Authors: Alafair Burke
Long Gone (19 page)
H
ank Beckman popped his third Advil in as many hours. He felt his eyes beginning to cross from the strain of reading entries on bank statements and deposit slips.
“Okay, Mrs. Ross. If we’ve identified every transaction at issue”—he punched a series of numbers into the calculator—“it looks like you transferred a total of $410,525.62 to Coulton since 2007. You withdrew only $35,000, leaving you with a loss of $375,525.62. Our charges against Coulton will reflect as much, and you might be needed to testify about the transactions and your communications with Coulton should the case proceed to trial.”
“What about the money? When will I get the money back?” Marlene Ross was a well-maintained woman with smooth skin and immobile hair. Had it not been for access to her official date of birth, he would have placed her a decade younger than her sixty-six years. She had tastefully applied whatever fragrance had created the subtle sweetness he smelled whenever she leaned toward him.
The U.S. Attorney was on the verge of indicting Richard Coulton in what would have been the office’s largest Ponzi scheme if Bernie Madoff had not blown that record out of the water a couple years back. “We’ll go after his assets, but there’s no guarantee, of course, of obtaining a complete recovery. The very nature of a Ponzi scheme is that Coulton used the money you gave him to cover promises he made to clients he enlisted years earlier.”
“So are you telling me that if you had just minded your own business and left him to his own devices, he would have received investment money from some other person in order to pay me back? He promised me a thirty percent return.”
The newspapers made it sound like the swindlers who engaged in pyramid schemes were taking food from the mouths of gullible investors, but Hank had found it difficult to sympathize with some of the entitled people who were supposedly Coulton’s victims.
He walked Mrs. Ross from the conference room. As she passed him, he noticed the ease with which she walked to the elevator in her six-inch heels, the designer red soles unscratched despite her claims that Coulton had left her “with nothing.”
Back at his desk, he Googled “Highline Gallery,” “Travis Larson,” and “Alice Humphrey,” as he had been doing obsessively since he divulged everything he knew to NYPD detective Willie Danes. No new information. He had seen the boxes of documents in the war room at the precinct. He had felt the energy and momentum of that investigation.
The police had a theory. He was certain of it. They had a suspect, that much had been obvious from their conversation. But three days had passed without an arrest. Probably some prosecutor had concluded that they lacked sufficient evidence for a trial, so now they were in that familiar holding pattern. He’d heard all the metaphors before: getting their ducks in a row; holding their cards close; letting the suspect wiggle free like a fish, careful not to try to grab it too early. Waiting for the media frenzy to die down. Waiting for another piece of the puzzle to fall into place. Waiting for the suspect to make a mistake. Waiting. Waiting.
He couldn’t wait any longer. For seven months, since Ellen died, he had thought about Travis Larson every single day. Now the man was dead, and Hank—for reasons he could not identify—felt like he had seen something that would somehow prove relevant. He hated being locked on the outside, left scouring the Internet for clues like one of those housebound true-crime crazies who routinely called the bureau with so-called tips gleaned from online surfing.
He kept recalling moments from the last days of Larson’s life, replaying mental videotapes from his periods of surveillance, wondering if he had overlooked the significance of something he had witnessed.
He also had an uneasy feeling about the identification process Danes had used to get him to name Alice Humphrey as the redhead he’d seen at Larson’s apartment. Last year, a federal court had released a man named Anthony James Adams after DNA evidence cleared him of raping a nurse working the night shift at St. Vincent’s Hospital thirteen years earlier. Hank had been the FBI agent in charge. He’d shown the victim a six-pack of photos, and after a minute of careful study, she’d identified Adams as the perpetrator. It would be more than another decade before a different man, Teddy Jackson, would tell his cellmate that he raped a nurse at a New York City hospital in 1997 and got away with it when another man took the rap. More sophisticated DNA analysis, unavailable during the original investigation, led to Adams’s release.
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.
I
t 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 Bedford.”
“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 Kinley?” 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?”
“I hate to think this, Alice, but I had this nauseous feeling from the minute I heard about your employer’s murder at the gallery. No, even before then, when those protesters showed up at your door. I had this horrible pain in my heart—this feeling of portent—but I didn’t want you to think I was undermining your accomplishment. I didn’t want to take something that was for you and make it about me. I wanted to believe that this new job was exactly what you believed it to be—”
“Just say it.”
“From the second that fascist preacher appeared outside the gallery with his brainwashed followers, I had a feeling that something horrible was happening. I never thought it was a coincidence that you landed this golden opportunity just to have some right-wing nuts drag your name through the mud—and in the process, let the media take a few more shots at the old man while they were at it.”
“You think George Hardy’s behind this? What would he get out of it?”
“These fellows thrive off of the culture wars. They have evil in their hearts, they preach hate in the name of Christ, and they have been coming after me for forty years. They already branded me an adulterer—”
“Come on, Papa.” They both knew he had himself to blame for that.
“I’m not making excuses, but I am pointing out that they fanned the media flames. Arthur even dug up proof that a couple of these guys paid women from my past to come forward with their stories.”
“Hardy’s outfit seems pretty small-time. I mean, how would they even have the resources to pull something like this off?”
“Oh, don’t you kid yourself, baby girl. Those guys pretend to be grassroots movements, tiny sects acting independent of one another. But they are organized. And they collaborate. And they have tremendous financial backing. Men with money fund their efforts. And these are not men of God. They manipulate religiosity for political, and ultimately financial, gain. If they can tie my name to child pornography, they can slap my face on every one of their fund-raising letters. And they can use guilt by association to campaign against every candidate and every cause your mother and I have ever given a cent to. When Hardy showed up at your door, I should have told you to walk out, right then and there.”
“So if Hardy and his church are behind this, who was the man who hired me? And why is he dead?”
He shrugged. “He could be anyone. One of Hardy’s followers who wasn’t playing along anymore. Or someone they hired. You said he wanted to meet you at the gallery that morning. Maybe he was going to tell you the truth.”
“A sudden change of heart?”
“Or he realized that the daughter of Frank Humphrey might be in a better position to help him than some loser like George Hardy and the whackjobs who carry his coat. I know I don’t have all the answers, Alice, but you have to trust me on this one: I did not have anything to do with this. And no matter what happens, we are apparently in this together now. My special effects guys tell me that photograph you gave me wasn’t Photoshopped. Whoever’s behind this went to the trouble of lining up not only the man who hired you, but whatever woman is in that picture. I’m canceling my trip.”
“Dad, you don’t know a girl called Becca Stevenson, do you?”
“No. Who’s that?”
“Some girl missing from her home in New Jersey. The police asked me about her, but I have no idea why.”
“We definitely need to get Art in on this. You need a lawyer.”
When Alice returned to her own apartment two hours later, she saw a green Toyota Camry around the corner on St. Mark’s. The driver appeared to be checking out the posted hours for parking. She could not tell if it was the same man she’d seen fiddling with the stereo in a green Camry on Second Avenue when she’d gone on her Starbucks run that morning. She made a mental note of the license plate number and was still repeating the pattern to herself when she flipped the bolt on her apartment door and fastened the security chain.