Beautiful Lies

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 to 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.”

He put the picture back on the shelf and turned me away by placing his hands on my shoulders. “Anyway,” he said, “that’s all ancient history.”

I sat down on the couch across from his desk and felt absorbed by it, it was so plush. He sat in a large ornate chair that looked more like a throne with its brocade seat and back, its blackwood arms that ended in fierce lion heads.

“So how about I call you a car to take you home to your parents’ place,” he said, reaching for the phone beside him. “You can get some rest. I’ll deal with the NYPD. A week from today, it’ll be like this never happened.”

I looked at him. He could make it go away. I knew he could. He had that look about him, the look of a man who could give your problem a pair of concrete boots and make it sink into the East River. Just don’t ask too many questions about his methods. You don’t want to know.

“No,” I said. “Don’t. I’ll take the train.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, lifting the receiver.

“No, really. I need the time to think.”

He paused, holding the phone in his hand, looking at me with skeptical eyes. “But you’ll go home to Ben and Grace?”

I nodded. “Where else can I go now? You’re right. I need a break.”

He put the phone down and I rose.

“My parents can’t know about this, Alex,” I said. “Not yet. It’ll just frighten them.”

“Attorney-client privilege, kid,” he said, standing up. “Everything we’ve talked about today stays here. I’ll leave a message for you at your place when I’ve talked to that detective. You check your messages? Check your messages.”

“I will.”

“Trust me,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder. “This time next week? Never happened. You did the