We didn’t talk much after that. He’d had his say, done his duty, and now he needed to move on. Goodbye was a simple handshake.
Somehow, none of what McKenna had to say made me feel better. Sure, I’d neglected to tell the cops that I hadn’t checked the house, that it was Jimmy Palumbo who’d done it, that it was him and not me who failed to find the altar room. But that didn’t get me off the hook. The fact is, I should’ve looked for myself. Maybe I would have found that room in the dark, maybe not. That’s not the point. The answer to why I didn’t have a look for myself was easy and it had nothing to do with believing Jimmy. It wasn’t even about believing Tierney. Now, looking back I wondered why I was so quick to believe a crazy man’s ten seconds of coherence.
“I didn’t take her,” John Tierney had said.
Those words were going to haunt me for the rest of my life; a lot about this case would. There was Delia Parker’s dead baby boy, a baby whose name I still didn’t know. And there was that other question, the bigger question, hanging over me like my own personal rain cloud. Why hadn’t I turned Martyr’s list over to McKenna the minute I got it? The thing is, the answer that I gave the cops was perfectly reasonable. It sounded so much like the truth I swear I almost believed it myself when it came out of my mouth.
I told them that it didn’t make much sense to me to turn over reams of unvetted data, that I was afraid it might slow down their investigation and waste manpower by sending the cops off in a hundred different directions. I said I thought I was being responsible by paring down the list, by doing some of the initial legwork myself. And hadn’t I turned the list over to McKenna the second I saw I wasn’t up to the task?
Even now, repeating the words in my head, it sounded like the truth, but it wasn’t. It was a rationalization. The real answer to both questions, to all the whys, was the same and much more simple than the answers I gave the cops. The answer was that I was a prideful son of a bitch. I always knew better. I always had too much faith in my own decisions, in my gut, in my ability to read people. So when Tier-ney said he didn’t do it and it rang true to me, I accepted it like the gospel truth. Hence there was no need for me to double-check Jimmy and search the house for myself. I’d already declared John Tierney a non-suspect by reason of insanity. And the list… I didn’t turn it over because it was mine, because in my gut I felt that if Sashi could be found, I would find her, not the cops.
The irony in this was that I was already wearing the albatross necklace before I ever heard of Sashi Bluntstone. Her death wasn’t a new lesson to me, but an old one, one I thought I had learned, but hadn’t. I’d simply kept my pride locked safely away in my office with the rest of my life for the last seven years. The lesson was that people don’t change, that I didn’t change, that my promises were just lies in waiting. That my pride and faith in my gut persisted in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. My two divorces and Katy’s murder weren’t enough to humble me. And for fuck’s sake, my ability to read people was as much a myth as the exploding poodle in the microwave. Me, read people? The two closest friends I ever had turned out to be corrupt murderers. What did I really know about people?
Funny that that should be my last thought before John Tierney’s psychiatrist opened the door to his office and asked, “Mr. Prager, would you like to step in?” What do any of us know about people?
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dr. Mehmet Ogologlu was a tall, olive-skinned man with a round face and thinning black hair. He had penetrating brown eyes, a very full mouth, and a beak-like nose. He was comfortably dressed in a burgundy sweater over a blue Oxford shirt and gray cords. His shoes were scruffy old Bass loafers. I guessed most people would feel pretty much at ease around him. He gestured at a brown leather chair that faced his desk and waited for me to sit before he sat himself. I didn’t know if that was a function of good manners or of his training. I wasn’t in a trusting frame of mind.
“Well, Mr. Prager, what motivated you to come see me today?” Although his accent was as Oxford as his shirt, there were still some traces of Turkey in his speech.
“Guilt,” I said.
“We all live with guilt,” he said dispassionately, lifting a notepad and pen off his desk.
“Not this kind of guilt.”
“What kind of guilt would that be?”
“I think I might be responsible for someone’s murder.”
That put a crack in his wall of dispassion. The psychiatrist leaned forward and stopped writing. “Whose murder?”
“Sashi Bluntstone’s.”
Now the wall came tumbling down. He stood up. “Are you a reporter? I will not discuss this with the press.”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“Please leave.”
“I swear, I’m not the press.”
“Who are you?”
“Just who I said I was. My name is Moe Prager.”
He studied me more carefully now. “I am still at a bit of a loss. If I accept you are who you say you are and I am to take you at your word, what is it that you believe I can do for you?”
“Can we sit?” I sat and he followed in kind.
“It’s customary for the patient to volunteer information and for the doctor to listen.”
“I was the private investigator who found John Tierney, Dr. Ogologlu.”
“I was under the impression it was the authorities who discovered John.”
“Through me. I developed the lead and tipped the police off to his activities. They followed up.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Prager, however, I fail to see in what capacity I can be of any service to you. In any case, I feel duty bound to warn you that I am loath to discuss my patients, living or deceased, with anyone.”
“I understand, but maybe if you hear me out…”
“Possibly. It might facilitate progress if I knew in what capacity you come here today: as a private investigator or as a potential patient?”
“Honestly?”
“That would be best, I think, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I confessed. “I just knew I had to speak to you.”
“Why is that, do you suppose?”
“Two days before the police went to Tierney’s house, I paid him a visit. He just seemed so detached from the world the rest of us operate in and so lost in his own, that I was convinced he couldn’t have had anything to do with Sashi Bluntstone’s kidnapping. Without a second thought, I disqualified him as a suspect. I was so sure of myself that I didn’t bother searching his house. I even considered not telling the police about him at all. That’s how sure I was. Then, just as I was leaving, he came right out and said he didn’t do it. He was coherent long enough to tell me that.”
“Oh, I see. You are feeling guilty and responsible.”
“Wouldn’t you, in my shoes?”
“It need not be that academic a question, Mr. Prager. I feel quite responsible enough in my own.”
“Then maybe we can help each other.”
“Yes, maybe we can. But if we can, this is not the proper venue. Come.”
For as long as I could remember, this part of Atlantic Avenue, from Court Street down to the BQE, was the main drag of a thriving area for Near and Middle Eastern businesses of all kinds. With Bordeaux In Brooklyn only a five-minute walk away, I sometimes came to the area for lunch or dinner. The Constantinople Cafe, a short stroll from Dr. Ogologlu’s office across from Long Island College Hospital, was a tiny coffeehouse with four small tables, a few decorative water pipes, rugs hung on the walls along with travel posters of ruins and mosques. That’s where the atmosphere stopped and reality set in as a local news radio channel filled the air instead of strains of exotic music. The cafe was shouldered on one side by a large Syrian-owned food shop and on the other by a Pan-Arab bookstore.