Suffolk crime scene guys had found some curious things in the basement of Jimmy’s house. Among other items, they’d discovered four original paintings signed by Sashi Bluntstone. Somewhere Sonia Barrows-Willingham and Randy Junction were having intense, simultaneous orgasms: four of them, to be exact. The cops had also found a cell phone, one of those Wal-Mart jobs that you just buy minutes for as needed. When they checked the records, they found that Sashi and Jimmy had been talking to each other for over a year. I told him what Ben Schare had told me about seeing Sashi on the beach sometimes talking on a cell phone. I could see on McKenna’s face that he’d come around to the same conclusion I’d come to the night we found Sashi alive. Neither of us said a word.
The fact was that even if we wanted to cobble together the truth of things, we would have been hard- pressed to do so. Sashi Bluntstone would have been of little help and Jimmy Palumbo none at all. At least Jimmy had a rock solid excuse: he was dead. He had been doing all right at first, huge blood loss and all, and looked like he might make it. Then he contracted one of those nasty hospital-bred bacterial infections that resist every drug known to mankind and lapsed into a coma. He didn’t last ten days. Besides, like I said, I don’t think either McKenna or I wanted to say the words aloud. What went on between Jimmy and Sashi was something, but it wasn’t a kidnapping.
I never returned to the house in Sea Cliff. I didn’t have the stomach for the inevitably halfhearted thank yous and insincere sorries. I had come into this mess with fond memories of Candy and hating Max. And now, while I didn’t hate Candy, I was much less fond of her. Whether or not she was the person who helped Sashi with her paintings, I couldn’t say. My guess was it was Max. Yet, at the very least, Candy was complicit in the deceit. Max was Max. I no longer despised him. There wasn’t enough there to hate, really. For the most part, I found myself feeling sorry for the both of them, that they had allowed themselves to become so woefully dependent on their daughter. Or, as Candy had put it, slaves to her career. In this case, the child was truly father to the man.
I did, however, have a nice little chat with Sonia Barrows-Willingham and Randy Junction. They had both read Carney’s report cover to cover and, in spite of their bluster, were scared shitless at the prospect of my releasing it to the media. Doing so would have ruined their credibility in the art world and decimated the value of their Sashi collections. That was the least of it. If it could be shown that either of them knew the paintings weren’t exclusively done by Sashi, it might have led to criminal charges and countless civil suits. And when I pointed that out to them, they were eager to reach an agreement. I proposed a deal: I would sit on the report if they would help pay off the Bluntstones’ debts and contribute a portion of the profits of Sashi’s resales to a trust fund for her. They couldn’t agree fast enough.
I never did get an invoice from Declan Carney. I tried, with no success, to contact him. His phone numbers were no longer valid and all my emails bounced back. So after a few weeks, armed with my checkbook, I went to his building in Long Island City. There was a foreclosure notice taped to the front door and there was no response to my insistent buzzing or repeated knocks. I walked around to the back side of the building. There, spray-painted on the back wall, were these words:
GONE HOME
Sarah was back in my life and we made a weekly date of meeting at New Carmens for breakfast or dinner. It all depended on her schedule. We talked a few times a week and we even talked about Katy and the stuff we did together as a family. She had forgiven me my sins. Still, the hurt of our estrangement has never gone away. I don’t know that it will. There was a seven-year gap between the time we buried Katy and the day Sarah asked me to be a part of the search for Sashi. Those years are impossible to recoup. She had grown into a woman without me there to be a part of it. Sure, I saw some of it at a distance. I’d been like a proud dad watching his kid play in a big game, but from the worst seat in the stadium.
It pretty quickly got serious between her and Paul. Sarah spent her once-a-month long weekends up in Vermont and Paul Stern was down in Brooklyn twice a month. I think I knew where they were headed before they did. It was hard for me not to like Paul, especially since we spent a lot of time together retracing the steps Rico and I had taken decades before. It helped me remember the Rico I had loved without the bitter aftertaste in my mouth. It was harder for Paul because he could only know Rico through me, but, I suppose, second-hand love is better than no love at all.
One icy cold night, long after Bordeaux In Brooklyn had closed for the day’s business, I went for a walk along the Promenade to just try and clear my head. It was quite late and the little strip of concrete above the Brooklyn- Queens Expressway was totally deserted. I leaned over the rail and gazed across the river at lower Manhattan. It still didn’t look right without the twin towers there. I don’t think I would ever get used to them being gone no matter how many years passed. I remembered what my dad’s friend Harry would say about the arm he’d lost at Anzio in WWII: “You learn how to work around it, but you never stop missing it.”
As far as trying to clear my head, it wasn’t working out, so I turned right and walked back towards the store. But before I got ten feet, something slammed hard into my right shoulder and sent searing pain shooting down my back and along my arm. A thousand stars exploded behind my eyes and I lost my balance. A strong arm shoved me down and I landed with a hard thump, the back of my head banging against the concrete for good measure. I tried shaking out the cobwebs, but moving my head at all only made the pain that much worse and exploded more stars. My right arm was numb and useless. I could sense that my shoulder was not where it should have been. Basically, I was screwed.
“I told you you shouldn’t’ve fucked with me, asshole.” I recognized the voice, but couldn’t quite place it. “You don’t remember me?” he said. “Maybe this will help.”
Bang! Now my left thigh was on fire.
“David Thompson,” I said through pain-clenched teeth.
“Give the man a cigar.”
“Nathan Martyr’s doorman and all around ass-licker.” My eyes were watery but I could see a smile on Thompson’s twisted face.
Bang! My other leg was now afire.
“I’m gonna fuck you up and there’s nothing you can do about it, because no matter what you think is happening to you, it can’t be. See, I’m in Martyr’s loft, hanging with some of his friends. Friends that will all testify that I was there with them.”
“Then you better kill me, butt-boy, or I’ll kill you.”
“Thanks for the suggestion, shitbird.”
Bang! I heard more than felt my ribs cracking and I started the slow fade into unconsciousness. As I slipped into the darkness, I tensed for the next blow, but it never came. I heard Thompson screaming in pain, then something fell down next to me. Thompson. He was convulsing, writhing, his arms and legs twitching, banging into me. Footsteps ran towards us. Thompson cried out in pain so that it bruised the night. There was a dull thud. The convulsing stopped. Then I thought I heard a woman calling my name, but realized I must have already been unconscious. She couldn’t be there.
The woman I’d known as Mary Lambert was sitting at my bedside. I was sore all over and, apparently, a confused elephant had decided to perch on my chest. There was an intravenous drip in my left arm and cold packs on both thighs. My right shoulder and ribs were taped up. There was a sling on my right arm and a brace around my neck.
“Hi,” I said in an old man’s voice. “Where’s Thompson?”
“Under arrest.”
“You Taser him?”
“Uh huh,” she said.
“I hear those things can be painful.”
“Very, but not nearly as painful as when I dug my heel into his nuts.”
“Maybe we can discuss that some other time,” I said, “like when I can breathe again.”
“Sure, Moses Prager. Anything you want.” She stood up out of her chair, knelt over me, and kissed my forehead. “I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced. My name is Pamela Osteen.”
“Nice to meet you, Miss Osteen,” the old man said. “It is Miss Osteen?”
“It is.” She waved her ringless left hand at me.
