“Pretty good for an old fuck,” he said, rubbing his kidney.
He swung a roundhouse right at me, but he was even drunker than I thought and I easily ducked the punch, delivering a right to his liver. He went down on his knees and vomited all over the nice carpet. Everyone’s attention was on him, but mine was on the screen. There it was again.
“What’s this?” I shouted, pointing at the screen.
“A Panasonic,” an unseen voice answered back.
“No. What’s this playing? What am I watching?”
“These are videos I had of Sashi’s shows,” Sonia said, somewhat disappointed that the fight hadn’t made it out of the first round. “I had a film editor put them together to run in a loop and had them transferred to a disc. Why do you ask?”
“I’m not sure, something caught my eye.” I turned and watched some more.
People were attending to McKenna, who was on his knees, drinking bottled water as someone applied a cold cloth to the back of his neck. Staff had appeared out of nowhere and were busily blotting up the mess the detective had made on the rug in front of him.
“What is it, Dad? What do you see?” Sarah and Paul stood on either side of me.
“I don’t know,” I said, watching scenes of Sashi and Ming and Cara the dog racing about as adults ogled her paintings, sipping Chardon-nay and acting as if they were in the presence of greatness. It was all so surreal. “I don’t know. Something. There! Stop. There!” I shouted. “Go back. Somebody stop it!”
Sonia found the controller and flashed back in that odd, still frame-by-frame way digitized video does.
“There!”
“For goodness sakes, what is it?” Sonia was screaming now.
“Him!” I pointed to a large man in the background, his arms folded across his massive chest, his eyes focused on Sashi in the foreground. “What’s he doing there?”
“Security,” Candy said as she stepped forward. “He worked for a security firm we hired to keep an eye on Sashi after she had gotten some weird fan letters.”
I shoved my way towards McKenna and yanked him up onto his feet. “Come on, McKenna. Let’s go.”
“Where’re we going?”
“To catch the real killer.”
“What? Not that-”
“Somebody call the Suffolk County Police Marine Bureau and tell them to get a boat to Santapogue Point.”
McKenna squinted at me. “Santapogue Point. Where the hell is that?”
“It’s on the Great South Bay in Babylon. I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go!”
There had been another link between John Tierney and Sashi Bluntstone, only it hadn’t dawned on me until that moment.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Fuck!
There was a three-inch blanket of white on the ground, the cars, the long driveway, and darkness had crept in under the cover of snow. Wind howled, icy flakes lashing our faces. I reached a gloveless hand into my pocket for my claim check and remembered that I’d given it to Sonia. No way I was going back inside.
“McKenna, give me your claim check.”
“Huh?”
“Your car claim check, give it to me.”
He was dazed, a little child just woken from sleep, patting his pockets down without rhyme or reason. The fight had braced him a bit and the vomiting had done him some good, but he was still drunk. Only time was going to make that better. Even fueled by my adrenaline rush, I wasn’t exactly feeling like a prize rooster either. Finally, McKenna pulled the playing card-sized stub out of his coat pocket. Paul Stern rushed past, grabbed it, and handed it to the eager valet.
“Neither of you guys is in any shape to drive,” Paul said, “and especially not in this weather.”
“This is police business, Paul.”
He flipped open a shield at me. “And I’m an assistant State’s Attorney in Windham County, Vermont. I told you I was a lawyer, but you never asked what kind. You probably assumed I was an ambulance chaser?”
He was right. That’s exactly what I’d assumed. “You’re out of your jurisdiction,” was all I managed to say.
“And you’re a drunk sixty-year-old man who hasn’t worn a badge in almost thirty years. Besides, I grew up in Vermont and was raised to drive in snow like this with my eyes closed. I’ve seen how downstate New Yorkers drive in this soup and it’s not pretty.”
McKenna opened his mouth to say something, but he either forgot what he had to say or thought better of it. Then the valet pulled up to the front entrance with the detective’s car. Paul Stern handed the kid a fiver and went straight for the driver’s seat.
“In or out, gentlemen? Come on.”
We both got in, me up front with Paul Stern and McKenna in the back.
“Hang on,” Paul shouted and hit the gas. The Crown Vic held a pretty steady line as we drove down the long drive and through the front gates. “Just tell me where I’m going and I’ll get us there.”
I gave him directions how to go south and east, but once we got off Chicken Valley Road and onto 107, it was a total slog.
After about five minutes and two hundred yards of torturous progress on 107, McKenna seemed to regain some brain function and lose all his patience. “Fuck this! Moe, hit that switch and that switch there,” he said, leaning over the seat and pointing at the dash.
When I did as he asked, the wailing siren kicked on, lights embedded in the grill strobed ahead of us and a bar of like-colored lights mounted to the back window flashed behind us. Now we were cooking and Paul seemed to know exactly what he was doing at the wheel.
“A highway patrol unit?” I asked.
“It’s what they gave me. Good thing too.”
“Call the Suffolk cops,” I said, turning back to McKenna, reciting Jimmy Palumbo’s address to him. “Tell them to close off his block, but not to approach him. He’s a big, strong motherfucker and he’s got a carry permit. I know he carries a Sig 9mm and probably has other weapons too. No need to get anybody hurt here.”
“Jimmy Palumbo, the guy who played for the Jets?” McKenna puzzled.
“Him. Just make the call and remind them to have their marine unit in West Babylon Creek at Santapogue Point. I just hope he hasn’t split yet.”
“What’s that ex-jock got to do with this?”
“Everything,” I said. “Everything.”
I listened as McKenna made the call. Things were going fine until he said the part about them not approaching the house. Cops are more territorial than Siamese fighting fish and they don’t want to hear a cop from a neighboring county telling them how to handle business inside their own bailiwick. Hell, when I was on the job, we didn’t like guys from the next precinct over even setting foot on our turf. McKenna wasn’t exactly in the best of shape to begin with and he was a bad drunk: one of those guys who had it all under control when they were dry, but who seemed to completely lose it after a few drinks. And at that moment he was fighting a losing battle with his Suffolk County counterpart on the other end of the phone. I waved to get his attention.
“Hold on a second,” McKenna slurred, covering the phone with his palm. “What?”
“What’s going on?”
“The police boat’s in position, but they want to send in the freakin’ troops. You know, in Suffolk they don’t get to use the SWAT team too often except to break up loud summer parties in the Hamptons. What am I going to say to him? He’s pissed off enough as it is.”
I thought for a few seconds. “Tell him we think Sashi’s still alive.”
