“Two double Dewars,” he said before I could breathe.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough, McKenna?”
“Enough! I’ve only just begun to fight.”
“Somehow, I don’t think scotch was what John Paul Jones had in mind.”
“You like Led Zeppelin?”
“Not that John Paul Jones,” I said.
“I know, you asshole.” He slapped my back hard, a little too hard, as the barman put our drinks down and the memorial crowd began shuffling out of the big room. “So that was a nice round of applause there.”
“Nice isn’t the word I would use.”
He either hadn’t heard me or didn’t agree. “You get a hundred grand and a standing fucking O and I get to become Detective Cheese-eater and rat. IA, here I come.” He wasn’t exactly whispering as he spoke. Heads turned our way.
“Try and keep it down, okay?”
He shrugged his shoulders and put his hand over his mouth. “Yeah, we wouldn’t want people to stare.”
I didn’t think pushing back was the best strategy with McKenna in his current state. Push a drunk and he pushes back harder. This was the classic bar brawl setup: two drunks in shitty moods, one with a particularly nasty bug up his ass. Frankly, in a different setting, I might have been willing to go at it with him. I was pretty fed up with the whole situation too. I hadn’t asked for any of it: the money or the applause. Over the last three or four weeks I’d found a dead baby in its crib and seen the ugly side of things I thought I’d left behind years ago. I found love or what I thought might be love and had it walk away from me, and to top it off, my daughter was dating the son of a guy who had sold me out and tried to get me killed. A fight was just what the doctor ordered, but instead of throwing punches, we clinked glasses.
“ Slainte,” I said.
“ Pog mo thoin, Prager.” Kiss my ass.
We drank. I sipped, he guzzled, slamming his empty down on top of the bar like it was a shot glass.
“Again!”
“Yo, McKenna, there are other people on line. Let’s slow down a little, okay, buddy.”
“Buddy! I ain’t your fuckin’ buddy. Do you think you’d get a standing O if these pricks knew you withheld evidence?”
Now all heads were turned, everyone staring our way. You could almost hear the whir and whoosh of the machines keeping Barrows-Willingham’s husband alive up on the third floor. The time for pushback had arrived, but I didn’t want to do it on the main stage. There was only one way to manage it.
“All right, come on, let’s go do this somewhere else.”
McKenna wasn’t expecting that. He was an aging cop, but I was just old, about twenty years his senior, and I don’t think he expected me to bite. Unfortunately, he was a little too drunk to let reason enter into his decision. I had hoped he would take it as an offer to talk it out.
“Okay, fuckhead.” Apparently, talking it out wasn’t an option.
“Dad, don’t do this!” Sarah screamed, pushing her way through the crowd with Paul’s help.
“I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing.”
“But you-”
“Let him go, Sarah,” Paul said, looking me straight in the eye and pulling my daughter gently away from me. “Trust him.”
I felt in a time warp, like Rico Tripoli was talking to me out of the past, telling me he had my back. Funny thing is, Rico never really had my back, but for some reason I knew his son did.
“Come on, McKenna, follow me,” I said.
I had an idea of where I was going as I’d walked the house in my search for a quiet spot. I marched us towards a den that was full of soft and cushy furniture and not as many breakable objects d’art as in some other parts of the house. There was a giant, wall-mounted, flat screen TV in there too, but unless I missed a room with a boxing ring, this was the best I could do on short notice. To my dismay, the crowd seemed to be following us and at the head of the mob was our hostess.
“Come on, Prager,” McKenna shouted behind me, “you trying to tire me out or what?”
“Just shut up. You’ll get a piece of me soon enough.”
Then we all seemed to spill into the den I was looking for. The TV was on, but even in my agitated state, that same vague image caught my eye once again. Before I could fully focus on the image, McKenna charged me, knocking me back onto the thick Berber carpeting. That was a good thing because my head thumped down pretty good. McKenna was on top of me and I could hear and feel that the fall had taken as much or more of a toll on him as on me. I chopped the side of my left fist down into his right kidney and the air rushed out of him with a sick groan. He went limp. With that, I bridged my neck and shoulders and rolled him off me. I stood. He staggered to his feet.
“Pretty good for an old fuck,” he said, rubbing his kidney.
He swung a roundhouse right at me, but he was even drunker than I thought and I easily ducked the punch, delivering a right to his liver. He went down on his knees and vomited all over the nice carpet. Everyone’s attention was on him, but mine was on the screen. There it was again.
“What’s this?” I shouted, pointing at the screen.
“A Panasonic,” an unseen voice answered back.
“No. What’s this playing? What am I watching?”
“These are videos I had of Sashi’s shows,” Sonia said, somewhat disappointed that the fight hadn’t made it out of the first round. “I had a film editor put them together to run in a loop and had them transferred to a disc. Why do you ask?”
“I’m not sure, something caught my eye.” I turned and watched some more.
People were attending to McKenna, who was on his knees, drinking bottled water as someone applied a cold cloth to the back of his neck. Staff had appeared out of nowhere and were busily blotting up the mess the detective had made on the rug in front of him.
“What is it, Dad? What do you see?” Sarah and Paul stood on either side of me.
“I don’t know,” I said, watching scenes of Sashi and Ming and Cara the dog racing about as adults ogled her paintings, sipping Chardon-nay and acting as if they were in the presence of greatness. It was all so surreal. “I don’t know. Something. There! Stop. There!” I shouted. “Go back. Somebody stop it!”
Sonia found the controller and flashed back in that odd, still frame-by-frame way digitized video does.
“There!”
“For goodness sakes, what is it?” Sonia was screaming now.
“Him!” I pointed to a large man in the background, his arms folded across his massive chest, his eyes focused on Sashi in the foreground. “What’s he doing there?”
“Security,” Candy said as she stepped forward. “He worked for a security firm we hired to keep an eye on Sashi after she had gotten some weird fan letters.”
I shoved my way towards McKenna and yanked him up onto his feet. “Come on, McKenna. Let’s go.”
“Where’re we going?”
“To catch the real killer.”
“What? Not that-”
“Somebody call the Suffolk County Police Marine Bureau and tell them to get a boat to Santapogue Point.”
McKenna squinted at me. “Santapogue Point. Where the hell is that?”
“It’s on the Great South Bay in Babylon. I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go!”
There had been another link between John Tierney and Sashi Bluntstone, only it hadn’t dawned on me until that moment.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Fuck!
There was a three-inch blanket of white on the ground, the cars, the long driveway, and darkness had crept in under the cover of snow. Wind howled, icy flakes lashing our faces. I reached a gloveless hand into my pocket for my claim check and remembered that I’d given it to Sonia. No way I was going back inside.
“McKenna, give me your claim check.”
“Huh?”
“Your car claim check, give it to me.”
He was dazed, a little child just woken from sleep, patting his pockets down without rhyme or reason. The fight had braced him a bit and the vomiting had done him some good, but he was still drunk. Only time was going to make that better. Even fueled by my adrenaline rush, I wasn’t exactly feeling like a prize rooster either. Finally, McKenna pulled the playing card-sized stub out of his coat pocket. Paul Stern rushed past, grabbed it, and handed it to the eager valet.