Long Gone

by Alafair Burke

  Hank never wanted to be part of a wrongful conviction. He still woke up some nights thinking about Anthony James, and wondering what kind of life he might have had if things had been different. Hank liked to think that he had at least learned something from the experience. What he learned was that human memory was fragile. An expert in eyewitness testimony had explained to him why the nurse had erred in her identification: when Hank handed her a single piece of paper depicting the faces of six men, she had asked herself which of the six men looked the most like her attacker. Poor Anthony James looked more like Teddy Jackson than the others. From that day forward, the nurse simply continued to identify him—not because she remembered him from the attack, but because she remembered him as the man she had already picked out of the six-pack. The expert had shown him videotapes of subjects in her laboratory who, after choosing the wrong suspect in a lineup, would continue to identify that person even when given a choice between him and the actual perpetrator.

  Hank prided himself on his ability to pull up images from his past as clearly as if he were examining a color photograph, but he realized that the clarity of an image and its accuracy were two different things.

  When Willie Danes asked him about the woman he’d seen at Larson’s apartment, he had handed him two photographs: one of a redhead kissing Larson, and one Hank knew to be Alice Humphrey. Hank realized now that he had simply assumed that the same woman was in both photographs. And the two images looked enough like each other and enough like the woman at Larson’s apartment that he had made the ID. But if the identification process had been perfect—if Hank had not already seen photographs of Alice Humphrey on the Internet, and if Danes had shown Hank a series of photographs of red-haired women to examine sequentially—would he have picked out Alice Humphrey as the woman from Larson’s apartment? He could never be absolutely certain, but he found himself doubting his own memory.

  And that’s why he kept searching for news updates. He wanted to know the police had more evidence pointing to Alice Humphrey’s involvement in Larson’s death. He wanted to be certain he had gotten it right when he’d made the ID.

  For what had to be the fifteenth time in the last three days, he entered her name in Google Images. He was trying to be certain she was the same woman from the apartment complex, but he knew he’d seen so many pictures of her by now that he had simply cut and pasted her face on those remembered images that he kept replaying in his mind’s eye.

  If only he could see her in person, watch her walk down Larson’s street in that bright blue coat and sexy shoes. Watch her arms barely move as she took the stairs. See the tilt of her head when she looked into a man’s face. Maybe if he were in the same room with her, he would know.

  And then he realized he might be able to get a moving image of her, right here from his cubicle.

  He opened YouTube on his computer and searched for Alice Humphrey. Nothing. Searched for Highline Gallery. Nothing. Then he searched for Frank Humphrey.

  He found thousands of results. Many of them were illegally uploaded—iconic scenes from his copyrighted films. There were also reels from Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight, and TMZ about the many mistresses who had stepped forward last year, one at a time in a slow, painful drip of tawdriness. There was the director’s exclusive sit-down interview with Katie Couric. Hank usually tried to block out celebrity gossip, but even he had been exposed to some of the ubiquitous sound bites: I understand other people with more traditional lifestyles may not understand; This is a private matter between Rose and me; None of this affects my work as an artist; I want to be evaluated based on my filmmaking. The interview was labeled a “trainwreck”—a patronizing non-apology from an arrogant old man.

  Hank clicked through the videos, searching for images of Humphrey with his family, until he finally found a screen capture of Humphrey, hand in hand with his daughter. It was footage of him leaving the premiere of The Burn Wall, his last film before the scandal. By all accounts, it was a good movie, but a commercial flop due to the public’s lack of interest in the story of a soldier serving in Afghanistan.

  Alice’s eyes darted around the glare of the flashbulbs while her father delivered the obligatory words of gratitude toward his actors and producers. As they left the red carpet, Alice looked down at her feet, delivering one awkward wave to the crowd before stepping into an awaiting limousine.

  He rewound the reel, examining the woman’s face, trying to re-create the appearance of the woman he’d seen with Larson. Her hair was pulled into a low ponytail at the nape of her neck, but a woman’s hairstyle could change twenty times in two years. She appeared to be about the same height and weight. The woman with Larson had struck him as younger, but he had seen her from a distance, and those big sunglasses and bangs over her eyebrows would have covered the small lines on her forehead and around her eyes, the only betrayals of Alice Humphrey’s age.

  He rewound the clip again, knowing that something about the video was bothering him.

  It wasn’t her face. It was the walk. Just like Mrs. Ross gliding into the elevator, every person had a distinctive gait. When Alice Humphrey followed her father on the red carpet, she looked down at her feet, watching each placement of her feet onto the ground. Her shoes had heels, but they were three inches max—modest as far as those things went for women these days. The way she stepped—flat-footed, cautious, in tiny baby steps—reminded him of Ellen practicing in her first pair of Manolo Blahniks, or whatever those things were called.

  This was not the walk of the woman outside Larson’s apartment. What had initially caught his attention had been that walk—that catlike prance up the street, eyes ahead, back straight, chest forward, nearly marching in those black stiletto pumps. It had been nearly two years since that film premiere. Maybe practice had made perfect for the once hesitant Miss Humphrey.

  But maybe not.

  He picked up the phone and asked for Detective Willie Danes.

  “I hate to bother you, Detective, but I may have been a little too quick to call the ID on Alice Humphrey.” He explained the discrepancy between the woman he’d seen and the videotape of Humphrey on YouTube.

  “You’re saying you saw Travis Larson with a knockout beauty of a redhead at his apartment, wearing a stunning peacock blue coat. And then his body gets found by, lo and behold, a knockout beauty of a redhead in the very same peacock blue coat, but it’s not the same woman? And you’re basing this on a pair of shoes the girl wore two years ago?”

  “I’m not saying it’s a different woman. All I’m saying is I can’t be a hundred percent sure that it’s the same woman. Not based on what I saw.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing the NYPD doesn’t operate on the same definition of a hundred percent as the FBI.”

  It wasn’t the first time Hank had been ribbed by a local cop about the federal government having the luxury of demanding more evidence, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  “Can you just be sure and check out Humphrey’s shoes? It’s not every woman out there who can pull off the monsters Larson’s girl was wearing.”

  “Do I look like Prince Charming? Chasing down Cinderella with the glass slipper? Tell you what, Beckman: we don’t even need your ID at this point, so don’t worry your head about it, all right?”

  “Well, you can’t have that much. I see you haven’t made an arrest yet.”

  “I don’t know you, Beckman, so I don’t know how to say this to you, but your sister’s dead. You couldn’t save her, and the asshole you blamed for that is dead now, too. See a shrink or find something else to obsess about. I don’t really care, but your involvement in this case is over.”

  The click on the other end of the line was like a punch in the throat.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  It was Alice’s second trip to the Upper East Side, and the weekend wasn’t even over. This time her mother answered the door herself, greeting her with a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Hey, Mom. I thought you were in Bed
ford.”

  “Well, I was, but Arthur has a table tonight at some fund-raiser for one civil right or another. I thought it would be a good excuse to put on a fancy gown and eat dessert.”

  “Dad’s going with you?” She had called in advance to make sure he had returned from yesterday’s location-scouting trip to Miami.

  “I’m afraid not. He’s packing a bag now to head out to Los Angeles. I told Arthur I’d be representing the family tonight. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve already had a little martini to get me started. Would you like one?”

  “No, thanks.” Based on her mother’s tolerance and extraordinary chipperness, Alice suspected she’d had more than one warm-up drink. She’d always found it strange that her mother continued an open affair with alcohol despite her husband’s decision twenty-five years earlier to go dry, but there was no shortage of things she did not understand about her parents’ marriage.

  “How are things at the gallery?” Her mother looked at her watch. “Shouldn’t you be there?”

  “It’s taken care of for now.”

  She felt guilty for not telling her what was happening, but Alice’s mother had spent her entire life sending out signals that she did not want to be troubled by disturbing news. Maybe in a different marriage, with different hardships, she would have developed into a more complex woman. Certainly the promising actress who had won an Academy Award for her depiction of a promiscuous young widow had shown early signs of emotional depth. But at some point in her life, Rose Sampson Humphrey had accepted a permanent role as happy Hollywood wife, standing quietly and supportively by her talented husband and perfect children, always grateful for the family’s good fortune.

  Even when Ben was turning into a full-out junkie, she’d allow herself to be convinced that he was plagued by migraines, anxiety disorders, chronic fatigue, any explanation for his weight loss, erratic behavior, and sickly pallor. Rose Sampson was not, as she liked to say, in the stress business.

  “All right. It’s nice to know I’ve got one child I don’t need to worry about for the time being.”

  “Ben?”

  “He didn’t show up for your opening last week. He told me he’d come up to the country for the weekend, but—well, he’s probably busy. Have you seen him?”

  “I was at his apartment last night.” She’d been trying him all morning, but her calls were still going directly to voice mail.

  “Did he seem okay? Everything’s all right?”

  “I only saw him for a few minutes, but, yeah—he was—he was Ben.” Go ahead, Mom. Ask the follow-up question. Push me for more information. Because you know. You know, Mom. You know he’s still got a problem, the way you know you smell like vodka and have glassy eyes at eleven in the morning.

  “Well, that’s good to hear. To what do I owe this pleasure, by the way?”

  “I need to talk to Dad about something.”

  “That’s even nicer to hear. Maybe the two of you will be back to normal soon.” Her chipper smile fell when Alice didn’t respond. “Don’t be so hard on your father, Alice. There are very few people in this world who have the power to hurt that man, and you’re one of them. I haven’t been a perfect wife, if that makes a difference.”

  She didn’t want to hear her mother make excuses for his affairs. She didn’t care about his sins as a father or a husband anymore. She just needed answers.

  “Mom, you don’t know anything about Dad somehow backing the gallery, do you?”

  Her lips formed a small O. “Sweetie, I know your father gave you a hard time about wanting to do things on your own, but really—I think you’re letting your imagination get the better of you.”

  “Did you have a chance to ask him about the ITH Corporation?”

  She was here to ask her father about the company directly, but it wouldn’t hurt to know what he might have said to her mother.

  Her mother snapped her fingers and pointed at her. “That’s right. You asked about that. I did not have a chance to ask your father about it. You know how hard he is to reach when he’s on the road. But I did have some extra time on my hands up in that empty house in Bedford waiting for your brother to show up, so I did some digging in your father’s old files.”

  She made her way to the coat closet near the front door and pulled out a canvas tote bag. “I found this.”

  Alice removed a file folder from the bag and flipped through its pages. She was no lawyer, but she could tell the document was an agreement between ITH Corporation and someone named Julie Kinley. ITH agreed to place all of its existing assets into a trust for the benefit of Julie Kinley. In exchange, Kinley agreed to release all potential legal claims against ITH and its agents, officers, and employees, both in their official and personal capacities. Alice wasn’t entirely clear about that part, but she assumed it was a settlement agreement of some kind. The final paragraph of the document was a clause requiring confidentiality from both Kinley and ITH about the agreement.

  “Is that what you were looking for?”

  “I think so. Thanks. Do you know what ITH was for?”

  “Your father has created a few different corporations over the years, hon. You know, for the film funding and what not. What’s this all about?”

  “Nothing, Mom. I’ll talk to him about it. Have fun at your event tonight.”

  By the time Alice was halfway up the stairs, her mother was already at the bar cart, pouring herself another martini.

  “Your mother went through my study? I don’t know how many times I’ve asked her—”

  “You were in Miami, and I needed to know about this company.”

  He shook his head with confusion. “You’re telling me that this gallery was started under the name ITH?”

  How many times would she need to go over this? “It was incorporated in 1985, and Arthur Cronin filed the paperwork with the state. Now it turns out you had this settlement agreement in your office. I assume that means you’re behind ITH. I need to know whether you were also behind the gallery.”

  Most of the time when Alice looked at her parents, she saw them as they had always appeared to her—beautiful, strong, a little exotic. But every once in a while, she saw them through a neutral observer’s eyes—not as they once were, but as they currently existed. A little thinner. A little paler. Their noses and ears a bit larger. Older. Her father was seventy-eight years old, and right now his face showed every day of it.

  “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you that. But I can’t dig myself out of this unless you tell me everything. ITH is your company, isn’t it?”

  “It was a d-b-a I formed to film In the Heavens.”

  She knew that d-b-a stood for doing-business-as. It was a moniker used for small businesses that were not technically formed as corporations. “You didn’t incorporate?”

  “I had no idea what I was doing back then. I was a kid with a script, some friends, and a fantasy. The next thing you know, your mother and I are both winning Academy Awards. I kept the money associated with In the Heavens in an account I had opened under the d-b-a.”

  “But then you incorporated in 1985? That was fifteen years later.”

  “Sixteen, actually.”

  “And now someone has used that company name to open the Highline Gallery.”

  He placed his head in his hands before looking up to answer. “There was a lawsuit that needed to be settled. I still had money under the ITH name. Arthur structured the settlement so that the plaintiff accepted the assets that were already with ITH. He incorporated and then created a trust. By that time, I was a millionaire fifty times over. Arthur had probably incorporated me fifteen times since then for various projects. It’s all about limiting liability and taxes and whatnot. But I haven’t used that corporate name for years. And I certainly didn’t start that gallery.”

  Her father had confirmed her suspicions about ITH, but she was no closer to the truth about the gallery’s origins.

  “Who is Julie Kinl
ey?” She gestured to the settlement papers that were now resting on the desk in his home office.

  “A wannabe screenwriter who claimed that I stole the idea for In the Heavens.” The movie that garnered his first and her mother’s only Oscar statues still remained his career-defining film. About a socially proper woman whose sexuality is awakened after the death of her husband, the film was labeled obscenity at the time by three attorneys general.

  “You were accused of plagiarism?” Her father had long been known as a sharp-tongued, hot-tempered, arguably sexist man who didn’t suffer fools, but she’d never detected any doubt in artistic circles about his intellectual integrity.

  “Anyone who’s had any kind of success in Hollywood gets accused with every project. Leeches slither from beneath every rock searching for publicity or an easy settlement. Kinley was a former employee and made the allegations long after the fact. They were bogus, of course, but I had enough money by then to settle. Art said it was better than taking the public relations hit. We structured the settlement using ITH, but I really haven’t thought of it for more than two decades.”

  “I already knew that someone did this to set me up. Now they use the name of a company you started when I was twelve years old? This is obviously personal.”

  “Maybe this isn’t just about you. I’m the one behind the corporate name.”

  “Someone wanted to set us both up?”