“Come on, bring him inside.”
The interior of Tierney’s place was a time capsule, an eerie cross between a crypt and cathedral. It reeked of mold and mildew and it was cold enough so that we could see our own breath. The furniture was turn-of-the-century stuff, but in immaculate shape. The seat cushions were protected by heavy duty plastic slipcovers that had yellowed with the years. There were delicate lace curtains hanging on the inside of the boarded windows, dusty fringed lampshades, and white lace doilies under porcelain knickknacks. And there were crucifixes… everywhere. Jesus Christ suffered a lot in here. His passion was the central design theme. Every available inch of wall space was covered in paintings of haloed saints, all with appropriately beatific smiles and prayerful hands. Only these saints all bled from the ears and their eyes were solid black. John Tierney’s handiwork, I imagined. We dragged Tierney upstairs, but he was getting some of his strength back and struggled a bit. One smack in the back of the head from Jimmy calmed him right down. Tierney babbled incoherently and crossed himself constantly. The babbling was a jumble of Latin prayers sprinkled with a few recognizable words, names, and phrases. He seemed rather fond of the CIA, FBI, Hamas, Satan, and, incredibly, the name Sashi. That stopped us in our tracks.
We sat Tierney down in a chair in a bedroom that had an electric heater going full blast against the chill. I told Jimmy to go stand by the heater and dry off as best he could. There was a flat screen TV. The TV was on but aimed so that the screen faced the aluminum-foiled windows. There was a shortwave radio, an old police scanner, and a laptop computer, but only a computer. There was no printer, no fax, no phone. The walls, ceiling, and floor were flat black and on each surface Tierney had painted a huge, bloody-faced Jesus, his eyes as black as the saints. I’d be lying to you if I said the Jesus heads didn’t creep me out.
You didn’t need a PhD in clinical psychology to figure out that John Tierney was schizophrenic and that, if he had meds, he hadn’t taken them recently. The house, his mad ramblings, all went a long way in explaining the wild, meandering comments Tierney posted following Nathan Martyr’s blog entries. Tierney’s posts often alluded to the ritual mutilation of Sashi Bluntstone and the use of her blood like that of a Passover lamb to ward off the angel of death. His psychosis didn’t mean he didn’t have Sashi or hadn’t had her or hadn’t killed her, but I doubted it. I could see that Jimmy’s presence in particular was making Tierney want to crawl out of his own skin. The last thing I needed was for him to go apeshit and for any of us to get hurt.
“Jimmy, why don’t you go take a look around, okay? John and I have to talk about some stuff that you can’t hear.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, and close the door behind you.”
That calmed Tierney down a little bit, but once Jimmy left, he seemed only vaguely aware of my presence. He was in a very different place than me and his odd affect gave new meaning to the phrase you can’t get there from here. I tried reaching him anyway.
“John,” I said, “you’ve written some pretty awful things about Sashi Bluntstone.”
“Satan.”
That was promising. “Is Sashi Satan?”
“Hamas is coming through the printers. Can’t you see them?”
So much for promising.
“Does Sashi have anything to do with the printers? If you killed Sashi, would her blood stop Hamas from coming through the printers?”
“St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter,” Tierney said, making the sign of the cross at me. Then he mumbled something I couldn’t make out at all. He got off the chair and kissed the floor at my feet. “St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter.”
We kept going round and round like that for another twenty minutes or so, but it got me nothing but a few more blessings and foot kisses. I found myself feeling nothing but sorry for John Tierney. Jimmy knocked.
“Come in,” I said.
“It’s pretty dark in the house, but I didn’t find anything but more crucifixes and paintings.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
I nodded for Jimmy to go first.
“Sorry to bother you, John,” I said. “I hope you find some peace or whatever it is you’re looking for. I just have to find Sashi.”
He didn’t move a muscle, his eyes still in that other place, but when I got to his bedroom door, he called to me.
“I didn’t take her,” he said in a calm coherent voice. “Her blood remains in the vessel of her body.”
I made sure not to turn back around and then just let myself out.
Back in my car, I was quiet. Jimmy wasn’t.
“Do me a favor and take me home. You don’t gotta pay me, but I’m freezing my balls off and I got work tomorrow.”
“Sure, no problem. I’m shot for the night anyway,” I said. “And don’t worry about the cash. You earned it. You up for this tomorrow night?”
“No problem, except maybe I’ll bring a Speedo and some extra clothes.”
Neither one of us said much after that.
TWENTY-ONE
The drive back from Babylon was the most hopeless hour I’d spent in a very very long time and it served as a cruel reminder of why I got out of the business of poking around in other people’s lives. Lives, even the ones that looked so orderly and beautiful from the outside, were messy, complicated things, often very ugly and painful things. And then there was the miraculous and the magical. Most people never experience either one. I’d had my brush with the miraculous on an April day over thirty years ago when I looked up and saw a rooftop water tank and thought, That’s where she is! That’s where Marina Conseco will be! In one of those. I was right that one time, but there wasn’t going to be a water tank miracle this go-round. I saw the futility of what I was trying to do reflected in the hopelessly lost eyes of John Tierney. What the hell was I doing looking for Sashi Bluntstone in such a place as that? She was dead. McKenna knew it. Even Max and Candy seemed to know. Was I the only one who refused to see the obvious?
When I dragged myself out of my car, my head throbbing from where it banged against the side porch railing, I was ready to pack it all in. So I had come to my senses and realized, what, that I wasn’t going to set the world right with some singularly miraculous redemptive act? Who was I kidding? What did I have to go back to? What was ahead of me, endless and endlessly boring days of hiding myself in my office? Days of planning new grand openings? Days of arguing with municipalities over the size of our store signage? Shopkeeping, is that really what I longed to return to? I was old and I was as lost in my way as poor John Tierney. At least he had enemies, real or imagined. My enemy was me. Then I heard Mary Lambert’s voice and all the selfpity receded.
“God, Moe, what happened to you?”
“Come on upstairs and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Except I didn’t, not at first. First I let Mary hold me in her arms and tell me everything was going to be all right. I was so smitten, I think I almost believed her. Then, when I cleaned myself up and put some ice to my head and had a drink, I told her about the case. I told her about who I was, who I really was.
“You see, Mary, the thing is, I’ve been selfish my whole life. I wanted life to be exciting. I wanted it to be about more than making money and settling down. I talked to you about Larry and Rico, but I didn’t talk much about me. I didn’t tell you about how I got my first wife killed or how I lost my daughter and a son that never had a chance to know me.”