“Probably wouldn’t’ve mattered.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I thought you might figure out it was me eventually, but not so soon.”
“You killed Tierney?”
“Hey, that’s on you, Moe.” Didn’t I know it? “You led me straight to him and paid me for the honor. He was perfect. Fucking crazy as a bedbug. He didn’t even put up too much of a fight. Who wasn’t gonna believe he did it?”
“Me.”
“Who else?” he asked.
“No one.”
Jimmy gloated. “See what I mean?”
“So you did find the altar room when you searched the house. You went back to Martyr’s house that night and planted those pictures of Sashi, her panties, the bones.”
“How’d you figure it out?” He was curious too.
“A lot of little things,” I said, happy he was willing to keep talking. More talk, less bullets. “I couldn’t accept that Tierney had it in him to plot and plan and carry out such a complicated scheme. People kept telling me I was nuts and I almost started believing them too. I noticed she was wearing different underclothes in the pictures on the altar than the ones she was wearing when she was taken. Tierney just wasn’t the type to shop for little girl’s panties. Then I realized that Tierney had blackened out the eyes in every photo and painting in his house, but not the ones you planted. I just couldn’t let it go. Then, tonight, I saw an old video of Sashi’s art shows and there you were, standing guard over her.”
“Shit!”
“It still all might have worked too if I hadn’t seen that video. That was just dumb luck.”
“Bad luck for me.”
“You vandalized my car, but why? It didn’t fit. That was another one of the things that really got in the way of me believing Tierney did it. Why didn’t you just split after you got the initial fifty grand?”
“Look, it was like my lucky day when you walked into the museum and hired me. Until then, I was thinking that it was only a matter of time till the cops came knocking at my door. It would’ve looked pretty bad if I cut and run before they showed up. They’d know I was guilty, and I’d be fucked. But you saved my ass. You brought me close to things, close enough so’s I could find a patsy and get away free and clear. No looking behind me, no waiting for a knock at my door. Besides, fifty grand wasn’t enough for me to make any kind of new start. I thought the Bluntstones were worth millions. I mean, I used to work Sashi’s shows and see people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at a clip on her stuff. How was I supposed to know her parents pissed all the money away and were broker than me?”
“But why fuck up my car and leave the bear?”
“It was a win-win for me. If it worked to scare you off, then great. If not, you’d keep paying me and keep me in the loop until I found the patsy. It worked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, but it ends here, Jimmy. There’s a Suffolk Police boat waiting for you at Santapogue Point and they’ve got the roads out of here blocked off. That’s why I’m wet and frozen. I had to swim across the channel to get here without the cops noticing. Believe it or not, I’m trying to save your worthless fucking life.”
Oops! That was a mistake. We were pals up till then.
“Fuck you! You don’t know about me, about who I am,” he shouted, tightening the grip on the big revolver, a grip that, until a few seconds ago, had been steadily relaxing. “Well, if I gotta go, I ain’t going alone.”
“Calm down, Jimmy. You still have a bargaining chip.”
He sneered. “You? Get out. Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Not me. The cops don’t give a shit about me. But you know something the cops want to know. That’s your play.”
“Yeah, and what do I know?”
“Where Sashi is buried.”
He seemed not to understand. “Huh?”
“They’ll make a deal if you can tell them where Sashi is buried.”
Again, he stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language, but that’s where the discussion came to an end. Things happened, everything happened, and, it seemed, all at once. There was a thump at the side door, then loud scratching, howling too, and not from the wind. A dog. The dog I’d heard on the phone the last time I’d spoken to Jimmy. Paul was shouting at someone in the backyard, “Go! Run! Faster! Run! That’s it, run! Faster! Run!” Jimmy’s face went from blank to panic to fury. Then a few beats later, the boat’s engines revved loudly and it sounded as if it was pulling away from the dock. Palumbo’s phone rang and we both startled. It rang and rang and rang.
I said, “Answer it.”
Jimmy was frozen, his attention and guts being tugged in a hundred different directions. He reached for the phone. It stopped ringing. Flashing red and blue lights strobed through the front window. The dog was howling louder now and scratching more fiercely. The boat crashed into something, groaning as it broke apart. Jimmy pointed the gun at my head.
“James Palumbo, this is the Suffolk County Police Department…”
Jimmy turned. I had no chance in a fight with him, but I did have a chance to get the gun out of his hand. I grabbed a crystal obelisk, about eight inches tall, off the end table and brought it down hard as I could on Jimmy’s wrist. The bones snapped and the gun fell to the floor. His bloodied hand hung down from his arm at an unnatural angle, exposed bone peeking through the skin. I nearly puked at the sight of it. Jimmy screamed, but didn’t freak. This was a man who had played NFL football. Talent, strength, size, and speed were parts of that equation, but the ability to withstand constant pain was another. He reached for the gun with his left hand. I kicked it away before he could grab it.
“You prick! I was her only hope.” And with that, he landed a left hook to my jaw that would be felt by generations of Pragers yet to be born. My eyes shut.
When they fluttered open again, I was on the floor, blood pouring out of my mouth, the revolver gone, and Jimmy Palumbo heading out the side door at a run. The dog was yelping and someone was shouting for Jimmy to halt. It was Paul Stern. Bang! A shot. Bang! Bang! Two more, louder, much much louder than the first. Now I was running, lots of people were running. I got out to the backyard just in time to see Jimmy Palumbo dive off the dock, gun in hand, knocking Paul Stern backwards into the water with him. Cops were all around me, but, crazy and irrational as it was, the only thing I could think about was that I was going to lose Rico again, and that I would lose Sarah again too.
The snow was stained with blood, a lot of blood, steam rising off it. We all ran to the edge of the dock. Three of the cops ran ahead and dived in without hesitation. For reasons I can’t begin to explain, I started praying to Mr. Roth, asking him to talk to God on my behalf. Me praying to a dead Jew. Go figure! As Izzy was fond of saying, “God does answer prayers, only most of the time, the answer is no.” A man who had witnessed the things he’d seen in Auschwitz understood the limitations of prayer. But when I looked down into the water, there was Paul Stern, his arm around Jimmy Palumbo’s neck, keeping him from drowning. Then the cops grabbed on and helped.
“Get out of there!” I screamed at him in joy and anguish. “Anything happens to you, my daughter will kill me herself.”
Behind me, the dog was at it again, only this time, it was yelping and howling in joy. When I turned to look, I saw McKenna, tears streaming down his face, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Then I understood. Standing in front of him was a little girl with green eyes and nine fingers. She was kneeling down to pet her beagle puppy.
I was right to have used Mr. Roth as the intermediary between me and the Almighty, because, this one time, God said yes.
THIRTY-NINE
The minute they brought Jimmy up out of the water I knew I had never really understood anything about the world and thought that maybe I should stop pretending that I did. Sashi stopped petting the little beagle, ran over to Jimmy, crying as fiercely as McKenna had been only moments before, and screamed, “Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Jimmy, please be all right.”