Innocent monster

TWENTY-SIX

I sat in Dr. Mehmet Ogologlu’s waiting room, thumbing through the magazines and trying very hard to fight my own desire to leave. Nothing new in that, in fighting myself. I’d been doing it for the two very long weeks since I’d thrown my guts up at the water’s edge behind Tierney’s house. Christmas was at hand, the world had stopped wobbling, and everyone had seemed to move beyond Sashi Bluntstone’s kidnapping and murder to the next petty, scandalous, or violent thing the media ran up the flagpole to distract us from what was actually important. Sometimes I think George Orwell got it right. He was just off by twenty years or so. Yes, people had moved on, but I hadn’t. That’s why I was here.

The first week was the roughest, although several days of it are lost to me forever. I spent nearly twenty-four hours at Brooklyn South Homicide on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island following the discovery of John Tierney’s body. There I was interviewed for hours on end by myriad detectives and representatives from the Brooklyn DA’s office. What happened after that I’ve been forced to piece together. I remember I started drinking the moment I walked back into my condo. I don’t know when I stopped or if I stopped, only that Sarah found me passed out and half-dressed on the bathroom floor three days later. She said I hadn’t been answering my phone messages or my emails and that everyone was worried about me. What did that mean, everyone? Isn’t everyone’s everyone different? How many people did my everyone constitute? Three? Four? Two? What was the formula? Thinking about it just made me feel more wretched.

Then, for a few days after that, I sat alone in my apartment. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I was numb. I wasn’t drinking. My body’d had quite enough of that, thank you very much. I played some old vinyl records without listening. I watched a lot of movies on cable, though I couldn’t tell you which ones. I screened my calls, answering only Sarah’s. She called every day. My daughter was back in my life, which was exactly what I’d hoped for when she begged me to get involved that morning at New Carmens. What I couldn’t figure out was the value of hopes realized versus the price paid. I didn’t know how to do that kind of calculus, but somewhere I heard the devil laughing, or maybe it was God.

I waited and waited for the cops to call me back in, but the call never came. It wasn’t going to. That’s what Detective McKenna told me when he showed up at my door, eight days of newspapers cradled in his arms. The first thing he said was, “Christ, Prager, you look like shit.”

“That I do,” I said, staring in the mirror and running my hand over the thicket of gray stubble covering my face. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve dug up every inch of Tierney’s property and taken his house apart, moldy stick by moldy stick.”

“Find anything else?”

“A few things, yeah.”

“Like what?”

“Like ten thousand dollars of the ransom money in a paper bag in one of the kitchen cabinets.”

“How do you know it’s from the ransom?”

“For starters, the parents identified the bag. It’s from a supermarket in Glen Cove. Their fingerprints are all over the bag and the money,” he said. “We also found a length of bloody gauze shoved under a mat in the backseat of his car. It’s the kid’s blood.”

“Fuck! Anything else?”

“Like what, Prager, a map to the pit where he burned her body?”

“Like the rest of the money?”

“No more money. Who knows what that wacky fuck was thinking? Maybe he flung it into Jamaica Bay or ate it for lunch.”

“Any more bones?”

“None of those either. We’re never going to find her ourselves. You know how it’s going to be. Ten years from now, some old fart will be walking his dog in a state park or along a parkway and he’ll trip over something and he’ll look back and see a bone sticking out of the ground. That’s how she’ll be found.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Sure I’m right.”

“What about the way he was living?” I asked.

“Tierney? Oh, it was his house, all right. The mother died like two years ago and left it to him, but that’s when he started going completely over the falls. Had all the utilities shut off because he told his shrink that he was worried Hamas could listen in on his thoughts through their special wires.”

“What’s the deal with Brooklyn South Homicide?” I asked. “They gonna keep me waiting until I start crawling on the ceiling before they call me back in?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Let me shower and shave before-”

“No. I’m here to tell you it’s over. They’re done with you. I’m done with you. Both the Nassau County PD and the NYPD have finished our investigations. We’ll keep looking for the remains, but the case is pretty much over. It’s all on Tierney, not on you. We figure the girl was already dead by the time you showed up and both departments agree that in his house at night in the dark, anyone could have missed the door to the pantry. The police get second-guessed all the time and we’re not about to play Monday morning quarterback with you.”

“But what if she wasn’t already dead? What if I’d just come to you with the list when I got it? What if I hadn’t been so fast to dismiss Tierney as a suspect?”

“Come on, Prager, we went over this a hundred times when you were at Brooklyn South. There’s no way of knowing any of that. You want to beat yourself up over it, I can’t stop you, but it’s a waste of time. The fact is, you led us to Tierney. You found him, not us. Maybe if the parents had come to you sooner, we could have saved the kid. You think that doesn’t eat at me? That me and a whole team of detectives were chasing our own tails around and you come in and in a few days… voila! None of this is on you. Whatever peace the parents have now is because of you.”

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?