashed and the driver’s side window was smashed to bits. I found a stuffed brown teddy bear propped up on my glass-covered front seat. Its head was missing, its legs and arms hog-tied behind it. The words STOP NOW were stenciled in red spray paint across the passenger seat. While I may not have known what I was doing, there must have been someone else who saw it differently.
I didn’t want to call McKenna, but I had to. There was no way I could leave the cops out of this without risking obstruction charges and further endangering Sashi’s life. This was evidence of something even if the vandalism turned out to be just some bullshit stunt. I’d managed to piss somebody off. No surprise there. I had a talent for it, but it wasn’t necessarily the person who had Sashi. Still, I couldn’t take that gamble. Before I called the cops, I brought the paintings back around the corner to the gallery. I warned Randy Junction not to talk about the paintings to the cops if they came asking questions, that mentioning them would ruin the one good lead I had. He may have been a bit of an asshole, but he seemed to care about Candy and Sashi enough to play along. After I called McKenna and the rent-a-car company, I rang Jimmy Palumbo and told him we were on for a visit to Nathan Martyr that evening. My back was in need of some serious watching.
FIFTEEN
“You got somebody’s attention, Prager.”
“Sure as shit looks that way.”
“Any idea who?”
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
“You want a list of the people I’ve spoken to?”
“That would be a start,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“Max and Candy.”
“Yeah.”
“Nathan Martyr, but he was alibied by the ex-cop doorman.”
“David Thompson.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“He may be, but it’s airtight,” McKenna said. “Martyr didn’t do it. He was home that day.”
“Junction, the gallery owner. Wallace Rusk.”
That got McKenna’s attention. “Who’s this Rusk guy?”
“Not your man. He’s an art critic and the curator of the Cold Spring Harbor Museum of Modern Art.”
“You don’t mind if we talk to him anyway, do you?”
“Be my guest.”
“Anyone else?”
“Dawn Parson. She wouldn’t let me talk to her kid.”
“Okay. You need a lift or anything? I can get one of the uniforms to take you.”
“No thanks, McKenna. I got a rental being dropped off for me.”
“Keep in touch.”
It was an order, not a suggestion.
The rental was dropped off at the gallery and I loaded the paintings into the backseat of the Japanese generic-mobile. Man, I was old. I still recalled a time when one car looked different than the next. “Not no more,” as my old friend Crazy Charlie Rolex used to say. Those days, like the majority of mine, were past. I was relieved that McKenna was still around the corner salivating over the crime scene. It would have been a bit awkward trying to explain to him what I was planning to do with the paintings. Many years had passed since I’d come anywhere near working a case, but the lying came back to me like riding a bike. You work a case, you start lying to everyone. More often than not, you even wind up lying to the person or persons who hired you. Sometimes especially them. The one person you can’t lie to is yourself.
As I drove out of Sea Cliff, away from the fussy Victorian houses and the quaint little shops on the main street, I thought about what must have been going through McKenna’s mind. He couldn’t have been any more confused by what had happened to my car, the hog-tied and headless teddy bear, and the cryptic warning than I was, because it didn’t seem to make any sense at all. I still had no idea what had become of Sashi Bluntstone or who had taken her or why. My stumbling around had only just begun and it had netted me very little in the way of progress. I hoped that was about to change.
When the earpiece to my phone beeped that I was getting a call, I felt myself getting more than a little aroused at the memory of holding Mary Lambert in my arms. I imagined I could still smell the intoxicating scent of her sweat and perfume and I rubbed the tips of my fingers together, recalling the feel of her hardened nipples beneath the lace of her bra and silk of her blouse.
“Hey, there,” I said in the best bedroom voice I could manage.
“What the fuck’s the matter with you, you sick or something?” It was Brian Doyle.
“Or something, yeah. What’s up?”
“The Bluntstones are broke, Moe.”
“Broke broke or just broke?”
“Broke broke. They’re mortgaged to the balls and their only assets are the kid’s paintings.”
“How about the house?”
“The thing cost two million and my bet is they’re still paying off the closing costs. I got more equity in my baseball card collection.”
“You collect baseball cards?”
“No, but I’m just saying.”
“How about available cash?” I asked.
“Less than ten grand and that ain’t gonna get them too far. Maybe the next time you’re over there, you should check if they’re hiding scratch in coffee cans or flour jars ‘cause they ain’t got shit elsewheres.”
“Thanks, Brian, and thank Devo for me.”
“No sweat, boss.”
“Fax the stuff over to my house, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Look, just send me the bill…” He was gone.
Declan Carney’s studio was in an old loft building within shouting distance of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge on Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City. This Queens neighborhood, just across the East River from Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, had undergone tremendous change and gentrification in the last decade or so. As Manhattan became even more unbearably expensive, people looked for places to live where they could still have a short commute to work and ready access to the city. Like Williamsburg before it, Long Island City was now an increasingly hot part of town. The thing about LIC, though, is that it was more industrial in its previous incarnation than Williamsburg, and not all of its factories and warehouse buildings had been converted into fabulous living spaces for expatriate Manhattanites.
Carney’s building was as yet untouched by the shifting tides of the churning real estate market. It was covered in a coat of soot and dirt so thick that it was nearly impossible to tell the exact shade of brick that made up its exterior walls. Carney was probably afraid to have the place cleaned for fear it might crumble without the filth to hold those walls together. I pressed the doorbell and waited for a voice over the old call box, but the door just buzzed and clicked open. I thought about taking the old-style freight elevator up and reconsidered when I saw the ratty shape it was in. At least the stairs were solid. I found Declan Carney on the top floor in a studio that looked like part sci-fi movie set, part photo lab, part artist’s loft, and it seemed about as well organized as a bowl of spaghetti. Once I saw the man himself, I quickly forgot about the disorganization and remembered Rusk’s warning about the man’s idiosyncrasies.
Dressed in a blue, red, and yellow Hawaiian shirt, red tartan kilt, white tube socks, and Earth Shoes, his weird looks didn’t stop with his attire. He had a bleached platinum Mohawk hairdo, brown and gray Hasidic sidecurls, a soul patch that grew five inches past his chin, and a Fu Manchu mustache that was braided at the tips. Then I realized there wasn’t a tattoo or piercing on him. I guess he saw the question in my eyes, or maybe I asked it. I don’t really remember.
“Tattoos go against all of my culture’s beliefs and I am afraid of pointed objects. I grow faint at the thought of an injection. You do not think I would permit some untrained technician to drill me with a machine that your Thomas Edison invented to make print copies.”
“Huh?”
“You did not know that the mechanism used for tattooing was a retrofitted Thomas Edison invention? Some fellow just added an ink reservoir, sharpened the point, and adjusted the cycling of the machine and, as some of your kind say, voila!”
“Sounds barbaric.”
“I will not disagree.”
I wanted him to speak a little more because he had a peculiar accent that wasn’t, as his name suggested, Irish. Actually, I’m not sure I had ever heard any English speaker with an accent like it. And then there was his oddly referencing things like “ your Thomas Edison” and “some of your kind.”
“Where are you from?”
“Skajit,” pronounced ska-JEET, “a planet four hundred million light years away from earth in the galaxy we call Plasnor.”
He answered with a disconcerting nonchalance and a straight face. It was as if I’d asked him the time and he said three o’clock. Before I could utter another sound, he pointed to the bubble-wrapped paintings at my side. Paintings which, once I’d beheld Declan Carney, I’d nearly forgotten.
“Those are the artworks you wish me to authenticate?”
“They are.”
“Sashi Bluntstone’s, correct, Mr. Prager?”
“How did you-”
“Wallace Rusk telecommunicated with me about the possibility of your arrival. Please leave the paintings.”
“How about a receipt?”
I thought Carney was going to break into tears. He was not only insulted, but wounded by my request. Apparently honor was meaningful to the people of Skajit.
“I meant no disrespect,” I said, playing along. “It is customary to ask because the paintings aren’t mine.”
That seemed to make him feel better. “I will do as you ask.”
He rummaged around for a piece of paper and found one under a can of turpentine. He scribbled on the paper with a pencil and handed it to me. It wasn’t much, but it was something and I sensed it was all I was apt to get. I accepted it gracefully.
“Thank you for understanding. How long do you think it will take?” I asked, pointing at the three paintings.
“At least several days, depending on the tests, but by the Holy Doctrine of Thalmador, my conclusions will be beyond reproach.”
“Wallace Rusk said you were good.”
“A strange man, Wallace Rusk.”
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
“Well, thank you, Declan.”
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