Innocent Monster (17 page)

“What’s that?”

“My bet is there was a ransom demand.”

“Get the fuck out of here! The kid was swiped, they paid ransom money, and what, it slipped their minds?”

“I think they were scared, McKenna. What if they’d already called you when they got the demand? It doesn’t take much to figure out why they’d keep this between them.”

“Bullshit.”

“Go talk to them and see if I’m not right. I feel it in my
kishkas.
”

“Are you kidding me? If I acted on every gut feeling I had, I’d still be riding around in a fucking patrol car or giving out speeding tickets on the LIE.”

“I’m an investigator too, remember? I got a feeling and it couldn’t hurt to confront them with it like you already know it’s true.”

“You got a point, Prager. Even if you’re wrong, it might shake ‘em up a little and get them to give up what they’ve really been hiding. Maybe between that and the shit we get from the bear and your car, we can finally make some progress.”

“At this point, it’s worth a try, right?”

“Okay, all right. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Thanks.”

That crap I fed him about this all being one big hunch might not insulate Sarah forever, but I hoped it would work long enough so that it wouldn’t matter in the end. I was doing a lot of hoping lately and that was always a dangerous thing.

When I got off the phone with the detective, I made myself some coffee and started looking through the pages Doyle had faxed me. These new developments—the teddy bear, the ransom demand and payment— would help me fly even further under the radar than I had been flying and I just needed to work out who I was going to see and when. It was difficult to know how to do a threat assessment with cowards who hid their identities with screen names, people who slammed the work of a little girl and the girl herself, but who were too frightened to stand up behind the venom they spewed. I figured I would see the people Martyr suggested first, the ones whose names he underlined, and then I’d take a look at the personal data of the rest and go from there. That’s how I figured to do it until I saw a name and an address I recognized. Now I had my first stop. I had a funny feeling the rest of it wasn’t going to be that easy.

The house was pretty fucking impressive all right: big, brick, and showy with a semi-circular cobblestone drive and white columns reaching only halfway to heaven. The low-slung hedges were perfectly trimmed and the dormant, carpet-like lawn was dotted with just enough leftover leaves to make it look as if they were placed there by the hired help to lend it an air of nature but without the mess. It was just the kind of lawn that screamed to someone from Brooklyn, “Piss on me.” And believe me, in the mood I was in, I was sorely tempted. I parked my gray rental at an awkward angle so it would discourage anyone else from coming up the drive. Like I said, I was in that kind of mood. Call me petty. I’d been called worse, much worse.

The front door chimes weren’t quite as loud as the Vatican’s on Easter Sunday, but they were close. The pope didn’t come to the door. Apparently, I didn’t even rate a parish priest. A chubby, rather pleasant-faced black woman in her forties in a nurse’s get-up came to the door instead.

“How can I help you?” Her voice lilted with the song of Haiti.

“Mrs. Barrows-Willingham, please.”

“Who is calling?”

“Just give her this, okay?” I handed the nurse a folded piece of paper and a business card. “She’ll understand.”

“
D’accord,
okay.
Ne quittez pas,
just a moment, please.”

She disappeared, closing the door behind her and locking it. Nothing so welcoming as a closing door and a deadbolt clicking shut in your face. I wasn’t fretting over it. The lady of the house would be coming to fetch me soon enough. The deadbolt clicked open and the mighty glass and wood door pulled back once again. Standing there in all her pinched glory was Mrs. Sonia Barrows-Willingham, only she hadn’t come to fetch me. No, instead, she stepped out of the house, pulling the door closed behind her. She smelled of cigarettes and decay. I guess I half expected her to look scared at being found out. Wrong again. She looked positively thrilled... well, as much as a dour-faced woman could look thrilled.

“Oh, I’ve been a naughty girl, haven’t I, Mr. Prager? Have you come to spank me, to threaten me, or blackmail me? Whichever it is, please get to it, I’ve got a husband up on the third floor who insists upon dying by the inch and he’s in a particular amount of distress today.”

She was good, Mrs. Barrows-Willingham, very good. She was prodding me, probing to see just what kind of manipulation I was susceptible to. I wasn’t going to make it easy for her. This clenched fist of a woman who had the largest collection of Sashi Bluntstone’s works used her spare time to go online and rip Sashi apart. Her blog was called Sushi Cuntstone Cooks and offered recipes, the ingredients of which included raw bits of Sashi Bluntstone’s anatomy. And the dishes were served on trays and in Bento boxes inspired by Sashi’s paintings.

“Sushi Cuntstone, very cute, Mrs. Barrows-Willingham. I particularly like your recipes for Sashi-me.”

She laughed or made a little barking noise, which I supposed passed for laughter, and looked at me I was like a main course. “Candy told me about you, that she was thinking of hiring you. You know, Mr. Prager, I get the impression that she has a father fixation on you, but one with a rather disturbing sexual element to it.”

“We weren’t talking about Candy.” I made sure to stay calm. “We were discussing your twisted hobby.”

“Oh, do grow up, Mr. Prager. Welcome to the new millennium. Sashi Bluntstone as an entity is as much my creation as any of her paintings are hers. You might ask sweet Candy about that when next you two speak. I arranged for Sashi’s first showings. I bought her first paintings. I created a market for her work. Me, not that buffoon Max, not Candy, not that fool Randolph Junction. Me! And in this new age, there is no market without controversy. Yes, Mr. Prager, I even helped create that. Who was it, do you suppose, who whispered in the ears of people like Nathan Martyr, a man who in spite of his legendary shortcomings and lack of talent as an artist, worked and studied very hard to achieve whatever success he managed? Can you even imagine how painful it is for the many worthy artists in the world who toil in poverty and rejection to swallow the success of the Sashi Bluntstones and Thomas Kinkades of the world?”

“I think I can.” I wasn’t lying. I remembered the bitter taste in my mouth when guys who couldn’t find their own dicks without a road map made detective. No one said life was fair and the job was even less fair than the rest of life. So I had to swallow it as the parade of gold shields passed me by. Yeah, I knew exactly how those other artists felt.

“Well, then you must understand the need and inevitability of blogs like Sushi Cuntstone Cooks and all the others. Resentment, jealousy, envy are in endless supply and they help drive the market. It’s part of an investment strategy, nothing more.”

“Okay, I get that. I also get that Sashi’s paintings have plummeted in value over the last years and I look around and I see who has the most to gain from her disappearance. That would be you, Mrs. Barrows-Willingham.”

“Indeed. An astute assessment on your part. My collection is now valued almost as highly as it was before the disappearance. In fact, I’ve recently added to it.”

“I know,” I said, “Forty grand worth.”

That caught her by surprise. “How could you know that? Did that ass Junction—”

“No, I was standing right there in the gallery, a few feet from you as the two of you bargained. I agree with you, that painting you bought is no ‘Red Waves.’”

“I underestimated you, Mr. Prager. Maybe Candy was right to seek your help. You seem a resourceful man. Try not to be big-headed about it, though. My husband was once a most resourceful man. Now he defecates into a bag and has a catheter shoved into his bladder through his penis.”

“Fair enough, so let me just ask. Did you—”

“No, I had nothing to do with Sashi’s disappearance. Once she was a delightful little girl. She has, however, become a rather dreadful and morbid child. I confess to feeling that about her, but I have no wish for harm to come to her, however much I might profit from it.”

“Oh, so you have your limits?”

“Some, yes. As much as I would profit, the money is almost beside the point. The ground under the garage on this property is worth more than all of Sashi’s paintings at their highest value. My husband is quite wealthy and I didn’t exactly enter the marriage as a pauper. So, no, Mr. Prager, I do so hate to disappoint you, but I had nothing to do with Sashi’s going missing.”

“Did you know that she was kidnapped, that there was a ransom demand?”

Again, she seemed caught off guard, as if she were looking for a left jab and I landed flush with a straight right to her liver. “I’ve heard nothing about that.”

“You will. My guess is the story will break later today. Even so,” I said, “it means she may not be dead and all the value that got built back up will vanish.” She didn’t like that and I piled it on. “What’s the matter, Sonia, I thought it wasn’t about the money?”

“Please excuse me, I have to get back inside.”

“One more thing.”

“If you must.”

“If Candy came to you for ransom money, would you help her?”

A crooked line appeared where Barrows-Willingham’s mouth used to be. “We will just have to see about that, won’t we. Good day to you, Mr. Prager.”

I stood stone still and watched her retreat back into her house. I actually reached around and touched the butt of my.38. I thought about shooting her through the door, but realized that as much sawdust would come out of her when the bullet passed through as would come out of the door.

Jimmy Palumbo was waiting out front of his house at four so we could head into the city without wasting time. While his place was a bit worse for wear with several mismatched cedar shakes on the front facade, a missing downspout on the garage gutter, the lawn ragged, and the bushes untidy and overgrown, it wouldn’t take much to get it back into nice shape. And though it wasn’t in the same class as the Barrows-Willinghams’ massive Gold Coast manor, Jimmy’s house was on a fairly secluded, lovely street south of Montauk Highway in Babylon. It was also appealing because all the lots down here had docks in their backyards on West Babylon Creek that led out past Santapogue Point and into the Great South Bay, Fire Island, and the Atlantic beyond. I knew the area pretty well because one of our biggest wine customers belonged to a nearby yacht club and had taken Aaron and me out on his boat a few times.

“Nice location,” I said.

“Needs a lotta work, but since the divorce...” He didn’t explain further and he didn’t really have to.

“Got a boat?”

His face, somewhat sour when discussing the house, broke into a big smile.

“Only reason I still live down here.”

“Tell me about her.”

“A Chris-Craft forty-two-foot Continental that I bought with part of my signing bonus. Three hundred and twenty horsepower twin engines. She’s a beaut. She needs some work too, but not as much as the house. The house and the boat were the only things I got in the divorce. My wife pretty much took everything else. She even turned the girls against me. They never call or write and when I make plans to visit, they’re always away.”

“Why not sell the house? Even with the downturn in the market, you could get big money for it.”

“What would I do with my boat? You know how much it would cost me to keep her somewheres else?”

I dropped it and turned on news radio. I could see the conversation was upsetting him and I needed him to be on his game. On the other hand, a bit of surliness probably wouldn’t hurt since I had no intention of making nice to the people on Martyr’s list. If we needed to twist arms, we weren’t going to do it metaphorically. I told Jimmy as much. He didn’t blink.

The radio filled the car with the usual background noise. Retailers were hoping for a big holiday shopping season.
There was that phrase again.
There was a war in Iraq.
No kidding?
Another one in Afghanistan.
Gee, I almost forgot.
John Lennon was dead for twenty-six years. I paid attention to that story. Lennon used to shop at City On The Vine when he wanted to buy gifts of fancy wine for friends. I remembered the time he came into the store near closing and playfully ripped Paul McCartney’s songwriting skills. I keep the picture of John and me on the wall in my office. I hadn’t looked at it for a very long time. I needed to look to remind myself that time passes and we leave things behind, even some things we shouldn’t. Then, I thought, that wasn’t really true, not for me. That’s what other people did. I never really leave anything behind, ever. On more than one occasion, I wished I could.

What I didn’t hear on the radio was anything new about Sashi Blunt-stone. I knew Sarah hadn’t lied to me, but I wondered if
she
had been lied to. It was pretty clear to me that Max and Candy weren’t exactly reliable and were fairly desperate. Generally speaking, that’s not a good combination. Was it possible they were so hard up for money that they concocted the ransom demand just to squeeze cash out of their friends? Everyone else seemed willing to use Sashi’s disappearance to their own ends, why not her parents? In my life I had seen the best in people, but I’d seen plenty more of the worst. If Max and Candy
had
manufactured the ransom demand, it would set an all-time low and would go a long way in convincing me that the bottom is much deeper than the top is high.