“May I come in? I’m not here to bust your chops about the crank.”
She almost seemed disappointed by that. I think she knew she was beyond helping herself and wanted desperately to be rescued. But we all want that, don’t we? What must it have been like, I wondered, to watch yourself drowning? Delia stepped back and shut the door when I stepped in.
“What then?”
“Sashi Bluntstone.”
She began laughing wildly, her whole body shaking. The laugh became a cough and the cough became vomit. The vomit was mostly yellowy-green mucus and blood. She fell to her knees. I found a towel, the least dirty one in the bathroom, and wiped her up. I put her down on her side to rest. Then I realized that that much noise would have woken up almost any baby. I left Delia where she laid and ran through the apartment looking for the baby. I found it in a filthy crib in the corner of the bedroom. The baby boy, blue and unbreathing, cold to the touch, was dead. His mother wasn’t the only soul in this place beyond help. I dialed 911, then sat down on the bed and waited, too numb to cry.
TWENTY-THREE
I didn’t listen to the press conference. I guess I couldn’t have even if I wanted to or had the strength to listen. I was too busy explaining myself to the long list of New York City officials who drifted in and out of the tenth-floor apartment. First there were the two uniforms, then the EMTs, then the detectives, then the ME’s man, then the housing rep, then it was the detectives again and again and again. That I was a retired cop and a lapsed-license PI helped, but not so much. The days of a badge getting you a pass were over. The necessity and art of ass covering had always been part of the job, but now with intense media scrutiny, cell phone cameras, and Gotcha! blogs, a smart cop didn’t give too many breaks to anyone just because he was once on the job. Maybe a little courtesy, but no breaks. That was probably a good thing, but it sure as shit didn’t feel like it to me.
Delia Parker’s story wasn’t much different than the rest of the Sashi haters. She was a promising artist who had come to New York after 9/11 to find out if she could make it on the main stage. She was an MICA graduate. I’d found her diploma on the floor next to her bed under some used condoms. It wasn’t tough to figure out what she’d been doing for drug money and, by the wasted look of her, she’d been doing a lot of it and not for very much a pop. Beneath the diploma I found photographs of the pre-meth Delia and her family. She was pretty once. She had been someone’s daughter and sister. She looked like her mom. Her sister looked more like her dad. I wondered about them. What did they think had become of their girl? Did they even know about the baby? They would know soon enough.
It’s a stretch to say that on the day you find a neglected, malnourished, and dead child in its filthy crib that things could get worse. A stretch, but not impossible. Because when I got back home to Sheepshead Bay, there was an envelope wedged between the jamb and my front door just above the knob. This was the note that had been missing this morning in the wake of Mary Lambert’s leaving.
Dear Moe,
›I came to tell you last night that I had been promoted and called back to the home office, but when I saw the shape you were in, I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. These last few days together have been some of the best of my life, certainly the best in the last ten years. You are a wonderful, trusting, and tender man, Moe Prager, and I know I will regret not chasing our relationship where it would have gone. But there are things about me you didn’t know. Things, that if you knew them, would have stopped us in our tracks. So please think of me with a smile and not anger. I will always think of you that way and I will always think of you. Please don’t come looking for me. It will ruin what we had and hurt us both. Goodbye.
With Love,
Mary
I didn’t have it in me to tear up the note or act the jilted lover. I put the note on my kitchen table and took a long shower that must have used up all the hot water for the entire building. When I got out of the shower, I wrapped a towel around me, poured myself a scotch, and watched the news. McKenna wasn’t kidding around. They had gone big, all right. And Sonia Barrows-Willingham had given me a pleasant and unexpected Go Fuck Yourself, Prager! in the form of offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to Sashi Bluntstone’s safe return or to the whereabouts of her abductors. I raised my Dewars to the screen when the nasty piece of work finished making her announcement. Then I made three calls, two of them the hardest phone calls I’d ever had to make.
This time I got to New Carmens first and was seated in the same banquette that we had occupied the day before. The world had turned upside down in the brief eternity since then. Twenty-four hours ago I had Mary Lambert in my life and the feel of her still fresh in my memory. There was a baby boy still alive in an apartment in Alphabet City, his mother not yet a full-fledged monster. Sarah was about to breathe life into a moribund case and I still had hope.
Sarah snuck up on me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. It was all I could do not to weep. My troubles were not lost on my daughter.
“Dad, Dad, what’s wrong?”
“A lot of things.”
“Sashi?” She sounded frightened. “Is it-”
“No, kiddo, it’s not Sashi.”
“Did you see the press conference?”
“I couldn’t, but I watched highlights on the news. Very impressive.”
The waiter came over and we ordered coffee and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. When he left, Sarah asked, “Do you think the reward money will help?”
“It will do something, but I’m not sure it will help.”
“What do you mean?”
“It will create a lot of activity. Reward money always does. The cops’ll get a million calls with tons of leads, but…” I shrugged my shoulders. “When your Uncle Patrick was missing, we had a reward hotline for him that was active for twenty years. Your mom forgot to shut it down even after we found out what had happened to him all those years ago. The hotline was still getting fresh calls on the day your mom finally closed it down and that was a month after the whole story had appeared in the papers and on TV. Not one of those leads was worth a damn thing.”
She bowed her head. “I see.”
“On the other hand, these things do sometimes pay off. That’s why they do them. At this point, kiddo, the cops need material to work with because they’ve exhausted everything else.”
“What about the stuff you’re working on?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Yeah.”
The waiter came over and delivered our coffees and pies. We each grabbed our forks, but it seemed neither one of us had much of an appetite.
“I can’t do this anymore, Sarah. I found a baby dead in its crib today. His mother was a meth addict and hadn’t fed him for days. It was more important that she feed her habit than her own kid. I didn’t sign on for this. Last night I was prepared to beat information out of a total schizophrenic. He was as lost as Sashi in his way. This is not who I am. The only reason I agreed to do this in the first place was because I wanted you back in my life again. I still want that more than anything, but not at this price.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
I reached across the table and stroked her face. “I can’t apologize anymore about what happened to your mom. I can’t take any of it back, kiddo, and I can’t make up for it either. I’ve tried. You’re going to have to forgive me because you forgive me, but I can’t earn it. Do you understand?”