Slipping Into Darkness (43 page)

 

It had been so long since he’d actually tied one on that he had to be careful not to exaggerate his performance.

 

“Go home, Francis. It’s the middle of the night.”

 

“Is it?”

 

He heard the engine still idling down the block and worried that Rashid was about to come over and blow the act here. “I just wanted to let you guys know, I’m still on it.”

 

“Still on what?” Tom asked, getting aggravated.

 

“Still on, you know, what happened to your sister. I haven’t forgotten. That’s the problem in the world. Too many people fuckin’ forget things. . . .”

 

“Francis, I never even wanted you to open this case again, if you recall.” Tom cinched the belt on his bathrobe. “I don’t know who this benefited, but it certainly wasn’t us. All we wanted was to be left alone.”

 

“Yeah, yeah,
closure.
I remember.” Francis nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot since you said it.”

 

“What about it?”

 

“It’s one of those new words, isn’t it?”

 

“I think you’d find it in most dictionaries.”

 

“No, but people use it differently now. They say, ‘closure,’ like it’s the end of some crappy TV show. Like you can just wrap everything up in a half hour and never have to think about it again. But we know it doesn’t work that way. Right, Tommy? You’re always thinking about it. Even when you don’t think you’re thinking about it, it’s still dinging around in the back of your mind. That’s why I wanted to talk to your mom. Let her know I’m still thinking about it too.”

 

“Why don’t you just dry out instead?” Tom made a small scratching sound at the back of his throat. “Christ, Francis. No wonder you’re having trouble with this case. You can barely stand up straight. You call that honoring our family?”

 

“Well . . . we all do what we can.”

 

They stared at each other wordlessly. For a few seconds, Francis had the odd sensation that the blanket of the night had lifted and rippled over him, straightening itself out and making a little breeze.

 

“Go home, Francis.” Tom sighed. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

 

“Sorry you feel that way, Tom. I’m just trying to do my job.”

 

“Jesus Christ. Enough already. I’m going to bed.”

 

He turned and walked back into the house, shaking his head and locking the gate after himself. Francis grabbed two bulging bags out of the barrels and stumbled his way back to the Buick.

 

“How’d you do?” asked Rashid.

 

“Okay, I guess.” Francis threw the bags in the back. “At least he didn’t call the cops on me.”

 

 

54

 

 

 

THIS TIME, SHE was waiting for him. She heard him closing the door and slowly coming up the stairs, each tread giving a long deep mahogany groan from the pressure of his step.

 

She burrowed deeper under the covers, the girls huddling close next to her in the single bed, their little frames shivering by her rib cage.
A thing doesn’t stop just because you pretend it isn’t happening. It just goes on and on. You have to make it stop. You have to take control.
She held her breath, hearing him hesitate on the landing, an animal presence just outside the door.
Please don’t come in. I’m not strong enough yet.

 

Michelle, the little one, wheezed and coughed, as Eileen pulled up the blanket.
You have to wrap them in layers.

 

The door swung open and Tom walked in, silhouetted, the limp ends of his bathrobe belt dangling down at his sides in a way that seemed both menacing and somehow obscene. He had brought something dark and confused into the room with him.

 

She hugged the girls tight, feeling herself start to shiver as well.

 

“Mom?” He stopped at the foot of the bed. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

 

 

55

 

 

 

ON THE LONG walk down to Red Hook, Hoolian started having a whole
Officer and a Gentleman
fantasy about sweeping Zana off her feet, then triumphantly carrying her past the wharves while Eddie skipped alongside of them, trying to keep up. Old longshoremen would wave them on, tugboats would sound their horns, and Wall Streeters across the river would throw confetti from their windows while “Lift Us Up Where We Belong” blared in the background.

 

Instead, he ended up leaning on her buzzer in vain and then hiding in the doorway of a building across the street, with a new toolbox, a MetroCard for the kid, and an F train T-shirt he’d bought near City Hall with money he’d borrowed from Ms. A.

 

A little after three, Zana’s friend Ysabel came walking up the block, holding Eddie by one hand and her own little girl by the other, taking her turn picking the kids up from day care.

 

“Heyy, how’s my big man?” Hoolian crossed Coffey Street, intercepting them. “You ready to take a ride with me out to Coney Island?”

 

The boy slipped from Ysabel’s grip and went running over, throwing his skinny arms around Hoolian’s knees.

 

“Look what else I got here, man. We can finish fixing the bathroom now.”

 

He started to show off the new toolbox, but Ysabel was teetering up, shouting at the top of her lungs in Spanish.
“ĄLarga de aqui! ĄVete a bańar!”

 

She was a big woman who put on makeup and high heels just to go to the bodega.

 

“Whatcho doing around here?” She pulled Eddie back and got between the two of them. “I thought they locked your ass up again.”

 

“They figured out they made a mistake. What time’s Zana getting back? I need to talk to her.”

 

Ms. A. had warned him not to tell anybody about what had just happened at the DA’s office, seeing how badly he’d screwed everything up before by literally shooting his mouth off.

 

“Didn’t she tell you she don’t wanna see you no more,
culo?
”

 

“Yeah, but that was before. . . .”

 

Eddie tried to hug him again, but Ysabel held him back by the hood of his sweatshirt and in her distress swatted absently at her own daughter, who’d been standing there, innocently sucking her thumb.

 

“Yo, don’t be like that,
mami,
” Hoolian protested. “You don’t know what happened to me.”

 

“I know the police woke up half the damn neighborhood, looking for you last week.”

 

Hoolian watched the boy start to edge away from him, hiding behind Ysabel’s thigh, knowing something was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. This was supposed to be a good day. He’d been vindicated—almost. He wasn’t the bad guy anymore. That was someone else now. On the way down here, he’d even dared to allow himself a moment of relief, thinking maybe everything would be all right after this. But the rest of the world hadn’t got the news. He was still the monster on the block, frightening people away.

 

“Can I at least give the kid his presents?” he asked, holding up the toolbox, MetroCard, and T-shirt. “I walked all the way, from Smith Street.”

 

“Keep them.” Ysabel grabbed both kids by the hand. “Nobody needs nothing from you, nohow.”

 

 

56

 

 

 

THANKS FOR COMING in on a Sunday, Tom.” Francis walked in the room and dropped a thick manila file folder on the table. “I know how hard it is leaving the kids on a weekend when you’re away most of the week.”

 

“Well, you may need to do some explaining to my wife, but I’m okay with it.” Tom Wallis settled into one of the metal chairs.

 

“And sorry about the other night again.”

 

Instead of assuring him that it was okay, Tom hunched forward. “So, what’s doing?”

 

“I think I mentioned to you on the phone this morning, some new evidence has developed and we could use a hand figuring out what it means.”

 

“Whatever it takes to bring this all to a conclusion.” Tom put his hands flat on the table. “Like I said before, we just want it to end.”

 

“Right. We’re on the same page there.” Francis half smiled. “Anyway . . .”

 

“Anyway . . .”

 

“I wonder if I could take you back a couple of steps. The night your sister was murdered.”

 

“Okay.” Tom nodded, his smooth white brow furrowed.

 

“I know it’s a pain in the ass, having to rehash these old details again, but we just have to nail them down one more time. S
oo
. . . She called you twice around midnight. Any idea what that was about?”

 

“I think that’s probably in your notes.” Tom glanced at the unopened file. “We talked about where we were going to have my mother’s birthday dinner. I was thinking Tavern on the Green. My sister thought we could find some place more intimate, so she called back a couple of times with suggestions.”

 

“Remember what they were?”

 

“No, but what does that matter? We never went.”

 

“Of course. You’re right. It doesn’t matter.” Francis sat down, trying to get into a rhythm. “I just needed to check. You didn’t go by her apartment after that, did you?”

 

“What,
that
night?”

 

“Just checking to make sure we have the chronology right. Julian Vega’s lawyer is challenging us on all these piddly little details. Real ballbuster, this lady.”

 

“Sure. I understand.”

 

“So you definitely didn’t stop by after you spoke to her, right?”

 

“Francis, it’s in the court record. I testified about it in 1984.
No
.” Tom looked him straight in the eye. “Why is this coming up again?”

 

“See, what’s happened is”—Francis hitched up his belt, making sure his gun was visible—“a new witness has come forward.”

 

“Really?” Tom shook his head, as if to say,
How do you like that? Isn’t life full of odd memorable little characters?

 

“You know, it might just be bullshit,” Francis said. “People coming out of the woodwork because they smell money in a civil case. Hey, it happens. But we still gotta run down every lead. At this point.”

 

“Sure, I understand.”

 

Tom let his attention wander for a fraction of a second, just long enough to confirm the presence of the one-way glass and the handcuff bar on the wall.

 

“So who is this, by the way?”

 

“Someone who worked in the building. I wouldn’t think you’d know the name.”

 

“No, probably not.” Tom crossed his legs.

 

“Thing is, he says he saw you leaving the building after midnight.”

 

“Me?” Tom touched a button halfway down his shirt. “What’re you, kidding?”

 

Francis let that sit for a while. Giving him a chance to feel how things had changed. That even though the walls were still about twelve feet apart and the ceiling was still about ten feet from the floor, the dimensions of the room had somehow shrunk just a little.

 

“There’s been a mistake,” Tom said, bouncing in his seat and noticing that the legs of his chair were a little short. “I don’t know who it is you’re talking to that has such a photographic memory after twenty years. How exactly does he know who I am in the first place?”

 

“He says he’d seen you before. Red-haired man about your height and build, with almost the same complexion as his sister upstairs. That’s a pretty specific description, don’t you think?”

 

“Then he’s wrong about when he saw me. I’m not sure how old this person is, but I think they’re getting a little confused.”

 

Sharp,
thought Francis.
He’s thinking ahead like a lawyer. Figuring the witness might be an old man, whose ID a good lawyer could pick apart on cross-examination.

 

“Yeah, but see, like, there’s this other thing that keeps fucking us up.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

Tom sat up, still playing the earnest grad student trying to help the absentminded professor.

 

“This thing with the DNA analysis,” Francis said. “What was in the newspapers.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“See, you’re in the field of medical supplies. You probably know about all this stuff already.”

 

“Not me,” Tom deferred. “I just pass along the information I get from the sales conferences and trade journals. I’m no Ph.D.”

 

“I’m sure you’re being way too modest, but let me come back to that. The point is, we were looking at this all wrong.”

 

“And why’s that?”

 

Francis shifted his chair, putting his back to the door. “See, the analysis came back XX, female, with half its genes from your mother. Like she had another daughter she wasn’t telling us about.”

 

“So you’ve been saying.”

 

“But, you know, everybody’s got a few kinks, here and there. Am I right?”

 

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Francis.”

 

“I mean, every human being has mutations, but not all of them necessarily show up in the course of a lifetime,” said Francis. “And one of the things that can happen is you can have somebody who looks and acts like a man in every single way. But when you send their DNA out for analysis, the profile comes back female.”

 

Tom took a long deep breath that sounded like a broom’s stiff bristles moving across a stretch of pavement.

 

“It’s not the first thing the people at the ME’s office think of. In fact, it’s pretty unusual. One of the research citations came back from Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia.”

 

Tom was not amused.

 

“But what happens is there can be a mutation or a deletion that keeps the Y chromosome from showing up when they test the gene that normally tells you what somebody’s sex is. They call it the amelogenin locus.”

 

Tom took a slightly longer look at the one-way glass, correctly intuiting there might be a crowd gathering on the other side.

 

“Pretty interesting once you get into it,” Francis continued, as if it were all just a matter of academic interest. “Little things can throw the test off. Like if you have certain kinds of cancer. But probably you knew all that already.”

 

He watched the subtle constriction of Tom’s throat muscles.