Innocent monster

EPILOGUE

Detective McKenna, who never went to IA, but got a bump up and was now scheduled to receive his department’s highest honor, came to visit me two weeks after I got out of the hospital. He came to tell me that the Suffolk crime scene guys had found some curious things in the basement of Jimmy’s house. Among other items, they’d discovered four original paintings signed by Sashi Bluntstone. Somewhere Sonia Barrows-Willingham and Randy Junction were having intense, simultaneous orgasms: four of them, to be exact. The cops had also found a cell phone, one of those Wal-Mart jobs that you just buy minutes for as needed. When they checked the records, they found that Sashi and Jimmy had been talking to each other for over a year. I told him what Ben Schare had told me about seeing Sashi on the beach sometimes talking on a cell phone. I could see on McKenna’s face that he’d come around to the same conclusion I’d come to the night we found Sashi alive. Neither of us said a word.

The fact was that even if we wanted to cobble together the truth of things, we would have been hard-pressed to do so. Sashi Bluntstone would have been of little help and Jimmy Palumbo none at all. At least Jimmy had a rock solid excuse: he was dead. He had been doing all right at first, huge blood loss and all, and looked like he might make it. Then he contracted one of those nasty hospital-bred bacterial infections that resist every drug known to mankind and lapsed into a coma. He didn’t last ten days. Besides, like I said, I don’t think either McKenna or I wanted to say the words aloud. What went on between Jimmy and Sashi was something, but it wasn’t a kidnapping.

I never returned to the house in Sea Cliff. I didn’t have the stomach for the inevitably halfhearted thank yous and insincere sorries. I had come into this mess with fond memories of Candy and hating Max. And now, while I didn’t hate Candy, I was much less fond of her. Whether or not she was the person who helped Sashi with her paintings, I couldn’t say. My guess was it was Max. Yet, at the very least, Candy was complicit in the deceit. Max was Max. I no longer despised him. There wasn’t enough there to hate, really. For the most part, I found myself feeling sorry for the both of them, that they had allowed themselves to become so woefully dependent on their daughter. Or, as Candy had put it, slaves to her career. In this case, the child was truly father to the man.

I did, however, have a nice little chat with Sonia Barrows-Willingham and Randy Junction. They had both read Carney’s report cover to cover and, in spite of their bluster, were scared shitless at the prospect of my releasing it to the media. Doing so would have ruined their credibility in the art world and decimated the value of their Sashi collections. That was the least of it. If it could be shown that either of them knew the paintings weren’t exclusively done by Sashi, it might have led to criminal charges and countless civil suits. And when I pointed that out to them, they were eager to reach an agreement. I proposed a deal: I would sit on the report if they would help pay off the Bluntstones’ debts and contribute a portion of the profits of Sashi’s resales to a trust fund for her. They couldn’t agree fast enough.

I never did get an invoice from Declan Carney. I tried, with no success, to contact him. His phone numbers were no longer valid and all my emails bounced back. So after a few weeks, armed with my checkbook, I went to his building in Long Island City. There was a foreclosure notice taped to the front door and there was no response to my insistent buzzing or repeated knocks. I walked around to the back side of the building. There, spray-painted on the back wall, were these words: