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  Innocent monster

  ( Moe Prager - 6 )

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Innocent monster

  If only it was a matter of the innocent and the guilty. Too bad for us it’s usually a matter of the guilty and the more guilty.

  — Israel Roth

  ONE

  Katy’s blood was no longer fresh on my hands and after 9/11 people seemed to stop taking notice. I stopped trying to scrub it away. With all due respect to Lady Macbeth, there isn’t enough soap or hot water to get those stains out and scouring brushes are impotent at guilt. Jews know from guilt. So do Catholics, but they know it differently. Jews know you can’t pray it away or confess it away and that there is no number of good acts that will balance the ledger sheet. Guilt is a tattoo and, if you’re lucky, it will fade. 9/11 faded my tattoo. Besides, in a world awash in blood, what’s one life, give or take?

  Even my daughter Sarah started talking to me again, if only once a week and then with a robotic detachment that hurt me more than her year of silence ever did. In the wake of 9/11 all of us New Yorkers were really just robots there for a little while. So it was that the pain of my divorce from Carmella and the dissolution of our partnership barely registered. It had taken twenty years of secrets to destroy my first marriage and about twenty minutes to destroy my second. I wondered if there were Las Vegas odds on how fast I could fuck up a third? I missed Israel, Carmella’s son by another man and, for a very brief time, mine in every other way that mattered. But he was less than a year old when Carmella moved up to Toronto and I doubt he misses me. At my age, on the other hand, you start to spend a lot of your time missing people: some living, some dead, some just gone.

  Although Carmella and I were no longer partners, I kept our firm, Prager amp; Melendez Investigations, Inc., open, at least until the end of our lease. And I couldn’t see putting Brian Doyle and Devo on the street because my marriage fell apart. It turned out to be one of those rare things done with best intentions that paid unexpected dividends. Sometimes the road to profit and not just to hell is paved with good intentions. Business boomed in the months following 9/11, but it was an odd kind of business. Other than our contract insurance work, we continued looking for people. That hadn’t changed. It was the nature of the people we were hired to find that had changed.

  Suddenly our clients, especially the ones forty years old and up, had an urgent need to reconnect with people who’d fallen through the cracks in their lives. We had a lot of jobs finding old flames and first loves, childhood friends, teammates and coaches, even black sheep relatives from the “wrong” side of the family. National tragedy fucks with people’s heads. And in those days when Chicken Little screamed that the sky was falling, no one seemed inclined to argue. But the sky didn’t fall and, in terms of our once burgeoning caseload, the affection for reconnection waned.

  That was six years ago now: our lease long expired, the office long closed. Brian Doyle and Devo have opened their own shop in lower Manhattan, scavenging off a better class of lice than on the Brooklyn side of the river. Currently, no one needs to pay to find anyone, not anymore. Well, at least not to find old flames or high school football heroes. You can find them where you find everything else in the world: on the Net. And if you don’t find them, just count to ten, and they’ll find you. Ah, the internet. Ten years ago I told Aaron to stop wasting our money on online advertising and building a topnotch website. He didn’t listen. Now internet sales accounted for about twenty percent of our business. So much for my business acumen, but the Net wasn’t all magic. If you want to find an ex who’s skipped town and is two years in arrears on child support payments, you might still consider using a professional investigator.

  These days I was a professional wine merchant. Period. I didn’t even know where my PI license was or if it was still valid. Somewhere along the way I moved it out of my sock drawer and haven’t seen it since. I think I might hunt it down one day and make a collage of it and my equally valueless shares of Enron stock. But for now, I was too busy being bored numb and sleepwalking through preparations for the summer grand opening of our second Long Island store-Sunrise and Vine in Bridgehampton-to worry about the toys in my attic. Tucked away there in the basement office of my favorite store, Bordeaux In Brooklyn, I was so enraptured by the details of the local ordinances concerning exterior commercial signage that I nearly forgot to breathe.

  “Moe, pick up line one,” a voice called to me from somewhere beyond the womb of my stupor. That it was the voice of the store’s assistant manager on the intercom mattered little. To me, it was the voice of salvation.

  Having depressed the speaker phone button, I said, “Good morning, Moe Prager.”

  “Dad?”

  “Hey, kid-Sarah.”

  “Are we on speaker phone?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m in the office. No one’s here. What’s wrong?”

  “How do you know something’s wrong?”

  “I don’t want to fight.”

  “Why would we fight?” she asked.

  “Because if I answer your question about how I know something’s wrong, you’ll get pissy with me.”

  “Risk it.”

  “I know because you’ve called me once a week, every Sunday morning at eleven, for the last six years. Whenever you break that schedule, something’s wrong. That, and I can hear it in your voice. I guess there are still some things you can’t hide from me.”

  She answered with silence, a noisy silence. I could hear her gears turning as she decided how to react. We had once been as close as a dad and daughter could be. No more. Sarah blamed me for her mother’s murder. That made two of us. I hadn’t pulled the trigger, but, in my way, I was just as guilty as the man who did.

  She finally spoke. “Can you meet me for lunch?”

  “Sure, but what’s wrong?”

  “I’m okay. It’s not me. I swear.”

  “Then who?”

  “I’ll see you at New Carmens on Sheepshead Bay Road in an hour and we can talk about it.”

  Click.

  North Shore Herald, Friday, July 14,

  Pint-sized Pollock Dazzles Locals

  GABRIEL BYNUM

  All of four years old, Sea Cliff ‘s own Sashi Bluntstone is already a world-renowned artist. She first put paint brush to canvas at eighteen months of age and has yet to stop. She sold her first painting at age two to local collector and patron of the arts Sonia Barrows-Willingham of Glen Cove.

  “I paid a mere five hundred dollars for ‘Pistachio Sprinkles,’” said Barrows-Willingham, gesturing at a canvas on the brick wall at the Junction Gallery in Sea Cliff. “Best five hundred dollars I ever invested. Just last month, I was offered twenty-five thousand for it. But I wouldn’t care if they offered me twenty-five million for it. I just love all of her work. It’s marvelous. I have several of her works and plan to add more. Don’t you just love them?”

  Four-year-old Sashi, busy chasing her friends around the gallery, seemed completely unfazed by all the hoopla surrounding her first big showing. An apparently normal kid in most ways, the green-eyed and russet-haired prodigy is shy with most adults, but when she opens up, her favorite subject isn’t art, it’s her beagle puppy Cara.

  The young Miss Bluntstone, whose work is most often categorized as Neo-Abstract Expressionism, is not without her detractors and doubters.

  “At best, the child’s an unwitting shill for her ambitious parents. At worst… I don’t even want to consider it,” says Wallace Rusk, curator at the nearby Cold Spring Harbor Museum of Modern Art. “The child is being mercilessly exploited, which, if she were actually any good, might be understandable, if not forgivable. But it’s just so m
uch kitsch and finger painting in the guise of high art.”

  Yet in the face of withering criticism, nothing could dampen the palpable excitement in the crowded gallery. If there were any Sashi doubters or detractors on hand, they weren’t very vocal. There were abundant smiles and sales seemed brisk as gallery owner and art agent Randolph Junction delighted in placing red dots-marking the pieces as “sold”-on the small, white name placards next to each painting.

  TWO

  December was never a favorite month of mine. Regardless of how good it was for the wine business, I found the season depressing on myriad levels. I wonder how many people were conscious of the subtle shift away from the phrase Christmas Season to the more mundane, palatable, and politically correct Holiday Season. Holiday Season, my ass! The older I get, the crankier I get, and nothing gets me quite as cranky as political correctness. Besides, who asked us Jews if we minded Hanukah being ignored? My questionnaire must’ve gotten lost in the mail. Now with the advent of Kwanza, there would be no going back. But there never is a going back, is there?

  I had my own very personal reasons for hating December. Exactly thirty years ago, a handsome college student named Patrick Michael Maloney worked a shift at Pooty’s Bar in Tribeca for a student government fundraiser. When he left Pooty’s that night, he vanished into thin air. And while it’s not quite factually accurate to say I was hired by his family to find him, it is essentially the truth, the truth always being more important than the facts. I found him, all right, when no one else could: not my former employer, the NYPD; not hundreds of volunteers; not the small army of private detectives hired by the Maloneys. I also found a trunk full of ugly secrets and my soon-to-be wife, Patrick’s sister, Katy Maloney. What I kept was Katy. I kept the ugly secrets too, until they blew up in my face. I let Patrick go. If there was a going back wish, that’s what I would spend it on. I would hold on to Patrick Michael Maloney with both hands and never let go. In his vanishing, the seeds of new lives were born. In my letting him go were born the seeds of destruction. Look closely enough and you can see the crooked and bloody red line that leads from one to the other.

  New Carmens Restaurant was a diner at the bent elbow of Sheepshead Bay Road in Brooklyn. While there were restaurants that Katy, Sarah, and I once loved to go to as a family, New Carmens was a special place for Sarah and me, our special place. It was where the two of us went for onion rings and vanilla egg creams when we had something like a good report card to celebrate. It was where we went for banana splits and coffee when young knees got scraped and then later when teenage hearts got broken. Neither Sarah nor I had set foot inside New Carmens since Katy’s murder seven years ago. That’s how I knew that whatever Sarah wanted to discuss was serious business.

  My daughter was waiting for me in the damp outside the front door, the curls of her long red hair undone by the rain. She might have been Sarah F.J. Prager, a newly minted Doctor of Veterinary Medicine to the rest of the world, but to me, at that moment, she was just my sad little girl. When she saw me, she smiled, then caught herself and stopped. She made to speak and, again, stopped herself. What was there to say, really? It was only right, I thought, that we go back in together. Yet when we walked in, things had changed. The restaurant had been remade. The old gold and grimy vinyl booths and speckled Formica countertops were gone, replaced with polished granite, cold brass, and black leather. The memories and quaintness had been squeezed out of the place like breakfast juice from an orange. I suppose there’s no going back, not even in restaurants.

  A cute girl no more than seventeen years old greeted us.

  “Two?” she asked, thumbing a stack of menus.

  “Two,” Sarah said. “Is Gus here?”

  The hostess crooked her head in puzzlement.

  “Gus?” “Gus,” I answered. “He used to run the place.”

  “Gus died three years ago,” said a customer paying his bill at the register. “Massive stroke.”

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  Sarah shrank into her memories.

  “This way,” said the hostess.

  We ate mostly in silence and a little bit in mourning for Gus and for the love Sarah and I once shared.

  “So, you want to tell me what this is all about?” I said, no longer able to stand the dark cloud that had followed us inside and settled over our table. “Is there something wrong? Is the practice you bought into not working out or something?”

  “No, Dad, the practice is great and I swear I’m fine. This isn’t about me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Do you remember Candy Castleman from down the block?”

  “What a silly question. Of course I remember Candy. She was like a big sister to you until she got married to that shithead who got her pregnant: Max Whatshisname.”

  “Max Bluntstone.”

  “You were in her wedding party. Your mother and I were there. I remember thinking how you looked like such a woman that day even in that hideous bridesmaid dress.”

  “All bridesmaids’ dresses are hideous. It’s tradition. The bride is supposed to be the star of the show.”

  “Well, you were the star of the show that day. Your mom cried at how you looked.” Oops! I’d strayed into dangerous territory. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For mentioning your mom.”

  “This isn’t about that, Dad.”

  “Yes, it is, Sarah. For the last seven years everything between us has been about that.”

  “Not this.”

  “Okay, then what is it about?”

  Sarah reached into her bag, unfolded a newspaper article, and slid it across the table to me. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to look because this was how it started, how it always started. Whenever someone wanted to hire me, this was how it began: a newspaper or magazine article shoved into my hand or pushed across a tabletop. Inevitably, the article would be about Marina Conseco, a little girl who’d wandered away from her family in Coney Island and wound up in the hands of a predator. It was Easter of 1972 and I was working in the Six-O precinct, the precinct that was responsible for Coney Island. Although we weren’t as sophisticated back then and didn’t have milk carton photos or AMBER Alerts, we knew that once a few days had passed, we were more likely to find Marina’s remains than to find her. But find her I did, alive, at the bottom of one of those old wooden rooftop water tanks that still dot the New York City skyline. Marina had been abused and beaten and thrown into the tank to die. Finding her was the only noteworthy thing I ever did as a cop and it got a lot of press. Well, what passed for a lot of press in 1972. From the day I found her, Marina and I have been inextricably linked together and in ways I’m still not sure I fully understand. Another story for another time.

  “Sarah, don’t do this.”

  “Dad, please.”

  “For you.” I turned the article so I could read it.

  NEWSDAY, FRIDAY NOVEMBER 16, 2007

  Child Prodigy Missing

  BY ALICE WANG [Alice. Wang@Newsday. com]

  Nerves are frayed and tensions are running high in the little village of Sea Cliff on Long Island’s North Shore. One of this close-knit community’s most celebrated citizens, artist and child prodigy Sashi Bluntstone, has been reported missing by her parents to the Nassau County Police Department. When contacted by Newsday, police spokesperson Det. Mary Holt refused comment other than to say that the report was being investigated.

  Sashi Bluntstone, now 11 years of age, skyrocketed to prominence at age four when her Abstract Expressionist paintings-most often likened to those of Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky-began selling for tens of thousands of dollars. She had several shows at prominent New York galleries, but serious art critics questioned Miss Bluntstone’s talent.

  More damaging perhaps, were the serious allegations that she didn’t, in fact, author the paintings, and that they were done by her father, Max Bluntstone, a one-time performance artist. These charges led to an expose done by Nathan
Flowers of CNN. In the expose, Mr. Flowers stated that “… while I cannot say who does do the work, I can tell you Sashi does not.”

  That statement caused a firestorm of charges and countercharges and a lawsuit is pending. After Flowers’ report, Sashi Bluntstone’s work began disappearing from gallery walls and Sashi herself withdrew from the public eye. Her last show and public appearance was nearly one year ago. Very little is known about the circumstances surrounding Miss Bluntstone’s alleged disappearance, but it is clear this tiny village, one square mile in area, has been shaken to its core. Pradeep Patel, a physician and neighbor of the Bluntstones, summed it up well: “It is all most unsettling.”

  Although the article wasn’t about Marina Conseco, it might just as well have been. The net result would be the same.

  “Okay, I’ve read it.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  “What do you want me to say, Sarah?”

  “Haven’t you heard about this? It’s been all over the news.”

  “I’ve been busy with the new store. You know how crazy your Uncle Aaron gets when we’re going to open a new store. Besides, since your mom… I just don’t pay much attention to the news anymore.”

  “That’s Candy’s daughter, Dad.”

  “I didn’t need a PI license to figure that out, but what can I do about it?”

  “It’s been three weeks.”

  “Does anyone have a sense of what really happened?” I asked.

  “They don’t know. Candy and Max thought she was in her studio painting and when they went to get her for dinner, she wasn’t there. First, they thought she’d just gone for a walk on the beach. She did that sometimes, but she didn’t come home. When they called the police, the police said that she had probably just run away.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “No,” I agreed, “not anymore.”