CIA, FBI, Hamas, Satan, and, incredibly, the name Sashi. That stopped us in our tracks.
We sat Tierney down in a chair in a bedroom that had an electric heater going full blast against the chill. I told Jimmy to go stand by the heater and dry off as best he could. There was a flat screen TV. The TV was on but aimed so that the screen faced the aluminum-foiled windows. There was a shortwave radio, an old police scanner, and a laptop computer, but only a computer. There was no printer, no fax, no phone. The walls, ceiling, and floor were flat black and on each surface Tierney had painted a huge, bloody-faced Jesus, his eyes as black as the saints. I’d be lying to you if I said the Jesus heads didn’t creep me out.
You didn’t need a PhD in clinical psychology to figure out that John Tierney was schizophrenic and that, if he had meds, he hadn’t taken them recently. The house, his mad ramblings, all went a long way in explaining the wild, meandering comments Tierney posted following Nathan Martyr’s blog entries. Tierney’s posts often alluded to the ritual mutilation of Sashi Bluntstone and the use of her blood like that of a Passover lamb to ward off the angel of death. His psychosis didn’t mean he didn’t have Sashi or hadn’t had her or hadn’t killed her, but I doubted it. I could see that Jimmy’s presence in particular was making Tierney want to crawl out of his own skin. The last thing I needed was for him to go apeshit and for any of us to get hurt.
“Jimmy, why don’t you go take a look around, okay? John and I have to talk about some stuff that you can’t hear.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, and close the door behind you.”
That calmed Tierney down a little bit, but once Jimmy left, he seemed only vaguely aware of my presence. He was in a very different place than me and his odd affect gave new meaning to the phrase you can’t get there from here. I tried reaching him anyway.
“John,” I said, “you’ve written some pretty awful things about Sashi Bluntstone.”
“Satan.”
That was promising. “Is Sashi Satan?”
“Hamas is coming through the printers. Can’t you see them?”
So much for promising.
“Does Sashi have anything to do with the printers? If you killed Sashi, would her blood stop Hamas from coming through the printers?”
“St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter,” Tierney said, making the sign of the cross at me. Then he mumbled something I couldn’t make out at all. He got off the chair and kissed the floor at my feet. “St. Peter. St. Peter. St. Peter.”
We kept going round and round like that for another twenty minutes or so, but it got me nothing but a few more blessings and foot kisses. I found myself feeling nothing but sorry for John Tierney. Jimmy knocked.
“Come in,” I said.
“It’s pretty dark in the house, but I didn’t find anything but more crucifixes and paintings.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
I nodded for Jimmy to go first.
“Sorry to bother you, John,” I said. “I hope you find some peace or whatever it is you’re looking for. I just have to find Sashi.”
He didn’t move a muscle, his eyes still in that other place, but when I got to his bedroom door, he called to me.
“I didn’t take her,” he said in a calm coherent voice. “Her blood remains in the vessel of her body.”
I made sure not to turn back around and then just let myself out.
Back in my car, I was quiet. Jimmy wasn’t.
“Do me a favor and take me home. You don’t gotta pay me, but I’m freezing my balls off and I got work tomorrow.”
“Sure, no problem. I’m shot for the night anyway,” I said. “And don’t worry about the cash. You earned it. You up for this tomorrow night?”
“No problem, except maybe I’ll bring a Speedo and some extra clothes.”
Neither one of us said much after that.
TWENTY-ONE
The drive back from Babylon was the most hopeless hour I’d spent in a very very long time and it served as a cruel reminder of why I got out of the business of poking around in other people’s lives. Lives, even the ones that looked so orderly and beautiful from the outside, were messy, complicated things, often very ugly and painful things. And then there was the miraculous and the magical. Most people never experience either one. I’d had my brush with the miraculous on an April day over thirty years ago when I looked up and saw a rooftop water tank and thought, That’s where she is! That’s where Marina Conseco will be! In one of those. I was right that one time, but there wasn’t going to be a water tank miracle this go-round. I saw the futility of what I was trying to do reflected in the hopelessly lost eyes of John Tierney. What the hell was I doing looking for Sashi Bluntstone in such a place as that? She was dead. McKenna knew it. Even Max and Candy seemed to know. Was I the only one who refused to see the obvious?
When I dragged myself out of my car, my head throbbing from where it banged against the side porch railing, I was ready to pack it all in. So I had come to my senses and realized, what, that I wasn’t going to set the world right with some singularly miraculous redemptive act? Who was I kidding? What did I have to go back to? What was ahead of me, endless and endlessly boring days of hiding myself in my office? Days of planning new grand openings? Days of arguing with municipalities over the size of our store signage? Shopkeeping, is that really what I longed to return to? I was old and I was as lost in my way as poor John Tierney. At least he had enemies, real or imagined. My enemy was me. Then I heard Mary Lambert’s voice and all the selfpity receded.
“God, Moe, what happened to you?”
“Come on upstairs and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Except I didn’t, not at first. First I let Mary hold me in her arms and tell me everything was going to be all right. I was so smitten, I think I almost believed her. Then, when I cleaned myself up and put some ice to my head and had a drink, I told her about the case. I told her about who I was, who I really was.
“You see, Mary, the thing is, I’ve been selfish my whole life. I wanted life to be exciting. I wanted it to be about more than making money and settling down. I talked to you about Larry and Rico, but I didn’t talk much about me. I didn’t tell you about how I got my first wife killed or how I lost my daughter and a son that never had a chance to know me.”
“Now you’re just beating yourself up.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am.”
“Sure you are,” she said. “You’re frustrated. You think there’s a dead girl out there somewhere that needed saving and you couldn’t save her.”
“I don’t know where I would have been tonight if you didn’t show up at my door.”
She stepped very close to me and put her hand over my mouth. “Let’s not talk anymore, not now. Can’t we just be happy I’m here?”
I shook my head yes, but as she turned to the bedroom I saw that thing in her eyes again and this time I was sure it was guilt. Then I fell so deeply into her that I didn’t question it.
In the morning, the sheets were cold on her side of the bed. Mary Lambert was gone. And though I couldn’t possibly explain how I knew she would be, I knew she would be. The sex wasn’t any less satisfying. On the contrary, there was a depth and complexity to it that we hadn’t achieved during the previous night’s awkward unfamiliarity. Yet it was the sort of depth and complexity that only comes from pain. I knew something about that. It was a major feature of sex with Carmella. She made physical art of her pain and anguish and it was intoxicating. Even now, seven years removed from her touch, I found myself craving her, but what made her so addictive in bed also made her impossible to live with in the light of day. I didn’t know Mary Lambert well enough to make that judgment about her. Now I felt I never would. There was an air of permanence in her leaving. What there wasn’t was a note. I was at least thankful for that. It gave me hope, fragile and torturous as it was.
