THIRTY-SEVEN
I got the point of last rites and wakes, funerals, and spadefuls of dirt thrown on sunken caskets. I understood funeral pyres and scattering ashes on the wind. In my middle age, I’d even come to grips with the tradition of sitting shiva, but what the fuck was the point of a memorial service? It was like group masturbation, a communal circle jerk. That’s what I kept thinking as speaker after speaker got up in front of the crowd and spewed polite niceties about Sashi Bluntstone. Talk about being damned with faint praise… I hadn’t known her and now I never would, but, Jesus Christ, didn’t anyone like her? The only people who had genuinely heartfelt things to say about Sashi herself were Ming, the last real friend Sashi had had; Ming’s mom, Dawn Parson; and old Ben Schare, who used to walk his dog along the beach with Sashi and Cara. All the rest of them could do was to fall over each other in praise of the kid’s work, her artistic vision and talent. Neither Candy nor Max had it in them to speak, thank goodness. I’d already done a slug of bourbon, a single, and two big double Dewars. Listening to them make a public spectacle of their grief would have pushed me over the top. McKenna was already there.
He was buzzed when we walked into the house. Now he was absolutely legless, which he proved by loudly stumbling out of the cavernous room in which the service was being held.
“Where’s the fucking bathroom in this mausoleum?” he shouted angrily at the security man who helped him to his feet and presumably the facilities.
As I stood there half listening to the moneychangers in sheep’s clothing drone on about Sashi’s brilliance, I felt like I was trapped in a made-for-TV Agatha Christie movie or a game of Clue. Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick. God knows, the setting was perfect: a country manor house. Shit, we even had the lead detective and private investigator on hand. The doubts I had about Tierney reasserted themselves and, with a push from my scotch consumption, my mind drifted off, meandering through all the scenarios I had tried to work through on my ride home from Declan Carney’s.
Yet, none of those scenarios had made any sense at the time. That, or they all led to obstacles that could not overcome logic or the facts, but I hadn’t entertained the thought that more than one or two of them-Sonia, Junction, Candy, maybe even Max-were working in concert. They all certainly had motives, whether it was greed or debt or a need for escape. It wasn’t a big leap to see how they might’ve planned a fake kidnapping that had gone terribly wrong. My guess was that McKenna and the cops had had that very same thought early on in their investigations and had clung stubbornly to it until it was too late. But even if they had all been in it together, Sashi having been killed accidentally, there was still John Tierney, the photographs, and the bones. The only link there was me. Then, just as something flashed in the corner of my mind-a vague image from the videos showing all around the house-I was roused from my trance by a loud ovation. When my eyes looked outward again, I noticed that all the assembled were looking at me as they stood and applauded.
“Yes, it is Mr. Moses Prager to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude,” said Sonia Barrows-Willingham, now at the podium. “It was through his efforts and his alone, that we learned of poor Sashi’s fate. Without his efforts on her behalf, we would all have been left to suffer endless years of torment over what had become of her.”
I don’t think I ever felt more uncomfortable in my life. My skin crawled at the perversity of the spectacle and it was all I could do not to run. I bowed my head and walked quickly out of the room. I found the bar and McKenna found me.
“Two double Dewars,” he said before I could breathe.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough, McKenna?”
“Enough! I’ve only just begun to fight.”
“Somehow, I don’t think scotch was what John Paul Jones had in mind.”
“You like Led Zeppelin?”
“Not that John Paul Jones,” I said.
“I know, you asshole.” He slapped my back hard, a little too hard, as the barman put our drinks down and the memorial crowd began shuffling out of the big room. “So that was a nice round of applause there.”
“Nice isn’t the word I would use.”
He either hadn’t heard me or didn’t agree. “You get a hundred grand and a standing fucking O and I get to become Detective Cheese-eater and rat. IA, here I come.” He wasn’t exactly whispering as he spoke. Heads turned our way.
“Try and keep it down, okay?”
He shrugged his shoulders and put his hand over his mouth. “Yeah, we wouldn’t want people to stare.”
I didn’t think pushing back was the best strategy with McKenna in his current state. Push a drunk and he pushes back harder. This was the classic bar brawl setup: two drunks in shitty moods, one with a particularly nasty bug up his ass. Frankly, in a different setting, I might have been willing to go at it with him. I was pretty fed up with the whole situation too. I hadn’t asked for any of it: the money or the applause. Over the last three or four weeks I’d found a dead baby in its crib and seen the ugly side of things I thought I’d left behind years ago. I found love or what I thought might be love and had it walk away from me, and to top it off, my daughter was dating the son of a guy who had sold me out and tried to get me killed. A fight was just what the doctor ordered, but instead of throwing punches, we clinked glasses.
“ Slainte,” I said.
“ Pog mo thoin, Prager.” Kiss my ass.
We drank. I sipped, he guzzled, slamming his empty down on top of the bar like it was a shot glass.
“Again!”
“Yo, McKenna, there are other people on line. Let’s slow down a little, okay, buddy.”
“Buddy! I ain’t your fuckin’ buddy. Do you think you’d get a standing O if these pricks knew you withheld evidence?”
Now all heads were turned, everyone staring our way. You could almost hear the whir and whoosh of the machines keeping Barrows-Willingham’s husband alive up on the third floor. The time for pushback had arrived, but I didn’t want to do it on the main stage. There was only one way to manage it.
“All right, come on, let’s go do this somewhere else.”
McKenna wasn’t expecting that. He was an aging cop, but I was just old, about twenty years his senior, and I don’t think he expected me to bite. Unfortunately, he was a little too drunk to let reason enter into his decision. I had hoped he would take it as an offer to talk it out.
“Okay, fuckhead.” Apparently, talking it out wasn’t an option.
“Dad, don’t do this!” Sarah screamed, pushing her way through the crowd with Paul’s help.
“I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing.”
“But you-”
“Let him go, Sarah,” Paul said, looking me straight in the eye and pulling my daughter gently away from me. “Trust him.”
I felt in a time warp, like Rico Tripoli was talking to me out of the past, telling me he had my back. Funny thing is, Rico never really had my back, but for some reason I knew his son did.
“Come on, McKenna, follow me,” I said.
I had an idea of where I was going as I’d walked the house in my search for a quiet spot. I marched us towards a den that was full of soft and cushy furniture and not as many breakable objects d’art as in some other parts of the house. There was a giant, wall-mounted, flat screen TV in there too, but unless I missed a room with a boxing ring, this was the best I could do on short notice. To my dismay, the crowd seemed to be following us and at the head of the mob was our hostess.
“Come on, Prager,” McKenna shouted behind me, “you trying to tire me out or what?”
“Just shut up. You’ll get a piece of me soon enough.”
Then we all seemed to spill into the den I was looking for. The TV was on, but even in my agitated state, that same vague image caught my eye once again. Before I could fully focus on the image, McKenna charged me, knocking me back onto the thick Berber carpeting. That was a good thing because my head thumped down pretty good. McKenna was on top of me and I could hear and feel that the fall had taken as much or more of a toll on him as on me. I chopped the side of my left fist down into his right kidney and the air rushed out of him with a sick groan. He went limp. With that, I bridged my neck and shoulders and rolled him off me. I stood. He staggered to his feet.
