Slipping Into Darkness (3 page)

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I came up one night to fix her sink when she was watching ‘The Menagerie.’ You know that one? It’s the two-part episode they made out of the original pilot, ‘The Cage,’ with Jeffrey Hunter playing Captain Pike. You know, the one where the Talosians with the big lightbulb heads are keeping him behind the glass and projecting these crazy pictures into his mind, trying to get him to stay. . . .”

Francis nodded sagely, thinking:
This is why some men never get laid.

“Not a lot of girls into science fiction, are there?”

“I don’t know. I think her older brother got her into it.”

Hoolian glanced over at the glass in the wall, gradually realizing that someone on the other side might be watching
him
.

They were certainly trying to project images into Francis’s mind. Telling him to speed it up, get the damn statement, wrap it up for the mayor and the PC on
Live at Five.
Any minute, Francis Senior Himself would be in the house, ready to put his two cents in.

“So, what time did you get done fixing her toilet?” Francis asked, paying them no mind and setting up the next part of the trap.

“’Bout ten o’clock. I remember she was watching Channel Five and they say that same thing every night. ‘It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?’”

Francis flipped back through his notes and was disappointed to see that the answer was consistent with what Hoolian had told Sully. That fucking useless civic-minded slogan must have provided about eight hundred alibis a year.

“So how long did you stay after you fixed the leak?”

“Dunno.” Hoolian pinched his shoulders. “Hour, maybe a half hour. It was hard to tell.”

“Why? Didn’t you say you had the news on?”

Don’t lunge,
he warned himself. Be patient. Remember: Time is better than a kick in the balls or a phone book upside the head. Time is better than a polygraph or an eyewitness. Time can weigh on you. Time can sit on your shoulders and play with your head. Time can make you hungry and weak. Time will give you time.

“We switched to MTV and made some popcorn,” Hoolian said, faintly aware of his own words stacking up into a teetering pile. “She’d just got cable. And once those Duran Duran videos come on, one after another, man, you just sort of zone out. And then after a while, she started to get sleepy. She had to be at the hospital at eight o’clock the next morning.”

It sounded almost sweet, this pretty young doctor falling asleep in front of the TV with this horny little seventeen-year-old mooning over her.

“Did she, like, have her head on your shoulder?”

“She might have.” An earnest little nub of flesh bulged between the boy’s eyebrows. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just, you know, it’s important to get all the details right. We collect fingerprints, hair fibers. We have to figure out what belongs to who so we don’t make any mistakes and lock up the wrong people.”

The long eyelashes fanned out. “I still don’t understand.”

“Look. I have a set of facts I’m trying to make sense of. The front door of the building is locked after midnight. Okay? The only people who have keys are the tenants and the super. And your father was out that night, so you had them. The only other way to get in is to ring the front bell and wake the doorman. And that never happened. Right?”

Hoolian nodded, scratching the inside of his thigh.

“
So . . .
No sign of forced entry in Allison’s apartment. No visitors buzzed in after midnight. You’re the last person to see her that night. She doesn’t show up for work the next morning. Your father lets in the patrolman, who finds her at ten o’clock. Help me out here.”

This last part seemed to take Hoolian by surprise, like a throw from left field, a white dot out of the green getting larger and larger until it smacked him right in the mouth. “You’re not thinking my father had anything to do with it, are you?”

“No. I am
not
thinking that.”

They’d already checked out Osvaldo anyway. He was off on a date that night. Took a fourth-grade teacher named Susan Armenio to dinner at Victor’s Café and then cha-cha-ing at Roseland, leaving an old alkie doorman called Boodha and Hoolian running the show. Maybe that got the kid mad, Dad stepping out with his mother dead and all. Maybe he just wanted some attention. You never knew.

“Then, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.” Hoolian fingered his scabs, mystified. “I’m thinking I should try calling my father again. He’s probably done in the basement.”

“Okay.” Francis sat up. “Of course, you can do that, but there’s something else I want to ask you about. . . .”

He reached into the bag at his feet, took out a red photo album. He put it down in front of Hoolian.

“You know what this is, don’t you?”

Hoolian stared at the book as if it were breathing.

“It’s Allison Wallis’s photo album. We found it in the back of your bedroom closet.”

You could almost hear the blood reversing in the kid’s veins. “My father let you look in my room?”

“He gave us permission to search your apartment this morning. He said, ‘Look everywhere.’”

Francis watched the telltale microshifting of Hoolian’s pupils.

“She let me borrow it.”

Francis sighed. “Look, Hoolian. I’m sitting here, talking to you like a man. Don’t you think we owe each other the respect of being honest? Why would you have something hidden in the back of your bedroom closet if you were just ‘borrowing it’?”

Hoolian seemed to have lost the power of human speech.

“All right.” Francis pulled back a second. “Let’s try and make it easier. You guys were friends. You liked her. You did things for her. You fixed her toilet. You hoped she would like you back.”

“No, man. It wasn’t like that. . . .”

“Listen.”
Francis rolled his chair around to Hoolian’s side of the table: just guys talking here. “I’ve been there too. I would’ve set myself on fire for some girls when I was your age. You can’t help it. Every time she looks at you, it’s like a magnet trying to pull your heart outta your chest. You’re dying and she doesn’t even know it. Am I right?”

Hoolian hesitated, tugging on the chain inside his shirt collar.

“I’m not saying she played you on purpose, but isn’t it possible she took advantage of you just a little bit?”

“
No.
She was a nice person.”

“I’m not saying she wasn’t a nice person.” Francis got up and stood over him. “But even nice people take advantage sometimes. Look at it her way. You’re this eager kid coming around all the time, to fix things and keep her company. You’re a pillow for her to fall asleep on. You’re
comfortable.
”

Hoolian blinked, as if he’d been slapped.
Oh yeah.
Francis moved in on him.
I got your number, son.

“Like she didn’t know how hot she was getting you.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Hoolian shook his head, eyelashes blinking a nervous semaphore. “She had a boyfriend.”

“Yeah? What was his name? Did you ever see him?”

“No . . .”

Francis inched forward, having spent much of the past twelve hours establishing that Allison hadn’t had a steady boyfriend since senior year at Amherst. And that guy, a Frisbee-tossing premed named Doug Wexler, was apparently down in Guatemala at the moment, running a children’s vaccination program with a couple of Maryknoll nuns.

“So, what happened?” Francis said. “You guys had a fight because she found you took her album?”

“
No,
she didn’t know about that,” Hoolian said too quickly, then realized what he’d just admitted. “I was going to give it back. I just wanted to see what her family looked like.”

“What’d you do, use your key to get into her apartment and take it when she wasn’t there?” Francis put a foot on his own empty seat and flexed forward like a sprinter.

“I think I better talk to a lawyer.”

From the corner of his eye, Francis saw the doorknob turn as if one of the Overlords was about to come in the room. He shook his head, asking for more time.
Don’t blow it. I’m almost there.
Time to go for the bomb.

“Okay, then, let me just ask you about one more thing.”

He picked up the second evidence bag and dropped it on the table in front of Hoolian. It puffed up and then collapsed in on itself more slowly than the one with the hammer in it, breathing out odorless fumes through a tiny hole. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

Hoolian shook his head, staring at the bloody little wad of cotton inside.

“You’re telling me you don’t know how Allison’s used tampon ended up in the wastepaper basket in your bathroom?”

The boy seemed to wilt with the bag.

“Somebody must have put it there,” he said weakly.

“Now how would that be?”

“I don’t know, man. I never even seen one of these before.”

Francis bore down on him. “Hoolian, come on. We have serology experts who can tell us that this is Allison’s blood on this cotton. I’m talking about irrefutable proof. . . .”

“But I’m telling the truth.” The boy’s lip trembled. “I’d be afraid to even touch something like that.”

“Then how the hell else would it have ended up in
your
bathroom? Can you tell me that?”

Hoolian gripped the arms of his chair, the Catholic boy confronted with direct evidence of his sins.

“
You
must have put it there,” he said.

“Me?” Francis touched his chest, bemused. “After I already had Allison’s family album in your closet and her blood on your tool? Does that make a lot of sense?”

Hoolian leaned forward in his chair a little, the eyelashes fluttering in panic.

“Look.” Francis touched the boy’s shoulder, playing Father Confessor. “Tell it to me your way. Help me understand.”

Hoolian shook his head again, clinging to threadbare denial.

“Then let me help you,” Francis said gently. “You were next to her on the couch. Maybe she let you touch her and pretended not to notice. Maybe she let you get a leg up. She had you going at ramming speed. Then all of a sudden, she decided she was too good for you. She tried to stop you dead in the water. And you can’t do that to a man, right?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Hoolian, I’m looking at a pair of scratches on your chin. They’re right in front of my face.”

Hoolian touched his scabs self-consciously. Just his bad luck that he had in-between skin: not golden brown like some Latinos, but not exactly pink like a white boy’s either. It was sallow and thin over the bones, almost translucent. Cuts that would heal on other kids in a day lingered on him.

“I cut myself shaving. I told the other detective that.”

“Julian, look at me. All right? The time has come to put away childish things. Remember how we talked about how we both lost our mothers?”

There was a sound in the air like water about to boil.
We’re almost there. Just a little further.
He’d proved the murder weapon was Hoolian’s. He’d gotten the kid to admit that he’d stolen her photo album, which showed he was obsessed. His fingerprints were all over the place, naturally. And once they matched his blood to what they’d scraped from under her fingernails, they’d probably have enough circumstantial evidence. All he needed to make it a slam-dunk and remove any possible doubt was a statement.

“So you know your mother is looking down on you right now, don’t you?”

Hoolian’s nostrils flared and contracted. The corner of his eye was glistening again. They were on the edge of something here.

“I’m telling you, man, you have to get right with what you did.”

The boy kept shaking his head. “But it’s not true.”

“Don’t keep saying that,” Francis warned him, playing this card for all he was worth. “You know she’s up there and her soul is in torment, because she’s afraid you won’t be able to join her in heaven.”

The boy opened his mouth, but only a dry creak came out.

“She didn’t raise you to be a liar, did she?”

The boy looked around for something to wipe his eyes and blow his nose with, but Francis had made a point of not bringing a box of Kleenex into the room.

“That shit is going to eat you inside. You know you’ve got to ask for forgiveness.”

Hoolian bit his lip and shook his head again, more furiously this time.

Come on. You want to tell me. Everybody wants to confess.

“You gotta do it, brother.” Francis loomed over him. “You have to get right with this. I’m giving you a way out. I know you’re a good boy.”

Yes, I’m your friend. Who else would be trying to put you in prison the rest of your life?

Hoolian took a deep breath, folded his hands on his lap, and stared at them, a small pale cathedral of fingers.

“All I’m asking you to do is to stand up to what you did. All I’m asking you to do is be a man.”

The joints squeezed tighter, the little cathedral showing veins in the marble.

Francis crossed his arms, finding himself knotting up as well. Because what the Overlords behind the glass had forgotten was: it
wasn’t
all bullshit and play-acting. Sure, you could get all righteous about it afterward, grandstanding for the press and pointing the finger at “the defendant” in court, saying, “We the People condemn you and cast you out
.
Begone from the sight of all good free men and women.” But sometimes, in this quiet little room, before the lawyers and stenographers came in, there was a half-second when you were almost on the guy’s side. Not above him or on the sidelines passing judgment. But right there in the thick of it with him, step-by-step, on his level, seeing it through his eyes. And, in your mind at least, doing the same things that he’d done. Because otherwise, why would anyone trust you enough to tell you the worst thing he ever did? You could never explain it to the so-called decent, normal, law-abiding civilians. To get someone to give it up, to lay himself before you, you had to put some soul into it, some compassion, you had to
feel
for him—if only for that instant right before he confessed. And then, of course, you could safely turn around on him and use his desperate little plea to be understood to ruin his life.