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
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
“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
“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
“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.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
