“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 Sashi became, I don’t know, more and more withdrawn.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.
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?”
