Innocent monster

SEVEN

I didn’t want Candy around if I could help it, so I sat down the block from the Bluntstones’ place and waited. This was the part of the job I didn’t miss, the waiting. Although there were many days I would have preferred sitting alone in a too-hot or too-cold car-and having to piss into the coffee cup from which I’d just been drinking-to tying frilly ribbons around the necks of gift bottles wrapped in flimsy silver foil. I especially hated it when customers would come rushing in, throw their black AmEx cards down on the counter, and demand, “Just get me something red and expensive. I’m in a hurry.” Nothing like a fivehundred-dollar bottle of wine in a two-cent gift bag to impress your friends. Good night! Fuck you very much!

But whether Candy left the house or not, I was going to have a chat with Max, for whom I still had no use, in spite of his wife’s confession about using a fake pregnancy as a pretense for marriage and a means of escape. Max was just one of those people I took an immediate dislike to. Other than knocking up my kid’s best friend, role model, and babysitter, I mean, what was there to dislike about the guy, right? Okay, so the pregnancy was bullshit and maybe I felt more paternal about Candy than I realized, but that wasn’t all of it. Max was Eddie Haskell: handsome enough, charming, polite, and poison. Sometimes the way you feel about people has nothing to do with rationality, maybe most of the time, but that was only part of it when it came to Max. The minute I met him, my cop radar switched on and the arrow on my bullshitometer jumped into the red numbers. I just knew that nothing the guy said or did was pure. He was always performing; there was always a shadow motive, a hidden, less obvious agenda. Always. He was an emotional pickpocket and you had to watch both his hands, not just the one he wanted you to look at.

Candy did me the favor of leaving. Though she was made-up and well-dressed as she left the house, she looked broken and old as she made her way down the porch steps. I could relate. Her steps were robotic and it seemed to take all her strength just to pull open the door to the blue Honda CR-V parked on the stone driveway. I ducked as she drove past, though I needn’t have. She stared blankly, straight ahead. Stress had temporarily blinded her.

Max Bluntstone smirked when he answered the front doorbell, and didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“The Great White Father has arrived,” he said, showing me his back, but leaving the door open. “I knew you’d show up sooner or later. I’m in the kitchen.”

I closed the front and vestibule doors behind me and followed him into the kitchen. And as much as I wanted to continue to dislike him, the look of him made me heartsick. For as tired and broken and stressblind as his wife was, he was worse. He wasn’t broken. He was defeated. He was pale, gaunt, vacant. The bags under his eyes were bloated and purple, the corners of his eyes were crusted, and the eyes themselves were shot with blood. He hadn’t shaved in a while and his sweat stank of bourbon. His clothes were wrinkled as if he had slept in them for several days. I recognized the signs. Max Bluntstone was grieving. His hope was gone. In his head, in his gut, and maybe in his heart, he knew Sashi was dead. Candy wasn’t there yet.

I’d seen this happen before. People were simply different from each other. Just as they aged and grayed and gained weight at different rates, they reached emotional crossroads at different times. For as beat-up and old as Candy looked, there was still some hope in her tone, in her facial expressions, in her words.

“Coffee?” Max asked.

“Sure. Just milk.”

I watched him pour my cup, spilling some, adding milk and sugar. He wasn’t there.

“Here.”

“Thanks.” I hated sugar in my coffee, but I wasn’t going to piss and moan about it. “But if you’re gonna add some bourbon to yours, save some for me.”

He laughed, hollow as a carved pumpkin. “How’d you know?” he asked, pulling a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark out of a drawer and topping off my cup.

“I used to be a private detective, remember? Besides, you stink like the floor at a Kentucky distillery.”

Max shook his head in agreement. I decided to gut punch him and watch his reaction.

“You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

First, briefly, he swelled up defiantly, but he didn’t have energy or anger enough to fight the good fight and he caved in on himself before he said a word. “It’s been over three weeks. The cops try to be hopeful, but I can see it in their eyes. What do you think?”

She’s probably dead. “ I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion. That’s why I want to talk to you. I talked to Candy yesterday.”

“I figured something had happened.”

“How’s that?”

“She was a little upbeat last night. It didn’t last.”

“Yeah, I saw her leaving the house. What was she made up for?”

“You mean who, not what,” he said.

“Okay, who?”

“Randy Junction. He owns the gallery in town that shows Sashi’s work.”

“I know the name. I came across it in some stuff I was reading, but why go see him this early in the morning?”

“For a little comfort.” I purposefully kept my mouth closed and Max obliged my silence. “That’s right, Moe, comfort. The kind I don’t seem able to supply to my wife anymore, not that she’d want it from me. She’s been fucking him on and off for years. Until Sashi… Until lately, it had been off. I learned not to mind it so much when she would throw me a bone too every now and then. I suppose if I had the heart for it, I’d be looking for the same kind of comfort. Candy doesn’t want to face the reality of things yet, but it won’t last.”

I let it go because that was a time bomb I wasn’t prepared to dig around just yet. “Tell me about the day Sashi disappeared.”

Raymond Shaw is kindest, warmest, bravest… It was the Manchurian Candidate all over again. Max’s story was nearly word for word what Candy had told me. Not only that, but his movements, his hand gestures, his intonation pattern were all startlingly similar. I didn’t like it any better this time than when Candy told it to me. There was definitely something they both knew that they weren’t telling, but badgering Max or Candy wouldn’t lead me to what it was. No, they would only circle the wagons and gird themselves. Now I was certain I knew what had motivated Detective McKenna to let me in on the case without having to jump through fiery hoops. He was hoping my presence might rock the boat a little and get Max or Candy to either confide in me or to tell an obvious lie. So far, the strategy was a failure, but it was early… for me. Not for Sashi. According to her father, it was late for her. Too late. I hoped like hell he was wrong and I hoped it was just a feeling he had and not something he knew for sure.

“Tell me about Sashi’s friends.”

“She didn’t have many friends.”

Didn’t. Past tense.

“In a lot of the stories I read about her, there were often mentions of her playing with friends at shows,” I said.

“When she was little… Yeah, she had lots of friends, but she really became very much a prisoner of her work. I’m to blame for that. I encouraged her, maybe pushed her too hard. Most ten- or elevenyear-olds aren’t working on their version of the Mona Lisa. I was such a complete fuck-up at my art, I wanted her to succeed so bad. I guess I wanted it too much. Her friends just sort of fell away. And the criticism and exposes didn’t help. We tried to shield her from that, but you can’t protect kids, not when some guy on CNN calls you a fraud, not with the Net and social networks. She heard it. She felt the pressure.”

“She had to have some friends.”

“There’s Ming,” he said.

“Ming?”

“Ming Parson. Her and Sashi have been buddies forever, but in the last year or so…”

“I’ll want her address.”

“Sure.” Max scribbled something out on a pad, ripped the top sheet off, and handed it to me.

“Thanks. How are you guys doing financially?”

You throw enough punches, some are bound to land. This one landed square on his jaw and the Max I disliked suddenly reappeared out of the past. He shook his head in disgust and that familiar cocky curled lip returned, the grief and mourning vanishing as if I’d taken an eraser to his face.

“Fuck you! You and that cop, you’re both the same. Get the fuck out of my house. Now!”

Now it was my turn to oblige him. I left. Staying wouldn’t have done anything for either one of us and it almost certainly would have done my cause harm. I’d pissed the man off. I might have been pissed off, too, had someone implied my precious daughter’s disappearance was somehow about money. Clearly, McKenna had done more than imply it.

The Parsons’ house was rather more modest than the grand Victorian on the cliff. It was a cute, slightly worse-for-wear little bungalow on the same block as one of the two Russian Orthodox churches in town. The bungalow was on a small lot with a tiny front yard and a gravel driveway barely big enough for a full-size car to park on, but it looked cozy and lived in, comfortable as a pair of old jeans. I knocked on the front door and a woman answered. She was forty, on the short and heavy side, not pretty, yet attractive in the way her house was.

“Hello there.” Her voice was warm and welcoming. “How can I help you?”

“Hi. Mrs. Parson?”

“Dawn.”

“Dawn, my name’s Moe Prager. I’m an old friend of Candy Blunt-stone.”

That took the warmth and sparkle right out of her. She stepped out of the house, closing the door behind her. “Look, mister, I’ve talked to the police about this several times and I don’t want to discuss it anymore. My daughter talked to them too. She hasn’t slept well since Sashi disappeared. At this age they know enough to understand what might have happened, but not enough to make sense of it.”

“I don’t think we ever get old enough to make sense of it.”

“I’m sorry for Candy and I’m scared for Sashi, but I have my own child to protect.”

I didn’t say a word. Instead, I reached into my wallet, removed two items, and handed them to Dawn Parson. One of the items was an old card I kept to remind me of what I used to be. The other was a photo of Sarah that was taken when she was in fifth grade and was about the same age as Ming and Sashi. It was as manipulative as hell, but I’d worry about paying that bill later.

“She’s a beautiful little girl. My god, such amazing red hair.”

“Her name’s Sarah and she’s grown into a beautiful woman. The hair’s a little darker now,” I said. “Candy used to babysit for Sarah. She was like her big sister.”

“Like I said, I feel for them, but I have to worry about me and mine.”

“I know. How about you give me a few minutes and I’ll get out of your way?”

“I don’t know what I can tell you that I haven’t already said to the cops.”

“Different sets of ears hear different things,” I said. “I was a cop once myself a long time ago and, like the card says, a private investigator. Sometimes it’s not what you’re saying that makes the difference, but who’s hearing it. Please.”

“Sure.”

“Did Ming see Sashi that day, the day she went missing?”

Ming’s mom frowned, looked at the welcome mat, and rubbed her hands. “They hadn’t seen each other for a while. So, no, they didn’t see each other that day.”

“I heard they were really good friends.”

“They were. We adopted Ming from China and she was older than most of the kids who come over. She’d been in the orphanage a long time. It was very bewildering for her at first and she was sort of the odd man out. I guess Sashi kind of felt like that too. They both didn’t quite fit in and they became immediate allies, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“Well, they just took to each other. Went to dance class together, summer day camp, you know, all the stuff little girls do together. If it wasn’t for Sashi, it would have taken Ming much longer to learn English. They actually became pretty popular, the two of them, and had a whole group of friends.”

“What happened?”

“Sashi stopped being a little girl and started having to be a grownup somewhere along the way. She stopped doing the stuff the other girls did. Eventually, only Ming was left.”

“But something happened.”

“Well, no, not really. There wasn’t a fight or anything like that. Sashi became, I don’t know, more and more withdrawn. She stopped calling Ming and Ming got tired of trying to do all the heavy lifting. My girl’s got lots of other friends and…”

“I understand. When was the last time they saw each other?”

“A few weeks before Sashi disappeared. We were in town at the dentist and Sashi was there too.”

“Did they talk?”

“Not much. It was awkward and kind of painful to watch.”

“What do you think of Max and Candy as parents?”

That question caught her off guard. She hemmed and hawed.

“Listen, Dawn, my old relationship with Candy isn’t as important as finding Sashi, so please don’t hold back.”

“I like Candy. She was always friendly and was really good with Sashi, but Max is…”

“Is what?”

“He pushed her too hard.”

“Dawn, I don’t like Max much myself, so don’t worry about it.”

“Kids grow up too fast anyway these days,” she said. “And Max, he just didn’t seem to understand that Sashi was just a little girl with a grown-up talent.”

“Thank you.”

I turned to walk away. I did it slowly, hoping Dawn Parson might call after me with some forgotten tidbit of information or an offer to talk with her daughter. Instead, I heard her front door open and close.

I drove slowly down Sea Cliff ‘s main street and saw that the Junction Gallery was closed. As it was just nine o’clock, the place probably would have been closed even if Candy weren’t looking for comfort and distraction in the arms of the eponymous Mr. Junction. I wasn’t going to judge her. That was somebody else’s job. Besides, judgmental people gave me a rash. You ever notice how judgmental bastards are always so fucking sure of themselves? Me, I stopped being sure of anything a long time ago.

I pulled to the curb and got out of the car. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through the plate glass windows. Sashi’s work covered the walls. In fact there was so much of her work on the walls, it looked like the Sashi Bluntstone Outlet Store. Displayed in one of the windows was an enlarged reproduction of a collection of very self-serving reviews. It was all breathless stuff:

Sashi Bluntstone is a genius!

Sashi Bluntstone is the Second Coming

Sashi Bluntstone cures cancer!

And it now seemed not only ridiculous, but morbid as well. I’d come back some other time.