by Lisa Unger
“Should I call?” I asked him.
He moved in closer to me. “What choice do you have?”
I should have been panicked, crippled with fear over what had happened to Ace and what was happening to me. But I was calm. The only hints of my fear were the persistent rushing sound in my right ear, the dryness in my throat, and the slight, barely perceptible shaking of my hands.
I dialed the number and we all waited while it rang.
“Ridley. That didn’t take you long at all. You always were a smart girl.”
I recognized the older man’s voice but couldn’t place it. It was smooth and educated but edged with malice.
“I thought we agreed that you’d go home to your parents, Ridley.”
The tumblers of recognition fell into place with a sick snap, unlocking the door to a tiger’s cage. It was Alexander Harriman.
“I don’t understand…” I said.
“I knew the minute I saw that picture of you on the cover of the paper that there was going to be trouble.” His voice was casual, lilting, as if we were old friends.
“What do you want, Mr. Harriman?”
“I just think we need to get together and talk some things over, clarify some misunderstandings, set a plan for the future. And when that’s all taken care of, we can talk about your brother, getting him the help he needs.”
I realized he was being careful about what he was saying on the phone.
“I could go to the media with what I already know, Mr. Harriman. I could call the police since I know you have my brother.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “You could. But there would be consequences. I think you’re starting to realize that the truth doesn’t always set us free. For many of the people I know, it’s quite the opposite. For many of the people you know as well.”
“Are you threatening me, Mr. Harriman?”
“Certainly not,” he said with mock indignation. My mind was racing. I didn’t know how to play this game. I felt like a mouse in the paws of a hungry house cat.
“I need to know that Ace is okay.” I know, it was lame. But I couldn’t think of any other demand to make. Plus, I just wanted to hear his voice, know that he was safe and that it was within my power to help him still.
“As long as you and I can reach an agreement, then your brother and the rest of your family, not to mention your friend Mr. Jacobsen, will have no concerns. You have my word.”
“That’s not good enough,” I said weakly.
“Look, Ridley,” he said, impatience slithering into his measured voice. “You’re not holding any cards here, so let’s stop fucking around. Be at my office before the end of the hour. I’m extending you a courtesy because of Max’s love for you. But I’m not a sentimental man by nature and you’ve become a terrible inconvenience.”
He hung up then. After all, he’d said everything he needed to. I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it as if it were a murder weapon. I felt a shudder move through my body, thinking about how his courtesy so far had involved a drive-by shooting and a bad case of road rage. I wondered what happened when his sentiment ran out. I looked over at Jake and he moved in to me and took my shoulders.
“Who was it, Ridley?”
“My uncle’s lawyer, a man named Alexander Harriman.”
“As in mob lawyer Alexander Harriman?”
I hadn’t really thought of him like that, but I guess once you’ve defended a mobster, then you’re a mob lawyer. I sat down on the bed beside Ruby, who was now looking at me with desperate eyes.
“I love him,” she told me. She was a wreck, so thin I could see the knobs in her shoulders and elbows, mascara streaking down her face. Her hair was fried from too much bleach. But there was a prettiness to her, a sweetness, something about her that I wanted to protect.
“I do, too,” I answered, a catch in my voice I hadn’t expected.
“So what does he want?” asked Jake.
“He wants to see me in his office, inside the hour.”
Jake shook his head. “That’s not a good idea.”
“What’s the alternative?”
We looked at each other for a second, but neither of us came up with an answer.
“Well, you’re not going alone,” he said.
“You can’t trust him,” Ruby said, grabbing my arm and turning a fearful gaze on Jake. She seemed desperate but not crazy.
“Why, Ruby? Why would you say that?” I asked her, looking at Jake. He just lifted his palms. She pulled me close to her and I could smell the cigarettes on her breath. She whispered fiercely, “He killed your uncle Max.”
The words chilled me. “Ruby, my uncle drove himself off a bridge. He was drunk. It was icy. He wasn’t murdered.”
I looked over at Jake, who stood still and silent. I wished I could see his eyes, but all I could see was the slow shake of his head.
“You don’t have to shoot a gun to kill someone,” she said, looking right at Jake.
Jake stepped into the light so that I could see his face and he sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “all you have to do is tell them the truth.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
I remembered how my uncle Max cried that night. I remembered his words. Ridley, you might be the only good I’ve ever done. And then I understood what Jake meant.
“You met him,” I said to Jake. “You told him what happened to you.”
He nodded. “I was in a dark place when I met Max. Like I told you, I had learned about the other missing kids, about your father. But I didn’t know how to move forward with the investigation. Then Arnie died. I had so much anger in me that I couldn’t sleep at night without drinking.
“When I learned about the Maxwell Allen Smiley Foundation and how it funded Project Rescue, I knew I had to talk to your uncle. You asked me about my theories? My theory was that the Little Angels Clinic and other places like it across the state that had been designated as ‘Safe Havens,’ places where scared mothers could leave their children, had a different function as well. Certain physicians were acting as ‘Guardian Angels.’”
He sighed again here, as if it was painful for him to go on.
“They were watching over children who they thought were being abused?” I asked. I thought about Jessie with her broken arm. I thought about how my father, so concerned for the welfare of children, must have felt while treating her.
“Yes, and flagging them,” said Jake.
“What do you mean?”
“In the seventies, it was very difficult to get a child out of an abusive situation.”
“So you think there was a system by which these abused children were identified by certain clinic physicians…and what?”
“They were abducted,” he said. “Maybe.”
“By who? And then what happened to them?”
“I didn’t know those answers when I went to see Max and I still don’t know for sure.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I tried to see him at his office but I couldn’t get an appointment with him, so I followed him for a couple of days and figured out the places he went to drink. I waited for him at the Blue Hen, not far from where your parents live, Ridley.”
“On Christmas Eve?”
“No. A couple weeks before that. He’d already been drinking when he arrived and everyone there seemed to know him. I waited at a corner table, nursing a Guinness until he sat alone. Then I joined him. He was a friendly guy, bought me a round. I hated him, hated his guts.” Jake’s voice had gone cold and I was hearing something there that I hadn’t suspected. I heard the anger he’d described and realized that it was still alive and well within him. Maybe it would be until he could understand his past.
“I said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ He looked at me, curious, a little suspicious. ‘No, son. I have no idea.’ I said, ‘Let me tell you about myself.’ And you know what? He was kind to me. He listened to my story, he engaged, shared a little bit about his own history of abuse.
But I didn’t care about his kindness. I just wanted answers. After I’d finished and we’d shared another beer, I said, ‘Mr. Smiley, what can you tell me about Project Rescue?’
“He stopped being kind then and started looking a little gray. ‘Who are you, son?’ he wanted to know. ‘That’s just it. I have no idea,’ I answered. He got the check then and wanted to leave but I followed him outside. He could have made a scene, got any of the guys in that bar to work me over, or called the police, but he didn’t do that. In the parking lot, I told him my theory about Project Rescue. ‘I think I was one of those kids, Mr. Smiley. But something went wrong and I wound up back in the system.’
“He told me I was crazy, that I didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Project Rescue is about saving abandoned infants, that’s it. You need help, son.’
“‘You’re right. I do need help. I need you to tell me the truth about Project Rescue.’ We were standing so close to each other that we were almost whispering. ‘I’ve told you the truth. I can’t help you.’ He got in his car then, but before he closed the door, I flicked a copy of my card onto his lap. I could see by the shine in his eyes that I’d upset him, unnerved him. I thought if he knew more, that his conscience would eventually get to him one day. And maybe it did. Maybe that’s how he came to drive off that bridge on Christmas Eve. And if I killed him, then that’s how.”
I braced myself against the wave of grief I felt for my uncle Max. Even after all of this, it still hurt to think of him dying with all that sadness. The sadness had stalked him every day of his life, thieved every possible joy from him, led him to do unspeakable things. It had won.
“How did Ace know about this?”
“Your uncle told him,” said Ruby. “A few days before he died, he came looking for Ace. He wanted to make things right with Ace, help him to get clean, pay for rehab. He told Ace that the past had come back on him and he had to fix some of the things he’d broken. I guess he thought Ace was one of those things.”
I remembered my last conversation with Uncle Max and I wondered what he would have told me that night if my father hadn’t stopped him. I thought about what my father told me, about Max leaving Ace’s inheritance in a trust available only after he’d been clean for five years. Was he trying to make things right by Ace in doing that?
I looked to Ruby, who seemed not to know what else to say. She just stared at Jake, chewing on what was left of her nails. I guess the only thing that rivaled my fear at that moment was a crushing gloom that so much harm had been done, that so much had gone so irreparably wrong. Did I blame Jake for Max’s death? No. He had a right to seek his truth. Did I blame Max for what had happened to Jake? I still didn’t know. And I wasn’t sure blame was really all that important now.
“We have to go,” I said to Jake. “It’s been a half hour since I called.”
He looked at me in surprise, as if waiting for a reaction he didn’t get. Then he gave a quick nod. “Let’s go.”
On the way down the stairs, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket and a glance at the screen revealed that it was Detective Salvo. I didn’t dare answer. But it gave me an idea.
thirty
Anyone who has watched an execution will tell you that it’s an anticlimax. Families of murder victims, after raging for years, waiting through endless trials they hope will bring the killer to justice, death row appeal after death row appeal, finally come to gather in a sterile room. They watch justice behind a sheet of glass. They watch the killer die. All those years they’ve looked to that moment as the time when pain ends and healing begins. They imagine a weight will be lifted from their hearts, that their sleep will be free from the nightmares. But once it’s done, they’ll tell you the pain doesn’t go away. They are not relieved of suffering. Their grief is just as hot and bright as it was the first day, not mitigated in the least by the death of the perpetrator.
Maybe it’s because the concept of punishment is a false one, because through good or evil action everything around us is altered irrevocably. We are changed by the things we experience. The big things, the small things have their impact and can’t be undone. To judge those experiences, to hate the things that have happened to us is to hate who we’ve become because of them. I guess that’s why I didn’t feel angry as we sped in a cab toward Harriman’s office. I was afraid, I was grieved by the things that had happened, but I wasn’t cursing the day I leaped in front of that van to save a little boy. I didn’t hate my father for “flagging” little Jessie Stone, if that’s what he in fact did. I didn’t hate Jake for confronting Max. I couldn’t muster a feeling of righteous indignation. Because it’s like I told you, I believe in balance, in karma. That for every good there is a bad, for every right there is a wrong.
Of course, in that moment I wasn’t thinking of any of that. Every nerve ending was alive with fear for my brother, for my family, for what Alexander Harriman wanted from me. Once again, I found myself in a situation for which I had no frame of reference. I leaned forward in my seat, willing the cab to move faster, the traffic to clear. By the time we were in front of the Central Park West brownstone that housed Alexander Harriman’s office, I was suddenly stuck to the vinyl upholstery with dread.
“It’s okay,” said Jake, paying the driver and nudging me out onto the sidewalk. “If he wanted to hurt you, you’d be dead already.”
I had to admit there was a logic to this, but it didn’t make me feel much better. We rang the buzzer and I wish I could say I was surprised when the skinhead freak opened the door for us. He smiled as he patted Jake down and took the gun at his waist. He didn’t look as scary as he had come to seem in my memory of him. He had stubble on his jaw and his eyes were rimmed with girlishly long lashes. He smelled of cheap, heavy cologne.
“Nice,” the bald man said, turning the weapon in his hand, then removing the magazine and the round in the chamber with two quick maneuvers. He handed the empty gun back to Jake.
He looked at me and smiled that wolfish grin I’d seen once before. “I feel like we know each other,” he said.
“We don’t,” I answered, trying for cold and tough but just sounding like a scared kid. His smile didn’t waver. Do things like this happen to people? I was wondering, feeling that dreamy wobble to my consciousness again.
The last time I’d been in Alexander Harriman’s plush office, I’d been a different person…though it was only a few days ago. Everything looked different to me—the plush carpets, the leather furniture, the portrait of his wife and daughter hanging on the wall over the wet bar. What had once seemed elegant and comforting seemed tainted now.
“I am going to give you something, Ridley, that no one ever has,” said Harriman as we entered the room. His thug for hire left and closed the door behind us, but I imagined he wouldn’t go far.
“And what’s that?”
He was standing, leaning on the edge of his monolithic oak desk with his arms folded across his belly. He was handsome, seemed almost benevolent if you failed to notice the glint of steel in his eyes.
“The truth,” he said, raising his eyebrows and showing us his palms. “I’m going to give both of you the truth.”
“Why bother?” asked Jake. “Why not just get rid of us. It’s not like you haven’t tried.”
“Well,” Harriman said with a placating laugh, “I wasn’t trying to kill you, exactly. Just turn you off. Sometimes these things…You ask someone to do a job for you and they get a little carried away.”
“Anyway,” he went on with a dismissive wave of his hand, “I’m going to tell you what you both want to know, and then I’m going to insist that it stays here, between us. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I believe it’s the only way to get you to stop nosing around, short of actually killing you.”
“And why would we agree to this?” asked Jake.
“The knowledge of consequences. Ridley, if your brother turned up on an East Village sidewalk tomorrow, dead from an overdose, can you think of anyone who would be surprised
? If your friend here disappeared without a trace, who—other than you—would miss him? Would you like me to go on or do you get the point?”
I got the point like a blow to the solar plexus. I nodded to communicate that.
“Where’s my brother?” I asked him.
“He’s quite a bit safer than he was when we found him. Sit down, Ridley. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner you’ll be reunited with Ace.”
I sunk into the leather sofa, more because I felt like I couldn’t hold my own body weight than out of an urge to obey Harriman. Jake stayed by the door.
“What I am going to give you,” he said dramatically, “is what they call in law enforcement ‘the fruits from a poisonous tree.’ You’ll have the knowledge you seek, but you won’t be able to use it to bring justice—just as if it had been obtained in an illegal search and seizure. Your questions will be answered, but you’ll have to be content with that. Shall I continue?”
I thought about it for a second. Maybe, even after all of this, I didn’t want to know. What would I do with the knowledge if I couldn’t share it, couldn’t pursue it, couldn’t endeavor to put wrong things right? Maybe I was better off not ever knowing what had happened to all of us. But I nodded my assent.
“Max was a crusader. He saw a wrong, a system that was failing, and he sought to correct it. But reforming a government system is slow work indeed, and in the meantime, children were dying. Children were being abused, neglected, fucked up in a hundred different ways by people who neither loved them nor wanted them or didn’t know what to do with them even if they did. Meanwhile, other couples were desperately seeking children, unable to conceive for whatever reasons, on long waiting lists for adoptions. Through his foundation, Max encountered many of these people, knew their desperation, knew what loving, affluent homes they could offer needy children. He was deeply frustrated by that knowledge, seeing these people as wasted resources.
