Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “What did you mean, Jake? When you said there were things I needed to know about you.”

  He didn’t answer right away and I wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  “I don’t know where to start,” he said finally.

  I realized that all the talking we’d done in the last few days, ninety percent of it had been about me. I knew a little bit about his art. About where he’d lived before he moved to the East Village. And that was pretty much it. I had the need to look into his face, but something in the air, something about the way he didn’t turn around to look at me when he responded, told me that he’d prefer that I didn’t. I thought about the scars on his body, and I felt something stutter inside me. This man, for as intimate as we’d become, was still a stranger to me. Somehow I kept forgetting that. I felt as though I knew him in a different way than I’d ever known anyone, that my knowledge of him went beyond his history and straight to the heart of him.

  I sat up and snaked my arms over the seat, wrapping them around his neck and putting my face to his. I could just see the outline of him, feel the stubble on his jaw, smell the scent of his skin mingling with the polished leather of the seat. He raised his hands and held on to my forearms.

  “Just start at the beginning,” I said softly into his ear. “Tell me everything.”

  “I really wish I could.”

  There was something dark in his voice, something almost angry. I didn’t have a chance to ask him what he meant by that because we both saw the figure of a man making his way up the sidewalk. We’d seen a lot of people tonight, but somehow both of us knew that this was the man we’d been waiting for.

  We watched him move quickly, shoulders hunched, a baseball cap pulled down, hiding his face. He had his hands in the pockets of a thin black jacket, which couldn’t have been enough to protect him from the cold. There was nothing about him that would cause anyone to look twice: average height, about five-ten; average size, maybe 185. But we both followed him with our eyes, forgetting our conversation as he turned and jogged up the flight of stairs that led to 6061½ Broadway.

  We waited another ten minutes in a loaded silence. The house stayed dark.

  “Is that him? Is that the man who sent me the letter?” I’d imagined him bigger, more menacing, this person who’d moved through my life like a wrecking ball.

  “It could be.”

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “You stay here, watch the front door. I’m going to go take a look around back.”

  Before I could answer, he slipped quietly from the car and walked up the street away from the house. I saw him in the rearview mirror cross Broadway and then approach the house from the opposite direction, then disappear into an alley. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might be having a panic attack. I waited with nothing but the sound of my own breathing for what seemed like an hour but might have been ten minutes. I didn’t have a watch, so I had no way of knowing. Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore, so I slipped from the car myself and followed the path Jake had taken.

  The dark silence of the park yawned to my right and unlike earlier there was no one around. The lamplights cast an orange glow as I crossed the street. But the west side had no street lamps. Between the convenience store and the first row house was an area of trees. It was a spooky little stretch, the ground slick with wet leaves. Darkness and silence leaked out of the woods like an odor.

  I came to the alleyway where Jake had disappeared and peered into its narrow darkness. A light glowed at the end and I made my way toward it, past reeking garbage cans and menacing shadowy spaces where anyone or anything could be hiding, waiting.

  I knocked into one of the garbage cans hard with my knee and the metal lid went clanging to the ground. Somewhere close a dog started barking, startling a little burst of adrenaline into my blood. I ran the rest of the way through the alley, which let out into—take a guess—another alleyway that ran along the back of the row houses.

  Some of the houses had lights lit in the back, and up above me I could see the glow of interior lamps and the blue flicker of television screens through the windows. I could hear the lightest strains of Pink Floyd’s “Money.” Someone was cooking pot roast or something meaty, the scent making my stomach grumble (yes, again). It was still dark back here, but at least if I screamed someone might hear me.

  I was pretty sure the dark house in the middle was 6061½. But I didn’t see Jake. I managed to continue my way through with a little more stealth and without banging into anything else. I saw a narrow metal staircase that led up to a landing that ran the length of the back of the house. From one of the back windows I thought I caught the movement of light. I climbed the staircase and peered in the window.

  He was sitting there on the floor, the man from the street, beside one of those battery-operated lanterns that you can get at Kmart. Leaning against the wall with his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, he’d taken off his baseball cap but left his jacket on. I couldn’t see his face clearly, couldn’t tell for sure if it was the man in the photograph. The light was dim and he was washed in shadows. Beside him sat an old green rotary phone.

  He ate slowly from a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli with a plastic fork. Looking intently at the can, he seemed to hold each bite of food in his mouth for a long time before swallowing. I could see the outline of his mouth, full lips pulled down hard at the corners. Sadness, anger, disgust…it was hard to tell. But he struck me as the very image of loneliness. Whoever this was, however it was that our lives had come to intersect in this strange way, his loneliness was a contagion and I felt it fill me. Tears welled in my eyes. I don’t know why. I had peered into this window of desolation and somehow in doing that I had let what I’d seen into my own heart.

  I suddenly felt warm arms around me and a hand over my mouth. I didn’t struggle because I knew it was Jake somehow, maybe by his scent.

  “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” he hissed into my ear.

  He released me and took me by the hand. Together we left and went back to the car.

  “Why did we do this?” I said when we were back in the Firebird.

  “Because I wanted to see what we were dealing with.”

  “And what are we dealing with?”

  “From what I can see? One lone guy sitting by a phone in an empty house with no electricity.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means that whatever threat he might pose, I can handle it.”

  My expression must have been blank with my lack of understanding.

  “Look,” he said patiently, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You asked me to help you find out what’s going on, right? I got some information, found out some background, figured out the address for that telephone number. Before you called, I wanted to know what we were walking into, who exactly we were calling.”

  “And who are we calling?”

  “My bet? That guy is Christian Luna. What he wants, why he thinks you’re his daughter, where he’s been all these years? I don’t think we can find that out without talking to him. So that’s the next logical step.”

  “Call?”

  He handed me a cellular phone from his pocket and the telephone number.

  “Call.”

  I paused with the phone in my hand.

  “Only if you want to, Ridley. Otherwise, I bust in there, scare the shit out of the guy, and he goes away. I guarantee you never hear from him again. The guy’s on the run. He’s scared and he’s hiding from something or someone, probably the police. He’ll slink right back under whatever rock he came out from. And you pretend none of this ever happened.”

  But it was too late for that now and we both knew it. It took a few minutes of us sitting there in the dark before I turned the phone on and punched in the number. My hands were shaking and I felt sweat on my brow, though it was so cold in the car I could see my own breath.

  He picked up the phone on the first ring. His voice was deep and had a slig
ht accent I couldn’t make out.

  He said, “Jessie?”

  I could picture him there on the floor. I heard the naked mixture of a deep sadness mitigated by a tentative hope.

  “This is Ridley,” I said, my voice sounding a little wobbly even to my own ears. “I’m Ridley.” I felt the need to assert that, at least. To hold on to that one thing that helped to claim my life as my own.

  “Ridley,” he repeated. “Of course. Ridley.”

  “I’d like to meet you.”

  “Yes,” he said, and it sounded like a plea.

  The benches at the entrance to Van Cortlandt Park in an hour, Jake had scribbled onto a piece of paper. I told him this and he paused. I wondered if he’d be suspicious of the nearness to his location, but he agreed after a second.

  “You’ll come alone?” he asked. And I agreed, though I was not comfortable lying, even to this stranger who was ruining my life.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “I’m your father,” he said after another pause.

  “What’s your name?” I repeated.

  “I’ll see you in an hour,” he said, and hung up.

  I ended the call and handed the phone back to Jake.

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  “No.”

  Jake shifted in his seat. “I guess I wouldn’t, either.”

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “If I were a fugitive? I told you my name, you could call the police and have a hundred squad cars waiting for me. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  I shrugged. “Then why risk it at all?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  fifteen

  We waited until he left the row house and watched as he walked toward the park entrance. Jake said he wanted to see him leave to make sure he was in this alone. I wasn’t sure who else he thought might be involved but I didn’t ask. Jake seemed oddly comfortable with the scenario of waiting and observing, plotting action, making sure things were safe—the whole thing. To me, the situation was surreal, strange enough for me to wonder a few times whether I was dreaming. A couple of times I thought I might actually wake up.

  After a few minutes had passed, we trailed behind him in the Firebird. He was hunched again but walking fast. He threw a glance over his shoulder a couple of times, but I don’t think he was looking at us.

  “He seems so lonely. Lonely and sad,” I said.

  After a strangely long pause, Jake said, “You can’t tell that by looking at him. You only see what he wants you to see.”

  I thought this was a very odd thing to say and I turned to see Jake’s face. But he was totally focused on the dark form in front of us, his eyes trained on the man like a preying owl on a mouse far below.

  “You can tell a lot about how someone holds himself when he thinks no one’s looking,” I said. “I saw him. I saw the sadness.”

  “I don’t believe that. I think we project what we’re feeling on the people we see. If you’re dishonest, you see dishonesty in people. If you’re good, you see only good things when you look at someone’s face. Physical cues might tell you if someone’s lying or if someone’s nervous, but I don’t think you can read much about a person, about who they are, by just looking at them.”

  I considered this for a moment. “So are you saying you think I’m sad and lonely?”

  Another pause. The darkness was like a physical substance between us, keeping me from connecting with his eyes.

  “Aren’t you?”

  Denial rose in my throat, indignation pulled my shoulders back. But before I spoke I realized he was right. That was exactly how I felt. It was how I’d felt from the second I got that envelope in the mail. And maybe on some deep, subconscious level even before that, if I was really honest with myself. I didn’t say anything and felt a kind of numbness wash over me as we got closer to the park entrance. Jake reached through the darkness and took my hand and squeezed it hard. I squeezed back and wished he’d never let go.

  He drove past the entrance, did another U-turn, and parked the Firebird. We both got out. This time I got a good look at the car. It really was mint; an extremely tough, hot car with a shiny paint job. Not exactly inconspicuous.

  “You like it?” he said when he saw me looking at the car. I smiled.

  “You know what they say about guys who feel compelled to drive a muscle car like this?”

  “What’s that?” he said, moving into me.

  “Overcompensation.”

  “Well,” he said, pulling me close. “You know better than that.”

  I felt heat rise to my cheeks. “I guess I do.”

  He placed his lips to mine and kissed me, long and soft, lighting me up inside. He pulled back and placed a hand on my face. His expression had gone from playful to serious.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding an assurance that I didn’t feel. “I know.”

  “You don’t,” he said softly. “But I do. Let’s go.”

  Jake and I walked into the park about two blocks from where I’d told Christian Luna—or whoever he was—to meet me. Jake hung back in the trees, about a hundred feet away, as I walked up to the path where the man sat on a bench. He turned, startled, when he heard my footsteps on the asphalt, then stood. I stopped walking and he came a little closer.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I said when he was about five feet from me. I was afraid; I wanted him to keep his distance.

  He was older and seemed smaller than I would have imagined, but there was no mistaking that he was the man in the picture. It was the dark intensity of his eyes, the heavy brows, the fullness of his lips. We stared at each other, as though we were separated by a sheet of glass and could only see our own reflections. For a moment, I thought I saw something in him that I had never seen in anyone else. The shadow of my own features. I’m not sure it’s anything that I could put my finger on, exactly. Something around the eyes, maybe something in the shape of his jaw. I thought, Maybe it’s my imagination. Maybe I’m seeing only what I want to see…or what I fear the most. Maybe it’s the drama of the moment.

  “Jessie,” he said. Relief, joy, and an intense grief mingled in his tone. He took a step closer and I took one back. He raised his arms slightly, as though he thought he would embrace me. But I wrapped my arms around myself tightly, moved back even farther. I hated him suddenly. Hated him for looking like me.

  “Did you kill her?” I said. My voice was an open hand, hard and unyielding, and he jerked as though he’d been slapped.

  “What?” he said softly, almost a whisper.

  “Teresa Elizabeth Stone. Did you kill her?”

  “Your mother,” he said, and sat down on the bench as if he’d lost his strength to stand. “No.” He dropped his head into his hands and began to sob. It was embarrassing, really, in its intensity, in the depth of its misery. I sat on the bench next to his and waited until he’d stopped crying. I couldn’t look at him and I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him, but the hatred I’d briefly felt drained away. I leaned back and looked up at the few stars I could see twinkling in the sky. I placed my cold fingers in the pockets of my jacket.

  “Are you Christian Luna?” I asked when his sobbing had stopped.

  “How do you know all of this?” he asked.

  “That’s not important,” I answered.

  Does it sound like I was cold? I was. Hard. Cold. Colder than liquid nitrogen. I have come to regret this. He might have deserved more compassion from me, but I just couldn’t afford it at that moment. I was wrecked inside. His face had done it.

  “Look,” I said after more silence where he seemed to be wrestling with what to say. “What do you want from me?”

  I could see disappointment and disbelief in his eyes. Whatever he had imagined of this moment, I was pretty sure he wasn’t getting it. And in the state I was in, I took a small, dark victory in depriving him of his fantasy reunion.

  “
What do I want? You’re my daughter,” he said, sounding incredulous. “My Jessie.” His voice and his eyes were pleading with me, but he would have had more luck moving the Statue of Liberty.

  “You don’t know that really,” I said, stubborn, my arms folded across my chest like a judge. Judgment is such a useful shield, isn’t it? We can hide behind it, rise above others on its crest, keep ourselves safe and separate.

  He laughed then, just a little. “Look at me, Jessie. You see it, don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. He moved over to my bench and I turned to look at him. I didn’t move away from him this time and he didn’t reach out to try to touch me.

  “If I’m Jessie, then what happened to Teresa Stone?” I said. “If you didn’t kill her, who did?”

  He sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that question every day for thirty years.” More silence where he looked at me and I looked at anything else. A car sped past, subwoofers booming a dance beat into the cold night.

  “I was a bad father,” he said. “And I treated your mother badly. But I didn’t kill anyone.” The youthful indignation and barely repressed rage I heard in his voice caused me to turn and examine his face. He was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. His skin was brownish, sun damaged, marred with deep lines. He had the worn look of a hard life—bad diet, bad choices, bad outcomes. He seemed to sag beneath the weight of it all but with a kind of determination to shoulder the load regardless. In Christian Luna I had expected to find a villain, someone malicious and menacing, someone powerful with the intent and ability to hurt me. But all I saw was someone tired, someone close to defeat without the sense to cut his losses and move on.

  “I tried in my way to do right, you know?” he said with that same hopeless laugh. “But I was young. So fucked up. I never had a father, so I didn’t know how to be a man.” He shook his head, remembering, and looked off into the darkness of the park.