Innocent Monster (21 page)

“Nice.”

“Rather monstrous, I think.”

“That’s what I meant by nice, monstrous.”

“Oh, I see.”

“So he flipped out?”

“Not initially, no. He returned home and resumed his education. Then, after several months had passed, he was given an honorable discharge. He resurfaced years later as Declan Carney.”

“A man who studies the authenticity of beautiful things.”

Rusk shook his head in agreement and finished his sherry. “Yes, I suppose that is one way to see it.”

“Beware the innocent monster,” I whispered barely loud enough for me to hear.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” I said, standing up and placing my empty glass on the desk. “I appreciate the time and the sherry. Thank you, Mr. Rusk.”

“You’re quite welcome, Mr. Prager. Please feel free to visit whenever you wish. I enjoy our little chats.”

“Me too. Be well.”

On the way home, I drove to Max and Candy’s house, but it was even more of a circus than when I’d been by earlier. I had no stomach for it and went home to lick my wounds in peace.

Two days later, the world wobbled on its axis and roused me from sleep. The wobble came in the form of a phone call and its voice asked, “You remember John Tierney’s address?”

“Yeah.”

“Then get over here. Now!”

I threw on a sweat suit and an old pair of sneakers, and brushed my teeth. Even as I drove, the earth shook beneath the wheels of my car. The wobbling, apparently, had only just begun.

My estimate was spot on. It took me about ten minutes to get from my condo to John Tierney’s ass-end retreat in Gerritsen Beach. Only this time a cold, mocking sun was rising overhead and the street was lit up like a Christmas tree from all the spinning, whirling roof lights atop cop cruisers, crime scene vans, ambulances, and other assorted vehicles. My stomach churned at the sight of Detective McKenna standing alone and ashen-faced just inside the band of yellow tape surrounding Tierney’s house and property. He noticed me coming his way, but it wasn’t anger I saw in his expression. I wasn’t sure what it was, just what it wasn’t.

“What was that call about?” I asked as if I didn’t already know.

“He’s dead. Come on.” He held the tape up for me like a cornerman holding up the ropes for his boxer. As we walked, he handed me some latex gloves and Tyvek booties. “Put those on and be prepared. It stinks in there.”

We walked upstairs, the paintings of the bloody-eared, black-eyed saints staring at me accusingly as we went. In spite of the stench of feces, urine, and decay, the bedroom was alive with activity. John Tierney, the centerpiece of all the fuss, was quite dead. He was seated facing the door, his head pitched forward, a chunk of his skull and scalp missing. A big old Webley revolver lay on the floor at the foot of the chair. The way it landed made it look like a tear leaking from the black eye of the Christ-head Tierney had painted on the floor.
Jesus wept.
There was dried blood splatter all over the foil-covered windows, some of the foil shredded by shards of his skull and brain tissue as they flew away from the shock wave and bullet. There was a larger hole in the foil where the bullet had exited the house after exiting Tierney.

“Okay,” I whispered to McKenna, “he killed himself. How long ago?”

“A couple of days.”

“Is there a note?”

“Uh huh.”

“Where?”

McKenna pointed at the laptop, its screen also smeared and dotted with blood and tissue, but not overwhelmed by it.

“What’s it say?”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little note pad. “It all runs together on the screen, but when you put in spacing, it reads: ‘My quest is over. My job done. I did it. I did it. I did it. Burned and scattered to the wind. Ashes to ashes. I did it.
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum..
’”

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee,” I mumbled. “Blessed art thou amongst women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus...

“I thought you were Jewish.”

“I was married to an ex-Catholic for almost twenty years. And try and remember, Jesus’s last supper was a Passover Seder.”

He snorted and shook his head. “You’re just full of surprises.”

“Everybody seems to think so.” Then I asked the million dollar question: “Do you think he really burned her body?”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

We went back down the stairs, turned around the staircase into the kitchen, but when we stepped into the kitchen, a young detective, NYPD shield hanging out of his jacket pocket, put his hand up and said to McKenna, “Wait a second. Who’s this guy now?”

That set McKenna off. “This guy is the PI that gave me the lead that got us here. He’s the one who tracked Tierney down in the first place.”

“We’ll wanna interview him when you’re done.” He continued to talk to McKenna directly as if I wasn’t standing a foot away from him.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Now can I see what there is to see?”

The young detective jerked his head over his left shoulder. “Go ahead. I’ll be outside when you’re ready.”

The kitchen, like the living room, was a museum piece. The floor was a sheet of yellow and green linoleum—the real stuff—and the appliances were from, as my mom used to say, the year of the flood. The wallpaper, a green floral print, had been around since WWII. The table was green Formica with a fluted aluminum border and the chairs were bent tubular aluminum with jade green plastic cushions. We turned right at the ancient fridge and then right again to an open door. The door led down three rough-hewn wooden steps to a small combination root cellar/pantry. In a house built so close to the water, this was the nearest thing you could get to a basement. The room was on the opposite side of the house from the porch, so I hadn’t noticed it when I was here the first time. Windowless, it was dark in here even though the sun was peeking through the kitchen windows. There was a bare bulb overhead in an old ceramic ceiling fixture. McKenna pulled the beaded chain that hung down from the light.

There before us was a kind of makeshift altar and shrine. The altar, complete with a kneeling step for prayer, was covered in candles and old candle wax. Above the altar was a collage of images of Sashi Bluntstone. Most were cut out of newspapers and magazines and glued and lacquered to the wall. Not unexpectedly, Sashi’s eyes had been blackened and blood poured from her ears. But there were other photographs that sat on top of the altar and leaned against the wall. They were of Sashi Bluntstone, her hands and legs bound behind her like the arms and legs of the stuffed bear left in my car. In the photos, she was propped against a blank wall and nude except for panties. She was limp and her eyes shut.

“See those panties?” McKenna whispered, pointing at the photos. “They were on the altar when we found this room. They were bloody, Moe. It was dried blood.”

“Fuck!”

“It gets worse.”

“How much worse?”

“Wrapped inside the panties we found some small charred bones. Human bones. One of the guys thinks they’re from a finger, maybe a pinky, a child’s pinky.”

The world began wobbling so fiercely, it was all I could do not to throw up right there. I managed to make it outside to the water’s edge before giving up whatever I had inside me. Then I plunged my head into the icy cold water. Now the what-ifs weren’t McKenna’s cross to bear. They were mine. And the cold water would have helped only if I’d managed to keep my head under.

I sat in Dr. Mehmet Ogologlu’s waiting room, thumbing through the magazines and trying very hard to fight my own desire to leave. Nothing new in that, in fighting myself. I’d been doing it for the two very long weeks since I’d thrown my guts up at the water’s edge behind Tierney’s house. Christmas was at hand, the world had stopped wobbling, and everyone had seemed to move beyond Sashi Bluntstone’s kidnapping and murder to the next petty, scandalous, or violent thing the media ran up the flagpole to distract us from what was actually important. Sometimes I think George Orwell got it right. He was just off by twenty years or so. Yes, people had moved on, but I hadn’t. That’s why I was here.

The first week was the roughest, although several days of it are lost to me forever. I spent nearly twenty-four hours at Brooklyn South Homicide on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island following the discovery of John Tierney’s body. There I was interviewed for hours on end by myriad detectives and representatives from the Brooklyn DA’s office. What happened after that I’ve been forced to piece together. I remember I started drinking the moment I walked back into my condo. I don’t know when I stopped or if I stopped, only that Sarah found me passed out and half-dressed on the bathroom floor three days later. She said I hadn’t been answering my phone messages or my emails and that everyone was worried about me. What did that mean, everyone? Isn’t everyone’s everyone different? How many people did my everyone constitute? Three? Four? Two? What was the formula? Thinking about it just made me feel more wretched.

Then, for a few days after that, I sat alone in my apartment. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I was numb. I wasn’t drinking. My body’d had quite enough of that, thank you very much. I played some old vinyl records without listening. I watched a lot of movies on cable, though I couldn’t tell you which ones. I screened my calls, answering only Sarah’s. She called every day. My daughter was back in my life, which was exactly what I’d hoped for when she begged me to get involved that morning at New Carmens. What I couldn’t figure out was the value of hopes realized versus the price paid. I didn’t know how to do that kind of calculus, but somewhere I heard the devil laughing, or maybe it was God.

I waited and waited for the cops to call me back in, but the call never came. It wasn’t going to. That’s what Detective McKenna told me when he showed up at my door, eight days of newspapers cradled in his arms. The first thing he said was, “Christ, Prager, you look like shit.”

“That I do,” I said, staring in the mirror and running my hand over the thicket of gray stubble covering my face. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve dug up every inch of Tierney’s property and taken his house apart, moldy stick by moldy stick.”

“Find anything else?”

“A few things, yeah.”

“Like what?”

“Like ten thousand dollars of the ransom money in a paper bag in one of the kitchen cabinets.”

“How do you know it’s from the ransom?”

“For starters, the parents identified the bag. It’s from a supermarket in Glen Cove. Their fingerprints are all over the bag and the money,” he said. “We also found a length of bloody gauze shoved under a mat in the backseat of his car. It’s the kid’s blood.”

“Fuck! Anything else?”

“Like what, Prager, a map to the pit where he burned her body?”

“Like the rest of the money?”

“No more money. Who knows what that wacky fuck was thinking? Maybe he flung it into Jamaica Bay or ate it for lunch.”

“Any more bones?”

“None of those either. We’re never going to find her ourselves. You know how it’s going to be. Ten years from now, some old fart will be walking his dog in a state park or along a parkway and he’ll trip over something and he’ll look back and see a bone sticking out of the ground. That’s how she’ll be found.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Sure I’m right.”

“What about the way he was living?” I asked.

“Tierney? Oh, it was his house, all right. The mother died like two years ago and left it to him, but that’s when he started going completely over the falls. Had all the utilities shut off because he told his shrink that he was worried Hamas could listen in on his thoughts through their special wires.”

“What’s the deal with Brooklyn South Homicide?” I asked. “They gonna keep me waiting until I start crawling on the ceiling before they call me back in?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Let me shower and shave before—”

“No. I’m here to tell you it’s over. They’re done with you.
I’m
done with you. Both the Nassau County PD and the NYPD have finished our investigations. We’ll keep looking for the remains, but the case is pretty much over. It’s all on Tierney, not on you. We figure the girl was already dead by the time you showed up and both departments agree that in his house at night in the dark, anyone could have missed the door to the pantry. The police get second-guessed all the time and we’re not about to play Monday morning quarterback with you.”

“But what if she wasn’t already dead? What if I’d just come to you with the list when I got it? What if I hadn’t been so fast to dismiss Tierney as a suspect?”

“Come on, Prager, we went over this a hundred times when you were at Brooklyn South. There’s no way of knowing any of that. You want to beat yourself up over it, I can’t stop you, but it’s a waste of time. The fact is, you led us to Tierney. You found him, not us. Maybe if the parents had come to you sooner, we could have saved the kid. You think that doesn’t eat at me? That me and a whole team of detectives were chasing our own tails around and you come in and in a few days... voila! None of this is on you. Whatever peace the parents have now is because of you.”

We didn’t talk much after that. He’d had his say, done his duty, and now he needed to move on. Goodbye was a simple handshake.

Somehow, none of what McKenna had to say made me feel better. Sure, I’d neglected to tell the cops that I hadn’t checked the house, that it was Jimmy Palumbo who’d done it, that it was him and not me who failed to find the altar room. But that didn’t get me off the hook. The fact is, I should’ve looked for myself. Maybe I would have found that room in the dark, maybe not. That’s not the point. The answer to why I didn’t have a look for myself was easy and it had nothing to do with believing Jimmy. It wasn’t even about believing Tierney. Now, looking back I wondered why I was so quick to believe a crazy man’s ten seconds of coherence.

“I didn’t take her,” John Tierney had said.

Those words were going to haunt me for the rest of my life; a lot about this case would. There was Delia Parker’s dead baby boy, a baby whose name I still didn’t know. And there was that other question, the bigger question, hanging over me like my own personal rain cloud. Why hadn’t I turned Martyr’s list over to McKenna the minute I got it? The thing is, the answer that I gave the cops was perfectly reasonable. It sounded so much like the truth I swear I almost believed it myself when it came out of my mouth.