Innocent monster mp-6

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “This city is a remarkable place,” he said. “I only wish we appreciated that fact.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Here we are in a Turkish cafe surrounded by Arab businesses in a city with perhaps the largest Jewish population in the world. I live in Ditmas Park or, as some call it, Little Pakistan. Little Pakistan abuts Mid-wood, which is dominated by Hasidic Jews. History would say none of this should be possible. And let us not even discuss Queens, where there are over one hundred and thirty languages spoken each day.”

  “I’ve lived here my whole life, Doc. The melting pot is a crock of shit.”

  “I am not naive, Mr. Prager, but I have lived in other places, places where the people are victims of their histories. Here, in this place, people rebuke the yokes of their histories. Not always, but on most days.”

  “Nice speech. Maybe you should run for mayor.”

  “I am afraid I would make a most dreadful politician. And I realize that the things I so admire about this place make it a target as much as anything else.”

  The barista brought over two espresso-sized cups on saucers and a larger plate with a selection of crusty and syrupy pastries. Some were sprinkled with chopped pistachio nuts, others covered in a kind of shredded wheat. All seemed to feature gobs of honey. Ogologlu thanked him and watched him retreat back around the counter.

  “I know it looks like espresso, but I would advise against drinking it so. The grinds are at the bottom of the cup. The pastries… for them, I will leave you to your own devices. Enjoy.”

  I took a sip of the coffee, which the psychiatrist watched with delight. “Amazing,” I said, “strong and sweet. I’ve never had anything quite like it.”

  For the next ten minutes we sat there making small talk, sipping our coffees, sampling the pastries.

  “You were talking about people being prisoners of their histories, Doc. Was John Tierney a prisoner of his?”

  The smile ran away from Ogologlu’s face. “As complex as we like to believe human history is, schizophrenia is a far more difficult a proposition. It defies the kind of analysis and deconstruction we feel comfortable with. Oh, we can describe it well enough, list its various manifestations, symptoms, drug therapies, and the rest, but…” He didn’t finish his thought. He didn’t need to.

  “He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, right?”

  “Broadly speaking. And before you ask, most people with this diagnosis tend not to be violent. Sometimes, however, they turn on people, even those closest to them.”

  “How long had you been treating him?”

  “Since he was about nineteen. He was a sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design, a fine arts major, I believe. Apparently, he had been displaying some symptoms since his mid-teens, but his mother and teachers dismissed his unusual behavior as the eccentricities of a talented and precocious child. When he was forced to withdraw from college, his mother was referred to me.”

  “Did the cops tell you about the paintings of the saints on his walls, the Christ-heads, the altar?”

  “They did. It was not a surprise to me. From the beginning, John, like many schizophrenics, had incorporated a strong religious element into his organizational scheme. Schizophrenia is an amazing disease, Mr. Prager, in that its manifestations can be very similar from patient to patient. The aluminum foil on the windows, the conviction that someone or some group is trying to read and influence thoughts, these are common things.”

  “Did he ever talk about Sashi Bluntstone?”

  Ogologlu swallowed hard. “He had, but more with a kind of religious reverence. He had mentioned a hundred people this way. What is it you are really asking me?”

  “You’re a smart man,” I said. “There’s lots of questions, but the one I guess I want answered is, could anyone have seen this coming?”

  “I don’t know if anyone could have seen it coming. I can only say that I did not.”

  “So there was no indication that he could turn violent.”

  “I did not say that. Maybe there were a thousand indications that he was capable of such heinous acts and I failed to see them. Maybe there were none. As I said, John’s disease defies easy answers. I can say that there were no overt and obvious signs that John was a danger to himself or others. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen him for several months before this happened. Therefore, I cannot say with any degree of certainty that his psychosis hadn’t deepened or evolved into something different and dangerous.”

  “There’s a lot you cannot say.”

  “There is one thing I can say, though. It seems to me that you are searching for some kind of absolution. Looking to me for that will only lead to disappointment. Absolution does not fall within my purview, I’m afraid. And frankly, in this kind of situation, I’m not certain there is anyone who can grant it to you. I can also say that I treated John and was myself shocked to hear the news about what he had done. Therefore, I would not be so fast to judge myself as harshly as you have judged yourself. You spent a few minutes with him and made an error. I spent years with him. If there is guilt and culpability here, there is plenty to go around. So you see, there is no hope of absolution for me either. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said as he stood. “I think I would like to go home and see my family.”

  I stood and shook his hand. “Thanks, Doc. If I have any other questions, would you mind if I called?”

  He shrugged, not looking thrilled at the prospect of rehashing the subject of John Tierney. Yet, he said, “If I can be of assistance, certainly feel free to contact me.”

  When he left, I ordered another coffee and sat, listening mostly to the traffic noise on Atlantic and my even noisier thoughts. No matter what Dr. Ogologlu had said, I was choking on guilt. I’d been through this kind of thing before, in the wake of Katy’s murder and, all things considered, I’d take a lungful of cancer over guilt. You can cut cancer out, burn it out, starve it, poison it. And if none of that works, the worst thing it can do is kill you. Cancer has a spot, a place, a name, even a face, but guilt is more insidious. It doesn’t spread because it’s everywhere to begin with, and it has a voice. It sings to you, but it won’t kill you. No, that’s on you. Guilt is the cab that drives you to the airport, but you have to crash the plane yourself.

  Then, above the traffic noise and the din of my guilt, a news story came over the cafe speakers that just made my day complete.

  … for that we go to our Long Island bureau chief, Marsha Farmer…

  “We’re here at the Junction Gallery in Sea Cliff where, only minutes ago, patron of the arts Sonia Barrows-Willingham announced that the hundred thousand dollar reward she offered for information leading to a break in the Sashi Bluntstone case, has been awarded to Moses Prager. Prager, a Brooklyn native, is a private investigator and retired NYPD officer. A friend of the Bluntstone family, he was brought into the case three weeks after the young artist was kidnapped from this scenic North Shore village. Within a week, Mr. Prager had gotten a line on a possible connection between Sashi Bluntstone and John Tierney. Following the lead developed by Prager, the NYPD and detectives from the Nassau County Police went to Tierney’s Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn home…”

  I left ten dollars on the table and my second cup of coffee untouched.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  That first night was worst of all. My phone machine was already full by the time I got home and I shut off my cell after taking calls from Aaron and Sarah. Both were politic enough and knew me well enough not to ask if I was happy about getting the money. There was nothing happy in any of this. Well, maybe Sonia Barrows-Willingham caught a buzz. Her extensive collection of Sashi’s art had probably just gone up several fold in value and the thought of dipping me in a hundred thousand dollars worth of blood money probably made her wet. I wondered, did a woman like her ever get wet?

  It didn’t take me long to figure out what I would do with the reward. I knew I wasn’t going to keep any of the money for myself, but I’d grown up too poor to make s
ome grandiose gesture with it. Money came too hard to most people at too high a cost for me to simply hand it over to a charity. With money comes responsibility and I wasn’t going to cede mine, not to a board or committee. If I thought it might’ve unhinged the albatross from around my neck or calmed the guilt, I would’ve considered it. I knew better. Didn’t I always know better? Sarah, because of our estrangement, had insisted on paying for vet school on her own and had only reluctantly let me help her buy into her practice. I thought maybe now that we had come to terms of forgiveness about Katy’s murder, that Sarah would be more amenable to letting me help. I hoped she’d take some of it, if only the money she’d fronted Max and Candy for the ransom, and I thought Jimmy Palumbo had done as much to earn the reward as I had. He sure as hell needed it more than I did and I didn’t suppose he was the type to be too proud not to take it. In his shoes, I’d take it.

  I heard a lot of noise coming from Emmons Avenue and peeked through the window. The inevitable frontal assault had begun. Three news vans were parked out there and a crowd was forming around them. I threw two changes of clothing and my shaving kit into a gym bag and locked the door behind me. I didn’t figure this story had much staying power. One day, two at most. I could hide for that long. I’d pretty much hidden for the last seven years. Outside in the hall, I went straight to the stairs and took the extra half flight down that led to the parking lot. The reporters hadn’t found their way back there yet and I got into my car. It smelled almost new, having just been returned from the body shop after the cops released it. Still, on such a day as this, I would have been better served by the generic rental I’d been driving for the past few weeks. I made a quick right out of the lot and sped towards the Belt Parkway service road. I didn’t know where I was headed, but that wasn’t exactly a new experience in my life. I figured to stumble into something.

  I drove around aimlessly for about an hour, listening to Steely Dan CDs, singing along, trying to blot out the noise in my head. And it worked for a while too. When I snapped out of my personal fog, I found I was parked next to Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. I wished I had parked anywhere else. In all the tumult of the last several weeks, I really hadn’t given much thought to Mary Lambert. Now, remembering our dinner here, the walk along the boardwalk, our nights together, she filled every corner of my head. I thought about how romantic it would have been to escape to her Greenpoint sublet. How I would have coaxed her into ditching work so we could spend a few days together in her bed, fucking our brains out like a couple of teenagers. Much like a teenager, I found myself fantasizing that the story of the reward money would make it up to Boston, and hearing it, Mary would get back in touch with me. Like I said, everybody wants to get rescued. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. I would never hear from her again.

  Christ, it was freezing cold on the boardwalk, but after a few minutes I barely noticed. I just kept moving. That seemed to be my plan: just keep moving. There was barely enough light left to see down the boardwalk towards Sea Gate. There was something achingly beautiful about this nearly deserted and decrepit stretch of beach that had once been the world’s playground. The truth of it was best seen in the dying light. In the summer, crowded with people, with the rumble of rides, the shrieks and screams, the barkers’ crooked come-ons, cotton candy, the pops and whistles, the siren’s song of french fries and hot dogs, Coney Island still had enough magic to fool you, to make promises it couldn’t keep, promises that it had probably never really kept. But now under the falling curtain of night, I could see it for what it wasn’t, for the lie I had let it tell me my entire life. There are lies to hate and lies to adore. Even now, seeing it clearly maybe for the very first time, Coney Island was a lie I adored. Coney Island was a lover who never kept her promises, but somehow it didn’t matter. Maybe it was no accident that I wound up here, that Mary Lambert was on my mind.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I was right this time. The reward story had no legs, no legs at all. The news vans and crowds were gone by the next evening. I spent my one night in self-exile at a faceless New Jersey motel out on Route 9. Although it lacked the romance of my Mary Lambert fantasy, it felt almost like a vacation. There can be great joy in anonymity. The story had no legs because Sashi was now just a collection of charred bones on the cold pyre of the twenty-four hour news cycle. She was no longer destiny’s child, now only a child of mind. I imagine that if Max and Candy had been willing to do the morning shows and Larry King and Oprah, they could have kept the machine churning by stirring the ashes and feeding the beast, but, to their credit, they had refused to play the game. The one thing in the world that bound them together was gone forever and I guess they were too busy staring into the abyss to worry about staring into the camera.

  I listened to my phone messages to make certain that I didn’t delete anything important. Most, as I suspected, were from the media requesting comment on the reward and the case. There was one from the code enforcement officer in Bridgehampton. Apparently, my moment in the sun had had an impact on the folks out east and they had magically approved all the permit requests, including the one for external signage, for our new store. Then there was the chilling message from Sonia Barrows-Willingham about the reward itself. It seemed a certified check was on its way to me via FedEx. There was this creepy sort of delight in her cool, bloodless voice.

  “Oh, and by the way, Mr. Prager, I wanted to let you know that we’re having a little memorial service for Sashi at my house on January second. Max and Candy have requested you be in attendance. Your daughter has already accepted the invitation. Do come.” Said the spider to the fly.

  I guessed I would go. The thought of Sarah alone around that woman brought out my fatherly protective instincts. Besides, I had some stuff I needed to say to Max and Candy that I hadn’t had the chance to say in person.

  With all the messages erased, emails answered or deleted, and the good news about the new store passed on to my big brother, I took a tour around my condo and realized it looked like a war zone. During my two weeks in brooding isolation, I hadn’t done much house cleaning or laundry or much of anything. I got to it. And though the hard edges of the guilt had softened a bit over the last few days and its voice was no longer operatic, I didn’t need to play music as I cleaned.

  I woke up, the pillow wet on my cheek from drool. The downstairs buzzer was ringing, but I didn’t jump out of bed to get it. I had dreamed and I didn’t want to lose it. I sat up, closed my eyes, and tried to get the dream straight in my head. When I thought I had it, I went to the intercom.

  “Who’s there?”

  “FedEx.”

  Come on up.”

  I must’ve been too quick for him because the buzzer rang again. I depressed the button again and, this time, held down for many seconds. Less than a minute later there was a rap at my door. The FedEx guy had that end-of-a-long-day look on his face and it was only then that I noticed it was completely dark outside. After tidying up, I’d had a Dewars, my first since my lost weekend, and laid down on my bed just to rest my eyes for a few minutes. I guess I rested more than my eyes and for more than a few minutes.

  “Sign this, please,” he said, passing over a handheld device with an electronic signing pad. When I was done, he handed me an envelope.

  “Busy, huh?”

  “Christmas.” His expression went from bored exhaustion to worry. He had slipped and used the C-word, Christmas.

  “That’s right. I almost forgot. Merry Christmas.”

  “Happy Holiday Season to you, sir,” he said too emphatically.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t report you to the Thought Police.”

  His face went from concern to confusion, but neither one of us had the energy nor the inclination to discuss it. I shut the door and ripped open the shipping envelope. Inside, along with the check, was a folded prepaid shipping envelope and some waivers to sign. I didn’t figure it was going to be simple. Nothing is simple anymore, especially not money.

  Befo
re I could step away from the door, there was another knock. I thought it was the FedEx guy coming back for some reason beyond my reasoning. Maybe my signature hadn’t taken in his handheld. I didn’t suppose the day was far off when they’d just want to scan your fingerprints or your retina or take a drop of blood. When I pulled back the door, it wasn’t the FedEx man at all. In the end, however, it was about blood, not my blood, but blood nonetheless.

  I swallowed hard at the sight of the man standing before me because I immediately recognized his face. Not him, his face. I realize that doesn’t make much sense, but there it is. He must’ve been around Sarah’s age, I thought, about my height, slender, yet well put together under his open cashmere overcoat and dark gray Italian suit. His black hair was thick and as well-groomed as hair that wavy and thick could be. He was a dead ringer for the young Tony Bennett and his mouth smiled at me out of the past. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown and shaped a little differently from the face I recognized. Still, in spite of what I knew in my heart and in my marrow, I said, “Sorry, I’m not talking to the media.”

  “I’m not from the media. I’m from Vermont.” He laughed at his own joke.

  “I don’t care if you’re from Verona. Who are you?” I asked, my voice breaking up.

  “My name is Paul Stern, but that’s only part of who I am. And if I’m reading your expression and voice correctly, I think you’ve figured out the rest.”

  “But Rico didn’t have kids,” I heard myself say.

  “None that he knew of, no. May I come in?”

  What could I do? I waved him in and closed the door behind him.

  Five minutes later, Paul Stern was sitting on my couch, holding the picture of Larry McDonald, Rico Tripoli, and me in his hand. It was the same picture Mary Lambert had held in her hand only a few weeks before and, as it happened, that was no accident. It was uncanny just how much he resembled Rico. Even some of his movements and gestures were reminiscent of my old precinct buddy. He took a long sip of the red wine I’d poured for him, then held the picture up to me, his thumb under Rico Tripoli’s chin.