Innocent Monster (10 page)

About a half hour later, Nathan Martyr floated up the stairs and back onto the street. While he didn’t look the picture of health, it was clear he’d gotten healthy. His zombie walk was now airy and free, the shackles off his ankles. I waited until he turned the corner and passed by an old church and an adjacent schoolyard. We were on him before he knew what was happening and we dragged him into the back of the dark playground.

I stuck my badge in his face and Jimmy shoved him to the ground. “Nathan Martyr, you’re under arrest.” I put my old cuffs tightly around his wrists. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights?”

The asshole actually started humming “Singing In The Rain.”

I patted him down and sure enough, he had an ounce, maybe two, of powder packaged in a knotted red balloon in his right front pocket.

“That’s a lot of weight, Nathan,” I said, cocky as could be.

He stopped humming long enough to tell me to go fuck myself.

Using one hand, Jimmy yanked Martyr up in the air by his wrists, and the asshole squealed in agony. Even at his junkie weight, getting lifted up that way must have felt like his arms were being ripped off his body. I shed no tears.

When Jimmy put him back down, I asked, “What did you say to me?”

“I said go fuck yourself, but what I should have said was good evening, Mr. Prager.”

Talk about stopping the show. I didn’t bother trying to plug ahead. He had me. I knelt down, uncuffed him, and helped stand him up. I held on to his heroin. It was the last card I had to play.

“The doorman, that asshole ex-cop, he showed you my picture,” I said.

“Not two minutes after you left, he buzzed me and told me to come to the lobby, that he had something I might want to take a look at. Thompson’s a dick, but he knows how to make tips and do his job.”

“Yeah, well, you got me, but I got this.” I held the balloon up and dangled it. He made a weak stab at snatching it away from me, but he was hopelessly slow. “Good thing you didn’t get it,” I said, “because then my only option would be to let my partner here have his way with your scrawny, pitiful ass and he’d make you hurt a lot more than you were hurting a half hour ago.”

As if on cue, Jimmy brought his big paw down on Martyr’s shoulder. He collapsed like a three-legged card table.

“Hey, man, there’s no need for that. Just tell me what you want and maybe we can come to some understanding,” he said, surprisingly little fear in his voice.

“I want your mailing list and I want all the data your webmaster has gathered about incoming emails, etc. I want—”

“Chill, Prager,” he said, rubbing his wrists. “That’s no way to negotiate.”

“Negotiate?”

“I want! I want! I want! Didn’t your mother teach you that saying
I want
won’t get you what you want? It’s pretty obvious what you want. You want to know which one of the people that visit my blog and site are sick enough to have abducted that little cunt Sashi Bluntstone.”

The next thing I knew, I was pulling Jimmy Palumbo’s fingers from around Martyr’s throat. Jimmy got up, but Martyr stayed down.

“That won’t get it done either, Prager,” he rasped. He sat up, resting on an arm outstretched behind him. “You don’t need to sort through all the shit you’d get from my webmaster. It’s already been over three weeks. Time’s running out on little Sashi. Tick... tick... tick...” He tapped his skull. “I have the names you want right here.”

“You motherfucker! I’m gonna—”

This time Jimmy grabbed
me
and held me back. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Listen to this prick and let’s get out of here.”

“I’m okay.” Jimmy let me go and I asked Martyr, “What do you want?”

“First thing I want is a gesture of good faith,” Martyr said, pointing at the balloon, which was lying on the ground near Jimmy Palumbo’s feet.

“I’ll think about it. What else?”

“I want her last painting.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What?”

“You heard me,” he said, standing up, brushing himself off. “I want the last painting she was working on.”

“Why?”

“Because the little bitch is probably dead and the last thing she worked on will be worth a fortune.”

I wanted to rip this guy’s head off. Jimmy did too. I think anyone would have, but I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood and continued as calmly as I could. “But you hate her and her work.”

“But I love money. I love it best of all. What, you think art is for art’s sake? Don’t be a rube, Prager. It’s a commodity like gold or oil or pork bellies. And just like those things, art has no inherent value. It’s about what the market will bear. You think when I kick that all the assholes who delight in pissing on my stuff now won’t be clamoring for a piece of it? Sure I hate that little twat and her awful smears and finger paintings, but I want one and I hope she’s—”

Jimmy Palumbo slapped Martyr so hard it split his lip. I thought the junkie’s body would snap in two. I couldn’t blame Jimmy, but I didn’t want to have to answer for manslaughter charges either. I stepped between Jimmy and Martyr.

“That’s it! Stop. Enough. You, back off!” I pointed at Jimmy. “Here, toss me the balloon.” He did so, if not enthusiastically. “And you,” I said, picking Martyr up in pieces off the playground, “keep your fucking mouth shut for two minutes. I’m gonna give you your drugs back and I’ll get you that painting, but it’ll be a day or two at least. First, I want one name and an address as a sign of good faith.”

His right cheek was scraped and bleeding, his left swollen from where Jimmy’s hand had landed, but Nathan Martyr smiled and looked at me with an odd mixture of contempt and pity. “You want a name? All right, Prager, I’ll give you a name: Sonia Barrows-Willingham. Now give me my medicine.”

“Sonia Barrows-Willingham... I know that name from somewhere,” I said, still gripping the red balloon in my fist. “Does she visit your website?”

“No, Prager, but she’s the one with the most to gain if little missy winds up dead.”

“Who is—”

“She is the biggest collector of that little—of Sashi Bluntstone’s work.” He put finger quotes around the word work. “You want to know who had motive, look at her.”

I handed him the balloon as promised. Martyr shoved it back into his pocket.

“When you get me the painting, you know where to find me.”

“And when I bring you that painting, I want names I couldn’t have found on my own or so help me, I’ll stick my gun down your throat and blow that collection of pus you call a brain out the back of your skull.”

He tried not to look rattled and failed. Jimmy Palumbo and I watched him recede into the night with the rest of the rats and roaches.

I didn’t play hide and seek with the sun as I drove back to Long Island. There was no fooling myself or anyone else for that matter about where I was headed or how this would end. Until meeting Nathan Martyr, it hadn’t really occurred to me that there were people who actually had a rooting interest in Sashi Bluntstone’s death. I’d met some repulsive human beings in my life, but none more so than Martyr. Being around him made me want to be able to molt like a snake and shed any piece of me that touched him. Yet, hours later, after I’d taken Jimmy Palumbo out for steak and paid him two hundred bucks in cash, after I showered and laid sleeplessly in my bed, I realized Martyr had done me a favor. Anyone who opens your eyes is doing you a favor. It was one thing when Lenya at the Brill Gallery mentioned the correlation between death and the value of art. It was something else when that junkie piece of shit gave me the lesson.

Martyr planted a seed in my head and it had blossomed overnight. Although I was still operating under the premise that Sashi Bluntstone had been abducted by a predator, possibly one of the resentful and twisted wack jobs who visited Martyr’s website or the others like it, I could no longer ignore the chance that she had been taken out of sheer greed. Sure, I thought Max and Candy were hiding something from me, but I didn’t really think they had somehow manufactured the disappearance to drive up the value of Sashi’s work. Yes, they too would surely benefit financially from Sashi’s death, at least in the short term, but neither Max nor Candy struck me as a criminal mastermind. Nor could I believe either of them was that cold-blooded. Candy couldn’t even hide her affair from her husband and Max’s grief was too real. Okay, maybe I was too close to Candy and maybe I was being naïve, but it was the cops’ job to be objective and unsentimental, not mine.

I’d put in a call to McKenna and we’d agreed to talk at some point during the day, though he refused to be pinned down about timing. That was fine by me. He couldn’t accuse me of keeping information from him if we couldn’t manage to reconnect. Even if we did, I planned on being as vague as possible. I hadn’t been on the job for decades and I was now pretty much just a civilian, but old resentments persist.

I spent my entire ten years as a cop in the bag, in uniform. Uniforms do the grunt work. It’s their lives that get put on the line with every traffic stop, with every domestic violence call, but at crime scenes they’re afterthoughts, blue window dressing there to string up the yellow tape and to say, “Please stand back.” Even now it eats at me that I was treated as a stalking horse, that I was the first one through the door to find the body of a woman beaten to death or the rag doll body of a baby dangling head first from its crib, but that I was shut out completely once the detectives had taken my statement. McKenna had been fair with me up to a point and I wasn’t going to do anything to risk Sashi’s life. Beyond that, however, regardless of the promises I made to him, that was as far as I was willing to go. This case was as much mine now as his.

Then my phone rang and the load on my shoulders lightened.

“Moe? Is that you?” asked the raspy voice on the other end of the line.

“Mary Lambert, how did you get this number?”

“I have my ways.”

“Apparently.”

“You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind? Not at all. So you got back for the conference call all right?”

“Your directions were perfect. I found my way just fine. Thanks again.”

“No problem. What’s up?”

There was a hesitant silence and then, “I hope this doesn’t put you off, but I haven’t really been able to concentrate since yesterday.”

“You’ve popped into my thoughts once or twice yourself,” I confessed.

“Do you think we could have dinner tonight? Until you say yes, I’ll be worthless to my employer and our clients.”

Now I hesitated. I wanted to say yes, to stop the car and pump my fist, but I couldn’t help but think about Sashi Bluntstone locked up in a dark, musty room, scared to death, waiting to be sodomized again or, worse, her cold body rotting under a pile of moldering leaves by the side of a highway somewhere. On the other hand, unless a major break fell into my lap, there would be no value in my sitting home alone in my condo. Mary misread my hesitation.

“I knew I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry. Please for—”

“It’s not that. Believe me, it’s not that at all, but I can’t explain right now. Can I give you an enthusiastic but tentative yes?”

“I’ll take it.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“That’s perfect.” Her voice smiled. “Bye, Moe Prager.”

“Bye, Mary Lambert.”

The Junction Gallery was open this time and I strolled in like a curious passerby. I don’t know, regardless of what Wallace Rusk and the Nathan Martyrs of the world had to say, I liked Sashi’s paintings. They were vibrant and whimsical and free of the constraints of European schools of thought and unconscious processes and whatever other rules the “serious” art world wanted to accuse her of breaking. If this was heresy, sign me up. Wouldn’t be the first time I was on that side of things.

The Junction Gallery wasn’t anything like the Brill. The Brill, in its stark whiteness, was nearly devoid of a sense of commerce. And with the junkie’s crap on display, it was downright anti-capitalist. The Junction Gallery, on the other hand, with its exposed brick walls, neon signs, colorful brochures and flyers, Kenny G soundtrack, and small DVD/CD and framed poster section, felt more like a Disney Store at the mall. Of course nearly all of the original paintings, framed prints, and DVDs were either produced by or were about Sashi Bluntstone. The only missing items were stuffed Sashi dolls.

There were six other people in the gallery with me. A young Japanese couple seemed to be engaged in a serious debate over the aesthetics of a Sashi painting that featured bright orange swirls, bold black streaks, and layers of yellow drips. An elderly couple just walked the gallery shaking their heads as they hesitated briefly by each painting. I wasn’t sure if their head shaking was commentary on the paintings themselves or on Sashi Bluntstone’s fate. In a corner by another of the paintings—this one predominantly textured shades of green and blue—stood the two remaining souls. She was a woman in her late fifties, thinset and lock-jawed, who looked like she just stepped out of a Talbot’s window display. She was so WASPy I thought I might have to check for wings beneath her tweed blazer. At her left shoulder was a tall, athletic man of forty with longish, slicked-back salt and pepper hair. Dressed in pine green corduroy pants over trail boots, a light green flannel shirt, and sweater vest, he struck me as an L.L. Bean man. By process of elimination, I pegged him as Randy Junction. I ambled casually over to where I could catch something of their conversation. As soon as he opened his mouth, he confirmed not only his identity, but the woman’s as well.