“She is the biggest collector of that little-of Sashi Bluntstone’s work.” He put finger quotes around the word work. “You want to know who had motive, look at her.”
I handed him the balloon as promised. Martyr shoved it back into his pocket.
“When you get me the painting, you know where to find me.”
“And when I bring you that painting, I want names I couldn’t have found on my own or so help me, I’ll stick my gun down your throat and blow that collection of pus you call a brain out the back of your skull.”
He tried not to look rattled and failed. Jimmy Palumbo and I watched him recede into the night with the rest of the rats and roaches.
ELEVEN
I didn’t play hide and seek with the sun as I drove back to Long Island. There was no fooling myself or anyone else for that matter about where I was headed or how this would end. Until meeting Nathan Martyr, it hadn’t really occurred to me that there were people who actually had a rooting interest in Sashi Bluntstone’s death. I’d met some repulsive human beings in my life, but none more so than Martyr. Being around him made me want to be able to molt like a snake and shed any piece of me that touched him. Yet, hours later, after I’d taken Jimmy Palumbo out for steak and paid him two hundred bucks in cash, after I showered and laid sleeplessly in my bed, I realized Martyr had done me a favor. Anyone who opens your eyes is doing you a favor. It was one thing when Lenya at the Brill Gallery mentioned the correlation between death and the value of art. It was something else when that junkie piece of shit gave me the lesson.
Martyr planted a seed in my head and it had blossomed overnight. Although I was still operating under the premise that Sashi Bluntstone had been abducted by a predator, possibly one of the resentful and twisted wack jobs who visited Martyr’s website or the others like it, I could no longer ignore the chance that she had been taken out of sheer greed. Sure, I thought Max and Candy were hiding something from me, but I didn’t really think they had somehow manufactured the disappearance to drive up the value of Sashi’s work. Yes, they too would surely benefit financially from Sashi’s death, at least in the short term, but neither Max nor Candy struck me as a criminal mastermind. Nor could I believe either of them was that cold-blooded. Candy couldn’t even hide her affair from her husband and Max’s grief was too real. Okay, maybe I was too close to Candy and maybe I was being naive, but it was the cops’ job to be objective and unsentimental, not mine.
I’d put in a call to McKenna and we’d agreed to talk at some point during the day, though he refused to be pinned down about timing. That was fine by me. He couldn’t accuse me of keeping information from him if we couldn’t manage to reconnect. Even if we did, I planned on being as vague as possible. I hadn’t been on the job for decades and I was now pretty much just a civilian, but old resentments persist.
I spent my entire ten years as a cop in the bag, in uniform. Uniforms do the grunt work. It’s their lives that get put on the line with every traffic stop, with every domestic violence call, but at crime scenes they’re afterthoughts, blue window dressing there to string up the yellow tape and to say, “Please stand back.” Even now it eats at me that I was treated as a stalking horse, that I was the first one through the door to find the body of a woman beaten to death or the rag doll body of a baby dangling head first from its crib, but that I was shut out completely once the detectives had taken my statement. McKenna had been fair with me up to a point and I wasn’t going to do anything to risk Sashi’s life. Beyond that, however, regardless of the promises I made to him, that was as far as I was willing to go. This case was as much mine now as his.
Then my phone rang and the load on my shoulders lightened.
“Moe? Is that you?” asked the raspy voice on the other end of the line.
“Mary Lambert, how did you get this number?”
“I have my ways.”
“Apparently.”
“You don’t mind, do you?”
“Mind? Not at all. So you got back for the conference call all right?”
“Your directions were perfect. I found my way just fine. Thanks again.”
“No problem. What’s up?”
There was a hesitant silence and then, “I hope this doesn’t put you off, but I haven’t really been able to concentrate since yesterday.”
“You’ve popped into my thoughts once or twice yourself,” I confessed.
“Do you think we could have dinner tonight? Until you say yes, I’ll be worthless to my employer and our clients.”
Now I hesitated. I wanted to say yes, to stop the car and pump my fist, but I couldn’t help but think about Sashi Bluntstone locked up in a dark, musty room, scared to death, waiting to be sodomized again or, worse, her cold body rotting under a pile of moldering leaves by the side of a highway somewhere. On the other hand, unless a major break fell into my lap, there would be no value in my sitting home alone in my condo. Mary misread my hesitation.
“I knew I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry. Please for-”
“It’s not that. Believe me, it’s not that at all, but I can’t explain right now. Can I give you an enthusiastic but tentative yes?”
“I’ll take it.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“That’s perfect.” Her voice smiled. “Bye, Moe Prager.”
“Bye, Mary Lambert.”
The Junction Gallery was open this time and I strolled in like a curious passerby. I don’t know, regardless of what Wallace Rusk and the Nathan Martyrs of the world had to say, I liked Sashi’s paintings. They were vibrant and whimsical and free of the constraints of European schools of thought and unconscious processes and whatever other rules the “serious” art world wanted to accuse her of breaking. If this was heresy, sign me up. Wouldn’t be the first time I was on that side of things.
The Junction Gallery wasn’t anything like the Brill. The Brill, in its stark whiteness, was nearly devoid of a sense of commerce. And with the junkie’s crap on display, it was downright anti-capitalist. The Junction Gallery, on the other hand, with its exposed brick walls, neon signs, colorful brochures and flyers, Kenny G soundtrack, and small DVD/CD and framed poster section, felt more like a Disney Store at the mall. Of course nearly all of the original paintings, framed prints, and DVDs were either produced by or were about Sashi Bluntstone. The only missing items were stuffed Sashi dolls.
There were six other people in the gallery with me. A young Japanese couple seemed to be engaged in a serious debate over the aesthetics of a Sashi painting that featured bright orange swirls, bold black streaks, and layers of yellow drips. An elderly couple just walked the gallery shaking their heads as they hesitated briefly by each painting. I wasn’t sure if their head shaking was commentary on the paintings themselves or on Sashi Bluntstone’s fate. In a corner by another of the paintings-this one predominantly textured shades of green and blue-stood the two remaining souls. She was a woman in her late fifties, thinset and lock-jawed, who looked like she just stepped out of a Talbot’s window display. She was so WASPy I thought I might have to check for wings beneath her tweed blazer. At her left shoulder was a tall, athletic man of forty with longish, slicked-back salt and pepper hair. Dressed in pine green corduroy pants over trail boots, a light green flannel shirt, and sweater vest, he struck me as an L.L. Bean man. By process of elimination, I pegged him as Randy Junction. I ambled casually over to where I could catch something of their conversation. As soon as he opened his mouth, he confirmed not only his identity, but the woman’s as well.
“Come on, Sonia,” he said, “you know the market for Sashi’s stuff is back through the roof. Don’t come in here and try and cut me off at the knees. We’ve been doing business with each other too long for that.”
“Thirty is as high as I’m going to go for this.”
He laughed, but not because he was really amused. “Sonia, Sonia, Sonia… I happen to know you paid fifty last year for ‘Red Waves’ to that collector in Ojai.”
“That was last year, Randy.”
“And this isn’t ‘Red Waves.’ ‘Lime Ocean Blue’ is the real thing and the subtlety of it shows Sashi was
