Slipping Into Darkness (19 page)

 

“So I’m looking around in here and I see she’s got a night table with a drawer in it and I’m thinking,
What the fuck?
” Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe she’s got a diary or an address book that’s got a couple of useful names in it.”

 

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” said Francis.

 

“So I’m rummaging around in the drawer, and I see she’s got a bunch of newspaper clippings lying around in there underneath some other crap. And I’m thinking,
That’s weird.
For a woman, I mean. I leave a newspaper on the bathroom floor, most times my wife is ready to call the marshals. . . .”

 

“Jimmy. Can we get to the point this fiscal year?”

 

“So then I take a good look and what do I find?”

 

He held up one of the clips and Francis took a step forward, not quite trusting his eyes. “Are you fucking with me, Ryan?”

 

“Déjŕ vu all over again. Am I right, Francis?”

 

“What is it?” Rashid trailed into the room.

 

“Girl was collecting stories from the newspapers about this guy that Francis made his bones locking up in ’83. Just got out because his conviction was overturned.”

 

“What’d you lock him up for?” Rashid asked.

 

Francis stared at the page-five headline from the
Post
that Jimmy was dangling in front of him.

 

“Killed a lady doctor.”

 

He felt a touch of coolness, as if the top of his skull had just come off.

 

What did they say déjŕ vu was? Just a mental glitch, a lapse in sequencing, a rerouting of information from short-term to long-term memory storage, so it only
seemed
like something had already happened. He reached into his pocket to get a pen for taking notes and then realized he was already holding one.

 

“You all right, Francis?” Jimmy eyed him. “You look a little peaked.”

 

“I’m fine.” He clicked the pen. “But Jimmy, do me a favor.”

 

“Wha?”

 

“Next time you ask if I want my mind blown, wait until I say yes, will you?”

 

 

18

 

 

 

EILEEN WAS TRYING to get the girls dressed in matching corduroy jumpers for school when Tom came in the room.

 

“What’s going on?” He put his coffee down with the weariness of a man who’d waited until he was forty-six to give his mother a grandchild. “I already laid out clothes for them.”

 

“They wanted these. They said they wanted to be alike today.”

 

“Oops, I did it again!”
The girls started jumping on their beds.

 

“Since when?”

 

“It’s just a stage they go through,” said Eileen, trying to get Stacy, the eldest, to settle down for the brush. “Your sister was the same way at this age. Always wanted to wear what I was wearing.”

 

“Nice for
you
to think so, anyway,” he muttered. “Hey, what happened to your lip?”

 

“I banged with the bathroom mirror.” Eileen touched the mark under her nose. “Don’t get old. There’s no future in it.”

 

He was still staring at it when Stacy dropped in his lap and threw her arms around him. Of course, then her little sister had to get in on the act, competing for lap time. Surrounded by women with needs, her son’s lot in life. So much easier for Daddy. Daughters never appreciate their mothers the same way. There’s always an edge, some resentment brewing, a simmering jealousy. She remembered how her skin broke out when she was first pregnant with Allison, and her own mother, never a soft touch herself, announced she must be having a girl. “Daughters always steal their mother’s beauty.”

 

“How’d you manage to get up here so early anyway?” he asked, glancing over at the Little Mermaid clock. “I didn’t hear you come upstairs when I was down in the kitchen, making coffee.”

 

“I was here already. Stacy was calling out in the night. I don’t know how you two managed to sleep through it.”

 

“You heard her from downstairs?”

 

“I couldn’t sleep. Another lovely side effect from the new combination I’m taking.”

 

She was scaring him again. She could see it by the way he was ignoring the girls and focusing on buttoning his cuffs.

 

“Maybe you want to take it down a notch,” he said. “Sometimes these things need a little fine-tuning.”

 

“I don’t mind being a little more awake.”

 

He touched his brow, a little disconcerted. No doubt thinking,
Mom’s acting up again. Gotta start keeping tabs on Mom. Keep things from getting out of hand. Keep the madwoman in the basement.

 

“Where’s Jen?” He looked around. “I thought she was getting up.”

 

“M’lady’s indisposed. She’s said she’s feeling unwell again.”

 

He seemed to accept that with a stoic half-smile. Poor Tom. After all the drama in his life, he probably thought he was getting a solid-state truehearted midwestern girl who’d keep the house running without a hitch, and not yet another complicated female with faulty wiring.

 

“I gotta finish getting dressed.” He tugged on the thin end of his tie. “I’ll take the girls to school before I drive out to Morristown. Let them wear whatever they want.”

 

 

19

 

 

 

AS THE AUTOMATIC doors swung open and Hoolian walked into Met Foods, he felt a cold ripple of apprehension, half expecting Lydia, the pretty cashier who always smiled at him, her handcuff-size earrings winking in the fluorescent store light, to suddenly point a long curly silver-painted nail in horror and start screaming,
“ĄAsesino! ĄAsesino!”
Murderer.

 

Instead, she just waved and went back to helping one of the local bag ladies count out her change, penny by penny.

 

He went to the time clock to punch in. Next to the Department of Labor clipboard for listing on-the-job injuries was the calendar he’d been looking at every day since the store manager had agreed to give him a shot part-time. His life was all about numbers now. Sixteen days since his last court date. Another sixteen until his next one. Ten days since he filled out the application here, writing
no
in the space where it asked if he’d been convicted of a felony. Not a lie, he told himself; the conviction had been “vacated.” Twenty-four more days until he officially got in the union, making it harder to fire him.

 

Every hour was a struggle. Yes, there were fleeting pleasures. The change of seasons in the air, the shrinking yolk of the sun, the collars coming up, the hemlines going down, the late-summer radio anthems muffled behind closing car windows, the little dogs on the street wearing sweaters, mysterious shiny pieces of cassette tape hanging from the tree branches like Christmas tinsel. But for every one of those, there were misread signals, dreadful misunderstandings, moments of spurting-nozzle anger and unintended consequences, deep black holes threatening to swallow him up. It wasn’t at all the same, being out, as he thought it would be. The ants never stopped crawling across his skin. He touched the back of his neck, still feeling the mark left by the clasp getting ripped off.

 

“Yo, Jools, I need to talk to you. Right away.”

 

He flinched and spun around to find Angel, the store manager, watching him from the elevated booth, where he spent most of the day surveying his retail kingdom of ten aisles, plus produce and deli.

 

“żQué pasa?”
Hoolian braced himself.

 

“Just take a walk with me, amigo.” Angel came down the short set of steps. “No one else needs to hear this.”

 

He grabbed Hoolian’s arm and pulled him toward a quiet alcove near the basement stairs. Hoolian felt the weight of the new Leatherman knife he’d been carrying in his pocket, hoping this wasn’t the kiss-off that he’d been half expecting. He’d desperately wanted the respect of this fastidious little man, who reminded him so much of his own father in his pressed white shirt and necktie. How guilty he’d felt after their first interview, where he’d played up the fact that both their families were from neighboring towns near San Juan but neglected to mention he’d just gotten out of prison.

 

Ever since then, he’d been waiting to get pulled aside—just like this. Of course, he should’ve taken the initiative, knowing his name could be back in the newspapers any day now. Every day, he told himself that he was going to go down to Angel’s office at closing time and confess, but every night he’d come up with another reason to put it off. It wasn’t his fault, he told himself. It was Angel’s responsibility. Angel should’ve known who he was already from all the press; he should’ve checked the references more carefully.

 

“I do something wrong?” He nervously rubbed a thumb along the smooth side of the closed-up knife.

 

“żQué mosca te ha picado?”
Anybody say you did?

 

“Nah, just . . .”

 

He was aware of himself tic’ing and twitching. Not knowing how to lock his knees, steady his eyes, or relax his shoulders.

 

“Looks like that spot’s gonna be opening up at the deli counter next week.” Angel dropped his voice into a conspiratorial murmur. “Still interested in the extra hours?”

 

“Oh.” His hand came out of his pocket. “What happened to Charlie?”

 

“I caught Charlie sleeping in the stockroom when he was supposed to be wiping down the meat slicer. I think the kid’s on the pipe.”

 

“Well, I ain’t ready to take over. I just got here.”

 

“Nah, don’t gimme that.” He clapped Hoolian on the shoulder. “I got my eye on you,
hombre.
I see how you’re waiting at the gate when I come to open the store every morning. I see how you keep the aisles clear just the way I told you to. Just keep doing what you’re doing. . . .”

 

Angel’s voice trailed off and Hoolian realized the manager was staring at the knife he’d taken out of his pocket without realizing it.

 

“What you got that for, bro?”

 

“I was just going to go downstairs and start cutting open some boxes,” he explained innocently.

 

“There you go, my man. That’s what I’m talking about! Don’t let me stop you.” Angel grinned. “You’re an animal, amigo. I wish I had a hundred like you.”

 

 

20

 

 

 

WHAT DID THEY have to do that for? She was so good.”

 

The nurse at Mount Sinai, a satiny throw pillow of a girl named Tracy Mercado with olive skin, a gravy boat smile, and dyed-blond tresses, was weeping. Fat hot-looking tears streaked her makeup, looking all the more substantial for having sat in the corners of her eyes awhile. Francis shot Rashid a cautioning glance, warning him not to get too close or say anything falsely comforting. Grief uncorked needed a chance to breathe.

 

“Tracy, we need to ask you a couple of things,” Francis said after a decent interval. “When was the last time you talked to Christine?”

 

“I don’t know.” She choked up, trying to get a grip. “I think the day before yesterday. She’d just worked like three twelve-hour days in a row. I warned her she was seriously pushing it on the Libby Zion rules. All she was going to do was go home and sleep.”

 

He gave Rashid a subtle headshake. She was going to be no help at all in establishing time of death.

 

“Did she happen to mention if she was expecting any company? A boyfriend or anything?”

 

“No. She wasn’t seeing anybody, far as I could tell.” The nurse worked a bent knuckle into the corner of her eye.

 

“Would you know for sure?”

 

“Would I
know?
Yeah, I’d know. I was her fucking best friend.”

 

Sunset Park. Francis placed her accent. A girl from around the way. He could picture her getting up early to catch the N train while everybody else in the house was still sleeping.

 

“I’m kind of surprised, you say she was your best friend.” Rashid cocked his head to one side. “I thought the doctors and the nursing staff didn’t usually get along in a hospital like this.”

 

“Aw, Christine wasn’t stuck up like that,” Tracy sniffed. “I mean, she was from East Armpit, Wisconsin, but she was a homegirl. You know how I’m saying? She was always just kickin’ it with the regular staff, reading Kohl’s catalogs in the break room and goofing on
The Ricki Lake Show
with the rest of us.”

 

“She have static with anybody else around here?” Francis asked. “Hospital security? Custodial staff? Patients?”

 

“Oh, she wasn’t afraid to get in somebody’s face when she had to. She’d tell you straight up if you were full of shit, pardon my language. Insurance company, hospital administrators, cardiologists. She’d tell off any senior staff member for not doing enough tests. And people whose kids had AIDS? Forget about it. They start missing appointments for their drug cocktails, she be all over their shit. Up in their grill, calling them night and day, shouting in the phone, ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know what’s going to happen?’ I saw her put her coat on at the end of her shift and walk right over to somebody’s apartment in the Schomburg Houses. Miss Figure Skating Champion. Knocked right on those people’s door and dragged the kid over here herself to make sure she got the protease inhibitors.”

 

“Any fallout from that?”

 

“Nah, they knew she was right.”

 

He cut his eyes over to Rashid, knowing they’d need help from other detectives in securing the ER records; it was going to take days to comb through all the logs, making sure they had the names of any parents who might’ve given her a hard time.

 

“Tracy, there’s something else we’ve got to ask you about.” Francis lowered his voice. “And we’re going to be depending on your discretion, because if any of these details got out to the media, it could seriously hurt our investigation.”

 

“A-ight, I hear you.” Tracy squared her shoulders, eyes minesweeping from Francis to Rashid. “G’head.”

 

“We found some articles in a desk drawer that Christine was collecting about an old case. . . .”

 

Tracy started nodding before Francis was done with the sentence.

 

“Yeah, yeah. That girl who was a doctor at Bellevue, like twenty years ago.”