Innocent monster mp-6

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “I’m going in,” I said. “You stay here out of trouble.”

  Paul showed me a Glock. “Detective McKenna gave it to me and went to stall the cops for time. I hope the damned thing works wet.” He looked down at his waterlogged watch. “We’ve got maybe ten more minutes.”

  “ We don’t have shit. You’re staying here.”

  “We outgun him, don’t we?” There was that we again.

  “Maybe not and neither of us is in any kind of shape to go toe to toe with him. He’s warm, dry, and gigantic. Plus, given the strain he’s been under for over a month, he’s probably about ready to explode.”

  “Then you need me and I’m helping whether you want me to or not.”

  I was in no position to argue and I needed to get out of the cold. “Okay.”

  “How are you going to deal with him if, like you say, he’s ready to blow?”

  “In his way, I think he’s expecting me. But it really doesn’t matter, does it? We’re here and I’m going after him. Cover me until I get around the side of the house, then take care of the boat. Do whatever you have to do to it, but just make sure he can’t use it to make a run.”

  As I worked my way to the side door, back against the clapboards, ducking below the windows, I tried figuring out a play that would get me inside the house without Jimmy knowing about it. Who was I kidding? Even if I wasn’t soaked, frostbitten, and shoeless and hadn’t consumed a third of a bottle of scotch or had a fight or been punched in the face, I don’t think I could have figured out a reasonable plan. I wasn’t a goddamned cat burglar, so I did the only thing that made any sense at all: I knocked. I put my arms in the air high above my head, my old. 38 in my hand, butt end out, and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

  Jimmy Palumbo almost smiled at me when he answered the door. He grabbed my. 38 and tossed it into the darkness and drifting snow behind me. He had a big, nasty-looking revolver in his hand and it was pointed right at my belly.

  “Come on inside,” was all he said as he backed up into the house. “Close the door behind you.”

  As cold and scared as I was, I did as he said without hesitation. I guess I didn’t care so much about getting killed as long as I could be warm when it happened.

  “There’s a comforter on the couch over there.” He pointed with the gun. I went to the couch and had the comforter wrapped around my shoulders and the rest of me in a flash. “Sit,” he said. I sat.

  The interior of the place looked as I imagined it would, like a well-decorated house that had been rented out to a couple of irresponsible frat boys. Dirty floors, dirty dishes, half-empty food containers, a big TV. Except for the lack of used needles and cotton balls, it kind of reminded me of Nathan Martyr’s place.

  “No way to sell a house,” I said, my teeth still chattering. “The place is a mess.”

  He ignored that, walking over to the front window and pushing the curtain aside with the muzzle of the revolver. “Fucking weather. I should have been long gone by now.” Jimmy let the curtain fall back into place.

  “Probably wouldn’t’ve mattered.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I thought you might figure out it was me eventually, but not so soon.”

  “You killed Tierney?”

  “Hey, that’s on you, Moe.” Didn’t I know it? “You led me straight to him and paid me for the honor. He was perfect. Fucking crazy as a bedbug. He didn’t even put up too much of a fight. Who wasn’t gonna believe he did it?”

  “Me.”

  “Who else?” he asked.

  “No one.”

  Jimmy gloated. “See what I mean?”

  “So you did find the altar room when you searched the house. You went back to Martyr’s house that night and planted those pictures of Sashi, her panties, the bones.”

  “How’d you figure it out?” He was curious too.

  “A lot of little things,” I said, happy he was willing to keep talking. More talk, less bullets. “I couldn’t accept that Tierney had it in him to plot and plan and carry out such a complicated scheme. People kept telling me I was nuts and I almost started believing them too. I noticed she was wearing different underclothes in the pictures on the altar than the ones she was wearing when she was taken. Tierney just wasn’t the type to shop for little girl’s panties. Then I realized that Tierney had blackened out the eyes in every photo and painting in his house, but not the ones you planted. I just couldn’t let it go. Then, tonight, I saw an old video of Sashi’s art shows and there you were, standing guard over her.”

  “Shit!”

  “It still all might have worked too if I hadn’t seen that video. That was just dumb luck.”

  “Bad luck for me.”

  “You vandalized my car, but why? It didn’t fit. That was another one of the things that really got in the way of me believing Tierney did it. Why didn’t you just split after you got the initial fifty grand?”

  “Look, it was like my lucky day when you walked into the museum and hired me. Until then, I was thinking that it was only a matter of time till the cops came knocking at my door. It would’ve looked pretty bad if I cut and run before they showed up. They’d know I was guilty, and I’d be fucked. But you saved my ass. You brought me close to things, close enough so’s I could find a patsy and get away free and clear. No looking behind me, no waiting for a knock at my door. Besides, fifty grand wasn’t enough for me to make any kind of new start. I thought the Bluntstones were worth millions. I mean, I used to work Sashi’s shows and see people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at a clip on her stuff. How was I supposed to know her parents pissed all the money away and were broker than me?”

  “But why fuck up my car and leave the bear?”

  “It was a win-win for me. If it worked to scare you off, then great. If not, you’d keep paying me and keep me in the loop until I found the patsy. It worked, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but it ends here, Jimmy. There’s a Suffolk Police boat waiting for you at Santapogue Point and they’ve got the roads out of here blocked off. That’s why I’m wet and frozen. I had to swim across the channel to get here without the cops noticing. Believe it or not, I’m trying to save your worthless fucking life.”

  Oops! That was a mistake. We were pals up till then.

  “Fuck you! You don’t know about me, about who I am,” he shouted, tightening the grip on the big revolver, a grip that, until a few seconds ago, had been steadily relaxing. “Well, if I gotta go, I ain’t going alone.”

  “Calm down, Jimmy. You still have a bargaining chip.”

  He sneered. “You? Get out. Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Not me. The cops don’t give a shit about me. But you know something the cops want to know. That’s your play.”

  “Yeah, and what do I know?”

  “Where Sashi is buried.”

  He seemed not to understand. “Huh?”

  “They’ll make a deal if you can tell them where Sashi is buried.”

  Again, he stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language, but that’s where the discussion came to an end. Things happened, everything happened, and, it seemed, all at once. There was a thump at the side door, then loud scratching, howling too, and not from the wind. A dog. The dog I’d heard on the phone the last time I’d spoken to Jimmy. Paul was shouting at someone in the backyard, “Go! Run! Faster! Run! That’s it, run! Faster! Run!” Jimmy’s face went from blank to panic to fury. Then a few beats later, the boat’s engines revved loudly and it sounded as if it was pulling away from the dock. Palumbo’s phone rang and we both startled. It rang and rang and rang.

  I said, “Answer it.”

  Jimmy was frozen, his attention and guts being tugged in a hundred different directions. He reached for the phone. It stopped ringing. Flashing red and blue lights strobed through the front window. The dog was howling louder now and scratching more fiercely. The boat crashed into something, groaning as it broke apart. Jimmy pointed the gun at my head.

  “James Palumbo, th
is is the Suffolk County Police Department…”

  Jimmy turned. I had no chance in a fight with him, but I did have a chance to get the gun out of his hand. I grabbed a crystal obelisk, about eight inches tall, off the end table and brought it down hard as I could on Jimmy’s wrist. The bones snapped and the gun fell to the floor. His bloodied hand hung down from his arm at an unnatural angle, exposed bone peeking through the skin. I nearly puked at the sight of it. Jimmy screamed, but didn’t freak. This was a man who had played NFL football. Talent, strength, size, and speed were parts of that equation, but the ability to withstand constant pain was another. He reached for the gun with his left hand. I kicked it away before he could grab it.

  “You prick! I was her only hope.” And with that, he landed a left hook to my jaw that would be felt by generations of Pragers yet to be born. My eyes shut.

  When they fluttered open again, I was on the floor, blood pouring out of my mouth, the revolver gone, and Jimmy Palumbo heading out the side door at a run. The dog was yelping and someone was shouting for Jimmy to halt. It was Paul Stern. Bang! A shot. Bang! Bang! Two more, louder, much much louder than the first. Now I was running, lots of people were running. I got out to the backyard just in time to see Jimmy Palumbo dive off the dock, gun in hand, knocking Paul Stern backwards into the water with him. Cops were all around me, but, crazy and irrational as it was, the only thing I could think about was that I was going to lose Rico again, and that I would lose Sarah again too.

  The snow was stained with blood, a lot of blood, steam rising off it. We all ran to the edge of the dock. Three of the cops ran ahead and dived in without hesitation. For reasons I can’t begin to explain, I started praying to Mr. Roth, asking him to talk to God on my behalf. Me praying to a dead Jew. Go figure! As Izzy was fond of saying, “God does answer prayers, only most of the time, the answer is no.” A man who had witnessed the things he’d seen in Auschwitz understood the limitations of prayer. But when I looked down into the water, there was Paul Stern, his arm around Jimmy Palumbo’s neck, keeping him from drowning. Then the cops grabbed on and helped.

  “Get out of there!” I screamed at him in joy and anguish. “Anything happens to you, my daughter will kill me herself.”

  Behind me, the dog was at it again, only this time, it was yelping and howling in joy. When I turned to look, I saw McKenna, tears streaming down his face, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Then I understood. Standing in front of him was a little girl with green eyes and nine fingers. She was kneeling down to pet her beagle puppy.

  I was right to have used Mr. Roth as the intermediary between me and the Almighty, because, this one time, God said yes.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The minute they brought Jimmy up out of the water I knew I had never really understood anything about the world and thought that maybe I should stop pretending that I did. Sashi stopped petting the little beagle, ran over to Jimmy, crying as fiercely as McKenna had been only moments before, and screamed, “Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Jimmy, please be all right.”

  He wasn’t all right and he wasn’t ever going to be all right again, even if he survived. Sashi could see that. That’s what the tears were about. That and maybe a lot more. Jimmy’s wrist was totally fucked, jagged bone sticking way the hell out, and it was hard to say whether his left thigh was soaked more with blood or water. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was crying too. Sashi was holding Jimmy’s good hand to her cheek even as the cops worked furiously to stanch the flow from his leg wound and deal with his wrist.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” he said, pulling his hand away from her cheek, stroking her hair. “It’ll be okay.”

  But she knew it was a lie. She knew the shapes and sounds of lies. Her parents had trained her in the art of the lie.

  A gurney appeared and Jimmy was on it. As they carried him past me, he said, “You shoulda let us go, Prager. You shoulda let me save her.” Then he was gone.

  “What was that about?” McKenna asked, more composed now.

  “A failed rescue attempt, I think. One gone very wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” is what I said.

  “Come on, let’s get you and your partner over there to the hospital.” McKenna was pointing at Paul Stern being helped out of the water.

  At the hospital, they examined us for hypothermia and frostbite, but both of us checked out okay. Thanks to McKenna’s intervention, they got us fixed up with some hospital scrubs to wear under the blankets instead of those ridiculous gowns. You want to suck the dignity out of a human being, make him wear a hospital gown.

  “Thanks, Paul. You saved my life.”

  He was horrified that I said it aloud. Talk about someone squirming in his seat, but he felt compelled to respond. “I did it for me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re the closest thing I’ve got on this earth to my biological father. I couldn’t just stand there and lose you too. Not now. And then there’s Sarah. I never met anyone like her.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  We let it go at that for a few minutes, then I started up again.

  “How’d you manage to find me in that storm? You don’t know the area and you weren’t right behind me. The visibility was terrible, sure, but if you were close, I would have seen you.”

  “Easy,” he said. “I tracked you. Footprints in the snow. Remember, I’m from-”

  “-Vermont. Yeah, I think I heard that once or twice already tonight.”

  He blushed.

  “So,” I said, “you used the dinghy to get across the first channel, huh?”

  “Dinghy?”

  “A dinghy, it’s a small boat that-”

  “I know what a dinghy is, Moe.”

  “Yeah, well, I found one stuck up against a piling and I-”

  “I didn’t see a dinghy. All I saw was your footprints stop on one side of the channel and begin again on the other side, so I-”

  “You swam across! Are you nuts? You could have been killed.”

  “Well, I thought if a drunk, sixty-year-old man with bad knees could do it, I could.”

  “Some prosecutor! If you saw me on the observation deck of the Empire State Building one minute and down on Thirty-fourth Street a few minutes later, would you assume I jumped? Oy gevalt! I like you, kid, but you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  “Never said I didn’t.”

  I changed subjects. “Were you trying to shoot Jimmy in the leg?”

  “No. I was aiming at his torso, but I was so incredibly cold that I couldn’t stop my hand from shaking.”

  “Cold, and maybe a little scared too?”

  “More than a little, Moe.”

  When he said those words, I knew that any resemblance to Rico was superficial. Rico Tripoli would never have been able to admit what his son had just confessed. One vote for nurture versus nature. For that matter, Rico would have let me drown and cried about it afterwards from the safety of shore. I didn’t tell that to Paul.

  We may not have had frostbite or hypothermia, but they kept me in the hospital for two days. They let Paul go home that night. When I asked the doctor why Paul got to go and I had to stay, he mentioned something about the difference in our ages. People seemed to be fixated on my age lately. In the end, I was thankful they kept me there, not because I was worried about my health, but because they kept the press out of my hair and let me get some sleep. I slept for almost an entire day. I had never been that tired in my life, nor had my muscles, the few that I had left, ever felt so incredibly sore. To paraphrase the late great Edmund Kean: drowning is easy, almost drowning is hard.

  EPILOGUE

  Detective McKenna, who never went to IA, but got a bump up and was now scheduled to receive his department’s highest honor, came to visit me two weeks after I got out of the hospital. He came to tell me that the Suffolk crime scene guys had found some curious things in the basement of Jimmy’s house. Among other items, they’d discovered four original painting
s signed by Sashi Bluntstone. Somewhere Sonia Barrows-Willingham and Randy Junction were having intense, simultaneous orgasms: four of them, to be exact. The cops had also found a cell phone, one of those Wal-Mart jobs that you just buy minutes for as needed. When they checked the records, they found that Sashi and Jimmy had been talking to each other for over a year. I told him what Ben Schare had told me about seeing Sashi on the beach sometimes talking on a cell phone. I could see on McKenna’s face that he’d come around to the same conclusion I’d come to the night we found Sashi alive. Neither of us said a word.

  The fact was that even if we wanted to cobble together the truth of things, we would have been hard-pressed to do so. Sashi Bluntstone would have been of little help and Jimmy Palumbo none at all. At least Jimmy had a rock solid excuse: he was dead. He had been doing all right at first, huge blood loss and all, and looked like he might make it. Then he contracted one of those nasty hospital-bred bacterial infections that resist every drug known to mankind and lapsed into a coma. He didn’t last ten days. Besides, like I said, I don’t think either McKenna or I wanted to say the words aloud. What went on between Jimmy and Sashi was something, but it wasn’t a kidnapping.

  I never returned to the house in Sea Cliff. I didn’t have the stomach for the inevitably halfhearted thank yous and insincere sorries. I had come into this mess with fond memories of Candy and hating Max. And now, while I didn’t hate Candy, I was much less fond of her. Whether or not she was the person who helped Sashi with her paintings, I couldn’t say. My guess was it was Max. Yet, at the very least, Candy was complicit in the deceit. Max was Max. I no longer despised him. There wasn’t enough there to hate, really. For the most part, I found myself feeling sorry for the both of them, that they had allowed themselves to become so woefully dependent on their daughter. Or, as Candy had put it, slaves to her career. In this case, the child was truly father to the man.