A Thousand Pardons (30 page)

“I think you were the one who said that, but yeah, it doesn’t matter to me.”

“Anywhere but this house. Okay. Do me a favor and go grab the vodka.”

Ben drove into town at about fifteen miles per hour and parked in the lot behind the hardware store. They stumbled up the steps and he opened the door with his key. “This is where I work,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, there’s ice. I’m going to turn on the light, count to three, and then turn it off again, because it would not be cool if anyone were to see us up here. Ready?”

He flicked the switch, and together they took in the tiny office, which, like any office, looked unfamiliar and slightly malicious when empty: the cheap, pocked desk, the noisy filing cabinets, the chair pulled up to the window so he could rest his feet on the sill, the water-stained curtains, the potted plant. Realizing he’d forgotten to start counting, Ben slapped at the switch again and they returned to darkness, a degree or two darker than before. “Now I forget where the chair was,” Hamilton said.

Ben’s cellphone chimed again, and he jumped. Without looking at the incoming number—he knew it anyway—he turned the phone off.

Helen had been trying to reach him for more than an hour, ever since she got out of that day’s meeting—another stalemate—with the Catholics; she’d dialed Hamilton’s number as well, but he rarely answered his phone even under the best circumstances. Her next call was to the accursed Hertz outpost near her apartment. She had a premonition something was wrong. Her messages and texts left no room for misunderstanding in terms of the need to check in with her right away: if Ben didn’t reply immediately, her last message had said, she was going to assume the worst and head up there. She picked up the car, called Sara to tell her to be ready in half an hour, and then drove to the pay phone outside Carl Schurz Park to make one more call that had been on her mind.

Not only had there been nothing in the papers or on the Internet about Hamilton Barth’s disappearance but she had actually come across a
Hollywood Reporter
item that claimed he had been at a gallery opening three nights ago in Venice Beach. They were good, those people, but if they were already going to the trouble of planting items, they must have been in a full-blown panic. Hamilton’s agent was someone named Kyle Stine—she’d looked it up—and with a prepaid phone card she’d bought at Duane Reade, she called his office from the lonely pay phone.

“No,” she had to say to three different people, “I’m not calling for information about Hamilton Barth. I’m calling
with
information about Hamilton Barth. Please just give that message to Mr. Stine, and I’ll hold.” Hold she did, for almost ten minutes. She could see the doorman
behind the glass wall of the building across the street, sitting at his desk, in the glow of the security-camera monitors.

“This is Kyle Stine,” said a hostile voice.

Helen swallowed. “I’m a friend of Hamilton’s,” she said quickly, “and I know you probably haven’t heard from him in a while, and I just wanted to let you know he’s fine—”

“Where is he?” Stine said, in a tone whose attempt at calm could not have been more frightening.

“I can’t tell you that,” Helen said, “but I can tell you that he’s okay, he’s perfectly safe—”

“What the fuck do you mean, he’s safe?” the voice thundered. “Who is this? Listen to me. You tell me where you have him right now.”

“He’s fine,” Helen said. “He will be back in touch when he’s ready.”

“Do you have any notion of the interests you are fucking with? What, have you kidnapped him or something?”

“Oh God, no. I’m trying to help him.”

But the voice formed its own judgment. “You are committing all kinds of crimes right now, you psychotic cunt, and if you think there is anything that I wouldn’t do in order to track you down and eliminate every last trace of you, you are really fucking mistaken. Do you have any idea what’s at stake here? What are you, some fan, you think he’s got some kind of special connection with you? Some relationship? Do you have any idea how pathetic you are? There will not be enough left of you to form a fucking stain on my bootheel, if anything happens to him. Do you have any idea of the forces that are closing in on you right now?”

Red-faced, Helen hung up. The doorman was now standing and staring at her through the glass wall. She drove home and found Sara sitting in the lobby, staring at her cellphone, her purple duffel bag at her feet.

“What’s that for?” Helen said. “We’re not spending the night.”

“I’m not coming back with you,” Sara said. “I was going to take the train up tomorrow anyway, but this is better. I need to go home and be with Dad. I do not feel safe here. I do not feel safe with a totally checked-out mother who has no interest at all in her daughter’s life.”

“What about homework?” Helen said reflexively.

“I don’t have any more homework. School ended today, thanks for noticing. Your job has turned you into some kind of zombie, apparently, but whatever, I choose to be with Dad now.”

“It’s not your choice,” Helen said.

“Want to test me?” said Sara.

And, God help her, the thought flashed through Helen’s mind that, if Sara were up there at the house with her father and Hamilton, it would be easier to keep them indoors, it would be harder for them to go out. Ten minutes later Sara had her earphones in and Helen drove in angry, agonized, private silence up the floodlit West Side Highway.

Ben still wasn’t answering his phone, but now that bit of childishness on his part just made her laugh with anticipatory pleasure: oh, you wanted some warning that you were about to become a full-time parent again? Try checking your goddamn voice mail once in a while. When they got to the house on Meadow Close, every light in it was blazing, seeping around the closed shutters as if some sort of industrial hellfire was burning in there. Helen knocked on the door and then pushed it open, Sara two steps behind her. No one was home. She could not make the brazen fact of it sink in right away. Red-faced, she ran in and out of every room, each of which now looked like some half-assed warehouse full of unmatched new furniture.

“What’s going on?” Sara said.

“I can’t believe it,” Helen said. “I literally cannot believe it. How stupid could I be?”

A mile and a half away, Ben and Hamilton sat with their eyes accustomed to the dark of Bonifacio’s second-floor law office. Ben had stressed the need for quiet, which was why his phone was turned off. It was also true, of course, that he knew he was now much too drunk to pull off a non-alarming phone conversation with Helen anyway. The vodka was nearly gone, and they’d run out of ice half an hour ago.

“This is the first time I’ve been drunk since rehab, if you please,” Ben said, in a voice just above a whisper. “I mean, don’t worry, it was fake rehab. Real problems, fake rehab.”

“I know lots of guys who have done that,” Hamilton said.

“So look,” Ben said, “can I ask you something? You’re a fucking movie star. Men want to be you, women want to be with you, or however that expression goes. What the hell is that like? Is it just incredibly great? Because I have to say, when I hear people complain about it, like boo hoo I have no privacy or whatever, I just think, what pussies.”

“Yeah?” said Hamilton idly. “You think you’d like that kind of life? Guys with cameras in your face everywhere you go, lies about you in the paper and on TV all the time? The true stuff is worse than the lies, actually.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “I think I might have liked it. I mean at least it’s a big life. At least it’s a consequential life. At least you’re at the center of your own life, not on the periphery of it.” He swirled the vodka in his glass and looked out the window at the streetlight. “Periphery,” he pronounced slowly.

“See,” Hamilton said, “you think that. People think that. But when you’re in it, it’s more like you’re a character in a story. You try to be the one telling it, but you’re not. And then you can try to get out of it, but when you do it’s like the story was already one step ahead of you anyway. It’s like Pirandello. Ever read Pirandello, man?”

“What?” Ben said. “No. What are you talking about? I mean look, let’s get down to brass tacks, man-wise. These four days or whatever it is that you’ve been living under my roof, that’s probably the longest you’ve ever gone without getting laid since like high school, right?”

Ben expected to bond over this bit of flattery and maybe to hear some good stories; but instead he seemed to have pushed a button. Hamilton put his drink down on the floor and placed his hands over his eyes. “I have this reputation as a very serious person,” he said. “And I used to be. I mean even when I wasn’t acting, in my downtime I painted, I wrote poetry. I actually published a couple of books. People liked to make fun of it because of who I was, but it was actually not that bad. But then I became less serious. Why is that? Older, and yet less serious. Why? Older, closer to death, less serious. It doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, that’s when I really started fucking a lot of chicks I didn’t know. I’d say like over the last six, eight years. I mean it became really important to me. I never really knew what all that was about
while I was doing it, what it was all pointing towards, but now I do know, man, now it’s obviously clear, but too late.”

“Right,” Ben said. “Wait, what? What do you mean, now you know?”

“I told you all this,” Hamilton said.

“You haven’t told me shit!”

“I killed a girl,” Hamilton said, and then that sentence hung there in the darkness for a while.

Ben felt the adrenaline cutting through his buzz. “What?” he said softly. “How?”

“I don’t know. Funny that’s your first question, though.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that either, except that it apparently was in me, and something in her woke it up. All those years of getting away with murder. So to speak. It’s emptied me out.”

“Are the—” Ben stopped when he thought he heard something outside on the steps, but it must have been just his paranoia. “Are the cops looking for you, then? Helen is helping you to hide from the cops? That doesn’t sound like—”

“I’m not hiding from anyone. Helen is making me stay here.”

“Why?”

“Because she doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t believe I did it.”

“Who does she think did it?”

Hamilton didn’t answer.

“So the cops are not looking for you?”

“No. Nobody’s looking for me, except my agent, Kyle, probably. No reason to.”

“No
reason
to?”

“There has to be a body,” Hamilton said sadly, “before anybody will believe there was a crime.”

And there it was again—the creak from outside, but it was definitely not his imagination this time, there were feet on the steps that ran up the side of the building. What the hell is this turning into? Ben had time to think. He dumped the rest of the vodka into the plant and raised the empty bottle above his shoulder, without getting out of the
desk chair. A face pressed up against the glass; then the knob turned and the lights went on and there, with as close to a look of disequilibrium as you were ever going to see on his face, was Bonifacio, wearing a Carhartt jacket over a pair of plaid pajamas, a set of keys in one hand and in the other, now dropped limply to his side, a gun.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he said. “I had three different people call and tell me someone had broken in. But it’s what, an office party? In the dark? Motherfucker,” he said, gesturing with the gun, “did anybody ever tell you you look just like Hamilton Barth?”

Ben stood and beckoned his boss into the desk chair. They had one more round, from Bonifacio’s desk-drawer bottle of Jameson, while everybody calmed down, and then Bonifacio, though likely drunk himself, drove the two men home. When they crested the hill, Ben saw a strange car in the driveway, and he reached out and grabbed Hamilton’s arm. “We’re dead,” he said. Bonifacio, tired and disgusted, made them get out at the top of the driveway. Trying gamely to sober up, they marched down the pavement toward the front door.

From the foyer Ben could see Helen sitting at the kitchen table and Sara stretched out on the new living room couch. He stood between them, paralyzed with fear, until Hamilton ungracefully squeezed past him, sat down across the table from Helen, and leaned toward her on his elbows.

“What have you found out?” he said.

“Where on earth,” Helen said in a gratingly high voice, “have you two been?”

“It’s not what you think,” Ben said.

“Helen, please!” Hamilton said.

“We just needed to get out,” Ben said. “But we didn’t do anything too stupid. We just went to Bonifacio’s office.”

“Bonifacio’s office?” Helen said incredulously. “At ten o’clock at night?”

“So we wouldn’t be seen,” Ben said.

“And did anybody see you?”

“Well,” Ben said, “Bonifacio.”

Helen put her head in her hands.

“Helen,” Hamilton said again. “Have they found her?”

“Have they what? Oh. No, there’s no word. We can’t find her, but on the bright side, no one has reported her missing either. She doesn’t really have a job to go to, and she has an apartment she hasn’t slept in in a while, but that doesn’t mean anything. Could just mean she found someone else to shack up with. Anyway,” she said, softening as she saw the anguish on his face, “that’s not why I drove up here, because I had news or anything. I just couldn’t get ahold of you and I was worried. Oh, and also,” she said to Ben, “apparently your daughter wants to live with you now. So there’s that.”

Hamilton sighed, got up, and wandered unsteadily toward the living room. He and Ben were clearly too drunk to keep up any kind of productive conversation for long; and Sara, scared and resentful and confused and tired, hadn’t spoken for more than an hour.

For a long moment, Helen, thinking of the three of them, felt that she would like nothing more than to get away from there, away from a sense of her own accountability for any of it, much less all of it. But a powerful inertia kept her in that ugly new kitchen chair, and she realized that she too was far too exhausted right now to get back in the car and go anywhere. “Hold it,” she said loudly, and everyone turned around. “Sara in her room. You two in the master bedroom. I’ll stay out here and then leave in the morning.”