Innocent monster

TWENTY-EIGHT

That first night was worst of all. My phone machine was already full by the time I got home and I shut off my cell after taking calls from Aaron and Sarah. Both were politic enough and knew me well enough not to ask if I was happy about getting the money. There was nothing happy in any of this. Well, maybe Sonia Barrows-Willingham caught a buzz. Her extensive collection of Sashi’s art had probably just gone up several fold in value and the thought of dipping me in a hundred thousand dollars worth of blood money probably made her wet. I wondered, did a woman like her ever get wet?

It didn’t take me long to figure out what I would do with the reward. I knew I wasn’t going to keep any of the money for myself, but I’d grown up too poor to make some grandiose gesture with it. Money came too hard to most people at too high a cost for me to simply hand it over to a charity. With money comes responsibility and I wasn’t going to cede mine, not to a board or committee. If I thought it might’ve unhinged the albatross from around my neck or calmed the guilt, I would’ve considered it. I knew better. Didn’t I always know better? Sarah, because of our estrangement, had insisted on paying for vet school on her own and had only reluctantly let me help her buy into her practice. I thought maybe now that we had come to terms of forgiveness about Katy’s murder, that Sarah would be more amenable to letting me help. I hoped she’d take some of it, if only the money she’d fronted Max and Candy for the ransom, and I thought Jimmy Palumbo had done as much to earn the reward as I had. He sure as hell needed it more than I did and I didn’t suppose he was the type to be too proud not to take it. In his shoes, I’d take it.

I heard a lot of noise coming from Emmons Avenue and peeked through the window. The inevitable frontal assault had begun. Three news vans were parked out there and a crowd was forming around them. I threw two changes of clothing and my shaving kit into a gym bag and locked the door behind me. I didn’t figure this story had much staying power. One day, two at most. I could hide for that long. I’d pretty much hidden for the last seven years. Outside in the hall, I went straight to the stairs and took the extra half flight down that led to the parking lot. The reporters hadn’t found their way back there yet and I got into my car. It smelled almost new, having just been returned from the body shop after the cops released it. Still, on such a day as this, I would have been better served by the generic rental I’d been driving for the past few weeks. I made a quick right out of the lot and sped towards the Belt Parkway service road. I didn’t know where I was headed, but that wasn’t exactly a new experience in my life. I figured to stumble into something.

I drove around aimlessly for about an hour, listening to Steely Dan CDs, singing along, trying to blot out the noise in my head. And it worked for a while too. When I snapped out of my personal fog, I found I was parked next to Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. I wished I had parked anywhere else. In all the tumult of the last several weeks, I really hadn’t given much thought to Mary Lambert. Now, remembering our dinner here, the walk along the boardwalk, our nights together, she filled every corner of my head. I thought about how romantic it would have been to escape to her Greenpoint sublet. How I would have coaxed her into ditching work so we could spend a few days together in her bed, fucking our brains out like a couple of teenagers. Much like a teenager, I found myself fantasizing that the story of the reward money would make it up to Boston, and hearing it, Mary would get back in touch with me. Like I said, everybody wants to get rescued. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. I would never hear from her again.

Christ, it was freezing cold on the boardwalk, but after a few minutes I barely noticed. I just kept moving. That seemed to be my plan: just keep moving. There was barely enough light left to see down the boardwalk towards Sea Gate. There was something achingly beautiful about this nearly deserted and decrepit stretch of beach that had once been the world’s playground. The truth of it was best seen in the dying light. In the summer, crowded with people, with the rumble of rides, the shrieks and screams, the barkers’ crooked come-ons, cotton candy, the pops and whistles, the siren’s song of french fries and hot dogs, Coney Island still had enough magic to fool you, to make promises it couldn’t keep, promises that it had probably never really kept. But now under the falling curtain of night, I could see it for what it wasn’t, for the lie I had let it tell me my entire life. There are lies to hate and lies to adore. Even now, seeing it clearly maybe for the very first time, Coney Island was a lie I adored. Coney Island was a lover who never kept her promises, but somehow it didn’t matter. Maybe it was no accident that I wound up here, that Mary Lambert was on my mind.