Long Gone

could tell from his briskness that there would be no easy answers.

“After this week, only a photograph of me on a police report with someone else’s name would count as bad news. Is there good news?”

“Not sure it’s good, but I do have some information to heap on to the pile. You said your father-or ITH-settled a lawsuit with a woman named Julie Kinley?”

She nodded. “She accused him of stealing the story idea for my dad’s first big film, In the Heavens. Art Cronin already checked her out, though. She died last year.”

“Well, you know that police report Robert Atkinson was so eager to get his hands on? According to him, the complainant would have been one Julie Christie Kinley.”

“Julie Christie?”

“Weird, huh? I guess her mother named her after the actress. Atkinson told the records clerk that the woman actually went by the name Christie, but her real name was Julie. That’s what the settlement papers said, right? Julie Kinley?”

“Yeah.” As her voice echoed in her own ears, it sounded vacant.

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure. There’s something about that name: Christie Kinley.”

“It almost rhymes.”

“I think that’s why I remember it. I have no idea what this means, but I remember a girl named Christie Kinley who lived somewhere around Bedford. But she couldn’t have been the woman who accused my father of plagiarism.”

“How come?”

“Because she was just a kid. She was somewhere in between me and my brother. In fact, I’m pretty sure she came to our house a couple of times. She wouldn’t have even been born when In the Heavens was made. Atkinson told the police that she was the one who filed the report?”

“Yes, Julie Christie Kinley. I assumed it was the same Julie Kinley who entered the settlement with ITH. I figured she’d gone to the police with her claims. People do that all the time, mixing up civil and criminal complaints. According to Atkinson, she would have filed the report in April 1985. April 18, to be precise.”

“He knew the exact date?

“Not quite. The complaint had something to do with the night of April 18, which supposedly was a Friday, but the actual report could have been made any time during that weekend.”

In April of 1985, Alice would have been in the sixth grade. Ben would have just turned sixteen. In fact, his birthday would have fallen precisely one week before the eighteenth, on April 11. And she knew without question that one week after his sixteenth birthday, on a Friday night, Ben hosted one hell of a keg party on the Bedford property, rowdy enough to lead two police officers to her family’s home on Sunday afternoon.

Threads of information were beginning to weave together. She hadn’t wanted to see the connections, but could not continue to deny the only explanation that made any sense.

“Did the records clerk say anything else about Atkinson?”

“Yeah. He was hurling accusations that someone with the police department had destroyed the report he was looking for. He said the tramp and the cops got paid off, and all he got was sandbagged.”

“That he was sandbagged?”

“Fucking sandbagged, was I believe the exact quote.”

“I think I know what that police report was all about. And if I’m right, that settlement with ITH had absolutely nothing to do with a stolen screenplay.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

“D on’t you need a search warrant or something?”

“The man lived alone, and now he’s dead. Guess the super figured no one’s left behind to yell at him for letting an FBI agent inside.”

Hank used the superintendent’s key to open the door to Robert Atkinson’s Gramercy Park apartment.

“Either this guy’s a worse housekeeper than I am, or I’d say that whoever removed those keys from his ignition has already been here.”

Kitchen drawers were open. Sofa cushions overturned. Even the edges of the living room rug had been flipped.

“Maybe a little of both.” Alice ran her fingertip across the dust accumulated on a student-sized desk in Atkinson’s front alcove. She pointed at a dust-free rectangle about the size of a laptop. The power cord was still connected to the wall.

“So much for finding a computer with all of our answers written up in an easy-to-follow tabloid story.”

“You’ve been pretty quiet since we left Bedford.”

“So have you. Given what this day’s been like, I figured you might want to be alone with your thoughts. You don’t know me from Adam, after all.”

“I know you’re an FBI agent. I know that probably means you have a theory-something to connect Julie Christie Kinley’s police report, her settlement with ITH, and those photographs I found on that thumb drive.”

“Anything I have to say would be conjecture at this point.”

“But isn’t that what investigators do? Conjure up possible explanations and then look for confirming or disconfirming evidence?”

“You said in Bedford that you thought you knew what the police report might have been about.”

She sat on Robert Atkinson’s faux leather desk chair. “The night of April 18, 1985, was precisely one week after my brother’s sixteenth birthday. Our house there’s on five acres of land. He used to get his friends together at the back edge of the property. At the time, it seemed like they were partying like rock stars, but it was probably pretty typical high school fare. My parents were sort of don’t ask, don’t tell about the entire thing. On that particular night, the party got so out of control, some girl got sent away to boarding school because of it. The police came to our house the following Sunday asking all kinds of questions about who’d been there and what happened.”

She knew that Hank’s silence was probably an interrogation technique he had learned in the FBI, but she didn’t care. She continued with her story.

“They asked me where my father was during the party. I remember because I was so afraid he was going to get in trouble for something Ben had done-like trying to hold the parents responsible for underage drinking or something. I told the police that my dad had been in our screening room with me. He’d gotten an advance copy of Goonies. Mom had gone to bed early. Their friend, Arthur, was staying for the weekend, but Goonies wasn’t exactly his bag, so he went out to the guest cottage. This was before my father stopped drinking. The truth was that he was pounding scotch after scotch after scotch. I tried to rouse him when I turned in, but he was totally passed out. I never actually saw him go to bed. I could still hear Ben’s friends partying when I fell asleep.”

Hank was silent again, but for some reason, this time she needed to be prodded.

“I notice you mentioned Christie Kinley, the ITH settlement agreement, and the thumb drive all together. Maybe part of you has decided that those pieces of information are all related to that weekend at your house in Bedford?”

“Don’t you think so?”

“I’m asking you to say out loud what it is that you believe now, Alice.”

“I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to believe it.”

“It’s just the two of us here. It’s like you said-investigators look for confirming or disconfirming evidence. We’ll investigate. Together. I’ll help you. And if we disconfirm whatever possibility you’re thinking about in your head right now, no one else has to know it was ever on the table.”

She looked at her feet as she spoke. “I think my father had sex with Christie Kinley the night of my brother’s party. I think he took pictures of them together in his study. I think she filed a police report, but that somehow my father made the case go away, paying her a settlement, using ITH for cover. And I think all these years later, someone’s still very pissed off at my father, and at me for unwittingly providing him an alibi. They made money