Beautiful Lies (19 page)

nineteen

“Did you know there were three other children abducted from this area in 1972?” I asked Detective Salvo.

I was sitting in my rented Jeep in the parking lot of the Hackettstown Public Library. After sitting in front of the microfiche for more than two hours, I’d been ejected from the building by the librarian, who wanted to go home. She’d let me in just minutes before closing, then let me stay as she finished her work for the night. Finally, she turned out the lights and told me it was time to go. Now, my head ached (yes, again)—eyestrain, probably. It was dark and I was tired, but hopped up on Frappuccinos. It was cold out and the car was taking a while to heat up. I could see my breath.

“I mean, like, literally within a five-mile radius,” I added for emphasis when he didn’t say anything.

He was quiet on the other end. Then: “I fail to see what this has to do with my case, Ridley. We’re talking thirty years ago in another state.”

Now it was my turn to be silent. It had
seemed
important back in my faux-wood carrel at the library. Four children, including Jessie Stone, had all gone missing that year from low-income housing in the Hackettstown area. Two boys, both three years old; two girls, one an infant just nine months old, the other, Jessie, not yet two. Light skinned, one blonde, one redhead, two brunettes. None of the cases were ever solved. I’d taken extensive notes. Now I thought, Why did I call him? Maybe because I didn’t have anyone else to call…not about this, anyway.

“You know the only thing more annoying to cops than private investigators? Civilians
pretending
to be private investigators.”

“Maybe it ties in to what happened to Christian Luna,” I said. It sounded lame now, amateurish even to my own ears.

“What, like, maybe he knew something about it?”

“Exactly.”

“Ridley, if he knew something that would get him off the hook for murdering his wife, don’t you think he’d have brought it up thirty years ago instead of living the rest of his life on the lam?”

I didn’t say anything. He had a point.

“Where are you?”

“In Jersey.”

“Come on home, okay?” he said, his voice softer now. “I’ll look into it. I promise.” I couldn’t tell whether he was patronizing me or not. He had one of those voices that just sounded patronizing.

“Oh,” he said. “One other thing. That friend of yours? Excuse me, the guy you’ve never heard of?”

“Yeah?”

“Turns out he has a new address. Guess where? Your building.”

“How about that,” I said. I think I sounded pretty cool. But I had that sick dread you got in your stomach as a kid when you were caught in a lie. Scared, foolish, no idea what to say. Very much inclined to lie again, if pressed.

“Guess what else?” He could barely keep the smile out of his voice. “Guy says he was up in Riverdale last night, a bar up there he likes to hang out at. Jimmy’s Bronx Café. Stopped off for a bite at a pizzeria in Riverdale on the way home. But he didn’t see or hear anything in the park. And he’s never heard of you, either.”

“Huh,” I said. Keeping it simple. “Well, you know how it is in the city. You can live next door to someone for years and never get to know his name.”

“Quite a coincidence, though, don’t you think?”

“Certainly is.”

“Only I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said, his voice going flat. “Come back to the city, Ridley. I have a feeling you and I are going to need to talk again.”

“I have a lawyer,” I said weakly.

“Yes, I know,” said Detective Salvo. “He’s been in touch. You don’t know me very well yet, Ridley. Maybe you think Alexander Harriman intimidates me. Let me assure you that you’re mistaken. Just come home.”

I did go back to the city but held on to the Jeep, parked it in the same garage where Jake kept his car. I noticed that the Firebird was gone.

I had a lot of new information and no brainpower to process it. It felt weird going back to my apartment, as if it wasn’t really mine anymore. All the memories lingering there were ghosts from someone else’s life, someone silly and frivolous. For a second, I thought about turning around and getting back in the Jeep. Going somewhere, anywhere else. But I was too tired. The pizzeria was closed and the street was pretty quiet. I dragged myself up the stairs and into my apartment.

He was there, waiting for me. Of course he was. On some level I knew he would be, would have been disappointed if he hadn’t been. He had the light on next to the couch and was lying there, staring at the ceiling. He stood when I entered. He looked so relieved, like he might pass out from it.

“How’d you get in?” I asked.

“You left your keys this morning.” It was true. When I left earlier, I’d grabbed the set I’d made Zack return to me when I couldn’t find my own.

Anyone in her right mind would have kept her distance, asked him to leave, but I think we’ve sufficiently established that I wasn’t anywhere close to being in my right mind. He came toward me quickly and pulled me into him. I wrapped my arms around him and held on tight. He was so strong and that felt good because suddenly I barely had the strength to even stand. I felt the taut, hard muscles of his biceps, of his thighs. My heart thrummed like an engine in my chest. I couldn’t get close enough to him.

“Man,” he breathed into my hair. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as worried about anyone as I’ve been about you tonight.”

I looked up at him. There was that sadness I’d seen before and I thought about the things Detective Salvo had told me. An odd vulnerability resided in the features of his face, as if he was unaccustomed to being controlled by his emotions and a little afraid of how it felt. He moved a hand to my face. His touch was tender, though his hands felt calloused.

“There are a lot of things you should know about me,” he said softly for the second time since we’d met. This time I was prepared to listen.

“I know,” I answered. “Let’s start with your name.”

The only thing you can give to someone telling a story like Jake’s is silence. Silence and your complete attention. We sat on my couch with my legs draped over his lap. He spoke very quietly, hardly looking at me except in quick, shy glances. His speech was halting, as though it wasn’t a story he’d told often. And when he was done, I felt like he had entrusted me with something. Something I had to hold and keep and protect. It bonded us.

“The funny thing is that I remember her. I remember my mother. Or maybe I just dreamed her. But I remember what it was like to feel loved, safe, to be tucked in at night. Maybe that’s why I’m not more fucked up than I am.”

Harley Jacobsen started calling himself Jake in his first foster home.
Harley
was a kid, a little boy who wet his bed sometimes and carried a tattered Winnie the Pooh, the last remnant of his former life as a child.
Harley
was someone who couldn’t protect himself against two foster brothers who were bigger than he was and meaner, more malicious than wolves.
Jake
fought back where Harley would have cried and cowered.
Jake
wasn’t afraid; he was angry. And he fought like a berserker, using all his strength and all his will. He had to because he was small, because it took everything he had just to stand up to people who were bigger than he was. So one day, when his two foster brothers started taunting him in the small backyard of their New Jersey home, after months of beatings and verbal abuse, Harley went away and Jake took up a big, sharp stick. When the older of the two boys grabbed for him, Jake took the stick and drove it into his eye.

“I can still hear him screaming,” said Jake. “It makes me sad now. But back then, it was the sound of victory. It was the sound that let me know I didn’t have to be anyone’s victim anymore.”

He was, of course, removed from that foster home and labeled as a problem kid, disturbed. One shrink noted in his juvenile record, which Jake later gained access to, that he had a disassociative disorder because he’d started calling himself Jake.

“But I wasn’t disassociating. I knew who I was. I just had this sense that I had to get real hard real fast or I wasn’t going to survive. Harley was a little kid’s name, to my seven-year-old mind. Jake, which I got from the first syllable of my last name, was a man’s name. I knew that’s what I needed to be.”

The rest of his childhood was a veritable carnival of abuse. In one home, he was made to sleep in a sleeping bag under another child’s bed. “They called it a bunk bed,” he said with a short, hard laugh. In this home, he ate cheese sandwiches for every meal for about three months. “It wasn’t bad, though. Looking back, it was probably the best of all of them. No one bothered me.” Eventually they turned him back over to the state because he kept wetting his bed and was sick often, coming down with cold after cold. The abuse he endured in subsequent foster homes ranged from neglect to physical violence, and he had the scars all over his body to prove it. There was the foster mother who made him kneel on the broken glass of a window he’d broken while playing ball in the yard. And the man who burned him with a cigarette when he discovered Jake had finished off the last of a carton of milk. There were knife fights and fistfights at school, nearly every week.

“My foster home ‘tour of duty’ ended when I was fourteen,” he said, glancing up at me. I held his eyes for a second and he seemed to find what he needed there. I was riven by what he was telling me, shredded. I wanted to climb inside his skin and comfort him on a cellular level, erase all memory of his suffering. But of course you can never do that for someone, and it’s a folly to imagine you can. Besides, he seemed whole, solid. A man who’d walked through the gauntlet, survived, and healed his own wounds. He was strong.

“My foster father, a man named Ben Wright, shot me. He seemed okay at first. I mean, really like a nice guy. He took me to a couple of baseball games at Yankee Stadium. His wife, Janet, was cool, really pretty. I was their only foster kid. It was a pretty good gig for a while.

“I was really big by then. I mean, ripped. I worked out every day. It served a couple of purposes. I think I was channeling my rage without really knowing it at the time. And it made me look hard. People stayed away from me. I think I looked more like sixteen or seventeen. I had a couple of tattoos by then; some pretty nasty scars. People had stopped fucking with me. I think everything about me said,
Stay away.
Of course, the flip side of that was that I didn’t have an easy time making friends, either.

“Then Janet got pregnant. I thought, Great, I’m so out of here. But she said no, I could stay as long as I wanted.

“The thing was, Ben, I guess, was sterile. Only Janet didn’t know it. She’d fucked around and got herself pregnant, not realizing. Ben went nuts. Got it in his head that it was
me
who knocked her up.”

“You were fourteen,” I said.

He laughed without any humor. “Yeah, I know.”

“I was sleeping one night and woke up to see Ben standing over me tapping me on the head with a gun. He goes, ‘You fuck my wife, punk?’ I said, ‘No, Ben. No way.’

“And I remember feeling so sad in that moment, more than scared. Because Ben had been nicer to me than anyone had ever been. And it made me feel bad that he’d think I’d do that to him. I said to him, ‘Don’t send me away. I like it here.’ It just felt so unfair. They’d been kind to me. I’d been better behaved because of it. I was doing all right in high school, getting good grades, and still everything was going to shit.

“Anyway, I tried to sit up and he shot me in the shoulder. He meant to kill me but he missed.”

The rest of his adolescence was spent in an orphanage for boys. And it was there of all places that he found a mentor and a friend. A counselor by the name of Arnie Coel.

“He taught me how to face my demons, express my anger in healthy ways. He made me keep a journal and then discuss the things I wrote with him. He taught me about art, encouraged me to get in touch with the creative part of myself. Paid out of his own pocket for me to take classes in metalwork and sculpture when I expressed an interest. He’d grown up in the system as well. And he used to say, ‘Just because people treat you like shit, just because you may feel like shit sometimes, doesn’t mean you
are
shit. You can make something out of your life. You can give of yourself in this world to make it a better place.’

“He was the one who suggested I enlist, so that they’d pay for my education. It was a hard road but I think the right one for me. Without that discipline after I left the orphanage, I think I might have headed down some wrong roads. Isn’t that what they say about soldiers, if they weren’t in the armed forces, they’d be in prison? I moved to the city when my time was up, went to John Jay College. I liked the idea of law enforcement, but I didn’t like the NYPD.”

“That’s why you got your PI license?”

He nodded, looked at the floor.

“The police were here. A detective told me everything,” I said. And he nodded again.

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t define me. I’m more defined by my art. The more money I made with my sculpture and the furniture, the less PI work I did. I primarily did insurance fraud investigation, checked up on some cheating husbands, did some work for the NYPD following around people on probation for DUI.”

He paused a second, rubbed his eyes. I wasn’t sure how well this answer sat with me. It seemed incomplete, a little vague. But he seemed frayed from the telling of things and I didn’t want to push him for more and better answers. I had a lot of other questions, too, but it didn’t seem like the right time for asking them. There’d be time for that later, I thought.

“I felt like as a private investigator I could right some wrongs and still play by my own rules,” he went on when I didn’t say anything. “So I got my PI license in ninety-seven. But it felt low. You catch somebody cheating on his wife, or some poor slob trying to make ends meet while on worker’s comp, and then you fuck up his life. I don’t know. Maybe I had a fantasy about what it would mean to be a PI. Thought I could use those skills to find out what happened to me, what happened to my parents. But I never got very far with that, either.”