Innocent monster

THIRTY-TWO

The day after Christmas I met Jimmy Palumbo for breakfast at a diner on Sunrise Highway. He told me he’d spent the holiday with family and that it was an okay time. He barely ate his eggs, mostly pushing them around his plate. Nor was he in a particularly talkative mood. I could tell there was something on his mind and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what it was. I didn’t imagine the stultifying life at the museum was the future he had envisioned for himself when he was pancaking linebackers in the NFL. But now that the extracurricular work I had for him had dried up, the museum was all he had ahead of him. At least, Jimmy said, he didn’t have to go back to work until the second week in January. I considered offering him something at one of our stores, then thought better of it. It would have been a lateral move: trading in one life-draining job for another.

And, I suspected, there was something else eating at him. Didn’t take a genius to figure that one out either. He had no doubt heard the stories about the reward money. I could see him trying to work out how to broach the subject without pissing me off. He even made an abortive attempt at talking his way around to it.

“I guess I didn’t do a very good job when I searched that fucking lunatic’s house. If we’d brought a flashlight, it might have ended different.”

“That wasn’t your fault,” I said. “No matter what, I should’ve taken a look for myself. I told you that already. The cops said they would probably have missed seeing that room too in bad light. They also think Sashi was probably already dead by then.”

Jimmy got silent again. He understood as I did that the space between what the cops thought and what they knew for sure was the place where the gnawing questions lived. If only we could have known for certain that Sashi was already dead by the time we got to Tierney’s house. If… if… if… The sad refrain of so many lives. The silence and unspoken questions continued for another couple of minutes, when, mercifully, the waitress brought the check. I snatched it away from Jimmy, threw a five-buck tip on the table, and made to stand up.

“Shit! I almost forgot,” I said, handing Jimmy an envelope. “Merry Christmas.”

I slid back into the booth and watched him open it up.

“Holy shit, Moe!” His hands shook as he held the check. “This is-”

“-a lot of money. Yeah, Jimmy, but you earned it as much as I did and you sure as shit need it. Maybe it’ll give you time to find a new job or maybe you can fix up the house or work on the boat. Whatever you want. I wish I could’ve given it to you in cash.”

“No, that’s all right. Thanks, man. I don’t know what to say.”

“You already said it.”

This time I stood in earnest. Jimmy was still staring at the check when I left.

Detective Jordan McKenna looked as beat-up as I felt.

Sure, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day had gone great for me. Dinner with Paul and Sarah at a little Indian place in Park Slope was amazing. Park Slope, that’s the part of Brooklyn where people who aren’t from Brooklyn live in Brooklyn while pretending they live in Manhattan. We walked into the place just before they closed the kitchen and so the owner/chef, who felt as awkward about Christmas Eve as any Jew, fired up his Tandoor and baked up an array of breads and meat dishes the likes of which I had never seen or tasted. He gave us a round of Taj Mahal beers on the house. And when we got back to my condo, Sarah and Paul decorated the tiny Christmas tree and placed it on top of the stack of gifts my daughter had bought me. I drank a little bit more of the fancy scotch and decided it was pretty fucking good after all. The next morning, Sarah came back and we celebrated the guilty pleasure of our first Christmas by opening the presents and staring at photo albums for hours on end. That said, the questions about the costs of having Sarah back still remained. One child lost for one child found, could that ever be balanced out?

McKenna, on the other hand, had been forced to deal with the same sorts of questions without any of the benefits. The case had been his from day one; Sashi had been killed on his watch. At least I’d gotten close. He didn’t get close. He didn’t get a daughter back. He didn’t get reward money. I knew what he got.

“The brass is breaking your balls, huh?”

“Pretty much. Looks like I’m going to get reassigned.”

“But you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But I didn’t do anything particularly right either, Moe. Let’s face it, you come on the scene and within a week you track the guy down. I had the case for three weeks.”

“We both know that’s not how it works.”

“Doesn’t matter how it works,” he said. “It’s how it looks that matters to the bosses.”

“So what are they going to do to you?”

“You know the drill. They’re going to give me a bump up and stick me in an office somewhere. I’ll be a supervisor consulting on supervising on consulting or I’ll be like a community relations guy… some bullshit like that.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. So you wanna have a look-see at the evidence?”

“I do.”

“Come on with me.”

I followed McKenna down a hallway into what I supposed was a lunch room. There on the table were several cardboard evidence boxes.

“I don’t know what you hope to find,” he said, “but you’re welcome to it.”

“Like I said to you the other day, I don’t know what I hope to find. Some solace, maybe. I don’t know.”

“There may be solace someplace in this fucking world, but not in those boxes. Only more misery in there.”

“Maybe.”

“I have to stay in the room. It’s the rules.”

“No problem.”

I began sorting and sifting through the evidence and files. Most of the evidence came from John Tierney’s house. The early stuff with the files was what you’d expect, written reports, interviews, a lot of pictures of Sashi at different ages. Through all of this, I realized, it had been a long time since I’d looked at Sashi Bluntstone. I mean, really looked at her and thought of her as a person. She had been many things to me throughout these last weeks: a means to an end, an artist, an object, a goal, someone else’s kid. But I’d only really ever thought about her as a child, a pretty sad one at that, early on in the process. Now I stared at her, Cara the beagle snuggling next to her. Even with that goofy kid’s smile on her face and the dog she loved more than anything next to her, her eyes looked ancient and tired. No kid, I thought, should look like that.

McKenna was right, there was no solace to be had in those boxes. There was something in them-not misery exactly, regret maybe-but certainly not peace of mind. If anything, I had more questions now than when I left my condo that morning. And as I drove back to Brooklyn from McKenna’s office, I felt an itch. My mind was working on something, but on what I could not say. It didn’t really matter, for even if I solved all the riddles the universe laid at my feet, Sashi Blunt-stone would still be dead. Even I understood that all this rooting around in Jordan McKenna’s files and my conversation with Dr. Ogologlu were ways to come to terms with that one simple fact.