the blank expression broke into a half smile.
“That’s better,” I said. “You know, I didn’t always own wine shops. I was on the job once too. I have a gun with real bullets and everything.”
“I know who you are. I read up on you. You got a hell of a track record. I respect that. That’s why I’m here. You think I’d waste my time dicking around with every schmo a missing kid’s parents want me to see? You’d be amazed at some of the clowns these people come up with. I call ‘em the psychics and psychos.”
“Desperation makes people do desperate things.”
“Stupid things.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “stupid things.”
“Like maybe involving an old family friend in something he shouldn’t be involved in.”
“Are you worried I’m too close to the situation to see what’s in front of me?”
“There’s that,” he said. “There’s also that your track record, as good as it is, is old. You ain’t been in the game for a long time. Kinda tough to hit a home run as a pinch hitter when you haven’t seen a good fastball for a while. And there was that thing with your ex-wife.”
“I can’t argue with you there, but look, I’m in the game whether you want me to be in or not. You can boo like an armchair manager or you can help me so I can help you. Anyway, I’m not a stupid man. Talking with you now, my guess is that if you had anywhere to go with finding Sashi, you wouldn’t be here, respect for my record or no respect.”
“No, I guess you’re not stupid. We’ve hit a wall.”
“Well, if the info in the newspapers is correct, you didn’t have much to go on.”
Hey, a little sympathy never hurt.
“We got some stuff to go on, but…”
“Some stuff, like what?”
He didn’t answer right away and spent the next few minutes eating his sandwich, so I ate mine too.
“Look, Prager, I can’t afford you getting in the way with an ongoing investigation. Do we understand each other?”
“Okay, Detective, you’ve given me my warning. I’ll keep out of your way and I’ll pass on anything I learn immediately. The only thing I’m interested in here is finding Sashi alive.”
“Fair enough,” he said and handed me his card. “Those are all my numbers. I’m available 24/7. I’m taking you at your word. If you find out anything at all, I want a call.”
The waitress came by and I took the check. “What now?”
He stood and threw his trench coat back on. “You go on over to your store. I’ll be over in a few minutes. I gotta get some stuff outta my car.”
I’d had much worse first dates, I thought, as he disappeared into the main dining room.
Back in the office of RWY, I spread out the paperwork McKenna gave me on one of the desks. I knew this wasn’t all of it, maybe not even most of it, but given that I was three weeks behind the curve, it was a lot to digest. It was no mystery to me why Detective McKenna had let me in the door without making me run the gauntlet. Good detectives have the knack of being able to balance their own necessarily strong egos against the public interest. McKenna’s equation was a simple one: his goal was to find Sashi and he didn’t give a shit what it took to do the job. He wasn’t interested in who got the credit and the kudos. He’d worry about bows and curtain calls after the girl was found and the smoke had cleared. It was always the weaklings and the climbers that put themselves ahead of the case. I’d known my share of the good, the bad, and the indifferent over the years. For now, at least, McKenna rated high on the list. I felt sure the detective would get through the night without worrying over my opinion of him. He had more important things to lose sleep over. We both did.
SIX
I set back out to Sea Cliff before sunup. I’m not exactly sure why I got such an early start. Maybe it was the buzz from working a case again or maybe it was that I wanted to travel under the cover afforded me by the veil of pre-dawn darkness. In the dark I could fool myself that I was going somewhere, anywhere other than Long Island. Long Island’s never been my favorite place. I suppose my antipathy started when I was around six or seven and some of my best friends disappeared from class and from the schoolyard; it was whispered that their parents had moved them to exotic places like Oyster Bay, Great Neck, Massapequa, and Ronkonkoma. Might just as well have been Siberia as far as I was concerned. In my kid’s mind, Long Island meant exile and punishment, a forbidden zone where friends went never to return. I mean, who would ever want to leave Brooklyn besides Walter O’Malley? Sometimes I think that prick’s only saving grace was that he didn’t move the Dodgers to Long Island.
But my rocky relationship with Long Island transcended my childhood visions of it as the briar patch. For almost nothing good beyond profit has ever come of my setting foot over the Queens-Nassau County border. Patrick Maloney went to school at Hofstra University on Long Island and I spent too much time there uncovering things about him, about his family and his relationships with women, one in particular, that made my skin crawl. It was five years later, however, after Katy and I were married and Sarah was just a little girl, that the first tentative steps in the long slow dance that led to Katy’s murder were taken.
It was at the wedding of a former wine store employee. She was a rich girl from Crocus Valley and her father, Thomas Geary, a star maker, bullied and extorted me into taking the case of one Steven Brightman. Brightman, a state senator, was the next fair-haired boy with Kennedy charm and working class credentials, but he had a big problem. One of his interns, a young woman named Moira Heaton, had disappeared from his community office on Thanksgiving Eve 1981. Although there was no evidence tying Brightman to Moira’s disappearance and in spite of his fully cooperating with the authorities, the whiff of scandal and suspicion put a hold on his once-meteoric ascendency. After two years in political purgatory, he needed someone to prove him innocent, to plunge him in the waters and have him come up pure and saved. That someone was me.
It almost worked too. I cleared him, but he came back up out of the purifying waters a little too clean and a little too easily. I found what had been planted for me to find: a patsy in a nasty package by the name of Ivan Alfonseca or, as the press had dubbed him, Ivan the Terrible, a convicted serial rapist. Already going away for life, he was paid to confess to Moira’s murder, clearing Brightman’s path to the Senate, if not to the White House. But I was no patsy and I kept digging. Problem was, the brother of one of Ivan’s real victims killed him in jail and with Ivan dead, I had a case as solid as air. So instead of going to the cops, I set Brightman up to spill his guts in front of two witnesses- his wife and Thomas Geary, the people in his life who could hurt him most. His wife left him and Geary withdrew his money and backing. Moira got whatever scraps of justice and shreds of revenge she was ever going to get. Then, seventeen years later, Brightman got his. He and his flunky, Ralph Barto, the man I wounded in Miami Beach, murdered Katy in front of me.
So here I was again, heading back to Long Island, the sun rising up before me, blinding me. I felt in my bones only darkness lay ahead. There were a lot of people I needed to speak to, people whose names appeared in the paperwork Detective McKenna had shared, and there were things I needed to see for myself. The day before, Candy had been with me, showing me Sashi’s room, the rest of the house and the property, walking with me along the length of the little beach across the road from the big Victorian, but when you’ve got a guide it’s hard to see things for yourself. You see things through their eyes. I didn’t know that I’d find anything or notice anything new. Nothing had jumped out at me, nothing got under my skin. Still, I had to look.
I stopped off at a deli and got myself a large coffee and a cholesterol special: two eggs scrambled, bacon, and cheese on a buttered roll. A steady diet of these had killed more cops than all the skels and mutts who’d ever lived. I laughed to myself thinking about the NRA’s PR team creating a new lobbying campaign. Guns don’t kill cops. Egg sandwiches do. I took my time eating, scanning the paper, waiting for a phone call I hoped would come before I got all the way into Sea Cliff. Whether Candy realized it or not, when she hired me-if you want to call it that-she got more than she bargained for. I was playing catchup and if I needed to take on some paid help or to call in some old markers, so be it. My job was to find Sashi and it wasn’t anybody’s business, not even her parents’, how I did it. That’s why I’d called Brian Doyle.
Brian Doyle wasn’t ever going to be mistaken for a theoretical physicist or a McKenna type of detective. He had been one of those cops who managed to hang on to the job by his fingernails. Back in his day, the NYPD wasn’t
