Innocent monster

TWENTY-ONE

The drive back from Babylon was the most hopeless hour I’d spent in a very very long time and it served as a cruel reminder of why I got out of the business of poking around in other people’s lives. Lives, even the ones that looked so orderly and beautiful from the outside, were messy, complicated things, often very ugly and painful things. And then there was the miraculous and the magical. Most people never experience either one. I’d had my brush with the miraculous on an April day over thirty years ago when I looked up and saw a rooftop water tank and thought, That’s where she is! That’s where Marina Conseco will be! In one of those. I was right that one time, but there wasn’t going to be a water tank miracle this go-round. I saw the futility of what I was trying to do reflected in the hopelessly lost eyes of John Tierney. What the hell was I doing looking for Sashi Bluntstone in such a place as that? She was dead. McKenna knew it. Even Max and Candy seemed to know. Was I the only one who refused to see the obvious?

When I dragged myself out of my car, my head throbbing from where it banged against the side porch railing, I was ready to pack it all in. So I had come to my senses and realized, what, that I wasn’t going to set the world right with some singularly miraculous redemptive act? Who was I kidding? What did I have to go back to? What was ahead of me, endless and endlessly boring days of hiding myself in my office? Days of planning new grand openings? Days of arguing with municipalities over the size of our store signage? Shopkeeping, is that really what I longed to return to? I was old and I was as lost in my way as poor John Tierney. At least he had enemies, real or imagined. My enemy was me. Then I heard Mary Lambert’s voice and all the selfpity receded.

“God, Moe, what happened to you?”

“Come on upstairs and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Except I didn’t, not at first. First I let Mary hold me in her arms and tell me everything was going to be all right. I was so smitten, I think I almost believed her. Then, when I cleaned myself up and put some ice to my head and had a drink, I told her about the case. I told her about who I was, who I really was.

“You see, Mary, the thing is, I’ve been selfish my whole life. I wanted life to be exciting. I wanted it to be about more than making money and settling down. I talked to you about Larry and Rico, but I didn’t talk much about me. I didn’t tell you about how I got my first wife killed or how I lost my daughter and a son that never had a chance to know me.”

“Now you’re just beating yourself up.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am.”

“Sure you are,” she said. “You’re frustrated. You think there’s a dead girl out there somewhere that needed saving and you couldn’t save her.”

“I don’t know where I would have been tonight if you didn’t show up at my door.”

She stepped very close to me and put her hand over my mouth. “Let’s not talk anymore, not now. Can’t we just be happy I’m here?”

I shook my head yes, but as she turned to the bedroom I saw that thing in her eyes again and this time I was sure it was guilt. Then I fell so deeply into her that I didn’t question it.

In the morning, the sheets were cold on her side of the bed. Mary Lambert was gone. And though I couldn’t possibly explain how I knew she would be, I knew she would be. The sex wasn’t any less satisfying. On the contrary, there was a depth and complexity to it that we hadn’t achieved during the previous night’s awkward unfamiliarity. Yet it was the sort of depth and complexity that only comes from pain. I knew something about that. It was a major feature of sex with Carmella. She made physical art of her pain and anguish and it was intoxicating. Even now, seven years removed from her touch, I found myself craving her, but what made her so addictive in bed also made her impossible to live with in the light of day. I didn’t know Mary Lambert well enough to make that judgment about her. Now I felt I never would. There was an air of permanence in her leaving. What there wasn’t was a note. I was at least thankful for that. It gave me hope, fragile and torturous as it was.

I showered and got dressed and decided that I needed to keep myself busy. Jews don’t generally buy into those rather puritanical adages about idle hands and the devil. I certainly didn’t, but today was an exception. I knew I had to keep moving or I wouldn’t be able to keep it all from crashing in on me. I needed to push away the feel of Mary Lambert’s kisses, the easy lock-and-key way I slid inside her, her scent. I needed to run away from John Tierney’s eyes. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. John Donne never met John Tierney. And the only way I knew to keep busy, to keep myself moving, was to work the case. I certainly wasn’t going to sit in my office and stare at old pictures of dead rock stars.