Beautiful Lies rj-1

by Lisa Unger

  I’d met Harriman many times at charity functions, dinners at Uncle Max’s, even once at a New Year’s Eve party my parents threw. As I mentioned, Harriman had a pretty colorful list of clients, but, as with so many of the gray areas in my life, I’d never actually dwelled on it too much. After all, the only time I’d dealt with him personally was to discuss the money my uncle had left me. That was a quick, amicable meeting where he turned over a check to me and offered his assistance in managing the money. I told him that I’d already arranged for it, but thanks.

  Something about him had always made me cringe. Maybe it was Max’s description of him, which always brought to mind the Terminator, or maybe it was my parents’ unspoken distaste for him. My heart always beat a little faster around him, and I always was a little uncomfortable beneath his gaze. As I left his office that day, he said, “Ridley, your uncle Max loved you very much. He wanted to be certain, if anything ever happened to him, that you could always come to me for help. If you ever need anything, have any questions about the law, any legal issues, really anything, Ridley, don’t hesitate.” I shook his hand and thanked him for his concern, secretly wondering how rock bottom you’d have to be to call on Alexander Harriman for help. Sitting on Jake’s couch, I wondered if I still had his business card in my Rolodex. I was feeling pretty rock bottom, and thinking that a titanium backbone and retractable claws might be of some use after you’d fled the scene of a murder, because that’s precisely what we’d done.

  As the local news stories rolled on, with no mention of Christian Luna, I tried to think of a good reason why we’d run. If it had just been a matter of getting ourselves out of harm’s way, we could have stopped and called the police when we were safe. But we didn’t do that. We watched a man get shot and then we left him there on a park bench.

  I took in the cold, industrial room, the absence of personal objects. I thought about the man sleeping in the bedroom. Like I said, I felt as though I knew Jake on some instinctive level that transcended my ignorance of his history. But as I sat on his futon and looked around the room for some sense of him, I felt a growing unease. I mean, think about your own living room. Imagine a stranger came into your home and sat on your couch. What would the stranger be able to deduce about you from the things she saw? Aren’t there at least some clues about your likes and dislikes, pictures of the people you love and value, a magazine on the coffee table…something? Jake’s living room offered nothing. It was sterile like a hotel room, had the air of transience. It felt as though he could walk out of that space and never come back, never think on the objects left there again. For some reason this disturbed me suddenly. It made me realize that as much as I felt as if Jake’s essence was clear, I was equally certain that he was hiding crucial parts of himself.

  His laptop sat on a slim desk in the corner of the room. In the absence of clutter, drawers to poke through, papers to rifle, it double-dog dared me to flip the lid and boot it up. I was always up for a dare, and given my circumstances I was feeling particularly bold. I padded over softly and lifted the lid, pressed the power button. It hummed to life with a couple of unpleasantly loud beeps. A screen presented itself, demanding a password. Shit. I thought on the little I knew about Jake and decided that the password wouldn’t be anything predictable. That he was likely to be fairly concerned about security. People with something to hide generally were.

  “Quidam.”

  I spun around to see Jake standing in the doorway.

  “What?”

  “The password. It’s ‘quidam.’”

  He looked at me and I tried to read his expression. He didn’t seem hurt or even surprised that I was quite obviously snooping around, or trying to, in his computer files. Oddly, I didn’t feel all that embarrassed at having been caught.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It’s from an epic work by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, a Polish romantic poet. It derives from the Latin word that means ‘someone, some human being.’ But the hero in Norwid’s ‘Quidam’ is a man looking for a place in his life, someone searching for goodness and truth. ‘He was anonymous, without a name—at all orphan, quidam.’”

  I walked away from the laptop and back to the futon where I sat earlier and pulled my knees to my chest.

  “Is that how you see yourself?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose so. In some ways.”

  He came over and sat beside me. The same shadow of sadness I’d seen cross his face, settle in his eyes for a second, or briefly pull down at the corners of his mouth seemed to find its home in his features. I could see that he wanted to reach out to touch me but wasn’t sure if it’s what I wanted. Something in the air between us had grown charged. My suspicions, I guess. They kept me from putting my arms around him and kissing all that sadness away, though that’s what my heart wanted.

  “Why didn’t you want to call the police last night?” I asked.

  He considered the question. “I guess I don’t have a good answer for that except that it would have tied us up in something that I’m not sure would have been good for either one of us.”

  “We just left him there,” I said, and was surprised to hear my voice crack, feel tears rush to my eyes. I put my head to my hand, rubbing at a headache that was now pressing at the back of my eyes.

  “He was dead,” he said, and seemed to realize that he sounded cold and harsh. “I’m sorry, Ridley.” He leaned into me. “I’m sorry it happened. I’m sorry you had to see it. And I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of protecting you. But—I mean—it’s not as if we could have helped him. Or even that we knew who’d shot him. The only thing that would have come from calling the police would have been a lot of questions. I just wanted to get you out of there.”

  I saw him focus on something over my shoulder and I turned to look at the television screen. A young reporter with a blunt blond bob was standing in front of Van Cortlandt Park, police officers milling about behind her.

  “An unidentified man was found murdered this morning in Van Cortlandt Park, located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Discovered by joggers, the man appears to have died from a gunshot wound to the head,” the reporter said with an odd cheeriness to her voice, as if she were reporting on the progress of a parade.

  Behind her, I could see a fleet of squad cars, and the place where I’d sat was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. A coroner’s van blocked the entrance to the park. I wondered how many people had passed Christian Luna’s dead body slumped on the bench before someone figured out he was dead. How many people had jogged by thinking he was just another bum taking a nap in the park? We’d left him to be discovered like that, a man who might have been my father. No matter what he might have done, he didn’t deserve that. Did he?

  The reporter continued: “Police say that while they can’t be certain until ballistics tests have been completed, the bullet appears to have come from a rifle, and the trajectory indicates the shot was fired from a rooftop across the street.” The camera panned to the buildings across the street from the park, the residential apartment buildings and row houses we’d sat in front of for hours. “Again, these are just initial reports and cannot be verified without further investigation.

  “Witnesses say that a woman and man were seen leaving the park shortly after midnight, but so far no one has come forward with a description. Police say that while these two are not suspects at this time, they are wanted for questioning.

  “This is Angela Martinez reporting, New York One News.”

  I got up and turned the television off and stood staring at the blank screen.

  “Holy shit,” I said, whispering to myself more than anything. “I cannot believe this. What is happening to my life?”

  I spun around to look at Jake. He sat still, looking unbelievably calm. “Did you hear that?” I demanded. “We’re wanted by the police.”

  I started walking the length of the room.

  “For questioning,” he said, as if it was nothing. Maybe it wa
s nothing to him, but to someone who’d never had so much as a parking ticket, it seemed like a pretty big deal.

  “Jake,” I said, stopping in front of him. “We have to go to the police.”

  He shook his head. “Forget it. Not an option. Anyway, the police are the least of our concerns.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Think, Ridley,” he said, pointing to his temple. “Who killed Christian Luna? And why?” Actually, believe it or not, in my monumental selfishness, it had not even occurred to me to wonder who had killed Mr. Luna. I was still trying to deal with the fact that a man had been murdered before my eyes. The reasons why hadn’t even begun to dawn.

  “Nobody knew we were going to meet him,” Jake said. “We didn’t even know until an hour before.”

  “So maybe it was just an accident. I mean, like something random,” I said, reaching, not wanting to even consider the other possibilities.

  “A shot like that?” said Jake with a sharp exhale. “No way.”

  “Then what? Someone was following him? Or tapped his phone?”

  “Maybe. Or someone was following you.”

  “Me?” I said, letting go a little laugh. “Why would anyone be following me?”

  You’re thinking, Is she nuts? The man in my building, the man in the pizzeria, the man I’d seen on the train. In my frazzled mind, all of these things still remained nebulous and unconnected. But I did think of the man on the train. Remembered his dead eyes and the case he’d carried. Had he been following me? Or was he some random weirdo? There was no way to know.

  “Seems like,” said Jake, “if someone had been following him with the intent to kill him, they could have done it before they did. When he was walking up the street to the house, for example. If he was the target, it would have been much easier and less risky to hit him when he was alone. But maybe the shooter, whoever it was, didn’t know who the target was. Wouldn’t know until you led them to him.”

  “I saw someone on the train,” I said. “He might have been following me but he got off before I did.” I wondered with a sickening twist in my stomach if I had inadvertently led Christian Luna’s killer to him.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jake, concerned. “Why would you think he was following you?”

  “He was staring at me. He smiled at me,” I said. It sounded lame as I described how the man had inched closer to me when he thought my eyes were closed. How he waved as the train pulled away from the station.

  “But he got off the train before you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jake shrugged. “Could have been some freak. It’s hard to say.”

  I sat down beside him again and tried to turn this information around in my mind and draw some conclusions, but I just couldn’t get my head around it. Instead, that moment when Christian Luna fell toward me started playing again and I put my head back in my hands.

  “Ridley—” he started, putting a hand on my back. But I stood up before he could finish. I walked into the bedroom, pulled on my jeans and socks, grabbed my shoes. Jake slid forward on the futon and looked at me with worry.

  “I can’t do this right now,” I said. He nodded and looked down at the floor. I turned my eyes from him; I didn’t want to see how beautiful he was. I didn’t want my growing feeling for him to cloud my judgment about what I needed to do next.

  “I need to think.”

  “Ridley, wait,” he said, standing. “You need to be careful.”

  “I will be. I’m just going downstairs for a while.” He nodded and sat back down. The look on his face—kind of compassionate and worried, a little hurt—made me feel like a bitch. But I left anyway.

  If he had come over to me, put his arms around me, I would have melted into him. Not that it was an unattractive option, but I was starting to see my real self through the fissures that had opened in the fantasy of my life. If I turned to him now, scared and weak, how could I know if what I felt for him was love or just need? And if I turned to him in need, how could I face whatever it was he was hiding from me? Of course, none of these thoughts were fully formed at that moment. The only thing I knew was that I had to get away from him and from this nightmare. As fast and as far as I could.

  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.