If I hadn’t already burned both bridges, I would have been on the phone to McKenna and Dr. Ogologlu. Unfortunately, I had burned those bridges. There weren’t going to be any second looks at the evidence nor would there be any more polite philosophical conversations with the doctor. Both of them, McKenna and Ogologlu, were right about me, but they were wrong, too. I wasn’t going to a dark place. I was already there and I was there alone. I wasn’t sure I believed in undeniable facts, bumblebees notwithstanding. I was less and less convinced that John Tierney had anything to do with Sashi Bluntstone’s murder, no matter what all the hard evidence indicated. That was ice-cold comfort because there was the part of me that distrusted my own motives for believing in John Tierney. Because if Tierney was guilty, he really wasn’t. That’s what’d gotten lost in all of this heartache. Tier-ney wasn’t responsible for the chemical imbalance in his brain or for the genetic flaw in his DNA. If he killed Sashi, he was an innocent monster. And if he was, the only guilt left on the table would be my own.
Then, as if on cue, Declan Carney called and asked me to come get the paintings and the test results.
Dressed in carpenter pants, a paint-smeared Hunter College sweatshirt, and work boots, Declan Carney wasn’t quite as fancifully decked out as when we first met. Gone were the Hawaiian shirt, kilt, tube socks, and Birkenstocks. He’d also shaved his head of the Mohawk, side curls, Fu Manchu, and soul patch. But I found out soon enough that his newfound Bohemian look did not mean he had abandoned his idiosyncrasies. When I made to shake his hand, he backed away.
“Take no offense,” he said, “but on Skajit it is our holy month and physical contact with other sentient beings is forbidden.”
“No offense taken.”
Outside, on the street in front of his building, they were tearing up the pavement. And though the noise was far from unbearable, it was enough to get your attention. It certainly had Carney’s attention. He could not seem to stop himself from staring over his shoulder at the filthy windows that would have looked down on the work below.
“Mr. Carney, can I have the results, please?” He didn’t react immediately, apparently still distracted by the work noise. “Please,” I repeated.
“Yes, the results.”
Continuing to look over his shoulder, he walked over to a workbench and grabbed a bound report about an inch thick. “These are my findings. There is a detailed analysis of the tests I ran, the methods I used…” His voice drifted off as he handed me the file. He made sure our hands didn’t touch.
I flipped through the report. It seemed incredibly thorough, but frankly, I didn’t give a shit about anything other than his conclusions.
“So, what’s the verdict?”
“Excuse me,” he said, his attention elsewhere.
“What are your conclusions?”
“The results are there in the-”
“Look, Carney, no offense, but I’d like a few minutes of your time. I realize we didn’t agree on a price, but by the appearance of this report, it’s not gonna be cheap.”
“What?”
I repeated myself.
“I will send you the invoice. The paintings are there.” He pointed to a crate at the side of his workbench. You’ve got to love someone who returns things in better packaging than the packaging you delivered the goods in. “Please, just leave.”
“Will you go look out the goddamned window already so we can talk.”
He relented. “All right. What is it you want to know?”
“Did Sashi Bluntstone do those paintings?”
“Yes and no.”
“Well, that just clears everything up, doesn’t it? Did she or didn’t she?”
“The first painting shows a consistency of brush stroke, material-”
I was beginning to lose it. “For fuck’s sake, Carney, just give it to me in English, clear, concise English for idiots.”
“She did the first painting entirely on her own. The second painting she had some help with. The third painting was done almost entirely by the person who helped her do the second painting. Now that you have your answer, please leave.”
“The last time I was here, you warned me about monsters.”
“Yes.”
“Innocent monsters in particular.”
“Yes.” I seemed finally to have drawn his attention.
“I found one, you know?”
“I know, the man who murdered Sashi Bluntstone.”
“Him, yeah.”
“I was saddened to hear of the child’s death, but it is what you anticipated.”
“Yes and no,” I said, tweaking him a bit.
He smiled briefly. “But you expected she would already be dead, so what is the matter?”
“I did, but I was shocked-I am shocked by who they say did it.”
“You do not believe this man Tierney killed her?”
“I don’t want to believe it.”
He smiled again, but this time it looked like a gunshot wound. “It would seem you are his second victim, then.”
“You know I did a little checking up on you.”
“To what end?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I was a little curious and I felt sorry for you.”
“Your sorrow was misguided. Sorrow often is.”
“So are guilt and blame, Carney.”
“Oh, do you really think so, Mr. Prager? I think the guilty know exactly who they are. Goodbye.”
When I got downstairs with the paintings, a workman stopped me from going to my car as a yellow front-end loader scooped up huge bucketfuls of chopped-up asphalt and dropped them into the box of a Mack dump truck. I turned and looked up and saw an open third-floor window. Declan Carney was staring down intently at the commotion in the street, but I was fairly certain he was seeing and hearing very different things than was I. I tried to imagine what he was seeing and hearing, yet no matter how hard I tried to hear the screams of the Iraqi soldiers Carney had suffocated beneath the chuff and grunts of the bulldozer and desert sands, I could not hear them. I noticed Carney wiping his cheeks. I could not see his tears.
THIRTY-FIVE
I was never much of a New Year’s Eve kind of guy. I guess I’m not much on holidays all the way around. I never liked being told how to feel or when to feel it. Besides, holidays, all of them, not only Christmas, seemed either too commercial or artificial or both. I liked Passover. I liked everything about it because, even if you were in the most fucked-up mood imaginable, there’s no two ways to feel about being freed from slavery. Then again, if I was destined to like a holiday, Passover was going to be the one. My name is Moses.
Oddly enough, I found myself on the couch half watching football, drinking some more of Paul Stern’s single snob whiskey and missing the hell out of Mary Lambert. I started out mad, but by my third sip it was all just melting away into missing her. She lied to me. PIs are liars. I was a liar. I made a mental list of who I hadn’t lied to over the last few weeks. Very short list, that. But Mary and I had chemistry. I felt it. That couldn’t have been a lie. It just couldn’t. Can women fake orgasms? The answer’s pretty obviously yes and I didn’t even like thinking about who might have acted her part in my bed. What pissed me off about the concept of faking it is that women assume we’re so fucking fragile that we need to feel the roof rafters shudder when they come. Well, no, that’s not what pissed me off. What pissed me off was that they were right. We are that fragile. There are things, however, that can’t be faked. That’s what got to me, her walking away from a rare kind of connection that no one should ever walk away from. But what did I know? Maybe I had been played for a love-hungry idiot. Maybe there wasn’t anything in the world that couldn’t be faked.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t live without someone to come home to, someone to need, and love. I functioned pretty well on my own the whole time I was on the job and I managed to dress and feed myself for the last seven years without someone packing my lunch and laying my clothes out on the bed-but I didn’t want to just manage or function anymore. My life always had more meaning when I was with Katy as it did during my brief time with Carmella. I didn’t want to die alone in a wheelchair-accessible apartment that Sarah and her husband-to-be-named-later set up for me in their house. Sixty might be the new forty, but there was no such thing as the new dead. Same as it ever was. There was no denying that I was closer to the end, a lot closer, than the beginning.