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.
ELEVEN
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 naive, but it was the cops’ job to be objective and unsentimental, not mine.