Slipping Into Darkness (30 page)

 

“You sure you buried the right girl back in ’83?”

 

“Oh for Chrissakes, Patti, now you sound like Eileen Wallis. . . .”

 

“Why, what’s she saying?”

 

“‘Allison’s not dead’. Somebody else’s out in Cricklewood.”

 

He swung the flashlight beam, and it left a trail in the darkness like a trout moving through black water.

 

“There’s gotta be another daughter.” Patti shook her head. “Unless the brother’s a woman in drag or something.”

 

“I’ve stood next to him at a urinal. He’s got everything I got.”

 

“Then Eileen’s lying to you.”

 

“Why would she do that?”

 

“Who the hell knows? You told me she was crazy.”

 

“Yeah, but what am I going to do? How do you find somebody who’s not supposed to exist? If Eileen had another daughter that she isn’t telling anybody about, the girl’s probably got a different name, a whole different identity. Finding her is going to be like finding somebody out there.”

 

He pointed his beam out toward where the Manhattan skyline used to be, the coded pattern changing and evolving moment by moment.

 

“Are you a real detective or what?” Patti nudged him. “You’re looking for a suspect and you already have the mother’s DNA. What do you think you’re going to do? Feed it through the state and federal systems and see if you get a hit. If you’re talking about somebody who’s killed two people in the last twenty years, there’s a good chance they got arrested for something else at least once.”

 

He put the flashlight under her chin, illuminating her from below like the Lincoln Memorial.

 

“Pretty sharp, lady,” he said.

 

“A lot of things become much more obvious in this world when you have a vagina.”

 

He nodded, acknowledging the universal truth of this even as he began to fall into despair again. “Problem is, I don’t know what we do if we come up empty on that. I guess we could do a system-wide search of marriage licenses and birth records, to see if Eileen was married before or gave a kid up for adoption without telling anyone. But the thing is, if she’s lying now about having another kid, she probably lied then and used a different name.”

 

“Then I don’t know how you’re going to figure it out.”

 

He swept the beam through the air, no longer able to see more than two feet in front of his face. Darkness had snuck up on him. He’d come up here thinking maybe he could catch a few last minutes of daylight, but then the night suddenly collapsed in on him.

 

“Francis,” she said quietly. “I want to ask you something.”

 

“What?”

 

“Does this mean you put the wrong guy away?”

 

He saw the light flicker slightly and shook the flashlight, hoping the batteries weren’t dying.

 

“You don’t know that and neither do I,” he said too quickly. “I still think Hoolian had something to do with it. It’s too much of a coincidence, Christine talking about him all the time and collecting stories about his case.”

 

“So, what are you saying, that it’s a . . .
conspiracy?
” she asked, like she was about to tell him to go sleep off a hangover on the couch.

 

“I don’t know what it is. I’m just saying I didn’t send any innocent guy to the can for twenty years.”

 

“Sound awfully sure of yourself, for somebody who doesn’t have all the facts yet.”

 

“Hey, I did my job,” he insisted. “I gave the case to the DA and he gave it to the jury and then
they
decided on the evidence. That’s all there was to it. I was just part of the process.”

 

She took his hand and squeezed it tighter than he would have liked.

 

“Let the chips fall where they have to,” he said. “I can handle it.”

 

“I hope that’s so, Francis.”

 

He let go of her hand. “I’m gonna sleep
fine
once this is over.”

 

“Okay. I’ll have to take your word.”

 

He heard her moving away from him, going back toward the hatch and the ladder.

 

“Coming down to bed?” she called out.

 

He took a step and almost stumbled over that tar bucket he’d meant to take down while the sun was up.

 

The darkness gave him no quarter, no hints where to turn. It wiped out Manhattan, blotted out the stars and swallowed the neighbors’ windows. It was alive with the menace of unseen things: car alarms, ambulance sirens, low-flying airplanes, squealing brakes, ranting derelicts, shattering glass.

 

“I can’t.”

 

“What?”

 

“I said, I can’t. I can’t move from where I am.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because I can’t find my way down from here, baby,” he said. “I can’t see a fucking thing.”

 

 

33

 

 

 

SEE, THIS IS how it was.”

 

Hoolian spread the subway map out on the hardwood floor as Zana’s son, Eddie, sat on his lap, still playing with the screwdriver.

 

“So every Saturday morning, when those other kids were still sleeping, my papi would get me up real early with buttered rolls and
café con leche
and take me riding on the trains.”

 

The heavy little head rested back against his chest and he started to trace the long colored lines with his finger.

 

“We tried to take a different line every time so it would be like an adventure. Sometimes we’d go looking for ghost stations.”

 

The kid looked back over his shoulder and wrinkled his nose.

 

“You don’t know about those?” Hoolian asked. “There are these abandoned stations that everyone has forgotten about. So, like, if you turn your head real fast when the downtown six goes around the turnaround loop, you can see they built this beautiful grotto under City Hall, with brass chandeliers and this fancy Guastavino tile on the walls. My father said if you were on the train late at night sometimes, you could see the ghosts in their party clothes dancing and drinking champagne.”

 

The boy scrunched up his face again, trying to imitate cynicism, but his eyes were shining.

 

“But my favorite was always St. John the Baptist Day,” Hoolian went on, knowing the kid was in his thrall. “See, every summer, Papi would take me on the F train out to Coney Island to go on all the rides and all that. But at the end of the day, we’d go down to the beach and join all these other people gathered along the shore to walk backward into the ocean. It was like this cleansing ritual to wash bad luck away.”

 

He fell silent a moment, remembering. The old man had never been that big on tradition, but it broke his heart not being allowed to walk backward into the water with his son one last time. The state made Hoolian start his sentence before
el Día de San Juan Baustista
that year.

 

“Eddie.” Zana came in from the kitchen with a sponge.
“Ba.”

 

“No,
Meme,
” he said, pleading for time.

 

“Go,” his mother insisted. “Make like the trees and beat it.”

 

He turned and hugged Hoolian, as if it were part of some nightly routine the two of them had been doing for years. Then he jumped up and scampered to the bath, with no inkling he’d just torn a chunk of insulation off a grown man’s heart.

 

“So how come you didn’t tell me you had a kid?” Hoolian looked after him, wondering how it had happened so fast.

 

“This is not appealing to many men.”

 

Hoolian heard the bath start to run and he drifted into the kitchen to help her finish washing the dishes.

 

“I appreciate that you allowed him to assist you,” Zana said. “This is good for him to see a big man working. Not like his father, who is completely a bum. He likes you.”

 

That’s understating it,
Hoolian thought. The kid had jumped all over him, bringing him tools and water, making unsolicited suggestions about how to plane the corners and shim the hinge sides, staring up in awe when the door swung open cleanly for the first time.

 

“So who watches him during the day?”

 

“My neighbor Ysabel has a little girl, ’bout the same age, so we trade off. She’s my dope fly homegirl.”

 

She smiled shyly, revealing a small space between her two front teeth. Yet somehow it brought her whole face to life and it thrilled him a little, knowing she’d just shown him something she didn’t show most people.

 

“Yeah, I used to help my papi out when I was his age. That’s the only way I learned to do anything with my hands.”

 

“Haven’t you ever wanted your own?”

 

“Oh, sure.” He picked up a rag and started drying dishes. “I think I’d make a hell of a father. They say you pass down whatever you get to the next generation.”

 

“So why haven’t you done it?” She passed him a plate.

 

“What?”

 

“Had children, at your age? What’s holding you back?”

 

“I dunno. Just never worked out.”

 

“I don’t believe this.” She turned off the hot water and faced him. “You are either gay man or you are in love with another woman. No one is nothing.”

 

“I’m not gay,” he said, crossing his arms in front of his chest and then uncrossing them, lest he look effeminate.

 

“Then what are you? You are telling me there was never anyone?”

 

“I don’t want to get into it.”

 

“I knew it,” she said.

 

“It was a long time ago.”

 

“She hurt you?”

 

“I don’t know why everything has to be somebody’s fault. Sometimes things just happen.”

 

He took a sponge and attacked the dinner table with the coarse side, going after tomato stains and dried spaghetti strands.

 

“No, I don’t think this is so,” she said. “Someone is always the victim.”

 

“Well, I’m trying to learn not to look at things that way.”

 

He finished wiping the table and went into the other room, hearing that Eddie was out of the bath and watching
Sesame Street Visits the Firehouse
in the back.

 

Pale yellow light from a half-dozen votive candles snapped and retreated at shadows, giving the living room a kind of eerie warm subterranean aura marred only by the sound of Fireman Bob singing “Waiting for the Bell to Ring.”

 

“Do you still think about her?” Zana stood in the doorway.

 

“Sometimes.” He sat down on the fold-out couch, looking for his work boots and trying to decide if it was time to go. “And then sometimes I don’t want to think about her at all.”

 

“So you are still in love with her?”

 

“What makes you say that?”

 

“It sounds that way.”

 

The candle before him stuttered, a small orange blade digging at the dark.

 

“She’s dead.”

 

She started across the floor and then stopped halfway. “For real?”

 

“Yes. For real. A long time ago. Seriously messed me up.”

 

“But what happened?”

 

“Something really fucked up. Would you mind if we didn’t talk about it?”

 

The flame before him wavered. He was sure she would press him now. And then he would either have to lie to her or tell the truth and ruin everything. Candle wax guttered into the saucer. A part of him longed to give it up and get it over with. His heart was only going to end up punctured and shredded anyway. But the other part yearned to pretend just a little while longer.

 

“But someday will you tell me?”

 

He made a sound deep in his throat, not yes or no. He half hoped she would hear the warning in it and know enough to stay back.

 

“Well, I think it’s sad,” she said.

 

“What?”

 

“To have such a good heart and no one to give it to.”

 

“Who said I had a good heart?”

 

He heard the bare soles of her feet peeling off the floorboards, one at a time. She should go to the door now and open it for him. That instinct that got her out of wherever she was from was kicking in here. She knew the truth without hearing all the details: he was too damaged to be any good to anyone. He put on his boots and stood up, ready to make his excuses and go.

 

But instead, she stopped in front of him, blocking him and staring up at his face. He felt the warmth of her body almost touching his and an almost painful longing threatened to pull him apart. He tried to hang on, telling himself this couldn’t be right. It must be a trick, another setup. What could she be seeing in him? He was supposed to be alone. He was supposed to be untouchable. Love was supposed to pass him by. The candles crackled and Mr. Monster in the next room cried out that his house was on fire. The rest of his insulation was melting.

 

He put his arms around her gingerly, sure she would push him back. Instead, her knee came up between his thighs and he felt a combination of joy and terror rise up inside him. Her hand came to rest on the back of his neck and her body pressed into him, imprinting him with the shape of her desire. Twenty years of keeping his guard up and never letting it down, of mistrusting all pleasure and always expecting the worst, of struggling and striving to keep his most powerful urges under wraps.

 

And just like that, she snuck her tongue past his lips and undid him as easily as a child undoing a shoelace.

 

 

34

 

 

 

FRANCIS LOOKED UP at the ceiling, a grown man a few months shy of fifty. An almost First Grade detective with twenty-five years on the job and a half-dozen commendations. Injured three times in the line of duty and never missed more than a month of work. He’d even killed a guy once. A parolee named Arturo Cruz jacked up on coke and Cuervo who’d charged him with a Stanley knife right after he’d stabbed his estranged wife to death. Francis, fourteen months out of the academy, pulled the trigger twice and dropped him in the hallway of an Avenue C tenement. Not his happiest memory, but you do what you have to do and fuck the begrudgers and second-guessers. Since then, he’d locked up psychopaths, throat-slicers, child molesters, capos, gangbangers, wannabes, and cut-price contract killers. He’d done a three-month-long undercover operation on a majorweight heroin dealer in Loisaida, who’d then been heard swearing on a wiretap that he’d have Francis’s head severed for testifying against him. Instead of asking for protection, he went to court the next day and laughed in that fool’s face. But now he was here, in his own home, in his own bed, next to the mother of his children, scared of the dark.