Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“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.