I'll Walk Alone - Mary Higgins Clark [21]
But that might take time. Maybe if I call, he thought, and ask when Fr. O’Brien is scheduled to hear confession next, whoever answers won’t think it unusual. I’m sure some people want to talk to the same guy about their problems every time they go. Besides I can’t sit around like this and wait for him to go to the cops.
The decision made, he placed the call and was told that Fr. O’Brien was scheduled for the next two weeks, Monday through Friday from four to six P.M.
It’s about time for me to go to confession, he thought.
Before he paid Gloria to mind the child, he’d known that she was a consummate makeup artist. She told him that she sometimes made up herself and her friends to look like celebrities, and that they’d fooled everyone. She said they all had a good laugh when according to Page Six of the Post the celebrities they were mimicking were sighted having a quiet dinner at an out-of-the-way spot and graciously signing autographs.
“You wouldn’t believe how often we don’t get a check,” she had giggled.
I always wear the wig she gave me when we meet in town, he thought. With that wig and the raincoat and dark glasses, even my best friends wouldn’t know me.
He laughed aloud. As a kid, he’d always enjoyed being in plays. His favorite was when he had played Thomas à Becket in Murder in the Cathedral.
16
After speaking to the reporters outside the Four Seasons, Ted Carpenter turned on his iPhone on his way downtown and found the photos of the person who seemed unmistakably to be Zan taking Matthew from the stroller. Shocked, he stopped at his duplex condo in the newly gentrified Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan. There he had agonized briefly about whether or not to meet Melissa at Lola’s Café. What will it look like for me to be there when these photos are showing my ex-wife stealing my child?
He phoned the Central Park Precinct and was put through to a detective who told him that it would be at least twenty-four hours before they could verify that the pictures were not doctored. At least if I’m questioned by the paparazzi, I can tell them that, he thought, as he changed his shirt and rushed back to the car.
The paparazzi on the sidewalk outside the popular café were kept back behind velvet ropes. One of the bouncers had held the door of his car open and he had ducked out toward the entrance. But then he stopped, unable to ignore the shouted question, “Have you seen those photos yet, Ted?”
“Yes, I have and I have been in touch with the police. I believe they are a cruel hoax,” he snapped.
Inside the café he braced himself, knowing he was a half hour late meeting Melissa. He fully expected to find her in a filthy mood, but she was sitting at a large table with five old friends from the band she had once been in as the lead singer. She was clearly enjoying their adulation. Ted knew all of them and was grateful for their presence. If Melissa had been waiting alone, there would have been hell to pay.
Her greeting to him, “Hey, you’re getting more coverage than I am,” was met with hoots of laughter from her tablemates.
Ted leaned over Melissa and kissed her on her lips.
“What’ll you have, Mr. Carpenter?” The waiter was at the table. There were already two bottles of their most expensive Champagne chilling in a bucket beside him. I don’t want that damn Champagne, Ted thought as he sat down next to her. I always get a headache from it. “A gin martini,” he said. Only one, he promised himself. But I need it. What in the hell does it look like for me to be here when there may be a break in the search for my son?
He was careful to drape his arm lovingly around Melissa and keep his eyes fixed on her for the benefit of the stringers who were paid to contribute items to the columnists. He knew that tomorrow Melissa would want to read something like “Top recording artist Melissa