Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “No, thanks,” the plainclothes cop said. “Ms. Jones, I’m Detective Gus Salvo. I’m going to get right to it. A man was murdered last night in Van Cortlandt Park up in the Bronx, and witnesses say they saw you talking to this man when he was shot and that you and another man fled the scene shortly after. What can you tell me about this?” I noticed that he didn’t say “someone matching your description.” He said me.

  “Our witness recognized you from the newspaper, Ms. Jones,” he said before I could even ask. “From when you saved that kid a couple of weeks ago.”

  The detective was a lean, rather slight man. It didn’t look as if he had a whole lot of muscle to him. But there was something about him that communicated strength. There was a mean narrowness to his face and his eyes were wide open, dark and deep as wells. He had the look of a man who’d heard a thousand pathetic lies, who saw the world in stark black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. Gray areas didn’t even exist for Gus Salvo.

  I didn’t say anything for a second. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was still there.

  “Look,” he said helpfully, “I know you were there. You know you were there. Why don’t you just tell me what happened?”

  This suggestion seemed so logical that I told him everything, starting with the day I’d rescued the boy and ending with Christian Luna dying on the park bench. I spilled my guts, sang like a canary, whatever it is they call it in those black-and-white gangster movies. I did leave out a couple of things. I left out Jake; I felt very protective of him and didn’t want him in trouble because of me. I left out my brother. But I told him pretty much everything else, basically saying that I’d called Christian Luna after a few days of thinking about his notes and agreed to meet him in the park. Okay, so I didn’t exactly sing like a canary. I actually left out pretty much everything except getting the note and pictures and calling Christian Luna.

  Detective Salvo didn’t have much of a reaction, just scribbled notes in a small leather-bound notebook as I talked. “Did you talk to anyone about this, Ms. Jones?”

  “No,” I said, feeling my cheeks go pink. “No one.”

  He glanced up at me and regarded me coolly for a moment. “So,” he said, cocking his head slightly, “you just decided to meet this man in a dark park in the Bronx, in the middle of the night, all by yourself. You didn’t tell anyone where you were going. You didn’t think it would be a good idea to bring a friend.”

  I shrugged, shook my head.

  “You seem like an intelligent woman. And that doesn’t seem like a very intelligent action,” he said, giving me a kind of curious half-smile.

  I shrugged again. It was a gesture that seemed to be serving me pretty well lately, so I was sticking with it. “Sometimes unusual circumstances cause us to act in unusual ways,” I said.

  “Hmm,” he answered with a nod. He looked at me. I think he was older than I was by about ten years or so and it showed in deep wrinkles around his eyes. He flipped through the pages of his notebook until he found the one he wanted.

  “Witnesses say that a few moments after the shooting, they saw a man emerge from the trees. That the two of you left together.”

  “There was no one else,” I said. “I left the park alone and got on the train. Came home.” I was proud. I didn’t even stutter. He didn’t say anything but he turned those eyes on me. He knew I was lying and I knew he knew. The knowledge relaxed me, as if we were just actors playing out a skit and everything we said from here on out was simply lines that had been written for us.

  “Why did you flee the scene?”

  I shook my head here. “I was in shock. Scared out of my mind. I barely remember leaving.”

  “Let me see if I can help you with your memory. Witnesses say that they saw you exit the park with this man. That he seemed to be leading you. That you got into a black sixty-nine Pontiac Firebird.”

  Christ. It was dark. Who could have seen all this? And didn’t the newscaster say that joggers had discovered the body this morning? If someone saw all of this last night, why didn’t “they” call the police then?

  “I told you I took the train.”

  I had to think a second about the car. Had Jake parked it in the street in front of the building? No. It was in a parking garage on Tenth Street.

  “Ms. Jones,” Detective Salvo said, his voice gentle, coaxing. “More than one person saw you.”

  “Am I responsible for what people think they see?” I said.

  He changed tack. “Okay, Ms. Jones. Let’s go back. Did you see where the shot came from?”

  “No.”

  “But you said you were both sitting on the same bench. You were turned facing the buildings across the street and he was turned toward you, facing the interior of the park. Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I answered. And here I flashed on something Jake had said about a shadow on the roof of the building across the street. And the newscaster, too, had reported that the bullet might have come from the rooftops. I was no ballistics expert, but thinking on it now, I knew that the shot that hit Christian Luna between the eyes couldn’t have come from the roof across the street. It had to have come from the woods…where Jake was. I saw a small smile turn up the corners of the detective’s mouth, then disappear. I think my face was like a movie screen for him, where he could watch my thoughts flicker in my expressions.

  “The car, a black sixty-nine Pontiac Firebird, license plate number RXT 658, is registered to a man by the name of Harley Jacobsen, address 258 West 110th Street.”

  He looked at me and I tried to make my face blank, shook my head. Harley? someone inside my head asked. Wasn’t that the name of Jake’s investigator friend? They had the same last name?

  “Three assault charges, possession of an unlicensed firearm, breaking and entering,” the detective was saying.

  I was starting to feel a little sick. But I kept silent.

  “I consider myself a good judge of character, Ms. Jones, and this is not the kind of man I would imagine a woman like you spending time with.”

  “You’re right,” I said after a second. “It isn’t. I’ve never heard of this man.”

  Again that small, fleeting smile. “Can I call you Ridley?”

  I nodded.

  “Ridley, I don’t want to see you get in trouble protecting someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

  His words stung a little. I could tell then that I was in the presence of a master. Detective Salvo was a man who knew how to size people up and subtly manipulate them into telling the truth. I wondered if this gift had led him to become a cop, or if he’d discovered it in the commission of his work.

  “I don’t know who this man is,” I said. And that much was true. I had no idea who Harley Jacobsen was. Apparently, though, I’d spent the better part of last night riding around in his car. The detective looked back down at his notes and ran down a laundry list of facts on Harley Jacobsen.

  “The guy was abandoned into the system when he was five years old. A problem kid. Was in and out of foster homes until he was fourteen, never adopted. He went to an orphanage in New Jersey then; stayed there until he was eighteen. He joined the Marines. Had some trouble there with fighting, conduct unbecoming, et cetera. His tour ended in ninety-six and he didn’t reenlist. Got his New York State private investigator’s license in ninety-seven.”

  There was a loud pounding in my right ear, this weird noise I hear sometimes when I’m under a lot of stress. My mind strained to keep up with what the detective was telling me. Had Jake lied about his name? Was he this guy Harley? Or was Harley a friend of his, as he’d told me, and we’d just borrowed his car? I know: duh.

  Gus Salvo handed me a piece of paper. It was a copy of Harley Jacobsen’s PI license. The picture was poor quality, dark and distorted. But there was no denying that it was Jake. My heart fell into a million pieces, fluttered down into my belly.

  Jake had lied about his name. That scared me. Jake had a private investigator’s
license, which explained a lot of things I hadn’t bothered to question. That also scared me. But as for the rest of it, for all I know these were the things he’d been trying to tell me since the night I met him.

  “Any of this ringing a bell for you, Ridley?”

  “No,” I said. “Not in the least.”

  The detective looked at me long, with hard, seeing eyes.

  “Sounds like he’s had a hard life,” I added, squirming just a little inside beneath those eyes.

  “That’s not an excuse for breaking the law.”

  I didn’t know what else to say to Detective Salvo. For whatever reason, I was feeling more protective of Jake—or whatever his name was—than ever. Sure, he’d lied about his name. But obviously I’d been lied to about more important things. I had been honest about the details of Christian Luna’s murder. I really didn’t know anything else about who had murdered him and why.

  “I can’t help you, Detective. I’ve told you everything I know about last night.”

  “Ridley,” he said with a sigh. “I’m just not sure I believe you.”

  I smiled at him, not in a smart-ass way, but in a way that communicated to him that I was done talking. I guess if he’d wanted to be a hard case, he could have arrested me for leaving the scene of a homicide, but I just didn’t get the sense that he was like that. Not that I thought he was giving up, either. He closed his notebook and stood. I told him then about Christian Luna’s cousin in Puerto Rico so that his body could be returned to his family. I didn’t know the name, but somehow I thought Detective Salvo would figure it out. The two police officers who had stood silent throughout the entire interview moved toward the door. I rose and followed the detective to the doorjamb. As I stood beside him, I realized that he was a bit shorter than I was, but somehow his personality made him seem larger.

  “So what did you find out? Was he your father?” asked Detective Salvo.

  “He seemed to think so,” I answered.

  “Any idea who would want him dead?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know him. He was hiding from someone. I thought it was the police. But maybe he had other people to be afraid of as well.”

  “I think that’s a safe assumption,” said the detective. “Consider something, will you, Ridley?” he asked, handing me his card.

  I nodded.

  “It was very easy for me to identify and find you. I was at your doorstep less than twelve hours after Luna was murdered.” I didn’t say anything, but I felt a chill and my stomach did a little flip. “I’m one of the good guys, okay? I show up at your door and you might get in trouble, but you’re not going to get hurt. You hear me? You get what I’m saying, Ridley?”

  I’d read somewhere that cops are trained to use your name a lot when they talk to you, that it fosters a sense of intimacy. It was working.

  “You’re a witness to a murder. If someone thinks you saw something, or wants to eliminate that possibility…” He let his voice trail, allowing my imagination to fill in the blanks. “I’m saying watch your back. I think you’re in over your head here.”

  I nodded again, not trusting my own voice. If he had been trying to scare me, he’d succeeded. I remembered what Jake said about the cops being the least of our problems. It sucked that the cops seemed to feel the same way.

  “I’ll be in touch, Ridley,” he said, putting his hand on my arm. “Call me day or night if you remember anything else, need to talk. Call if you’re in trouble.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that you should remain easy for me to find.” He gave me a look that somehow managed to be condescending and paternal. Then he and the uniformed officers moved down the stairs. I waited until I heard the gate door swing open downstairs and then slam shut before I ran up to Jake’s apartment. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I turned on the knob and pushed at the door but it was locked. I knocked once more but there was only silence.

  seventeen

  “Alexander Harriman’s office,” answered a bright, hard voice. I’d figured someone like Alex Harriman didn’t take Saturdays off. And I was right.

  “This is Ridley Jones,” I said. “Is he in?”

  There was a slight pause. “Just a moment.”

  Rock bottom. Do you think I qualified? I’d just watched a man get murdered, and then fled from the scene of the crime. The man I’ve been sleeping with was suddenly a stranger who’d lied about or omitted nearly everything important about himself. The police had been to my apartment and asked that I remain “easy to find.” Those retractable claws were sounding pretty good.

  “Ridley,” said Alexander Harriman, his voice warm and familiar as if he’d known me all my life, which I guess he had from a distance. “What can I do for you?”

  “I think I’m in trouble.”

  A pause. “What kind of trouble?” he said, his voice gone from bright to serious.

  “I witnessed a murder.”

  “I’m going to stop you. Don’t say another word.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t like to have these conversations over the phone. Can you come to my office?”

  I showered and pulled myself together. Except for the dark rings around my eyes and the frown on my forehead, I looked fairly normal in my bathroom mirror. I hopped a cab down on First Avenue and headed up to Central Park West to see my uncle’s lawyer.

  The brownstone office was posh in a subdued way, lots of oak and leather, Oriental carpets, and the same Asian and African art my uncle had always favored. A giant red Buddha stared at me happily from his place in the corner. A tribal mask fashioned from bark and topped with enormous red feathers seemed to recognize the seriousness of my situation and looked down on me gravely from its perch above rows of bookshelves holding law texts.

  It seemed weird to be in this much trouble and for my parents not to be around. I don’t think I ever got a bad grade without calling my father to lament. I had this feeling of having been cut loose from my life, as if I could drift away, just get smaller and smaller and finally be gone for good.

  “I wish we’d had this conversation before you talked to the police,” said Harriman, after I told him the whole story, from the first note to my visit with Detective Salvo.

  I shrugged.

  “In fact,” he said, leaning back and looking at me, “you should have called me the minute the harassment began.”

  “I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.” I put my hand to my eyes and started to rub away some of the fatigue that ached there.

  “No, of course not,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the gigantic oak desk. I swear I’ve seen smaller Volkswagens.

  “So what do I do now?”

  “My advice? Take a break. Go home and stay with your parents for a while. I’ll call Detective Salvo, and any contact you have with him can be arranged through me from now on. I’ll handle this from here on out, and if you need to talk to the police again, I’ll go with you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re not guilty of anything except some questionable judgment calls.”

  It sounded easy enough. Downright tempting, in fact. Crawl back into the fold and let the gates come down behind me. Forget it all.

  “Seems to me like the source of your problem has been eliminated,” said Harriman. “If you want, this can all just go away.”

  I stood up and walked over to a shelf of photographs to the right of his desk. Outside his window, there was a sprawling view of Central Park and Fifth Avenue. Eliminated. Seemed like an odd choice of words for the death of a man who might have been my father.

  “He thought I was his daughter. He came to find me and someone killed him,” I said, looking out at the traffic on the street below. “How does that just go away?”

  He didn’t say anything but I could feel his eyes on me. “That man, whoever he was, was not your father. I guarantee you that.” He sounded so certain, I turned t
o look at him.

  “I mean, come on,” he said with a disdainful laugh. “Give me a break. This guy just emerges after thirty years and claims to be your father? And you believe him? You’re a smart girl, Ridley. Too smart for this shit.”

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at him. I tried to think of all the reasons this couldn’t have been some kind of sick joke. And I couldn’t come up with one.

  “Okay,” he said, showing me his palms. “Let me do this. I’ll get a court order to preserve a tissue sample. We’ll do a DNA test.”

  The thought made my stomach bottom out. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Maybe I didn’t really want to know. Maybe the question was safer than the answer.

  “See?” he said when I didn’t answer. “You don’t really want to know, do you?”

  I looked at the pictures on his shelf and one in particular caught my eye. It was Harriman, my uncle Max, Esme, my father, and a man I didn’t recognize. They stood beneath a banner that read:

  I picked it up and looked at it closely. They all seemed very young and I noticed Max’s arm around Esme’s shoulder. Her smile was bright and her arm disappeared around his waist.

  “When was this taken?”

  He walked over beside me. I could smell his expensive cologne. The watch on his arm probably could have put a kid or two through college. His hands were so tan, it looked like he was wearing leather gloves. He took the photograph from me and looked at it with a smile.

  “A long time ago. Before you were born,” he said.

  “What’s Project Rescue?”

  “It was one of the ventures of the Maxwell Allen Smiley Foundation. You remember how your uncle lobbied for the passing of the Safe Haven Law?”

  I nodded, remembering the conversation I’d had with my father.

  “Project Rescue was the group that did all the lobbying, public relations, advertising, soliciting funds, and celebrity support,” he said. “Now that the law has passed, they operate a helpline and act as a public relations office, produce those stickers for hospitals, clinics, police stations, and firehouses to put in their windows to identify themselves as Project Rescue facilities where people can leave their babies. They give award dinners honoring physicians who have provided extraordinary assistance to children in need. Max’s estate still provides the funding.”