“Your sorrow was misguided. Sorrow often is.”
“So are guilt and blame, Carney.”
“Oh, do you really think so, Mr. Prager? I think the guilty know exactly who they are. Goodbye.”
When I got downstairs with the paintings, a workman stopped me from going to my car as a yellow front-end loader scooped up huge bucketfuls of chopped-up asphalt and dropped them into the box of a Mack dump truck. I turned and looked up and saw an open third-floor window. Declan Carney was staring down intently at the commotion in the street, but I was fairly certain he was seeing and hearing very different things than was I. I tried to imagine what he was seeing and hearing, yet no matter how hard I tried to hear the screams of the Iraqi soldiers Carney had suffocated beneath the chuff and grunts of the bulldozer and desert sands, I could not hear them. I noticed Carney wiping his cheeks. I could not see his tears.
THIRTY-FIVE
I was never much of a New Year’s Eve kind of guy. I guess I’m not much on holidays all the way around. I never liked being told how to feel or when to feel it. Besides, holidays, all of them, not only Christmas, seemed either too commercial or artificial or both. I liked Passover. I liked everything about it because, even if you were in the most fucked-up mood imaginable, there’s no two ways to feel about being freed from slavery. Then again, if I was destined to like a holiday, Passover was going to be the one. My name is Moses.
Oddly enough, I found myself on the couch half watching football, drinking some more of Paul Stern’s single snob whiskey and missing the hell out of Mary Lambert. I started out mad, but by my third sip it was all just melting away into missing her. She lied to me. PIs are liars. I was a liar. I made a mental list of who I hadn’t lied to over the last few weeks. Very short list, that. But Mary and I had chemistry. I felt it. That couldn’t have been a lie. It just couldn’t. Can women fake orgasms? The answer’s pretty obviously yes and I didn’t even like thinking about who might have acted her part in my bed. What pissed me off about the concept of faking it is that women assume we’re so fucking fragile that we need to feel the roof rafters shudder when they come. Well, no, that’s not what pissed me off. What pissed me off was that they were right. We are that fragile. There are things, however, that can’t be faked. That’s what got to me, her walking away from a rare kind of connection that no one should ever walk away from. But what did I know? Maybe I had been played for a love-hungry idiot. Maybe there wasn’t anything in the world that couldn’t be faked.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t live without someone to come home to, someone to need, and love. I functioned pretty well on my own the whole time I was on the job and I managed to dress and feed myself for the last seven years without someone packing my lunch and laying my clothes out on the bed-but I didn’t want to just manage or function anymore. My life always had more meaning when I was with Katy as it did during my brief time with Carmella. I didn’t want to die alone in a wheelchair-accessible apartment that Sarah and her husband-to-be- named-later set up for me in their house. Sixty might be the new forty, but there was no such thing as the new dead. Same as it ever was. There was no denying that I was closer to the end, a lot closer, than the beginning.
By my second glass of scotch, it dawned on me that I’d only felt the kind of connection and chemistry I had with Mary Lambert twice in my life. Now both those women were gone. That’s why I cursed Mary Lambert or whatever the hell her name was for walking away from it. You don’t just walk away from such a rare gift. That’s why people want to live forever, you know. Not to go through the daily grind and pain and bullshit, but for the hope of those few things that make your heart race. What’s the rest of it worth, really? And somehow, even with my Scrooge-ian take on holidays, I just knew Mary would have been the perfect woman to spend New Year’s Eve with. She would have made it fun. I saw in her someone to make the other stuff worth it.
I suppose I was in an especially grumpy mood because I’d hoped Sarah might go to dinner with me, but she said she’d already made plans. Then she rubbed salt in the wound by telling me she couldn’t come to Sashi’s memorial with me either. I didn’t press her for details. We were still making a comeback. We weren’t quite there yet. Even my newfound friend and scotch supplier, Paul Stern, turned me down. After I hung up the phone with him, I started grumbling to myself about him being just like Rico, and that was before I had anything to drink. Aaron invited me to spend the night with him and Cindy, but regardless of my love for them, I politely said no. For the last thirty years they’d gotten together with the same group of friends and played board games and watched the ball drop. It was tradition. Theirs, not mine. I would rather have gone to the dentist.
I actually did call Jimmy Palumbo and offered to meet him in the City or somewhere out on the Island and buy him a New Year’s steak dinner. He turned me down flat, but in the nicest possible way and it had nothing to do with his latest financial gains. Well, maybe it did, sort of.
“Sorry, man, I just can’t. I’d really like too, but I gotta say no.” In the background, I heard a young dog yapping for attention. “Excuse me for a second, Moe.” Then to the dog, “Okay, you, calm down. Atta girl, calm down. Good girl.”
“New puppy?”
“Had her a couple a weeks.”
“What about tonight?” I asked. “A family party or something?”
“Nah, I’m packing up and gettin’ outta here. There’s nothing for me here anymore except bad memories. I gave my notice to the museum yesterday and the house goes on the market later this week. I need a new start.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m puttin’ some stuff in storage, gettin’ on the boat with the pup, and going. I guess I’ll head south first with the shitty weather here and all. Then, who knows.”
“When you leaving?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“New year, new start,” I said. “Nice symmetry.”
“Maybe, but probably I’ll leave the day after tomorrow. Loose ends and shit. You know?”
“I know. Well, good luck, brother. I hope things work out for you.”
“Me too, but I got a good feeling about it. Things are different now. Thanks for everything, man.”
I’d thought about offering up some tired platitudes about there being no escape from yourself and that wherever a man goes, he takes his woes with him. No need to inflict my rotten mood on him, I thought, and just said goodbye.
Another scotch later, I actually found myself wondering what Dr. Ogologlu was doing, if his family was still in Amsterdam. My stubborn refusal to buy into the facts about Tierney’s role in Sashi Blunt-stone’s death had finally begun to fade. I think it was when Declan Carney implied that my desperately clinging to belief in Tierney’s innocence had made me yet another victim that I began to wake up as if from a fitful sleep. On my ride back from Long Island City, I’d gone over all the possible scenarios and the only one that made any sense involved John Tierney and Sashi. I could manage to implicate Randy Junction, Sonia Barrows-Willingham, Max, and even Candy in some of those scenarios, but I couldn’t see it ending up the way it had. I was tempted to call both McKenna and the doctor and swear that I’d finally seen the light. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! But what would they have cared? Besides, I was going to see McKenna soon enough.
When I woke up on the couch, the ball had dropped, the new year had come in without my notice, and the world had moved on. It always does.
THIRTY-SIX
There was a rather bizarre carnival-like atmosphere to the whole thing. Mrs. Sonia Barrows-Willingham had hired a valet parking service to handle the cars of the memorial attendees. And by the look of the makeshift parking lot, there were going to be more people here than at an April Mets game at Shea during the mid-’70s. I arrived at about the same time as Detective McKenna and he was in a fairly pissy mood to begin with. Maybe a little drunk too.
