A Thousand Pardons (29 page)

Ben’s phone vibrated again. That Hamilton plainly had no sense of this question as rude or invasive said a lot, Ben felt, about the kind of life such people led. “The whole adoption almost fell through, actually, at a couple of stages,” he said, “and at the time, I was ready to live without it. It was Helen whose heart would have been broken. I don’t think out of vanity. Do you? Anyway, it’s got fuck-all to do with what they look like. You give them a life, and then they grow up and start calling you on your shit. You could maybe use one yourself.” Out the kitchen window he saw a Sears truck inching along Meadow Close from house to house, looking, he was sure, for his street number. It was either the rugs or the bookshelves, but in any case, Hamilton was going to have to be shut back in the bedroom for a while. Ben sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, also new, so new it still felt stiff underneath him. “You know what?” he said. “We’re going a little crazy locked up in
here. Maybe later if we get in the car and drive out toward, say, Saugerties, get you like a baseball cap or something, I bet we can stay under the radar. I’ll do all the driving. We’ll find someplace to eat dinner and just sit and not say anything.”

Hamilton smiled and shook his head sadly. “Doesn’t work like that, man,” he said. “There is always an eye on you. I feel a little like there’s somebody watching me right now.”

     7

T
HE OBVIOUS COURSE—“obvious” in the sense that her only frame of reference in this situation was television—was to hire some sort of private investigator. There was no one to advise her on how to tell a good one from a bad one, though, so in the end, humiliatingly, she went with the one who had the most serious-looking website. His name was Charles Cudahy, and he was a retired New York City detective. Or maybe neither of those things was true. Conscious of the need to insulate Hamilton by exposing Cudahy to as little information as possible—just enough to get the job done—she called him from a pay phone, all the way over by Carl Schurz Park. Working pay phones were not easy to find anymore. She told him she needed to locate a young woman with an ordinary name.

“What else do you know about her?” Cudahy said, patiently enough. He had a much higher voice than she had been expecting.

“Her most recent place of employment,” Helen said, “though it seems like she was only a temp there. A recent home address. A phone number that’s I don’t know how old.”

“Let’s have them,” he said.

“Really? Right now? Don’t—shouldn’t we meet first, or at least talk about payment or something? I mean this is just an exploratory—”

“This is the age of the Internet,” Cudahy said, “and for people in my line of work, you would be surprised how many cases can be solved in the first thirty seconds, without my ass ever leaving the chair. Not very Humphrey Bogart, but there it is. So how about this: if I can find this person in the next two minutes, while we’re on the phone, you will
owe me five hundred dollars. If not, if it’s more interesting than that, then we will discuss a more traditional fee structure. Sound good?”

She rattled off what little she knew, and then she listened to the sound of him typing. The pay phone was near the East River, not far from the mayor’s house; across the street was a posh new apartment building whose doorman rocked back and forth on his heels like an old Keystone Kop, while staring directly at her.

“Nope,” Cudahy said abruptly. “This is a fun one. I’ll have to put on my pants to solve this one. Just kidding, that’s a joke, I promise you I am wearing pants right now. I work on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar retainer. Cash only. I see you’re calling from a pay phone in Manhattan, so I assume you don’t know how to get to Bayside?”

She wound up messengering a cashier’s check—her own money—and then she waited. Her whole life felt like a pose now, a smokescreen, an alias. She was in backchannel communication with her own ex-husband, on whom, stupidly and perversely, everything now depended. She wouldn’t have minded some sort of webcam setup where she could watch him, unseen, 24/7, both because she didn’t trust him and because she knew that demonstrating that mistrust by texting him compulsively every hour was probably the best way to set him off. As for work, it was one thing to play hooky for a day, but she understood she couldn’t hide out indefinitely—it would put too much of a spotlight on her. So she returned to the office after a two-and-a-half-day absence, telling everyone who asked only that Sara was fine, not sick, back in school, all of which was true but still upped the stakes on the initial lie by making it sound as if whatever happened was so bad she preferred not to talk about it. She wanted to go up to Mr. Malloy’s office to apologize personally, but there was no way to access or even to buzz for his private elevator. So she settled for an interoffice email full of profuse and deceitful apologies. Two hours later, flowers were delivered to her office. She stared at them miserably.

And so that afternoon she finally, distractedly, went to work on what she still had trouble calling the Catholic Church account. They didn’t want to risk a meeting where anyone might see her; she took the subway to an unmarked office building down by City Hall. The New
York archdiocese had been contacted by a
Post
reporter who led them to believe that a major story was in the works about a secret list of priests accused of sexual misconduct, priests who had not simply been reassigned to different parishes but who actually had their names changed.

“Does such a list exist?” Helen asked Father Clement, who was the archbishop’s PR liaison.

“Isn’t it easier for you to do your job,” Father Clement said, “if you assume that the answer is no?”

Helen blinked a few times while trying to think what to say next. “If it helps you,” she said, “think of me as your lawyer. I need to know the truth in order to do my job. While of course the notion of confidentiality is technically not legally binding around here, we do, actually, consider it”—she lost steam as she neared the end of this speech she had delivered to clients a hundred times before—“sacred.”

Father Clement just smiled. “I understand,” he said. “In that case, just between us: yes, while it does not preclude the likelihood that this reporter may be bluffing or exaggerating or making things up, a list of that sort exists.”

“Well, then, Father,” she said, aware that she was speaking with a touch less patience than she might have if there were fewer other things on her mind, “my crisis management advice is very simple—simpler in this case than in most, because presumably I don’t have to explain the concept to you.”

He smiled at her interrogatively.

“Confess,” she said.

His smile broadened until she saw the condescension in it. “To whom?” he said. “To you? To the
New York Post
? I am gratified that you’re looking out for our spiritual well-being. But we are pretty well taken care of on that plane. We come to you precisely because we are also living and operating in your realm, and, like any other institution, we need to keep moving forward.” They spoke like that for another twenty minutes, and then Helen, nettled and distracted and checking her phone, got on the Brooklyn-bound subway by mistake. She didn’t realize it until she felt her ears pop when the train was under the East River. By then it was too late to get back to the office by close of business
anyway, so she consulted a subway map on the platform to figure out the simplest route home.

Her relationship with her daughter was now so cordial and businesslike that Sara had a vague sense of having broken something. Her mother hadn’t so much as asked her a question in days. She worked longer hours than usual, or maybe something else was going on, for when Sara called her at Malloy at four in the afternoon to ask about dinner, she was told that Ms. Armstead had already left for the day. When Helen finally did get home, around six, she seemed immensely distracted, but not in a good way. Maybe that Hamilton Barth dude had broken her heart. Exceedingly hard to imagine, but that was how all the signs read.

And then, after two days in which Sara was relieved to hear nothing, Cutter had started popping up on her Facebook wall again. She’d missed a day and a half of school, and now there were only three more perfunctory, movie-watching days left in the school year. She was ashamed to catch herself looking forward to having to deal with Cutter only on the phone or online. But when he wasn’t in school Wednesday, and she didn’t hear from him, Sara got up the nerve to ask her former friend Tracy if she’d seen him.

“Very funny,” Tracy said; then, catching the look in Sara’s eyes, her interest grew, vengefully. “You really don’t know?” she said. She told the story from her own perspective, as if that mattered to anyone: on Tuesday morning she had been running down the hall, trying not to be late for homeroom even though it was the last week of school so who would care, only to find the doorway blocked by cops, real cops. Apparently Cutter had gotten into an argument with Mr. Hartford, his American History teacher—not for the first time, Sara knew—that had ended with Cutter punching Mr. Hartford in the eye. So Cutter was gone and not coming back, that much was obvious, but past that point it was all ignorant speculation, about jail and lawsuits and whatever else, in which Tracy indulged gleefully.

Sara felt the water closing over her head. She hated herself for wanting to be free of him, for her weak and desperate hope that he would not try to contact her. She thought she might be in the clear
after checking Facebook one last time before bed that same Wednesday night. Then on Thursday morning she had twenty-seven new posts on her wall, and they were all from him. The final one was a photo of her, taken on the sidewalk outside her building, in which she was wearing the clothes she wore yesterday.

She took down the posts and blocked him. He’s only trying to scare you, she said to herself; but guess what, it was working. She went to the front door, and a good thing too—her mother had forgotten to lock it. It must be nice, Sara thought tearfully, just to live in your own little bubble, without it occurring to you that something bad might happen to you or to anyone else.

Helen, meanwhile, lost more and more confidence in the situation in Rensselaer Valley. The fact that she communicated with Ben mostly by text, since she still felt a surge of anger and embarrassment whenever she spoke to him, naturally contributed to the clipped and ominously terse quality of his status reports to her. Still, the situation could only be decaying. You just could not take two men of that nature, ask them to do nothing, go nowhere, talk to no one but each other, and expect that request to be honored indefinitely; but that’s what she had done, that was her only plan.
What r we waiting 4?
was one of his last messages, followed a minute later by
Literally?
They were waiting for proof of Bettina’s continued existence on this earth, proof that was turning out to be maddeningly, alarmingly, expensively elusive. That night Helen nervously floated with Sara the notion that she might take another quick trip up to Rensselaer Valley after work on Friday, just for an hour or two, to check on Hamilton. She made it clear that there was no need for Sara herself to come; but Sara insisted that she would.

Ben had taken the risk of leaving Hamilton by himself once or twice by then, just to go to Bonifacio’s office for a couple of hours, and there hadn’t been any incident. He wasn’t a bad guy, Ben thought. A little self-absorbed, maybe. In the evenings they watched TV and drank. On their fourth night together, a Friday, there was a good old-fashioned, window-shaking thunderstorm, and about ten minutes later the cable, installed earlier that day, went out.

“That’s it,” Ben said. “It’s a sign. We have got to get out of here. I
am trying so hard to do this for Helen, but it’s too much, it’s too open-ended. They are going to find us dead together in here and no one will ever know why.”

“You know, that brings up an interesting point,” Hamilton said. His eyes were glassy. “You two are divorced, right? I’ve never been divorced myself, but doesn’t it sort of mean you don’t have to do what she tells you anymore?”

Ben turned off the hissing TV. “It’s complicated,” he said. “I owe her something. I’m not sure even this is going to pay it off, actually.”

“What did you do?” Hamilton asked somberly.

Ben had an idea. He swirled the ice cubes in his glass. “I’ll tell you what I did,” he said, “if you tell me what you did.”

Hamilton considered it. “Okay, man,” he said. “Only fair. But you may regret asking. It may raise the stakes for you a little bit.”

“All right,” Ben said. He was excited now; he figured Hamilton had maybe slept with some producer’s girlfriend, like in
The Godfather
. “But not here. Seriously, we need a change of venue.”

“No bars,” Hamilton said warily. “I don’t mind saying or doing something stupid in front of you, but if we are out I’ll get recognized, and then we’re both screwed.”

Ben nodded. “Plus the nearest real bar is probably in New Castle, which is like ten miles from here, and if I get nicked for DWI again, it’s back to jail for moi.” Hamilton’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, I have an idea. It’s a little offbeat, but safe, at least. It doesn’t matter where we go, you said, right?”