Junction smiled at that. “I know all about how Candy came to you. Moe Prager ex machina: you were going to come in out of the blue and save the day. You were going to come in off the bench and hit a walk-off home run. What a load of crap. You’re just going to make it all worse. What am I saying? You already have.”
I wanted to disagree with him, but he was right, up to a point. I had walked into a situation I didn’t understand. I didn’t know Sashi except through videos and I hadn’t seen Candy since her wedding day. I did have a separate agenda in wanting to regain my daughter’s love and, as far as Candy and Junction were concerned, I had made things worse. I took the paintings and left.
As was the norm with this case, I didn’t get very far. All four of my tires were slashed and the driver’s side window was smashed to bits. I found a stuffed brown teddy bear propped up on my glass-covered front seat. Its head was missing, its legs and arms hog-tied behind it. The words STOP NOW were stenciled in red spray paint across the passenger seat. While I may not have known what I was doing, there must have been someone else who saw it differently.
I didn’t want to call McKenna, but I had to. There was no way I could leave the cops out of this without risking obstruction charges and further endangering Sashi’s life. This was evidence of something even if the vandalism turned out to be just some bullshit stunt. I’d managed to piss somebody off. No surprise there. I had a talent for it, but it wasn’t necessarily the person who had Sashi. Still, I couldn’t take that gamble. Before I called the cops, I brought the paintings back around the corner to the gallery. I warned Randy Junction not to talk about the paintings to the cops if they came asking questions, that mentioning them would ruin the one good lead I had. He may have been a bit of an asshole, but he seemed to care about Candy and Sashi enough to play along. After I called McKenna and the rent-a-car company, I rang Jimmy Palumbo and told him we were on for a visit to Nathan Martyr that evening. My back was in need of some serious watching.
FIFTEEN
I hadn’t even bothered calling for a tow as there was little doubt my car would be impounded before it was released back to me. Detective McKenna was fairly humming with perverse joy when he showed up and beheld the wrecked glory that was my car and the crime scene boys fussing over it like nervous ants attending the colony’s newborn. I couldn’t begrudge McKenna his newfound joy. It is the harsh reality of police work that bad news is sometimes the best possible news, that a new crime is a welcome event as it might shed light on an icy cold case. I remembered when I was in uniform and got assigned to do grunt work for the Son of Sam task force. Confounded as they were by the. 44 Caliber Killer, the detectives let out a silent somber-faced cheer every time Sam struck again because it meant fresh evidence. Every new killing meant there was a chance to find that one fingerprint or shell casing or witness that would break the case wide open. And in the end, that’s what happened. On the mid-summer night Sam shot out the eye of Robert Violante and snuffed out the life of Stacy Moskowitz, he got a parking ticket and was spotted by a woman walking her dog. So I understood why McKenna looked about ready to click up his heels.
“You got somebody’s attention, Prager.”
“Sure as shit looks that way.”
“Any idea who?”
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
“You want a list of the people I’ve spoken to?”
“That would be a start,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“Max and Candy.”
“Yeah.”
“Nathan Martyr, but he was alibied by the ex-cop doorman.”
“David Thompson.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“He may be, but it’s airtight,” McKenna said. “Martyr didn’t do it. He was home that day.”
“Junction, the gallery owner. Wallace Rusk.”
That got McKenna’s attention. “Who’s this Rusk guy?”
“Not your man. He’s an art critic and the curator of the Cold Spring Harbor Museum of Modern Art.”
“You don’t mind if we talk to him anyway, do you?”
“Be my guest.”
“Anyone else?”
“Dawn Parson. She wouldn’t let me talk to her kid.”
“Okay. You need a lift or anything? I can get one of the uniforms to take you.”
“No thanks, McKenna. I got a rental being dropped off for me.”
“Keep in touch.”
It was an order, not a suggestion.
The rental was dropped off at the gallery and I loaded the paintings into the backseat of the Japanese generic-mobile. Man, I was old. I still recalled a time when one car looked different than the next. “Not no more,” as my old friend Crazy Charlie Rolex used to say. Those days, like the majority of mine, were past. I was relieved that McKenna was still around the corner salivating over the crime scene. It would have been a bit awkward trying to explain to him what I was planning to do with the paintings. Many years had passed since I’d come anywhere near working a case, but the lying came back to me like riding a bike. You work a case, you start lying to everyone. More often than not, you even wind up lying to the person or persons who hired you. Sometimes especially them. The one person you can’t lie to is yourself.
As I drove out of Sea Cliff, away from the fussy Victorian houses and the quaint little shops on the main street, I thought about what must have been going through McKenna’s mind. He couldn’t have been any more confused by what had happened to my car, the hog-tied and headless teddy bear, and the cryptic warning than I was, because it didn’t seem to make any sense at all. I still had no idea what had become of Sashi Bluntstone or who had taken her or why. My stumbling around had only just begun and it had netted me very little in the way of progress. I hoped that was about to change.
When the earpiece to my phone beeped that I was getting a call, I felt myself getting more than a little aroused at the memory of holding Mary Lambert in my arms. I imagined I could still smell the intoxicating scent of her sweat and perfume and I rubbed the tips of my fingers together, recalling the feel of her hardened nipples beneath the lace of her bra and silk of her blouse.
“Hey, there,” I said in the best bedroom voice I could manage.
“What the fuck’s the matter with you, you sick or something?” It was Brian Doyle.
“Or something, yeah. What’s up?”
“The Bluntstones are broke, Moe.”
“Broke broke or just broke?”
“Broke broke. They’re mortgaged to the balls and their only assets are the kid’s paintings.”
“How about the house?”
“The thing cost two million and my bet is they’re still paying off the closing costs. I got more equity in my baseball card collection.”
“You collect baseball cards?”
“No, but I’m just saying.”
“How about available cash?” I asked.
“Less than ten grand and that ain’t gonna get them too far. Maybe the next time you’re over there, you should check if they’re hiding scratch in coffee cans or flour jars ‘cause they ain’t got shit elsewheres.”
“Thanks, Brian, and thank Devo for me.”
“No sweat, boss.”
“Fax the stuff over to my house, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Look, just send me the bill…” He was gone.
Declan Carney’s studio was in an old loft building within shouting distance of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge on Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City. This Queens neighborhood, just across the East River from Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, had undergone tremendous change and gentrification in the last decade or so. As Manhattan became even more unbearably expensive, people looked for places to live where they could still have a short commute to work and ready access to the city. Like Williamsburg before it, Long Island City was now an increasingly hot part of town. The thing about LIC, though, is that it was more industrial in its previous incarnation than Williamsburg, and not all of its factories and warehouse buildings had been converted into fabulous living spaces for expatriate Manhattanites.