Beautiful Lies (16 page)

I went back to my apartment. As soon as I closed the door, everything that happened last night and all the fear I’d felt up in Jake’s apartment seemed as though it was behind a sheet of bullet-proof glass. The familiar space wrapped itself around me and for a few merciful minutes I was just Ridley again.

An angry “5” blinked accusingly on my machine. When was the last time I’d checked my messages? Wednesday morning? Thursday? It was Saturday now and I felt like I’d been away from my life for a month. There was a pleasant and then a terse message from Uma Thurman’s publicist. The
Vanity Fair
editor wanted to know if I’d been able to connect with Uma and if the article was a go. There was a pleading message from Zachary: Wouldn’t I
please
call so we can clear the air about some things? The last message was a hang-up.

A few days earlier, I would have rushed to return all these calls, anxious that I’d been out of the loop, let things slide. But that morning I just lay on the couch, listening to these voices bounce around my apartment, overcome by a kind of emotional lethargy. I felt like I’d left a part of myself in the park where Christian Luna had died, the part of myself that knew how to handle the simple things like returning phone calls. I lay there for a while, my mind reeling so fast that it seemed almost blank. I decided coffee was a good idea, something to get my mental energy up.

After I was properly caffeinated, I called the editor at
Vanity Fair,
thankful that it was Saturday, and left a message saying I’d had a family emergency and would need to postpone the article. I knew she wouldn’t like it, and I was not comfortable blowing off such a plum assignment, but what could I do? I called Tama Puma (what kind of name is that, anyway?) and left a similar message. It wasn’t a lie. My life
was
officially in a state of emergency; whether it was a family matter or not was still under investigation. I said a brief prayer that I was not flushing my career down the toilet. I mean, the freelance writing thing is hugely competitive and you don’t just
postpone
articles you’re assigned to write for
Vanity Fair.
Word gets out that you can’t be counted on to meet a deadline and all of a sudden those assignments are going to someone else. I’d actually never missed a deadline before; considered it a violation of my personal code. I said another brief prayer that I wasn’t flushing my
life
down the toilet.

As for Zack, well, I just couldn’t deal with him. Exhausted by my efforts, I lay back down on the couch.

You may be thinking at this point that with Christian Luna dead, my problem had more or less disappeared. And it was true, with him gone there was no one to claim, as far as I knew, that I was not who I believed myself to be. But I couldn’t put what I’d learned from Christian Luna out of my head and go on as before. It wasn’t even an option. And now there were a gaggle of other questions nipping at me. Most pressing of which was: Who killed Teresa Stone? You probably don’t think that’s the most pressing question, but bear with me. Here was a young woman, a struggling single mother, working hard and loving her little daughter, putting up with the asshole Christian Luna. Then one night she’d been murdered in her home, her daughter kidnapped. That is, if you believed Christian Luna, and I did on this point at least, that he didn’t kill Teresa and that her killer and Jessie’s kidnapper was never caught. If Teresa was my mother, and if I was Jessie, I owed it to her—and to myself—to find out what happened to them. Us. Whoever. I felt that beneath my skin. And finding the answer to that question might answer the two others: Who killed Christian Luna? And who the hell was I?

There was a knock on my door then and I sighed. I didn’t want to face Jake right now. I didn’t want to deal with his puzzles on top of my own. I opened the door and Zelda was standing there. Behind her there were three cops, two in uniform and one in plain clothes.

“Ms. Jones? Ridley Jones?” said the plainclothes officer.

“Yes.”

Let me at this point mention that I’m a very, very bad liar. I can’t do it. My face flushes. I stutter. I avert my eyes. In school I’d had a couple of detentions, but as far as being in trouble, that was about it. The sight of a police officer at my door, and basically I felt like I was going to pass out from anxiety.

“We have some questions for you. Can we come in?”

“Sure,” I said as lightly as possible.

I stood aside and let them come in. Zelda hung back in the hallway, looking at me sternly. “You’re a good girl, Ridley,” she said. “I don’t want no trouble here.”

“I know, Zelda. It’s okay.”

“The police,” she said quietly, making a spitting noise with her mouth that I guessed was meant to communicate her disdain. “Worse than the bad men who come looking for you. Too much trouble, Ridley.”

She walked down the stairs shaking her head. I felt eyes on me and looked to my right and saw Victoria peering through a crack she’d opened in her door. When she saw me looking at her, she slammed the door shut.
Had Zelda said bad “men”?

“Ms. Jones?”

I shut the door and walked into my living room.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked, sitting down on the couch and curling my legs under me.

“No, thanks,” the plainclothes cop said. “Ms. Jones, I’m Detective Gus Salvo. I’m going to get right to it. A man was murdered last night in Van Cortlandt Park up in the Bronx, and witnesses say they saw you talking to this man when he was shot and that you and another man fled the scene shortly after. What can you tell me about this?” I noticed that he didn’t say “someone matching your description.” He said me.

“Our witness recognized you from the newspaper, Ms. Jones,” he said before I could even ask. “From when you saved that kid a couple of weeks ago.”

The detective was a lean, rather slight man. It didn’t look as if he had a whole lot of muscle to him. But there was something about him that communicated strength. There was a mean narrowness to his face and his eyes were wide open, dark and deep as wells. He had the look of a man who’d heard a thousand pathetic lies, who saw the world in stark black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. Gray areas didn’t even
exist
for Gus Salvo.

I didn’t say anything for a second. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was still there.

“Look,” he said helpfully, “I know you were there. You know you were there. Why don’t you just tell me what happened?”

This suggestion seemed so logical that I told him everything, starting with the day I’d rescued the boy and ending with Christian Luna dying on the park bench. I spilled my guts, sang like a canary, whatever it is they call it in those black-and-white gangster movies. I did leave out a couple of things. I left out Jake; I felt very protective of him and didn’t want him in trouble because of me. I left out my brother. But I told him pretty much everything else, basically saying that I’d called Christian Luna after a few days of thinking about his notes and agreed to meet him in the park. Okay, so I didn’t
exactly
sing like a canary. I actually left out pretty much everything except getting the note and pictures and calling Christian Luna.

Detective Salvo didn’t have much of a reaction, just scribbled notes in a small leather-bound notebook as I talked. “Did you talk to anyone about this, Ms. Jones?”

“No,” I said, feeling my cheeks go pink. “No one.”

He glanced up at me and regarded me coolly for a moment. “So,” he said, cocking his head slightly, “you just decided to meet this man in a dark park in the Bronx, in the middle of the night, all by yourself. You didn’t tell anyone where you were going. You didn’t think it would be a good idea to bring a friend.”

I shrugged, shook my head.

“You seem like an intelligent woman. And that doesn’t seem like a very intelligent action,” he said, giving me a kind of curious half-smile.

I shrugged again. It was a gesture that seemed to be serving me pretty well lately, so I was sticking with it. “Sometimes unusual circumstances cause us to act in unusual ways,” I said.

“Hmm,” he answered with a nod. He looked at me. I think he was older than I was by about ten years or so and it showed in deep wrinkles around his eyes. He flipped through the pages of his notebook until he found the one he wanted.

“Witnesses say that a few moments after the shooting, they saw a man emerge from the trees. That the two of you left together.”

“There was no one else,” I said. “I left the park alone and got on the train. Came home.” I was proud. I didn’t even stutter. He didn’t say anything but he turned those eyes on me. He knew I was lying and I knew he knew. The knowledge relaxed me, as if we were just actors playing out a skit and everything we said from here on out was simply lines that had been written for us.

“Why did you flee the scene?”

I shook my head here. “I was in shock. Scared out of my mind. I barely remember leaving.”

“Let me see if I can help you with your memory. Witnesses say that they saw you exit the park with this man. That he seemed to be leading you. That you got into a black sixty-nine Pontiac Firebird.”

Christ. It was dark. Who could have seen all this? And didn’t the newscaster say that joggers had discovered the body this morning? If someone saw all of this last night, why didn’t “they” call the police then?

“I told you I took the train.”

I had to think a second about the car. Had Jake parked it in the street in front of the building? No. It was in a parking garage on Tenth Street.

“Ms. Jones,” Detective Salvo said, his voice gentle, coaxing. “More than one person saw you.”

“Am I responsible for what people think they see?” I said.

He changed tack. “Okay, Ms. Jones. Let’s go back. Did you see where the shot came from?”

“No.”

“But you said you were both sitting on the same bench. You were turned facing the buildings across the street and he was turned toward you, facing the interior of the park. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I answered. And here I flashed on something Jake had said about a shadow on the roof of the building across the street. And the newscaster, too, had reported that the bullet might have come from the rooftops. I was no ballistics expert, but thinking on it now, I knew that the shot that hit Christian Luna between the eyes couldn’t have come from the roof across the street. It had to have come from the woods…where Jake was. I saw a small smile turn up the corners of the detective’s mouth, then disappear. I think my face was like a movie screen for him, where he could watch my thoughts flicker in my expressions.

“The car, a black sixty-nine Pontiac Firebird, license plate number RXT 658, is registered to a man by the name of Harley Jacobsen, address 258 West 110th Street.”

He looked at me and I tried to make my face blank, shook my head. Harley? someone inside my head asked. Wasn’t that the name of Jake’s investigator friend? They had the same last name?

“Three assault charges, possession of an unlicensed firearm, breaking and entering,” the detective was saying.

I was starting to feel a little sick. But I kept silent.

“I consider myself a good judge of character, Ms. Jones, and this is not the kind of man I would imagine a woman like you spending time with.”

“You’re right,” I said after a second. “It isn’t. I’ve never heard of this man.”

Again that small, fleeting smile. “Can I call you Ridley?”

I nodded.

“Ridley, I don’t want to see you get in trouble protecting someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

His words stung a little. I could tell then that I was in the presence of a master. Detective Salvo was a man who knew how to size people up and subtly manipulate them into telling the truth. I wondered if this gift had led him to become a cop, or if he’d discovered it in the commission of his work.

“I don’t know who this man is,” I said. And that much was true. I had
no idea
who Harley Jacobsen was. Apparently, though, I’d spent the better part of last night riding around in his car. The detective looked back down at his notes and ran down a laundry list of facts on Harley Jacobsen.

“The guy was abandoned into the system when he was five years old. A problem kid. Was in and out of foster homes until he was fourteen, never adopted. He went to an orphanage in New Jersey then; stayed there until he was eighteen. He joined the Marines. Had some trouble there with fighting, conduct unbecoming, et cetera. His tour ended in ninety-six and he didn’t reenlist. Got his New York State private investigator’s license in ninety-seven.”

There was a loud pounding in my right ear, this weird noise I hear sometimes when I’m under a lot of stress. My mind strained to keep up with what the detective was telling me. Had Jake lied about his name? Was
he
this guy Harley? Or was Harley a friend of his, as he’d told me, and we’d just borrowed his car? I know: duh.

Gus Salvo handed me a piece of paper. It was a copy of Harley Jacobsen’s PI license. The picture was poor quality, dark and distorted. But there was no denying that it was Jake. My heart fell into a million pieces, fluttered down into my belly.

Jake had lied about his name. That scared me. Jake had a private investigator’s license, which explained a lot of things I hadn’t bothered to question. That also scared me. But as for the rest of it, for all I know these were the things he’d been trying to tell me since the night I met him.

“Any of this ringing a bell for you, Ridley?”

“No,” I said. “Not in the least.”

The detective looked at me long, with hard, seeing eyes.

“Sounds like he’s had a hard life,” I added, squirming just a little inside beneath those eyes.

“That’s not an excuse for breaking the law.”

I didn’t know what else to say to Detective Salvo. For whatever reason, I was feeling more protective of Jake—or whatever his name was—than ever. Sure, he’d lied about his name. But obviously I’d been lied to about more important things. I
had
been honest about the details of Christian Luna’s murder. I really
didn’t
know anything else about who had murdered him and why.