Beautiful Lies

thirteen

THE NEW JERSEY RECORD

By Margaria Popick

OCTOBER 27, 1972—HACKETTSTOWN, NJ

Teresa Elizabeth Stone, 25 years old, was found dead today in her small apartment in the Oak Groves apartment complex on Jefferson Avenue. Police were alerted when neighbors reported that her television had been on at top volume for almost twenty-four hours. This was not usual for the young, hardworking single mother who worked as a receptionist at a Manhattan real estate office to support her 18-month-old daughter, Jessie Amelia Stone. Jessie is missing.

Ms. Stone was found brutally beaten to death on the kitchen floor of her apartment. There were no signs of a forced entry and neighbors say she was in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend, Jessie’s father. Police had responded to calls of domestic disputes on several occasions since the beginning of the year. Ms. Stone took out a restraining order against him just last month.

Neighbors describe Ms. Stone as being quiet, hardworking, and a loving mother. Maria Cacciatore, Ms. Stone’s neighbor, often took in Jessie free of charge while Ms. Stone worked. “We’re devastated. I never thought such a thing could happen,” she said. “She loved that little girl like crazy. Like crazy.”

Police are looking for Ms. Stone’s boyfriend, Christian Luna, whom they believe might have Jessie. He is considered extremely dangerous and police urge anyone who sees him to contact the police immediately.

“How did you find this?” I said, looking at the photocopy in front of me. A picture accompanied the article, the same one as in the clipping I’d been sent in the mail. I felt a mild wave of nausea and my throat was dry.

“My friend, the detective, recognized the typeface on the second article, visited the newspaper archives online, and was able to track it down.”

“How is that possible?” I said, interrupting him. I looked at the article in my hand. “It’s Times New Roman, indistinguishable from a thousand other papers.”

“Hey,” he said lightly. “You can’t argue with results. It took him a couple of hours, but here it is.”

“It just seems too easy,” I said, and my voice was doubtful, angry, as if I didn’t believe my own eyes.

You may ask yourself here why I was being so belligerent. And it’s a good question. After all, hadn’t I asked him to do just what he did? But I was mad anyway, felt vaguely violated and defensive. I was mad at him for finding the article so fast; maybe I was hoping he wouldn’t be able to turn anything up. I remembered all the listings on LexisNexis, how I hadn’t had the energy to search through them. Maybe if I had tried harder, I would have found it, too.

I walked over to his window and looked down at First Avenue, Pete’s Spice across the street, the Italian bakery that isn’t Veniero’s. They were the most familiar sights in all the world to me, but I felt as if I were on another planet, distant and cold. Some thugs with do-rags and sagging denims skulked on a stoop, reminding me of my brother’s building. I thought about the girl Ruby I had met, my mind wandering.

“What does it mean?” I asked finally. He had seated himself on the couch, waiting patiently for me to figure out what I was feeling.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing.”

Silence. Then: “There’s more.”

I turned to look at him, then walked back over to the table and seated myself, wrapping my arms tightly across my waist and leaning forward as if I had severe abdominal pain. I wished I did. I wished I would double over and pass out from a burst appendix right there so that I could avoid this whole thing.

“My friend has a contact over at the Hackettstown Police Department, so he gave a call. The case was never solved. Christian Luna was never found, never questioned, and never charged. The little girl, Jessie, was never found.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Who?”

“This friend of yours who did this for you.”

He hesitated just a millisecond. “Harley. Someone I grew up with. He owes me a few favors. I’ve helped him out a lot over the years.”

“He’s a detective? With the police department?”

“No, he’s a private detective.”

I nodded. Why did I care about that? I don’t know. Maybe I was just stalling, trying to find a reason why this friend of Jake’s was unqualified to have dug up all of this, trying to cast doubt on its veracity. It didn’t work. You can’t argue with the black and white in front of your face. Well, you can, but you just look like a jackass.

I looked back over at the papers on the table. The printout of the article stared at me. In the picture, the woman and her child were so washed out they looked like ghosts. The yellowed piece of newsprint that I’d received in the mail lay beside it. Someone had kept that piece of paper for more than thirty years. A few days ago they’d decided to part with it and send it to me. I turned that around in my mind, imagining what would inspire me to part with something I had clung to for thirty years. The only possible motivation would be the return of the lost thing represented by the cherished item. For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They’re charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away.

“Christian Luna was born in the Bronx in 1941,” said Jake, looking at some notes he’d written in a small black book. “He went to high school in Yonkers, graduated in 1960, and joined the army. He received an honorable discharge after eighteen months. No further information on that yet. He moved to Hackettstown, New Jersey, in 1962 and worked in various locations as a millwright. Never married. One daughter, Jessie Amelia Stone. He was arrested in 1968 for DUI; did three hundred hours of community service. In 1970 he was taken into custody three times after domestic disturbance calls. He was never charged. In September of 1972, Teresa Stone took out a restraining order against him. But that’s it. After her murder, he drops off the face of the earth. Driver’s license expired in 1974; it’s never been renewed. No voter registration, no employment records, no further arrests. He doesn’t profile as someone smart or connected enough to change his identity, so either he left the country—probably Canada or Mexico, since he doesn’t have a passport on record—or he’s dead somewhere and no one ever found him.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked ridiculously, still angry, still copping an attitude. Jake shrugged with a patient half-smile, oblivious to or very understanding of my shit mood.

“Look,” he said, standing and coming over to the table. He dragged a chair in front of me and straddled it, facing me. “Either you want to do this or you don’t. Did you ask me to look into this for you?”

I nodded, feeling a headache make its debut behind my left eye. He put a hand on my arm.

“Are you still sure you want to know what this means?” he said, nodding toward the papers on the table. “Because if you don’t, we can work on protecting you, work on stopping the harassment, as opposed to finding the root cause. That’s your choice, Ridley. This is your life; it’s up to you if you want to risk turning it upside down. I don’t think it’s too late to forget this ever happened.”

He was calm and level. But there was something glowing in his eyes. He was giving me a last chance to keep my illusions intact, and I think he was hoping for my sake that I would choose denial, even though it wasn’t what he wanted. Who was it who said that once the mind glimpses enlightenment, it can never go dark again?

“I want to know what’s happening. I do.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, looking at me hard. I noticed only when he released me that his grip on my arm had grown tense. “So if we’re trying to figure out who might have sent you the notes and photograph, we have to look at what we’ve got. We have this article. We have this name, Christian Luna.”

“And we have this number,” I said, picking up the note.

More silence, Jake’s face unreadable.

“Do you think it’s him?” I asked. “Do you think it’s Christian Luna doing this?”

Jake shrugged. “Well, at this point, that would be assuming a lot.”

“But you think it’s possible?”

“He seems like a likely suspect. But there are some big questions.”

“Like?”

“Like, for starters, where’s he been for the last thirty years? And what happened to Jessie? If Christian Luna killed Teresa Stone, and I’m not saying that he did, wouldn’t he know what happened to the little girl? But if he didn’t kill Teresa Stone and he didn’t kidnap Jessie…who did?”

“What about this number? Isn’t there like a reverse directory or something?”

Jake nodded. “There is a reverse directory. I plugged the number in.”

He walked over to his computer and jiggled the mouse. The black screen bloomed to life and Jake logged on to a site called netcop.com. He plugged the number into one of the fields. A name and address, along with a map, popped up. Amelia Mira, 6061½Broadway, Bronx, New York.

“Whoever is doing this to you is not a professional,” said Jake, “and not computer savvy, or we never would have been able to find this so quickly.”

“Wasn’t Jessie’s middle name Amelia?” I asked.

Jake smiled. “You’re pretty quick. Sure you never did this before?”

“Yeah. Ridley Jones, writer by day, PI by night,” I said without levity. I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Okay. So who is she?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to come up with any information on her.”

I sighed, stood up to walk the length of the room and back again. I looked at Jake and noticed again those hands, big and square, how the bulk of his muscles strained the cuffs of his shirt. Something else was bothering me, too.

“Jake,” I said. “I don’t understand how you got all this information. How you seem to know so much about this.”

“I told you,” he said.

“Yeah, but you just seem really comfortable with it, like you’ve done it before.”

He smiled. “I always secretly wanted to be a detective. And I know a lot of cops. You hang around those guys enough, it starts to rub off.” He gave a shrug and pointed toward his notes. “Besides, this isn’t me. My buddy got all the info for you.”

Distantly something was jangling, something I didn’t want to acknowledge. I’d felt his tenderness, his kindness, I’d trusted him with this secret part of myself, felt safe enough to share my body with him. But there was something about him, even about his apartment, that made him seem transient, as though he could walk away from everything in the room, including me, and never look back. I looked around the apartment for something that grounded him, something that made him seem more real, more permanent. A photograph, an address book, anything that made him attached to the space. But it was bare, void of the detritus that makes a place home.

I remembered him saying, There are things you need to know about me. He’d said it last night and I’d quieted him and then we’d fucked each other into oblivion. We fucked away each of our pasts, the present. My body, fully electrified by lust and whatever else, was unconcerned about a future. Today again, I’d let desire wrestle all my questions to the floor.

“Ridley,” he said, walking toward me, snapping me back to the moment.

He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. I saw it there, the thing about him that made me trust him. He put those arms around me and placed a kiss on the top of my head. And then the scent of him unleashed a chemical reaction in my brain. The Japanese believe in a fifth taste sense called Umami. When it is ignited by certain foods, it unleashes intense cravings, causing you to eat long after hunger has been sated. I was experiencing the emotional equivalent of that phenomenon. I didn’t ask him what he had meant last night.

“So…what now?” I said, moving away from him. I sank into his couch, which was about as comfortable as granite.

“Well, the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. Call the number and see who answers, see how they play it and decide how to proceed based on that. Or maybe I go up to the Bronx and hang out around this address. See what I can turn up. You give away a lot of power if you call. You let them know that they got to you, that you’re scared, curious, whatever. They have the upper hand.”

Here a kind of mental paralysis set in. To me it felt like choosing how you wanted to commit suicide. Jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or shoot yourself in the head? Slit your wrists in the tub or take a bottle of sleeping pills? Each method had its pros and cons, but in the end you still wound up dead.

“Why you?” I said after a minute. I was suddenly so exhausted it was an effort to voice the question.

He shrugged. “Why not me?”

“Do you have any experience with this kind of thing?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Do you?”

I lay down on my back and looked at him briefly, then covered my eyes with my forearm. It was my “woe is me” position.

“Just forget it,” I said, standing up suddenly. “Just forget the whole thing.” I left him sitting there and slammed the door as I left.