Innocent Monster (16 page)

“What was that?”

“When I got hurt and forced to retire, Rico begged me to be a third partner in our first wine store. I’m not exaggerating, he begged me. And at the time, my brother and I were short and Rico had the extra money we needed, but we turned him down. I always told him that it was Aaron who didn’t want him to be a part of it, that the business was going to be dedicated to our dad who was a complete failure in business.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes and no. The part about my dad is true, but it wasn’t only Aaron who didn’t want Rico as a partner. I hid behind my brother to shield myself from the truth that I didn’t want Rico involved either. There’s been a lot of times over the years I’ve thought that things would have been very different if I’d been willing to take a chance on Rico or if I only fought a little harder for him.”

“And maybe not.” Mary stood up, put her glass down, folded me into her arms, and laid my head on her shoulder. She stroked the back of my neck. “People are responsible for their own lives, Moe.”

“I guess, but if it wasn’t for Rico, I wouldn’t have met Katy and I wouldn’t have Sarah.”

“Speaking of having someone...”

“Huh?”

“Don’t make me pay for those remedial classes,” she said, then kissed me softly on the mouth. She took me by the hand. “Show me to the bedroom.”

I did, but I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder at the picture of Larry, Rico, and me still propped up on the coffee table. Even now, I missed those guys. I didn’t suppose that was ever going to change.

When I rolled over in bed, the first hints of sunshine coming through the bedroom window, Mary Lambert was still there. On the other side of the bed, but still there. As long as she hadn’t crept silently away in the middle of the night, I would have been okay with her sleeping on the floor. I love how in movies couples manage to sleep in perfect symmetry like synchronized swimmers and wake up folded neatly in each other’s arms.
Yeah, right!
Mostly, I liked the way the room still smelled vaguely of sex. The sex itself wasn’t atomic. It wasn’t disappointing. It was good. It was good because we liked each other. We didn’t like each other because the sex was good. Those things are worlds apart. It was what sex between two slightly drunk, slightly nervous adults who didn’t really know one another is like. There was a kind of innocence about it that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. Of course the real test would come when she got up and the only opinion in the room wouldn’t be mine.

I slid over to her side of the bed and wrapped her up in my arms. She didn’t say anything, but smiled and pressed herself against me. Five minutes later, I was inside her again. The innocence was still there, but this time the sex was a notch closer to atomic. We were both wet with sweat when she reared back, tensed, and rolled off me. A little while later, she got out of bed without a word and walked slowly towards the bathroom. I enjoyed watching her as she walked. Her back and legs were well-muscled and her ass was a revelation. When I heard the shower, I got up to join her.

We came out of the shower and moved back into the bedroom, still playfully drying each other off, occasionally stopping for a hug and kiss. Then Mary looked away and the spell was broken.

“Your machine’s blinking,” she said. “You’ve got a message.”

I wanted to believe it was disappointment I saw in Mary’s eyes when she noticed the red light flashing on the phone machine. I wanted to believe she wanted the day to last and last the way I wanted it to. But that wasn’t what I saw in her eyes. What I saw in her eyes looked like guilt and that wasn’t lost on me. It was as if the unexpected red light had caught her off guard and she let her defenses down and beneath them was guilt. Guilt about what, I wondered? Was she married? Committed to someone else? Did I care? When I looked back, the guilt was gone and she was kissing my chest. Still, I wondered. That stopped when the phone rang.

“I better get this,” I said, stroking her damp hair.

“Of course, I’ll go make myself human.” Mary grabbed her bag and disappeared back into the bathroom.

“Hello.”

“Dad, where were you? I called about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Hey, kiddo. I was in the shower. What’s up? Did something happen to—”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Is it about Sashi?”

“In a way.”

“Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“No, Dad, in person.”

“Come on over.”

“How about New Carmens in a half hour?”

“Okay. A half hour. If you get there before me, get us a booth.”

“I love you.”

“I’ve waited a long time to hear you say that again, Sarah.”

The line went silent. I put the phone back in its cradle. I guess I was still sitting there looking at the phone when Mary came back out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped tightly around her, another covering her hair, and her face made up.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“It’s my daughter. She wants to talk to me. Would you like to meet her?”

There it was again, that thing in her eyes. “Someday, but I’ve got to get back to my apartment and get to an appointment in the city. I’ve got a presentation to prepare as well.”

Maybe that’s what I was seeing, guilt over blowing off her responsibilities.

“I hope last night and this morning were worth a little rushing around,” I said.

“Oh, it was worth a lot more than that.” She leaned up, cupped my chin, and kissed me ever so gently on the lips. Then, with the swipe of her thumb, she brushed the lipstick residue off my mouth. “It was worth a lot.”

“I have to get ready to meet her.”

“Go ahead. I’ll get dressed in the living room and let myself out.”

“Call me.”

“I will.” She waved, winked, and turned to the living room.

Sarah was waiting at a small corner banquette, a cup of coffee in front of her. She was nervously flicking her index finger against the thick white porcelain cup and watching the small ripples spread out along the surface of the steaming coffee. I had seen her like this only a few times in her life, always when she had something to confess. There was the time in second grade when she had shut the lights out in the gym, but her friend Megan got blamed for it. I found her that day after school, sitting at the kitchen table lost in thought, tapping her milk glass much as she was tapping the coffee cup now.

“What is it, kiddo?”

“I did a bad thing, Daddy.”

We went to the principal’s office together the next morning.

Then there was the time she was fifteen and had the drinking and pot party at the house when Katy and I were on a cruise. A few of the guys had gotten their teenage beer muscles on and got into a brawl and the neighbors called the cops. That time, like this time, she brought me to New Carmens to tell me what had happened. But the worst time was in her senior year in high school and her period was late and she wrongly, but understandably, thought she was pregnant by a boy she’d broken up with weeks before. Again, she’d told me here.

“I got a funny feeling you’re not gonna tell me that you got Megan Costello in trouble for shutting out the gym lights.”

She fought it, but couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “You remember that?”

“I remember everything about you, Sarah. You’re the most important thing in my life. You always have been. So what is it? What’s up?”

“It’s about what happened to Sashi.”

“That much I figured out.”

“Max and Candy lied to the police.”

“About what?”

“Candy made me promise not to say anything, Dad. I owed so much to her. She was like the big sister I always wanted. I couldn’t, you know... And Sashi is her kid, so I had to give my word.”

“Come on, Sarah, tell me. If I can keep it quiet, I will.”

“You can’t. It’s too big to keep quiet anymore. That’s why I came to you because you’ll know how to fix it.”

“I won’t know if I can until you tell me.”

She bowed her head and looked away. I could see Sarah wanted to say something; her lips moved, but she couldn’t seem to find the words. I figured I’d try to help.

“Did Max and Candy fake this whole thing?”

Sarah stared at me as if I were speaking Chinese. “No, Dad, nothing like that.”

“Do they know who did it?”

“No, but there
was
a ransom demand,” Sarah said.

“What?”

“There was a—”

“I heard you. How much? When? Did they—”

“That night, the night Sashi was taken, right after Candy called the police. The call came in on Max’s cell phone. The caller used one of those distortion boxes like in the movies, so they can’t even be sure it was a man’s voice.”

“But they think it was a man?”

“They think so.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know exactly. All I know is that he wanted money or he would do things to Sashi, horrible things. Candy couldn’t bring herself to tell me exactly what was said.”

“Did they pay?”

“Some of it,” she whispered.

“What does that mean?”

“He wanted two million dollars, but Max and Candy, they’re—”

“—broke. I know. They have about ten thousand dollars in the bank.”

“But how could you know that?” The look on my daughter’s face was a mixture of surprise and disgust, of pride and anger.

“I had to know it,” I said. “My interest in this is Sashi, not Max and Candy. Everybody lies, Sarah: clients, cops, PIs, everybody. And I guess I was right, Max and Candy have been lying from the start. I had to know what anyone involved possibly had to gain if Sashi went missing.”

“Still...”

“Hey, kiddo, it was your idea to get me mixed up in this. You don’t get to judge.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“That’s okay. Keep going.”

“There’s not much else to tell except that Candy dropped fifty thousand dollars off in a garbage can at Caumsett Park a few days after Sashi was taken.”

“They don’t have a pot to piss in. Where did they get fifty thous—”

“I gave them some of it,” she said, looking rather sheepish. “I think Randy Junction gave them some, and someone else, but I don’t know who or how much.”

“Did you know Candy was sleeping with Junction?”

Sarah hesitated, then said, “I knew about it.”

“We may have to discuss that soon, but for now, I’ve got to call Detective McKenna and figure out a way to tell him and keep your name out of it.”

“Don’t, Dad, just tell him the truth.”

“And maybe fuck up your career and your life because you were trying to do the right thing? No. That’s not gonna happen.” I stood up and threw a twenty on the table. “Eat something and go about your business as if it was just another day.”

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“You’re my kid. You’re Katy Maloney’s kid. You can do it. You have to do it. And if the cops come to you, don’t say a word without me or a lawyer in the room. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“You did the right thing by telling me, kiddo.” I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “But why tell me now? What happened to make you come to me now?”

“It’s almost four weeks, Dad. I may not have been a cop or a PI, but I can hear the clock ticking too.”

“It’s okay. I’ll fix it.”

Walking away, I didn’t look back.

As I rushed to my car, I felt sick to my stomach. I felt sick because I had visited my sins upon my only child. She was a secret keeper too and I knew there was only grief at the end of that road.

When I got back to my apartment, there were several sheets of paper sitting in the bin of my fax machine. Apparently the promise of cash money had motivated Devo and Brian Doyle to burn the midnight and pre-dawn oil. PIs are like actors. No matter how good times are, they don’t tend to turn down paying jobs. I scanned the faxes, but put them aside to call McKenna. On the ride over, I figured out how to play it to keep Sarah’s name out of it. My guess was that even if McKenna didn’t totally buy it, he would be too busy to realize it or care.

“Almost four weeks,” Sarah said, but time was fluid and its viscosity was dependent upon your point of view. To McKenna it was an eternity. To the kidnapper—that’s what this was, a kidnapping—it might not seem that long. If the fifty grand wasn’t enough, Sashi might still be alive. Her continued good health would be in his best interest. On the other hand, if he panicked or if he decided to quit while he was ahead, she was dead and all the machinations of all the other players were moot. If Sashi were still alive, I couldn’t imagine what the month in captivity felt like.

When I got McKenna on the phone, he sounded upbeat. I thought he might somehow have gotten word of the ransom demand and payoff. I was wrong. He had other morbidly good news.

“The teddy bear that was left in your car was hers, Sashi’s,” he said. “The parents IDed it. The kid’s beagle had chewed its leg up a little bit when she was younger and the teeth marks were there. We’re running DNA tests now to confirm it.”

“They didn’t notice the teddy bear was gone all this time?”

“Guess not.”

“I got something for you too.”

“What?”

“It’s a guess, but I think I know what they’ve been hiding from us.”