Innocent Monster (18 page)

Then my cell phone rang and McKenna saved me from myself.

“Yeah.”

“Your hunch was right on, Prager. They paid fifty grand. Dropped it in a garbage can up in a state park in Huntington.”

“Why aren’t I hearing about it on the news?”

“We’re going big with it tomorrow: a 1:00
PM
press conference, new AMBER Alerts, whole nine yards. You wanna be there?”

“Nah. I’ve been a part of those circuses before and it always comes back to bite me.”

“I figured I’d ask.”

“And I appreciate that. Aren’t you even a little worried that this may force the guy’s hand? He may panic and—”

“Wasn’t really my decision. The brass took it upon themselves to make the rest of the world think we’re doing something besides chasing our own tails. Anyway, my bet is the kid’s dead and no matter what we do or don’t do, it won’t matter, but maybe this way we can at least flush the bastard out of hiding.”

I said, “You may be right.”

“But what if I’m not?”

“That’s the big question, isn’t it? If it’s any comfort to you, McKenna, I know what that particular purgatory is like.”

“I’ll let you know if it helps. By the way,” he said before I could click off my Bluetooth, “if you think I believe in hunches, look under your pillow tonight and maybe you’ll find five dollars.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you should thank your daughter for standing up and you have my word I’ll keep her name out of this.”

He hung up.

“What’s going on?” Jimmy wanted to know.

“I guess I might as well tell you since the story’s gonna hit tomorrow.”

“What story?”

“Sashi Bluntstone’s disappearance was a kidnapping after all. There was a ransom demand and a partial payoff that the parents didn’t bother telling the cops about. We better get lucky tonight, because things are about to change. The cops are gonna try and flush the kidnapper out.”

Jimmy fell silent. He understood what I understood. This might be our last best chance to make things happen before all hell broke loose.

Well, so much for brick manor houses and nice suburban homes on secluded streets. John Tierney’s place gave shitboxes a bad name. Way at the ass end of Gerritsen Beach, the water lapping at the back deck, the deep color of the siding more a product of black mold than of dark paint, the rickety old house looked to be a single snapped nail away from total collapse. Jimmy took one look at the state of the house, the aluminum foil covering the upstairs windows and the plywood covering what should have been the downstairs windows and doors, and said: “Abandoned?”

“Seems that way,” I agreed, but shook my head no, pointing up at the nearest utility pole. It didn’t take an electrician to see that somebody had hacked into the local electrical supply and cable service. “Come on, let’s go,” I said loud enough for anyone in the house to hear.

We got in the car, drove down the block, and turned the corner. We parked.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Jimmy said. “If this is the guy’s address, why’s he living like a squatter?”

“Good question. Let’s go get some answers.”

Two minutes later, Jimmy Palumbo and I were working our way back down the street on foot, using parked cars and light poles for cover. When I reached the corner of the vacant lot abutting Tierney’s shithole, I cut towards the water and crept along the shore towards the back deck. From there, I moved to the side porch. I hadn’t grown up very far from here. In fact, I didn’t live more than ten minutes from where I now stood, but Gerritsen Beach had always been a bit of a mystery to me, kind of like Breezy Point in Rockaway. My dad used to call Breezy Point the Irish Riviera because it was a tight-knit enclave of cops and firemen on the water at the western end of Rockaway. It was a different world. This part of Gerritsen Beach had been blue collar Irish when I was a kid. And not unlike Jimmy Palumbo’s house, the places around here had access to the water and the Atlantic was just on the other side of the Belt Parkway.

The plan was for me to get into the house and either grab Tierney or flush him out into Jimmy Palumbo’s welcoming arms. Too bad Tierney had different ideas. When I was about two steps up on the stairs to the side porch, a human tornado bowled me over, sending my.38 flying and my head bouncing off the railing.

“Fuck!”

Then there was a splash. I turned and saw someone swimming furiously in the dark water. With my brain rattled and night having fallen, keeping track of the swimmer wasn’t easy. Jimmy tore past me, dropping his Sig by me as he went. Christ, I thought, he must have been tremendously fast for a big man when his knees actually worked. There was another splash, a louder one, and he too disappeared into the darkness. I got up, brushed myself off, collected the guns, and tried to get my head back on straight. I was too old for this shit. I had a nice lump under my hair, just above my right ear. Less than a minute later, Jimmy emerged from the water, dragging the exhausted John Tierney by the scruff of his neck.

“Come on, bring him inside.”

The interior of Tierney’s place was a time capsule, an eerie cross between a crypt and cathedral. It reeked of mold and mildew and it was cold enough so that we could see our own breath. The furniture was turn-of-the-century stuff, but in immaculate shape. The seat cushions were protected by heavy duty plastic slipcovers that had yellowed with the years. There were delicate lace curtains hanging on the inside of the boarded windows, dusty fringed lampshades, and white lace doilies under porcelain knickknacks. And there were crucifixes... everywhere. Jesus Christ suffered a lot in here. His passion was the central design theme. Every available inch of wall space was covered in paintings of haloed saints, all with appropriately beatific smiles and prayerful hands. Only these saints all bled from the ears and their eyes were solid black. John Tierney’s handiwork, I imagined. We dragged Tierney upstairs, but he was getting some of his strength back and struggled a bit. One smack in the back of the head from Jimmy calmed him right down. Tierney babbled incoherently and crossed himself constantly. The babbling was a jumble of Latin prayers sprinkled with a few recognizable words, names, and phrases. He seemed rather fond of the CIA, FBI, Hamas, Satan, and, incredibly, the name Sashi. That stopped us in our tracks.

We sat Tierney down in a chair in a bedroom that had an electric heater going full blast against the chill. I told Jimmy to go stand by the heater and dry off as best he could. There was a flat screen TV. The TV was on but aimed so that the screen faced the aluminum-foiled windows. There was a shortwave radio, an old police scanner, and a laptop computer, but only a computer. There was no printer, no fax, no phone. The walls, ceiling, and floor were flat black and on each surface Tierney had painted a huge, bloody-faced Jesus, his eyes as black as the saints. I’d be lying to you if I said the Jesus heads didn’t creep me out.

You didn’t need a PhD in clinical psychology to figure out that John Tierney was schizophrenic and that, if he had meds, he hadn’t taken them recently. The house, his mad ramblings, all went a long way in explaining the wild, meandering comments Tierney posted following Nathan Martyr’s blog entries. Tierney’s posts often alluded to the ritual mutilation of Sashi Bluntstone and the use of her blood like that of a Passover lamb to ward off the angel of death. His psychosis didn’t mean he didn’t have Sashi or hadn’t had her or hadn’t killed her, but I doubted it. I could see that Jimmy’s presence in particular was making Tierney want to crawl out of his own skin. The last thing I needed was for him to go apeshit and for any of us to get hurt.

“Jimmy, why don’t you go take a look around, okay? John and I have to talk about some stuff that you can’t hear.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, and close the door behind you.”

That calmed Tierney down a little bit, but once Jimmy left, he seemed only vaguely aware of my presence. He was in a very different place than me and his odd affect gave new meaning to the phrase
you can’t get there from here.
I tried reaching him anyway.

“John,” I said, “you’ve written some pretty awful things about Sashi Bluntstone.”

“Satan.”

That was promising. “Is Sashi Satan?”

“Hamas is coming through the printers. Can’t you see them?”

So much for promising.

“Does Sashi have anything to do with the printers? If you killed Sashi, would her blood stop Hamas from coming through the printers?”

“St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter,” Tierney said, making the sign of the cross at me. Then he mumbled something I couldn’t make out at all. He got off the chair and kissed the floor at my feet. “St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter.”

We kept going round and round like that for another twenty minutes or so, but it got me nothing but a few more blessings and foot kisses. I found myself feeling nothing but sorry for John Tierney. Jimmy knocked.

“Come in,” I said.

“It’s pretty dark in the house, but I didn’t find anything but more crucifixes and paintings.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

I nodded for Jimmy to go first.

“Sorry to bother you, John,” I said. “I hope you find some peace or whatever it is you’re looking for. I just have to find Sashi.”

He didn’t move a muscle, his eyes still in that other place, but when I got to his bedroom door, he called to me.

“I didn’t take her,” he said in a calm coherent voice. “Her blood remains in the vessel of her body.”

I made sure not to turn back around and then just let myself out.

Back in my car, I was quiet. Jimmy wasn’t.

“Do me a favor and take me home. You don’t gotta pay me, but I’m freezing my balls off and I got work tomorrow.”

“Sure, no problem. I’m shot for the night anyway,” I said. “And don’t worry about the cash. You earned it. You up for this tomorrow night?”

“No problem, except maybe I’ll bring a Speedo and some extra clothes.”

Neither one of us said much after that.

The drive back from Babylon was the most hopeless hour I’d spent in a very very long time and it served as a cruel reminder of why I got out of the business of poking around in other people’s lives. Lives, even the ones that looked so orderly and beautiful from the outside, were messy, complicated things, often very ugly and painful things. And then there was the miraculous and the magical. Most people never experience either one. I’d had my brush with the miraculous on an April day over thirty years ago when I looked up and saw a rooftop water tank and thought,
That’s where she is! That’s where Marina Conseco will be! In one of those.
I was right that one time, but there wasn’t going to be a water tank miracle this go-round. I saw the futility of what I was trying to do reflected in the hopelessly lost eyes of John Tierney. What the hell was I doing looking for Sashi Bluntstone in such a place as that? She was dead. McKenna knew it. Even Max and Candy seemed to know. Was I the only one who refused to see the obvious?

When I dragged myself out of my car, my head throbbing from where it banged against the side porch railing, I was ready to pack it all in. So I had come to my senses and realized, what, that I wasn’t going to set the world right with some singularly miraculous redemptive act? Who was I kidding? What did I have to go back to? What was ahead of me, endless and endlessly boring days of hiding myself in my office? Days of planning new grand openings? Days of arguing with municipalities over the size of our store signage? Shopkeeping, is that really what I longed to return to? I was old and I was as lost in my way as poor John Tierney. At least he had enemies, real or imagined. My enemy was me. Then I heard Mary Lambert’s voice and all the selfpity receded.

“God, Moe, what happened to you?”

“Come on upstairs and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Except I didn’t, not at first. First I let Mary hold me in her arms and tell me everything was going to be all right. I was so smitten, I think I almost believed her. Then, when I cleaned myself up and put some ice to my head and had a drink, I told her about the case. I told her about who I was, who I really was.

“You see, Mary, the thing is, I’ve been selfish my whole life. I wanted life to be exciting. I wanted it to be about more than making money and settling down. I talked to you about Larry and Rico, but I didn’t talk much about me. I didn’t tell you about how I got my first wife killed or how I lost my daughter and a son that never had a chance to know me.”

“Now you’re just beating yourself up.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am.”

“Sure you are,” she said. “You’re frustrated. You think there’s a dead girl out there somewhere that needed saving and you couldn’t save her.”

“I don’t know where I would have been tonight if you didn’t show up at my door.”

She stepped very close to me and put her hand over my mouth. “Let’s not talk anymore, not now. Can’t we just be happy I’m here?”

I shook my head yes, but as she turned to the bedroom I saw that thing in her eyes again and this time I was sure it was guilt. Then I fell so deeply into her that I didn’t question it.