Alafair Burke - Long Gone

“But he didn’t return the following day with the mysterious, wealthy client.”

“Oh, no, he most certainly did not. When he hadn’t appeared by late afternoon, I called the number he’d given me. It was a takeout falafel stand, as far as I could make out through the broken English. No art dealers on premises,” she added with a wry smile. “Unfortunately, our talented Mr. Lipton was not particularly understanding. All artists have unrealistic expectations, but I think Phillip really expected this show to be a comeback that would set the art world afire. He was shocked we didn’t sell out at the opening. I, on the other hand, was happy to have sold two pieces in this market, but when I had to notify Phillip that the Carnival One sale had fallen through, he was apoplectic. That wife of his only encourages him. Consider me one more art dealer in that very talented but absolutely insane man’s long path of self-destruction. I have Steven Henning to thank for that. I suppose from that look on your face that I wasn’t the only one to fall for him, hook, line, and sinker?”

O nly forty miles of road separated Dover, New Jersey, from New York City, but Morhart’s lifetime trips into the city probably still numbered in the single digits. He liked Central Park. The pizza. The lights at Christmas at Rockefeller Center. But, boy, you sure did pay a big price for those experiences. Simply put, this place had too much stuff in too small a space for his tastes. In Dover, you get outside of town and can look at miles of green hills and blue sky. He appreciated the open space. In New York, a person wasn’t in control of his own movement. Cars crept inch by inch around double-parked trucks. Pedestrians gazing up at skyscrapers and down at cell phones collided into each other like bumper cars. The ability to move was what made Morhart feel free.

Now he was one of thousands of other drivers fighting to squeeze through the light at Broadway and Houston. How-stin, they called it, just inviting out-of-towners to make the obvious mispronunciation so they could whisper about stupid tourists. He was tempted to trigger his dash lights to cut through traffic but didn’t want to find himself at odds with the infamously territorial NYPD.

When he heard a voice blasting from a bullhorn, he felt some of the stress leave his hands, still tight on the steering wheel. He couldn’t spot the protesters yet, but they were here.

He had found a 900 number for the Redemption of Christ Church online. The call cost his department a buck, but the prerecorded message had given him a line on George Hardy’s current location: “ We came to New York City to tackle the belly of temptation and sin. We started with peddlers of smut and the pornographers of children. Yesterday, we learned that the establishment in question had closed, proving we are on the side of righteousness. Today we will continue our work here in the name of our savior. The slope of sexuality created for our children is a slippery one, and the slide can sometimes begin with the so-called clothing that treats our young girls like objects of sexuality instead of vessels of Christ. We will converge upon Little Angels, a store that markets to our children clothing more suited for street corners than schools, at three p.m. If you are with us-even if you have not met us-if you love your daughters, and follow the word of our one savior, Jesus Christ, please join with us. We will expose Little Angels for the damage its business causes to the lives of young women. And we will continue to spread our message that each Christian is called and chosen in God to be a priest unto God, and to give of his time, strength, and material possessions to the service of the Lord. To donate to this cause, please…”

Morhart did not make a donation, but did jot down the address of the church’s protest du jour.

He recognized the man with the bullhorn as Hardy himself from photographs on the Internet. Based on the patches of clothing barely covering the mannequins in the front window of Little Angels, Morhart had to admit the man had a point. A flash of his badge was enough for Hardy to hand his amplifier to one of his followers.

“Someone from your precinct’s already been around here with some ground rules. We’re following them to the letter, Officer.”

“This isn’t about your protests, Reverend.”

“Is this about the pornographer found dead in that smut palace over yonder? The Meatpacking District, they call it? Might as well call it the fudge-packing district, you ask me. I done already talked to some of yours about that one, too.”

“This is about something else entirely.”

“Well, my word, son. How many of this city’s problems can y’all lay at our feet? Don’t you have about eight million other folks to talk to?”

“I need to talk to you about Becca Stevenson.”

A darkness fell across Hardy’s face. The exaggerated folksiness was gone from his voice when he finally spoke. “Now is that right?”

“Are you really going to force me to play this game, Reverend? I know Becca was your daughter. I know you gave her a cell phone. And I know you established contact with her behind her mother’s back and against her mother’s wishes.”

“Her mother had no business denying a man the right to father his own blood. Her mother had no right to give that girl her own last name, like some bastard child. Her mother -her mother’s a harlot and a liar.”

Joann had already filled Morhart in on the background. When she was twenty-one years old, a few years out of high school in Oklahoma, she had gotten pregnant by an out-of-work married man who started out as a daytime drinking buddy at the local watering hole and had become her lover. Would he offer to leave the wife he’d never managed to impregnate? Offer to pay child support in exchange for her silence? When she told Hardy about the pregnancy, she hadn’t known what to expect.

What she never anticipated, though, was the man’s anger. No, not mere anger. As Joann had conveyed it to him-all these years later-Morhart could tell that she had been exposed to the humiliating scorn and hatred of the first man whom she had trusted and loved. Meeting that man now, Morhart could imagine the words Hardy would have used. Seductress. Beguiler. Trouble. Couldn’t keep your legs shut even with a married man. How do I even know it’s mine with a loose woman like you?

The anger in Hardy’s whisper was fierce. “She told me she killed it. Is there anything worse than that?”

Rather than forever entangle her and her daughter’s lives with Hardy, Joann had tried to create a new life on her own. She saw Hardy one last time before leaving Oklahoma. She told him she had terminated the pregnancy. She said she would no longer continue her relationship with the still-married Hardy. She moved north to Jersey and enrolled in classes at the technical college while working full-time. She assumed that Hardy would go on with his life, with the same enabling wife, the same bar stool, and a new woman to keep him company.

But apparently that hadn’t happened.

“Linda and I were almost fifty when I knew Joann.”

“Joann was young enough to be your daughter.”

“I wasn’t the same man then. I changed. Linda never could give me a child. She blamed it on me. Said I wasn’t good at much of anything, not even spreading my seed. I finally told her I knew she was the one who was barren. I knew I was capable of fathering a child. But that, that woman -I know, I wasn’t kind to her when she came to me with news of the baby. But she killed our child. Murdered it. Or so I thought. I couldn’t get past that. And Linda couldn’t get past the infidelities I eventually confessed once I turned to Jesus Christ for forgiveness.”