Hibernate Entitymanager remove elegantly without exception?

Is there a more elegant way of avoiding javax.persistence.EntityNotFoundException when calling EntityManager.remove() on an object that may or may not currently exist in persistent state? I am trying to avoid a situation where I need to make 2 queries to remove an object. Currently I am cheating with:

void remove(String id) {
    T model = entityManager.getReference(type, id);
    entityManager.remove(model);
}

But this will throw an exception if the model does not exist.

I could:

void remove(String id) {
    T model = retrieve(id);
    if(model != null)
        entityManager.remove(model);
}

But that would involve 2 queries (setting aside the notion of a cache for now).