Beautiful Lies (17 page)

“I can’t help you, Detective. I’ve told you everything I know about last night.”

“Ridley,” he said with a sigh. “I’m just not sure I believe you.”

I smiled at him, not in a smart-ass way, but in a way that communicated to him that I was done talking. I guess if he’d wanted to be a hard case, he could have arrested me for leaving the scene of a homicide, but I just didn’t get the sense that he was like that. Not that I thought he was giving up, either. He closed his notebook and stood. I told him then about Christian Luna’s cousin in Puerto Rico so that his body could be returned to his family. I didn’t know the name, but somehow I thought Detective Salvo would figure it out. The two police officers who had stood silent throughout the entire interview moved toward the door. I rose and followed the detective to the doorjamb. As I stood beside him, I realized that he was a bit shorter than I was, but somehow his personality made him seem larger.

“So what did you find out? Was he your father?” asked Detective Salvo.

“He seemed to think so,” I answered.

“Any idea who would want him dead?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know him. He was hiding from someone. I thought it was the police. But maybe he had other people to be afraid of as well.”

“I think that’s a safe assumption,” said the detective. “Consider something, will you, Ridley?” he asked, handing me his card.

I nodded.

“It was very easy for me to identify and find you. I was at your doorstep less than twelve hours after Luna was murdered.” I didn’t say anything, but I felt a chill and my stomach did a little flip. “I’m one of the good guys, okay? I show up at your door and you might get in trouble, but you’re not going to get hurt. You hear me? You get what I’m saying, Ridley?”

I’d read somewhere that cops are trained to use your name a lot when they talk to you, that it fosters a sense of intimacy. It was working.

“You’re a witness to a murder. If someone thinks you saw something, or wants to eliminate that possibility…” He let his voice trail, allowing my imagination to fill in the blanks. “I’m saying watch your back. I think you’re in over your head here.”

I nodded again, not trusting my own voice. If he had been trying to scare me, he’d succeeded. I remembered what Jake said about the cops being the least of our problems. It sucked that the cops seemed to feel the same way.

“I’ll be in touch, Ridley,” he said, putting his hand on my arm. “Call me day or night if you remember anything else, need to talk. Call if you’re in trouble.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that you should remain easy for me to find.” He gave me a look that somehow managed to be condescending and paternal. Then he and the uniformed officers moved down the stairs. I waited until I heard the gate door swing open downstairs and then slam shut before I ran up to Jake’s apartment. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I turned on the knob and pushed at the door but it was locked. I knocked once more but there was only silence.

seventeen

“Alexander Harriman’s office,” answered a bright, hard voice. I’d figured someone like Alex Harriman didn’t take Saturdays off. And I was right.

“This is Ridley Jones,” I said. “Is he in?”

There was a slight pause. “Just a moment.”

Rock bottom. Do you think I qualified? I’d just watched a man get murdered, and then fled from the scene of the crime. The man I’ve been sleeping with was suddenly a stranger who’d lied about or omitted nearly everything important about himself. The police had been to my apartment and asked that I remain “easy to find.” Those retractable claws were sounding pretty good.

“Ridley,” said Alexander Harriman, his voice warm and familiar as if he’d known me all my life, which I guess he had from a distance. “What can I do for you?”

“I think I’m in trouble.”

A pause. “What kind of trouble?” he said, his voice gone from bright to serious.

“I witnessed a murder.”

“I’m going to stop you. Don’t say another word.”

“What?”

“I don’t like to have these conversations over the phone. Can you come to my office?”

I showered and pulled myself together. Except for the dark rings around my eyes and the frown on my forehead, I looked fairly normal in my bathroom mirror. I hopped a cab down on First Avenue and headed up to Central Park West to see my uncle’s lawyer.

The brownstone office was posh in a subdued way, lots of oak and leather, Oriental carpets, and the same Asian and African art my uncle had always favored. A giant red Buddha stared at me happily from his place in the corner. A tribal mask fashioned from bark and topped with enormous red feathers seemed to recognize the seriousness of my situation and looked down on me gravely from its perch above rows of bookshelves holding law texts.

It seemed weird to be in this much trouble and for my parents not to be around. I don’t think I ever got a bad grade without calling my father to lament. I had this feeling of having been cut loose from my life, as if I could drift away, just get smaller and smaller and finally be gone for good.

“I wish we’d had this conversation before you talked to the police,” said Harriman, after I told him the whole story, from the first note to my visit with Detective Salvo.

I shrugged.

“In fact,” he said, leaning back and looking at me, “you should have called me the minute the harassment began.”

“I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.” I put my hand to my eyes and started to rub away some of the fatigue that ached there.

“No, of course not,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the gigantic oak desk. I swear I’ve seen smaller Volkswagens.

“So what do I do now?”

“My advice? Take a break. Go home and stay with your parents for a while. I’ll call Detective Salvo, and any contact you have with him can be arranged through me from now on. I’ll handle this from here on out, and if you need to talk to the police again, I’ll go with you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re not guilty of anything except some questionable judgment calls.”

It sounded easy enough. Downright tempting, in fact. Crawl back into the fold and let the gates come down behind me. Forget it all.

“Seems to me like the source of your problem has been eliminated,” said Harriman. “If you want, this can all just go away.”

I stood up and walked over to a shelf of photographs to the right of his desk. Outside his window, there was a sprawling view of Central Park and Fifth Avenue.
Eliminated.
Seemed like an odd choice of words for the death of a man who might have been my father.

“He thought I was his daughter. He came to find me and someone killed him,” I said, looking out at the traffic on the street below. “How does that just go away?”

He didn’t say anything but I could feel his eyes on me. “That man, whoever he was, was not your father. I guarantee you that.” He sounded so certain, I turned to look at him.

“I mean, come on,” he said with a disdainful laugh. “Give me a break. This guy just emerges after thirty years and claims to be your father? And you believe him? You’re a smart girl, Ridley. Too smart for this shit.”

I didn’t say anything, just looked at him. I tried to think of all the reasons this couldn’t have been some kind of sick joke. And I couldn’t come up with one.

“Okay,” he said, showing me his palms. “Let me do this. I’ll get a court order to preserve a tissue sample. We’ll do a DNA test.”

The thought made my stomach bottom out. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Maybe I didn’t really want to know. Maybe the question was safer than the answer.

“See?” he said when I didn’t answer. “You don’t really want to know, do you?”

I looked at the pictures on his shelf and one in particular caught my eye. It was Harriman, my uncle Max, Esme, my father, and a man I didn’t recognize. They stood beneath a banner that read:

I picked it up and looked at it closely. They all seemed very young and I noticed Max’s arm around Esme’s shoulder. Her smile was bright and her arm disappeared around his waist.

“When was this taken?”

He walked over beside me. I could smell his expensive cologne. The watch on his arm probably could have put a kid or two through college. His hands were so tan, it looked like he was wearing leather gloves. He took the photograph from me and looked at it with a smile.

“A long time ago. Before you were born,” he said.

“What’s Project Rescue?”

“It was one of the ventures of the Maxwell Allen Smiley Foundation. You remember how your uncle lobbied for the passing of the Safe Haven Law?”

I nodded, remembering the conversation I’d had with my father.

“Project Rescue was the group that did all the lobbying, public relations, advertising, soliciting funds, and celebrity support,” he said. “Now that the law has passed, they operate a helpline and act as a public relations office, produce those stickers for hospitals, clinics, police stations, and firehouses to put in their windows to identify themselves as Project Rescue facilities where people can leave their babies. They give award dinners honoring physicians who have provided extraordinary assistance to children in need. Max’s estate still provides the funding.”

He put the picture back on the shelf and turned me away by placing his hands on my shoulders. “Anyway,” he said, “that’s all ancient history.”

I sat down on the couch across from his desk and felt absorbed by it, it was so plush. He sat in a large ornate chair that looked more like a throne with its brocade seat and back, its blackwood arms that ended in fierce lion heads.

“So how about I call you a car to take you home to your parents’ place,” he said, reaching for the phone beside him. “You can get some rest. I’ll deal with the NYPD. A week from today, it’ll be like this never happened.”

I looked at him. He
could
make it go away. I knew he could. He had that look about him, the look of a man who could give your problem a pair of concrete boots and make it sink into the East River. Just don’t ask too many questions about his methods. You don’t want to know.

“No,” I said. “Don’t. I’ll take the train.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, lifting the receiver.

“No, really. I need the time to think.”

He paused, holding the phone in his hand, looking at me with skeptical eyes. “But you’ll go home to Ben and Grace?”

I nodded. “Where else can I go now? You’re right. I need a break.”

He put the phone down and I rose.

“My parents can’t know about this, Alex,” I said. “Not yet. It’ll just frighten them.”

“Attorney-client privilege, kid,” he said, standing up. “Everything we’ve talked about today stays here. I’ll leave a message for you at your place when I’ve talked to that detective. You check your messages? Check your messages.”

“I will.”

“Trust me,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder. “This time next week? Never happened. You did the right thing coming here. Your uncle Max wanted to know you’d always be taken care of, you know?”

I nodded, turned, and shook the hand he offered.

“Thanks, Mr. Harriman.”

I am not a very good driver. Partly from inexperience and partly because of the tendency of my mind to wander. I got into a bunch of accidents as a teenager. Minor stuff, always my fault, leading my father to lament, “Ridley, do you ever leave the house and
not
hit something?” Their insurance went up, the repair bills were not small. But I think their major concern was how much worse it could get. Every fender bender was a reminder of the frailty of my life and how my independence meant that they could no longer be on the lookout for dangers that might befall me. They represented a loss of control.

I rented a black Jeep Grand Cherokee (unbelievably expensive) in the West Village later that day and headed out of the city. I crawled up the Henry Hudson through a gauntlet of construction sites (which I swear have been under way for more than fifteen years) and I finally broke free of the snarl at the exit to the George Washington Bridge. I was headed to Jersey. Not to my parents, as I’d promised Harriman. No. I couldn’t have done that, good as it sounded. There was no going home now.

I’m no private investigator, unlike
some
people, but I
am
a writer. Which means I’ve followed up a few leads, tracked down a few people over the years. I’ve convinced a few reticent people to talk to me. After leaving Alexander Harriman, I’d returned to my place and sat on the couch with a giant cup of coffee and stared out my window at the concrete wall and dark windows that were my view. I thought about my story. And I asked myself something that I often wondered when I was writing an article or a profile: If I was reading this story, what would I want to know next? What are the big questions left unanswered so far?

I had no intention of going home to my parents or of pretending none of this had ever happened. It wasn’t an option. The point of safe return had passed when I agreed to meet Christian Luna in the park. The path back to my old life was closed completely and there was nothing to do but move forward.

I felt unbelievably calm. You’d think I’d have been a complete basket case, but I remember something a psychologist once told me, someone my parents and I saw after my uncle Max died and my father decided we all needed grief counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones. The mind can’t handle emotions like grief and terror for any sustained period of time, so it takes some downtime, she’d said. I’m not sure that I was in a state of grief, but maybe. Christian Luna, a man who believed himself to be my father, was dead. Jake was a stranger who’d lied to me. And I wasn’t sure who I was any longer. But somehow I was transcendent, able to compartmentalize my fear and think about the questions that needed answering in this, the story of my life.

I mentioned that I thought the biggest question was: Who killed Teresa Stone? Like I said, I thought the answer to that question would answer a lot of the others. The way I saw it, there were a couple other biggies. Tell me if you agree. First was: Who the hell is Jake? But I couldn’t answer that without talking to him, so the answer was going to have to wait, since PI Jake/Harley was currently MIA. The second question was: Who killed Christian Luna and why? Again, I was at the wall on this one. I had no way of knowing or even beginning to find out. Then last: Did Christian Luna tell the truth? Was I his daughter? And was he innocent of the murder of Teresa Elizabeth Stone?

I read through the article that Jake/Harley had found from the
New Jersey Record.
Maria Cacciatore was Teresa’s neighbor, the woman who had taken care of Jessie while Teresa worked. I booted my computer, dialed up the Internet, and went into LexisNexis. Within seconds, I had telephone numbers and addresses for three M. Cacciatores in Hackettstown, New Jersey. I also found a number for the management company of the Oak Groves apartment complex. “Clean, safe, affordable apartment living!” hailed the Web site. I’d never thought of the words
clean
and
safe
as superlatives to be used in advertising, but I guess you worked with what you had. From the pictures, the complex looked like low-income housing, which I guessed made sense, considering Teresa’s situation when she was murdered. I figured if I couldn’t locate Maria Cacciatore, maybe someone in the management company could turn me on to someone who had lived in the apartment complex back in the seventies.

You might think I would have made these calls before heading out to Jersey, but sitting around making phone calls that might or might not be successful did not seem like action to me. I know I was supposed to be careful, but I figured that since Jake/Harley had lied about his name, his profession, and who knows what else, then I was released from the promise I’d made him to be careful. So I headed to New Jersey.

I was the only person in New York City who didn’t own a cellular phone. It wasn’t really a philosophical decision. It was just that I worked from home and was pretty easy to reach. I didn’t drive usually, so it wasn’t as if it would come in handy in the event of a breakdown. Cell phones didn’t work on the subway, which was the only place I could imagine one being useful, as in “I’m stuck on the train, running late, et cetera.” And frankly, if you couldn’t reach me, it meant that I didn’t want to be reached. My friends and family bitched endlessly. Naturally (you should be getting to know me by now), that only made me want one even less. But I pulled off of Route 80 at the Rockaway Mall and picked up a phone at one of those AT&T kiosks. I could envision a need for one on this errand. I got a tiny red Nokia, barely bigger than a pack of Chiclets. I also grabbed a Cin-a-Bon and an Orange Julius while I was there, which I ate and drank in the parking lot while examining my new toy. God bless America.

I know it sounds like I was pretty solid and clear headed, if a little rash, a little reckless, and I guess I was. I was scared, still rattled from the night before, which flashed with sickeningly vivid clarity. But I felt like, maybe erroneously, I had taken control of the situation. Maria Cacciatore was my only link to a past of which until a few days ago I had been ignorant. If she was still alive and I could find her, then maybe the truth hadn’t died last night with Christian Luna. I was infused with hope and the purpose of my mission to find out who killed Teresa Stone, what had happened to Jessie, and what it meant to me.