Slipping Into Darkness (28 page)

 

“That
is
fucked up.”

 

“Someone who does this is totally disqualified from being human,” she said, the color draining from her face even as she made it sound like she was just talking about somebody getting thrown out of a soccer game. “This is not even animal.”

 

He sensed he was coming up to one of her edges.

 

“Anything like that happen to you?” he asked, pushing her.

 

“No, of course not.” She shook her head too vigorously. “They only burned our house down and made us walk five days in the rain to the border. We were the lucky ones.”

 

“You call that lucky?”

 

“The lady in the next tent died and left three children,” she said. “We only lost our home. It’s not so bad. By comparison.”

 

He didn’t believe her. He could almost smell that there was something else she hadn’t told him. It was in the air like the ozone after a lightning strike. “But the rest of your family made it out okay?”

 

“Yes. Everyone is intact. Why are you still asking?”

 

“I don’t know. Just sounds like you dropped a beat somewhere.”

 

He still had that thing, that upstate instinct. Once you’d been ripped down the sides, you could see where other people were stitched up. She was starting to open up to him without even knowing it. A core was half exposed, something warm and fragile that he could crush as easily as a trembling little sparrow. The thought of such power, such dominance excited him and then disturbed him. He had to stop and ask himself exactly what it was that he wanted from her.

 

“Maybe it’s better not to talk about these things.” She started tearing her napkin into little cannonballs.

 

“I’m sorry. Did I upset you or something?”

 

“No, just, there are complications, always. Like I say, you don’t erase mistakes. You draw around them.”

 

“I still don’t understand.”

 

“Why should you?” Her fingers spread across her sketch pad, like she was covering the front of a dress. “It’s impossible for anyone else.”

 

“How do you know?”

 

“What?”

 

“You keep saying that, but how do you know?” He put his unbandaged hand over hers. “I might be the one person who gets you.”

 

He registered the pulse of tension under his palm and the flicker of longing on her face. She wanted to believe in him, wanted to think he was a better person than he actually was.

 

“You shut me down,” he said, “you’re never gonna know.”

 

The curly-haired girl put her book down, eavesdropping. Hoolian shot her a warning glance, to mind her own goddamn business.

 

“You’re a sweet man.” Zana quickly took her hand back and swept the shreds of her torn napkin into her cupped palm. “I worry for you.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because the world is a very bad place for sweet men.”

 

 

30

 

 

 

D
ENIAL. ANGER. BARGAINING.

 

Okay, stop there. Let’s talk deal. It’s not that dark yet. Just hold back the night a little; a few more hours of daylight is all it would take.

 

Francis dropped off Eileen’s DNA with Dr. Dave, left a message for Tom Wallis to check up on his sister’s female acquaintances, typed up his notes, and then headed home. Amber rays slanted through the Brooklyn Bridge harp strings, making bright strobe flashes on his windshield. A stretch of pink was showing under gray clouds, like a glimpse of a girl’s midriff under a thin sweater. He found himself constantly adjusting his mirrors to compensate for blind spots, trying to make sure he didn’t get sideswiped. The chipped diamond sparkle of the East River was lost on him these days because he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the road.

 

— Come on, God of Small Things, just get me home in one piece. I’ll take it from there.

 

— Still a fine one for playing the angles, Loughlin, aren’t you? Just one more drink and I’ll quit. Just let me clear this case and I won’t bitch about the next three. Just get me through this door alive. I promise I’ll believe you until the next crisis.

 

He wended his way down Sackett Street, the sun just beginning its slow descent over the old rotting piers of Red Hook and the fuming grumble of traffic on the BQE. Without his quite admitting it, he’d begun to notice himself tensing up with the coming of night lately, paying more attention to following the same route home, becoming just slightly more aware of double-parked cars, of children running after balls in the street, of how long it took the city to fix the broken light in front of the house.

 

He locked the car and saw the curtains move in the neighbor’s front window. The lady who lived there was the widow of a firefighter who’d died at the Trade Center. She had Jesus on a half shell near her front steps and honored her husband’s memory by hardly ever speaking to Francis. Whether she was carrying on the great tradition of interdepartmental rivalry or silently asking God why he’d take her good man and let Francis live, he couldn’t say.

 

He got the mail and went up the stoop, quickly shuffling the letters to see what aggravation awaited him. An oil bill, Con Ed, Patti’s seed catalogs and yoga brochures, another bill from his father’s nursing home upstate, and something from the Jewish Guild for the Blind. Probably a fund-raising solicitation. He started to put his key in the door, idly wondering how they got his name in the first place. Who would they go through? DMV, Detectives’ Endowment Association, doctors’ offices? The key ring slipped from around his finger just as he remembered seeing pamphlets for the guild and Lighthouse International in Dr. Friedan’s waiting room.

 

I need this?
He tore the letter in half and stuffed it in his pocket, then bent down, looking for the keys, hoping the angry widow wouldn’t look out and see him fumbling around like he was already blind.

 

The house was as quiet and dark as a mausoleum as he let himself in. He missed the kids blasting music at each other—Slayer versus the Indigo Girls—and Patti clanging around the kitchen, chatting to her girlfriends on the phone and getting dinner ready. He remembered she wouldn’t be home until nine tonight because she was working late with clients at the gym again.

 

He started turning on lights and making as much noise as he could, a habit he’d had since he was ten, coming home from school to an empty house. He found the remote in the living room and put on CNN. Just in time to hear about a roadside bomb killing three soldiers outside Mosul. Jesus. He listened, with a grappling hook in the middle of his chest, waiting to hear if there was any word about more troops being called up from Korea. Fucking kid. Had to show the old man he couldn’t pull rank anymore.
Got you there, Dad. Never fought in a real war, did you?
The boy had struggled to find himself. Never a good student like his younger sister, and not much of a prospect on the Bishop Ford baseball team. He’d been easy pickings for the local army recruiter, who’d told him he could make something of himself, defend his country, and get more pussy than Snoop Dog all at the same time. But for what? Weapons of Mass Destruction? Get the fuck out of here. That was the story of another underachiever trying to one-up the old man.

 

But what could you do about it now? You start a fight, you finish it. And if what was behind it was a little shaky, well, that just meant you had to fight harder. Besides, the guy they were after was an asshole, gassed a hundred thousand of his own people. The case against him needed a little help?
So what?
You knew he was up to no good anyway. They all were. Sometimes you just had to fill in the missing pieces for everyone else to see the whole picture. Didn’t mean you were wrong, did it?

 

He turned off the set, not able to take the agitation, and started up the stairs. Thinking about reopening plea negotiations with the higher authority.
Okay, here’s what I’m putting on the table. You keep my boy out of this war and I’ll give up my driver’s license in the next six months. I’ll take five degrees off my vision and a chronic pain condition to be named later. I’ll even start going to confession again. Forgive me, Father, I have sinned. It’s been thirty-three years since my last confession. . . .

 

You sleazy bastard. What right do you have to a better deal? How about showing a little gratitude? You could have been dead a half-dozen times over the years. Falling down that flight of stairs at the Baruch Houses. That kid stepping out from behind a Datsun on Lenox Avenue and dry-clicking three times on you with a Browning, the barrel maybe a yard and a half from your face. Almost falling down an airshaft on 132nd Street, chasing a rapist over a rooftop.

 

Sometimes those moments seemed more real than the fact that he was here, in this stolid old house, with this spectacular woman, who’d forgiven him for all the spectacularly stupid things he’d done. More real than the fact they’d had two children, who used to sit on his lap watching old John Wayne movies long after they should’ve been in bed on a school night. Maybe he was actually lying at the bottom of that airshaft, and this was all just a dying man’s dream.

 

He stopped on the landing, resting for a moment. He wondered if this would still be a good house for him in a few years. A fair number of steps, but so what? He was losing his eyesight, not his legs. The more immediate problem would be all the little scars and dings he wouldn’t see until Patti pointed them out. Constant vigilance being one of the hidden costs of owning an old house. You had to look out for chipped wainscoting, nails sticking out of the floorboards, towel racks coming away from the walls. How would he be able to handle a hacksaw or an acetylene torch when he needed a Seeing Eye dog just to get a quart of milk from around the corner?

 

He put his jacket on a hanger in the bedroom closet and went into the bathroom to wash up. A cool glob of water pinged on his scalp as he stood before the sink, a direct hit on the bald spot, reminding him that it was supposed to rain on and off again tonight and he still hadn’t found that leak in the roof. Dripping since April. Where was the water getting in? He figured he’d have about forty-five minutes to get up there and have a look around before it got too dark.

 

You keep asking yourself, what did I do?
He patted his head with a washcloth, brooding on what Eileen said.
It must be something I did.

 

Not me, sister.
He didn’t have anything in the record that he couldn’t stand up to. Well, nothing he couldn’t really live with. He went through the litany again, just to reassure himself. You’ve been a good husband (after a couple of early stumbles out of the blocks), a good provider, a good father,
a good cop.

 

It wasn’t as if this Hoolian thing had been lodged in his brain like a splinter all these years. Everybody had a couple of calls that might have seemed a little questionable when you looked back on them. But it was what it was. You live the life you live, and it’s up to somebody else to add it up and give you the bill at the end.

 

Those were savage times and he was the man for them. Two thousand murders a year in the city: babies shot to death in their cribs, lawyers stabbed on the subway, doctors slaughtered in their living rooms. You don’t send for the Jesuits. You send someone who’s willing to man the barriers. Life and death, it’s not for the quibblers and hairsplitters. The state penal code never helped a broken heart. The Fourth Amendment never comforted a family that lost a loved one. Sometimes you had to put your precious little guidebook aside and operate in the gray-zone threshold.

 

Did you actually see him put the gun in his pocket, Officer?
No, I observed the outline through his jacket.
Did you actually see him exchange the money for drugs?
Well, how the hell else do you think they got in his pocket?

 

Each time he’d told himself he wasn’t going to do it again, knowing he was coming closer and closer to crossing the line and not being able to get back. He was a good man, a good cop. So why the hell had he done it? They probably already had enough to make the case. Hoolian’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, the keys to the victim’s apartment in his pocket. But at that crucial moment, when no one was looking, he’d found himself picking up that bloody tampon that had somehow ended up on the floor near the fire hose, as if it had been dragged there, stuck to the bottom of the murderer’s shoe, and depositing it into the bathroom trash can inside Hoolian’s apartment less than twelve feet away.

 

Over the years, he’d replayed that scene in his head a half-dozen times, asking himself why it had happened. Each time all he could recall was how scared he’d been. Of course, he was afraid of getting caught, but it was more than that. He must have been afraid
not
to do it, he realized now. He must have been afraid of failing, of everyone seeing that, in fact, he was not the man to be entrusted with the Job.

 

He opened the medicine-cabinet door and closed it.
Fuck it.
Just like in a war, you couldn’t always wait for absolute proof. And besides, they were all guilty of something, weren’t they?

 

But in twenty years since then, he’d never stepped over the line again. Something about hearing that kid’s father cry out when the judge said, “Twenty-five to life,” had put the fear of God back into him. He’d been put on notice.

 

Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he’d changed after that. Not all at once, but by degrees. Stopped drinking and fucking around, started spending more time with the kids and making amends to Patti. And made damn sure he never locked another man up without giving him a fair shake. By every measure, he’d done his penance. So why did he still keep feeling this cold hand resting on his heart?

 

He left the bathroom and saw the answering machine blinking on the night table. Too soon to be hearing back from Dave at the ME’s office, so his thoughts wandered back to Eileen again.
Children have secrets.
Whatever that meant. He wondered if he was missing something along the sides again. Same blood twenty years later.