Innocent monster

EIGHT

If it sounds like I know what I’m doing, it’s bullshit. I’ve never really known what I was doing, certainly not in the wine business and not as a PI. What I said to Sarah at the restaurant was true: I’m more lucky than good. I’m a stumbler. Always have been. I fall into things, sometimes the right things. It isn’t in my nature to follow a set of rules even when I know the rules to follow. I’m the musician who plays it by ear, by feel, and once I get a sense of things, I stick with it. The only two places I ever felt comfortable or like I really understood how to do my job was on the basketball court and on my beat in the Six-O. My ankle having been shattered by a bullet when Katy was murdered, it had been seven years since I set foot on a basketball court. I’d been off the job since 1977.

When we went into business together, Carmella tried to show me how real investigators worked a case. She knew. She had learned the hard way, from the bottom up. And her bottom was several sub-basements below the detectives she learned from. Starting out, she had more strikes against her than a tall lightning rod in a flat field. She was young, female, Puerto Rican, and beautiful. Advantages in many lines of work, but not in the NYPD in the ‘80s. As she was wont to say, “It’s not about whether you stand or squat to pee. My gold shield is about being a good detective, not about my pussy or being Puerto Rican.” And she was a good detective, but I never learned to do it her way. I was always going to pee standing up and I was always going to be a stumbler. The one aspect of the process I was good at was people. I understood people. That’s why I didn’t ask the questions everyone else asked. And what good would it have done me to ask Candy or Max or Dawn Parson if they knew anybody who might want to harm Sashi? If they knew, the cops would already be on it. If they didn’t know, my asking wasn’t going to make them give a magical answer.

Frustrated by the lack of information from Max and Candy, I decided it was time to go off the map, to stray from the list of people McKenna intended for me to reinterview. That’s why, when I walked away from the Junction Gallery, I headed east, even more deeply into the enclaves of the rich and richer. The Cold Spring Harbor/Lloyd’s Neck area of Long Island’s North Shore was physically beautiful and a bit more isolated than the Sea Cliff/Glen Cove area I’d just come from. It was all little hidden inlets on the Sound, twisty private roads, hills, and old majestic trees. This was Movers-and-Shakersville, where, as my mom might say, all the big machas lived. Around these parts, the maids had their own cleaning ladies. Along the way I passed the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory-run by that brilliant lunatic and codiscoverer of the DNA double-helix, James Watson-a fish hatchery, a few exclusive marinas, and a horse farm or two.

The Cold Spring Harbor Museum of Modern Art was located on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound on one side and a small, treelined cove on another. It was a very dramatic structure that looked like a series of glass and steel blocks piled atop one another at odd angles. Too bad it was nearly impossible to find and harder to get into than Skull and Bones. You’ve got to love the rich. The museum was for the public, but their notion of the public and my notion of the public didn’t seem to overlap much. The parking lot was nearly empty but for a classic gull wing Mercedes Benz and a five-year-old Honda Civic parked in the spot furthest away from the main entrance. I parked close to the Mercedes, but not close enough to clip its wings.

When I tried to push in the front door, I nearly unhinged my wrist. Neither my cursing in pain nor the noise at the door seemed to rouse anyone’s attention, so I rapped hard on the glass with my good hand. That stirred the beast. A security guard who looked like an escapee from the Arnold Schwarzenegger School of Acting loomed before me. He was dressed in a neat blue blazer, gray slacks, and shiny black shoes. His impassive white face looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it. He pointed a huge index finger at the intercom to the left of the door.

“Are you a town resident, sir?” he asked, his deep voice only adding to his already serious intimidation factor.

I pressed the talk button. “No.”

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“An appointment? No. This is a public museum, right?”

“Yes, sir, but to town residents only at this hour. Non-residents do need an appointment before noon.” He had a bit of southern cooking in his voice, southern Brooklyn.

“I’m here to see Wallace Rusk, not the art.”

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“You’re kidding me, right? Don’t you have any other lines in this play?”

“Excuse me, sir, but do you have an appointment?”

I thought I saw the corner of his lip curl up a little.

“Funny man, huh?” I reached into my back pocket and did something that was either going to get me a face to face with Rusk or arrested… maybe both. I clanked my old NYPD badge hard against the door glass. “That’s my appointment, motherfucker. Now open the fucking door!”

His face remained impassive, but he unlocked the door and held it open for me ever so politely.

“Sorry,” he said, “just doing my job, you know?”

I didn’t push it. First, because he was right. Second, because I didn’t want him to take a closer look at my tin.

“Forget it.”

“I’ll get Mr. Rusk for you. What’s your name, Officer?”

“Prager, but I’d rather go surprise him.”

“He’s not gonna like that.”

“Too fucking bad.”

“Hey, I need this job and trust me, that man’ll can my ass if you go in unannounced.”

Then it hit me. “You’re Jimmy Palumbo, offensive tackle out of Rutgers,” I said, snapping my fingers. “The Jets drafted you third round ten years ago, right?”

But instead of smiling, the big man’s expression turned sour. “Eleven years ago. Might as well have been a million.”

“You went to New Utrecht High, right?”

“Lafayette.”

“I went to Lincoln when Lafayette was our big rival… a long time before you went to school. Really rare for a local guy to make it in the NFL.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You fucked up your knees, didn’t you?”

That didn’t improve his mood any. “Both of ‘em, yeah. You got a good memory for bad things, Officer.”

I rolled up my pants and showed him the maze of scars that covered my knee. I would have also showed him the scars on my ankle, but that was a road better left untraveled. Besides, these days, I only limped on the inside.

“Holy shit!”

“No arthroscopic surgery when I went down,” I said. “They used to cut you open like a fish and see what they could see. I had three surgeries, four weeks of PT with each one, and a pain script.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Me too. So why you working this gig?”

“Divorce,” he said as if it explained everything.

Maybe it did. My two trips down that path had been amicable, but that was more rare than you might think. Some of the work we did at Prager amp; Melendez had been for divorce lawyers. We didn’t handle the slimy end of things. We didn’t videotape or tap phones or entrap spouses out for the night with the boys or girls. No, we were usually hired after the papers were served, when motel bills, fancy gift receipts, and hidden assets needed to be tracked down. Divorce tended to get ugly and very expensive, emotionally and financially, for everyone involved.

“Kids?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Twin girls. The bitch moved ‘em out of state. Like cutting the heart right outta me, taking them from me that way. Things are a little better now.”

I was a big football fan and this was all very fascinating, but I didn’t drag my ass up here to get Jimmy Palumbo’s autograph or to discuss his past domestic woes. He did seem like a nice enough guy, though, and I thought he’d be fun to have a beer with.

“You ever work any private security?” I asked.

“Used to, not so much no more. Why you wanna know?”

“While I’m in with Rusk, write your contact info down on a piece of paper for me. I have some connections and maybe I can get you some outside work.”

“That would be great. Thanks.”

“Okay, you can call Rusk now. Which way to his office?”

“Walk through the galleries and take the elevator down to the lower level, turn left and you’ll see his office door.”

As I walked across the stark, hardwood floor, Palumbo spoke my name in hushed tones. Made me smile to hear it. It had been thirty years since someone called me Officer Prager. I’d worry about how to explain away my lie when I got to Rusk’s office. For the moment, I was busy admiring the views through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls that let ambient natural light flood into the gallery space. The views were nearly as impressive as the Lichtenstein and the Warhol, the Wesselmann and the Rauschenberg I passed on my way to the elevator.

Rusk met me at the elevator door and looked pretty much how I expected him to look. He was small, in his early sixties with delicate features and a ring of neatly groomed gray hair around a bald pate. He wore a blue camel hair blazer-gold buttons et al-with a gold and red family crest embroidered on the pocket. There was a red silk hanky in the pocket that matched his French-cuffed shirt. His tie was a perfectly knotted and textured piece of gold silk. His teeth were white and straight, of course, and the crimson-framed glasses he wore over his blue eyes cost more than the Honda in the parking lot. I couldn’t tell you the cost of the antique Patek Philipe watch he stared at impatiently as he waited to see who would get things going. I guess he got tired of showing me his watch.

“What can I do for you, Officer Prager?”

“This visit isn’t official,” I said, trying to sidestep the lie I’d told upstairs.

He furrowed his brow. “Then I’m afraid I don’t-”

“Sashi Bluntstone.”

“Oh, dear. Has there been some awful news?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Nothing in particular. It is simply that the child has been missing for some time now and I could think of no other reason for a police official to come to me.”

“That’s reasonable,” I said. “Again, Mr. Rusk, my visit isn’t official. I’ve been hired by the Bluntstone family to investigate their daughter’s disappearance, to make sure the police are doing all they can.”

“Investigate? Why on earth would you come see me? You couldn’t possibly think I had anything to do with her disappearance.”

“Well, you are one of Sashi’s most vociferous critics.”

“Vociferous… my, my, no dumb cops on this beat, eh?”

“I also know how to tie my own shoes and everything.”

“Please, Officer Prager, I’ve been rude. Come into my office and let us discuss this.”

Rusk’s office was startling. The back wall was a huge pane of glass not unlike those on the gallery levels upstairs and it looked out onto the Sound and the southern shore of western Connecticut. The furnishings themselves were all very austere, almost industrial, and there was not a stitch of art on the walls or anywhere else in the office. Rusk gestured at a metal chair in front of his desk and when I sat in it, he retreated around the desk and sat in a metal mesh desk chair.

“As you were saying…”

“No, I don’t think you had anything to do with Sashi’s disappearance. If the cops did, they would have been here already.”

“Forgive me, Officer Prager, but I now find myself even more confused by your presence here.”

“First, Mr. Rusk, please call me Moe or Mr. Prager, if that is more comfortable for you. Second thing is that although the case is over three weeks old, I’m new to it and playing catch-up. The police do things their way and I do things my way. Why I’m here is to try and get some understanding of why Sashi’s work and Sashi herself seem to make people like yourself, serious people involved in the art world, so incensed and crazed.”

“That, Mr. Prager, is a very easy question to answer. Art, in this case, painting, is more, much more than what appears on the canvas. Art is also what goes on in the artist’s mind before and during and after putting brush to canvas. Art is a continuum that stretches from conception to reaction and beyond.”

“Okay, let’s say I buy that. On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of Sashi’s work,” I said, “and I know this is going to upset you, but it’s pretty good. I’m no art critic and certainly not the curator of a museum, but I know a little bit about art. Her work is undeniably reminiscent of Kandinsky and Pollock.”

Rusk clapped his hands together and laughed. “Ah, Mr. Prager, for an artist to produce work that is reminiscent of her forebears, mustn’t she be aware of those forebears? Jackson Pollock didn’t pull his art out of…”

“His ass?”

“I was thinking thin air, but your phrasing makes the point more emphatically. Pollock understood European Surrealism and had studied Jung in order to gain access to his unconscious processes and to free himself of conventionally constructed art.”

“Okay, then what you’re saying is that he knew what he was doing.”

“Exactly. The very concept of an unschooled prodigy doing abstract expressionism, a style that merged two sophisticated art styles-surrealism and cubism-with automatic process is absurd, simply impossible. Look, Mr. Prager, had Sashi Bluntstone made exquisite realistic paintings beyond her years, maybe she would be taken seriously, but anyone can smear paint on a canvas and say they are aping Pollock… including an ape!”

“Don’t you think her paintings have any merit at all?”

“Yes, I suppose, but not to a serious artist and not in the serious art world. I don’t so much object to the paintings as much as I do to where fools and uneducated critics place them. And in all honesty, Mr. Prager, I am not close to being Sashi Bluntstone’s most vociferous or meanspirited critic. Here…” Rusk tapped something out on the keyboard of his wafer-thin laptop and spun it around so as to face me.

I could scarcely believe what appeared on the screen. It was a rendering of three crosses on a hill under an ominous black sky. There were bloodied and brutalized bodies crucified on two of the crosses. To the far left was a naked man, hands amputated, his torso speared in so many places he looked like a pin cushion. The plaque behind his head read Kinkade. On the far right cross was a young girl’s body, her vagina afire, an arrow through her head, and her torso covered in blood splatter a la Pollock. The letters on the plaque behind her head spelled out Bluntstone. On the middle cross was the body of a frail young man wearing a thorny crown and the mutilation to his body was meant to replicate the damage done to Christ. His expression was beatific. His plaque read Martyr. I’d seen enough and turned the computer back around to Rusk.

“You see my point?” Rusk asked.

“Who is this guy?”

“Nathan Martyr. About ten years ago he was a hot new commodity, but his work quickly fell out of favor and he devolved into a very bitter man. He has a particular distaste for Thomas Kinkade and Sashi Bluntstone. But he’s not alone. There are many such sites.”

“Do you happen to know where I can find Mr. Martyr?”

“I don’t have an address for him, but he used to show at the Brill Gallery on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. They should have an address for him.”

I stood up. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Rusk. It’s been enlightening.”

“My pleasure, really,” he said, shaking my hand. “I do hope you find the child. Maybe you can get her away from those exploitive monsters she was born to so she can get a real artist’s education.”

“I’ll settle for finding her alive.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.”

“That’s okay.”

He walked me to the elevator and wished me farewell. Upstairs a few visitors-older women-were roaming about the museum. They were perfectly put together, tanned from weekends in the sun, every stitch of their clothing and every accessory just so. I guessed they were about the same age as my mom when she passed away. Yet my mom had looked so much older. My late friend Israel Roth once said that money was a retreat, not a fortress, and that the rich suffered as much as any of us. Some days that was easier to swallow than others. Today it was going down hard.

Jimmy Palumbo stopped me on the way out and handed me his contact information. He thanked me, but didn’t seem encouraged.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll call.”

“Yeah, no offense, but I heard that before. Last coach I had told me he cut me so another team could pick me up, that a few teams had shown interest in me. He told me not to worry. That I’d get a call from somebody. Yeah, well, I’m still waiting for the call.”

“No sweat. I understand.”

“And I’m sorry for going on about my kids,” he said. “It’s just that I miss ‘em.”

“My daughter didn’t talk to me for a year and it still hasn’t stopped hurting, so no need to apologize.”

I waved the paper at him and waved goodbye. Nothing I had to say was going to make him feel any better. I’d been cut by the NYPD. At least they’d had the good sense not to promise me anything but my pension as they shoved me out the door.