Ben stood up and began mixing them two more drinks, even though the orange juice was now gone.
“She is a trip,” Hamilton said. “I totally get why you couldn’t stay married to her. Hey, can I ask you something? That Chinese girl that was here — that’s Helen’s daughter, so I guess she would be your daughter too?”
“That’s right,” Ben said. “Sara.”
“Is she from China China?” Ben nodded. “So you went over there to the orphanage and all that?”
“We went over there,” Ben said, “but not to the orphanage. They didn’t want us to see it.”
“So has it been awkward, ever?”
“Has what been awkward?”
“Having a child who’s a different race than you,” Hamilton said. “I always wondered that about adoption. I mean I guess I’ve always assumed that it was basically vanity that made people reproduce in the first place, and adopting a kid who looks nothing like you — it doesn’t seem like it would satisfy that. Am I wrong?”
Ben’s phone vibrated again. That Hamilton plainly had no sense of this question as rude or invasive said a lot, Ben felt, about the kind of life such people led. “The whole adoption almost fell through, actually, at a couple of stages,” he said, “and at the time, I was ready to live without it. It was Helen whose heart would have been broken. I don’t think out of vanity. Do you? Anyway, it’s got fuck-all to do with what they look like. You give them a life, and then they grow up and start calling you on your shit. You could maybe use one yourself.” Out the kitchen window he saw a Sears truck inching along Meadow Close from house to house, looking, he was sure, for his street number. It was either the rugs or the bookshelves, but in any case, Hamilton was going to have to be shut back in the bedroom for a while. Ben sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, also new, so new it still felt stiff underneath him. “You know what?” he said. “We’re going a little crazy locked up in here. Maybe later if we get in the car and drive out toward, say, Saugerties, get you like a baseball cap or something, I bet we can stay under the radar. I’ll do all the driving. We’ll find someplace to eat dinner and just sit and not say anything.”
Hamilton smiled and shook his head sadly. “Doesn’t work like that, man,” he said. “There is always an eye on you. I feel a little like there’s somebody watching me right now.”
7
THE OBVIOUS COURSE—“obvious” in the sense that her only frame of reference in this situation was television — was to hire some sort of private investigator. There was no one to advise her on how to tell a good one from a bad one, though, so in the end, humiliatingly, she went with the one who had the most serious-looking website. His name was Charles Cudahy, and he was a retired New York City detective. Or maybe neither of those things was true. Conscious of the need to insulate Hamilton by exposing Cudahy to as little information as possible — just enough to get the job done — she called him from a pay phone, all the way over by Carl Schurz Park. Working pay phones were not easy to find anymore. She told him she needed to locate a young woman with an ordinary name.
“What else do you know about her?” Cudahy said, patiently enough. He had a much higher voice than she had been expecting.
“Her most recent place of employment,” Helen said, “though it seems like she was only a temp there. A recent home address. A phone number that’s I don’t know how old.”
“Let’s have them,” he said.
“Really? Right now? Don’t — shouldn’t we meet first, or at least talk about payment or something? I mean this is just an exploratory—”
“This is the age of the Internet,” Cudahy said, “and for people in my line of work, you would be surprised how many cases can be solved in the first thirty seconds, without my ass ever leaving the chair. Not very Humphrey Bogart, but there it is. So how about this: if I can find this person in the next two minutes, while we’re on the phone, you will owe me five hundred dollars. If not, if it’s more interesting than that, then we will discuss a more traditional fee structure. Sound good?”
She rattled off what little she knew, and then she listened to the sound of him typing. The pay phone was near the East River, not far from the mayor’s house; across the street was a posh new apartment building whose doorman rocked back and forth on his heels like an old Keystone Kop, while staring directly at her.
“Nope,” Cudahy said abruptly. “This is a fun one. I’ll have to put on my pants to solve this one. Just kidding, that’s a joke, I promise you I am wearing pants right now. I work on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar retainer. Cash only. I see you’re calling from a pay phone in Manhattan, so I assume you don’t know how to get to Bayside?”
She wound up messengering a cashier’s check — her own money — and then she waited. Her whole life felt like a pose now, a smokescreen, an alias. She was in backchannel communication with her own ex-husband, on whom, stupidly and perversely, everything now depended. She wouldn’t have minded some sort of webcam setup where she could watch him, unseen, 24/7, both because she didn’t trust him and because she knew that demonstrating that mistrust by texting him compulsively every hour was probably the best way to set him off. As for work, it was one thing to play hooky for a day, but she understood she couldn’t hide out indefinitely — it would put too much of a spotlight on her. So she returned to the office after a two-and-a-half-day absence, telling everyone who asked only that Sara was fine, not sick, back in school, all of which was true but still upped the stakes on the initial lie by making it sound as if whatever happened was so bad she preferred not to talk about it. She wanted to go up to Mr. Malloy’s office to apologize personally, but there was no way to access or even to buzz for his private elevator. So she settled for an interoffice email full of profuse and deceitful apologies. Two hours later, flowers were delivered to her office. She stared at them miserably.
And so that afternoon she finally, distractedly, went to work on what she still had trouble calling the Catholic Church account. They didn’t want to risk a meeting where anyone might see her; she took the subway to an unmarked office building down by City Hall. The New York archdiocese had been contacted by a Post reporter who led them to believe that a major story was in the works about a secret list of priests accused of sexual misconduct, priests who had not simply been reassigned to different parishes but who actually had their names changed.
“Does such a list exist?” Helen asked Father Clement, who was the archbishop’s PR liaison.
“Isn’t it easier for you to do your job,” Father Clement said, “if you assume that the answer is no?”
Helen blinked a few times while trying to think what to say next. “If it helps you,” she said, “think of me as your lawyer. I need to know the truth in order to do my job. While of course the notion of confidentiality is technically not legally binding around here, we do, actually, consider it”—she lost steam as she neared the end of this speech she had delivered to clients a hundred times before—“sacred.”
Father Clement just smiled. “I understand,” he said. “In that case, just between us: yes, while it does not preclude the likelihood that this reporter may be bluffing or exaggerating or making things up, a list of that sort exists.”