TWO
December was never a favorite month of mine. Regardless of how good it was for the wine business, I found the season depressing on myriad levels. I wonder how many people were conscious of the subtle shift away from the phrase Christmas Season to the more mundane, palatable, and politically correct Holiday Season. Holiday Season, my ass! The older I get, the crankier I get, and nothing gets me quite as cranky as political correctness. Besides, who asked us Jews if we minded Hanukah being ignored? My questionnaire must’ve gotten lost in the mail. Now with the advent of Kwanza, there would be no going back. But there never is a going back, is there?
I had my own very personal reasons for hating December. Exactly thirty years ago, a handsome college student named Patrick Michael Maloney worked a shift at Pooty’s Bar in Tribeca for a student government fundraiser. When he left Pooty’s that night, he vanished into thin air. And while it’s not quite factually accurate to say I was hired by his family to find him, it is essentially the truth, the truth always being more important than the facts. I found him, all right, when no one else could: not my former employer, the NYPD; not hundreds of volunteers; not the small army of private detectives hired by the Maloneys. I also found a trunk full of ugly secrets and my soon-to-be wife, Patrick’s sister, Katy Maloney. What I kept was Katy. I kept the ugly secrets too, until they blew up in my face. I let Patrick go. If there was a going back wish, that’s what I would spend it on. I would hold on to Patrick Michael Maloney with both hands and never let go. In his vanishing, the seeds of new lives were born. In my letting him go were born the seeds of destruction. Look closely enough and you can see the crooked and bloody red line that leads from one to the other.
New Carmens Restaurant was a diner at the bent elbow of Sheepshead Bay Road in Brooklyn. While there were restaurants that Katy, Sarah, and I once loved to go to as a family, New Carmens was a special place for Sarah and me, our special place. It was where the two of us went for onion rings and vanilla egg creams when we had something like a good report card to celebrate. It was where we went for banana splits and coffee when young knees got scraped and then later when teenage hearts got broken. Neither Sarah nor I had set foot inside New Carmens since Katy’s murder seven years ago. That’s how I knew that whatever Sarah wanted to discuss was serious business.
My daughter was waiting for me in the damp outside the front door, the curls of her long red hair undone by the rain. She might have been Sarah F.J. Prager, a newly minted Doctor of Veterinary Medicine to the rest of the world, but to me, at that moment, she was just my sad little girl. When she saw me, she smiled, then caught herself and stopped. She made to speak and, again, stopped herself. What was there to say, really? It was only right, I thought, that we go back in together. Yet when we walked in, things had changed. The restaurant had been remade. The old gold and grimy vinyl booths and speckled Formica countertops were gone, replaced with polished granite, cold brass, and black leather. The memories and quaintness had been squeezed out of the place like breakfast juice from an orange. I suppose there’s no going back, not even in restaurants.
A cute girl no more than seventeen years old greeted us.
“Two?” she asked, thumbing a stack of menus.
“Two,” Sarah said. “Is Gus here?”
The hostess crooked her head in puzzlement.
“Gus?” “Gus,” I answered. “He used to run the place.”
“Gus died three years ago,” said a customer paying his bill at the register. “Massive stroke.”
“Shit,” I muttered.
Sarah shrank into her memories.
“This way,” said the hostess.
We ate mostly in silence and a little bit in mourning for Gus and for the love Sarah and I once shared.
“So, you want to tell me what this is all about?” I said, no longer able to stand the dark cloud that had followed us inside and settled over our table. “Is there something wrong? Is the practice you bought into not working out or something?”
“No, Dad, the practice is great and I swear I’m fine. This isn’t about me.”
“Then what?”
“Do you remember Candy Castleman from down the block?”
“What a silly question. Of course I remember Candy. She was like a big sister to you until she got married to that shithead who got her pregnant: Max Whatshisname.”
“Max Bluntstone.”
“You were in her wedding party. Your mother and I were there. I remember thinking how you looked like such a woman that day even in that hideous bridesmaid dress.”
“All bridesmaids’ dresses are hideous. It’s tradition. The bride is supposed to be the star of the show.”
“Well, you were the star of the show that day. Your mom cried at how you looked.” Oops! I’d strayed into dangerous territory. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For mentioning your mom.”
“This isn’t about that, Dad.”
“Yes, it is, Sarah. For the last seven years everything between us has been about that.”
“Not this.”
“Okay, then what is it about?”
Sarah reached into her bag, unfolded a newspaper article, and slid it across the table to me. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to look because this was how it started, how it always started. Whenever someone wanted to hire me, this was how it began: a newspaper or magazine article shoved into my hand or pushed across a tabletop. Inevitably, the article would be about Marina Conseco, a little girl who’d wandered away from her family in Coney Island and wound up in the hands of a predator. It was Easter of 1972 and I was working in the Six-O precinct, the precinct that was responsible for Coney Island. Although we weren’t as sophisticated back then and didn’t have milk carton photos or AMBER Alerts, we knew that once a few days had passed, we were more likely to find Marina’s remains than to find her. But find her I did, alive, at the bottom of one of those old wooden rooftop water tanks that still dot the New York City skyline. Marina had been abused and beaten and thrown into the tank to die. Finding her was the only noteworthy thing I ever did as a cop and it got a lot of press. Well, what passed for a lot of press in 1972. From the day I found her, Marina and I have been inextricably linked together and in ways I’m still not sure I fully understand. Another story for another time.
“Sarah, don’t do this.”
“Dad, please.”
“For you.” I turned the article so I could read it.
NEWSDAY, FRIDAY NOVEMBER 16, 2007
Child Prodigy Missing
BY ALICE WANG [Alice. Wang@Newsday. com]
Nerves are frayed and tensions are running high in the little village of Sea Cliff on Long Island’s North Shore. One of this close-knit community’s most celebrated citizens, artist and child prodigy Sashi Bluntstone, has been reported missing by her parents to the Nassau County Police Department. When contacted by Newsday, police spokesperson Det. Mary Holt refused comment other than to say that the report was being investigated.
Sashi Bluntstone, now 11 years of age, skyrocketed to prominence at age four when her Abstract Expressionist paintings-most often likened to those of Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky-began selling for tens of thousands of dollars. She had several shows at prominent New York galleries, but serious art critics questioned Miss Bluntstone’s talent.
More damaging perhaps, were the serious allegations that she didn’t, in fact, author the paintings, and that they were done by her father, Max Bluntstone, a one-time performance artist. These charges led to an expose done by Nathan Flowers of CNN. In the expose, Mr. Flowers stated that “… while I cannot say who does do the work, I can tell you Sashi does not.”