“I’ll get Mr. Rusk for you. What’s your name, Officer?”
“Prager, but I’d rather go surprise him.”
“He’s not gonna like that.”
“Too fucking bad.”
“Hey, I need this job and trust me, that man’ll can my ass if you go in unannounced.”
Then it hit me. “You’re Jimmy Palumbo, offensive tackle out of Rutgers,” I said, snapping my fingers. “The Jets drafted you third round ten years ago, right?”
But instead of smiling, the big man’s expression turned sour. “Eleven years ago. Might as well have been a million.”
“You went to New Utrecht High, right?”
“Lafayette.”
“I went to Lincoln when Lafayette was our big rival… a long time before you went to school. Really rare for a local guy to make it in the NFL.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You fucked up your knees, didn’t you?”
That didn’t improve his mood any. “Both of ‘em, yeah. You got a good memory for bad things, Officer.”
I rolled up my pants and showed him the maze of scars that covered my knee. I would have also showed him the scars on my ankle, but that was a road better left untraveled. Besides, these days, I only limped on the inside.
“Holy shit!”
“No arthroscopic surgery when I went down,” I said. “They used to cut you open like a fish and see what they could see. I had three surgeries, four weeks of PT with each one, and a pain script.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Me too. So why you working this gig?”
“Divorce,” he said as if it explained everything.
Maybe it did. My two trips down that path had been amicable, but that was more rare than you might think. Some of the work we did at Prager amp; Melendez had been for divorce lawyers. We didn’t handle the slimy end of things. We didn’t videotape or tap phones or entrap spouses out for the night with the boys or girls. No, we were usually hired after the papers were served, when motel bills, fancy gift receipts, and hidden assets needed to be tracked down. Divorce tended to get ugly and very expensive, emotionally and financially, for everyone involved.
“Kids?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Twin girls. The bitch moved ‘em out of state. Like cutting the heart right outta me, taking them from me that way. Things are a little better now.”
I was a big football fan and this was all very fascinating, but I didn’t drag my ass up here to get Jimmy Palumbo’s autograph or to discuss his past domestic woes. He did seem like a nice enough guy, though, and I thought he’d be fun to have a beer with.
“You ever work any private security?” I asked.
“Used to, not so much no more. Why you wanna know?”
“While I’m in with Rusk, write your contact info down on a piece of paper for me. I have some connections and maybe I can get you some outside work.”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
“Okay, you can call Rusk now. Which way to his office?”
“Walk through the galleries and take the elevator down to the lower level, turn left and you’ll see his office door.”
As I walked across the stark, hardwood floor, Palumbo spoke my name in hushed tones. Made me smile to hear it. It had been thirty years since someone called me Officer Prager. I’d worry about how to explain away my lie when I got to Rusk’s office. For the moment, I was busy admiring the views through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls that let ambient natural light flood into the gallery space. The views were nearly as impressive as the Lichtenstein and the Warhol, the Wesselmann and the Rauschenberg I passed on my way to the elevator.
Rusk met me at the elevator door and looked pretty much how I expected him to look. He was small, in his early sixties with delicate features and a ring of neatly groomed gray hair around a bald pate. He wore a blue camel hair blazer-gold buttons et al-with a gold and red family crest embroidered on the pocket. There was a red silk hanky in the pocket that matched his French-cuffed shirt. His tie was a perfectly knotted and textured piece of gold silk. His teeth were white and straight, of course, and the crimson-framed glasses he wore over his blue eyes cost more than the Honda in the parking lot. I couldn’t tell you the cost of the antique Patek Philipe watch he stared at impatiently as he waited to see who would get things going. I guess he got tired of showing me his watch.
“What can I do for you, Officer Prager?”
“This visit isn’t official,” I said, trying to sidestep the lie I’d told upstairs.
He furrowed his brow. “Then I’m afraid I don’t-”
“Sashi Bluntstone.”
“Oh, dear. Has there been some awful news?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Nothing in particular. It is simply that the child has been missing for some time now and I could think of no other reason for a police official to come to me.”
“That’s reasonable,” I said. “Again, Mr. Rusk, my visit isn’t official. I’ve been hired by the Bluntstone family to investigate their daughter’s disappearance, to make sure the police are doing all they can.”
“Investigate? Why on earth would you come see me? You couldn’t possibly think I had anything to do with her disappearance.”
“Well, you are one of Sashi’s most vociferous critics.”
“Vociferous… my, my, no dumb cops on this beat, eh?”
“I also know how to tie my own shoes and everything.”
“Please, Officer Prager, I’ve been rude. Come into my office and let us discuss this.”
Rusk’s office was startling. The back wall was a huge pane of glass not unlike those on the gallery levels upstairs and it looked out onto the Sound and the southern shore of western Connecticut. The furnishings themselves were all very austere, almost industrial, and there was not a stitch of art on the walls or anywhere else in the office. Rusk gestured at a metal chair in front of his desk and when I sat in it, he retreated around the desk and sat in a metal mesh desk chair.
“As you were saying…”
“No, I don’t think you had anything to do with Sashi’s disappearance. If the cops did, they would have been here already.”
“Forgive me, Officer Prager, but I now find myself even more confused by your presence here.”
“First, Mr. Rusk, please call me Moe or Mr. Prager, if that is more comfortable for you. Second thing is that although the case is over three weeks old, I’m new to it and playing catch-up. The police do things their way and I do things my way. Why I’m here is to try and get some understanding of why Sashi’s work and Sashi herself seem to make people like yourself, serious people involved in the art world, so incensed and crazed.”
“That, Mr. Prager, is a very easy question to answer. Art, in this case, painting, is more, much more than what appears on the canvas. Art is also what goes on in the artist’s mind before and during and after putting brush to canvas. Art is a continuum that stretches from conception to reaction and beyond.”
“Okay, let’s say I buy that. On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of Sashi’s work,” I said, “and I know this is going to upset you, but it’s pretty good. I’m no art critic and certainly not the curator of a museum, but I know a little bit about art. Her work is undeniably reminiscent of Kandinsky and Pollock.”
Rusk clapped his hands together and laughed. “Ah, Mr. Prager, for an artist to produce work that is reminiscent of her forebears, mustn’t she be aware of those forebears? Jackson Pollock didn’t pull his art out of…”
“His ass?”
“I was thinking thin air, but your phrasing makes the point more emphatically. Pollock understood European Surrealism and had studied Jung in order to gain access to his unconscious processes and to free himself of conventionally constructed art.”
“Okay, then what you’re saying is that he knew what he was doing.”
“Exactly. The very concept of an unschooled prodigy doing abstract expressionism, a style that merged two sophisticated art styles-surrealism and cubism-with automatic process is absurd, simply impossible. Look, Mr. Prager, had Sashi Bluntstone made exquisite realistic paintings beyond her years, maybe she would be taken seriously, but anyone can smear paint on a canvas and say they are aping Pollock… including an ape!”