Slipping Into Darkness (40 page)

 

“Come on, amigo.” The delegate picked up his phone. “You want a long sit-down, talk to your shop steward about setting up an appointment with me. Are you even in the union yourself?”

 

“No.”

 

“Ayy. Why am I talking to you then?”

 

“I just thought . . .” His voice trailed off as he kept looking at the doorman’s cap with its gold braid over the bill. “I just thought you could help me for old times . . .”

 

“
Vete a banar.
This is Local 32
BJ,
amigo, not the Salvation Army. Who the hell’s your father anyway?”

 

“Osvaldo Vega.”

 

“For real?”

 

“Why, did you know him?”

 

“No, but . . .” Uncertainty inched across the delegate’s well-mapped face. “You serious? Osvaldo was the Man.”

 

“I know. . . .”

 

“No, I mean, he was like the Jackie Robinson of Puerto Rican supers.” Tavares fumbled to hang up the phone. “Before him, it was almost all Irish running the A buildings below 96th Street on the East Side.”

 

Hoolian half smiled, pleased to hear Papi spoken of with the respect he deserved.

 

Tavares angled his glasses. “So you’re the kid who just got out of the can?”

 

“Basically.”

 

“The thing with the girl who got killed in the building that was back in the papers a few weeks ago?”

 

“Yeah, but they set me up. . . .” He was so sick of hearing himself say the same words over and over that he was beginning not to believe them.

 

“I have a brother who’s been in and out of state prison a few times himself,” Tavares said grimly, tugging at the ring that seemed destined never to come off his pudgy finger. “Can’t stay off drugs.”

 

“That wasn’t my problem,” Hoolian snapped. “My problem was the union wouldn’t help my father find a decent lawyer.”

 

“Hey, bro.” Tavares put his hands up. “I’m not saying the union was perfect back in the day, but there wasn’t much we could’ve done anyhow. The bylaws are damn specific. We can only shell out for Class E and D felonies. You get charged with murder,
compańero,
that’s a whole ’nother ball game. We had troubles of our own.”

 

Hoolian nodded, remembering the stories his father used to tell him about corruption at the local. But what was the point of bringing any of that up now?
Put the ass on your lip,
they used to say upstate.
Put the ass on your lip and keep kissing it.
Nobody gave you a fucking thing in this life because you made them feel bad. They either helped you because they were scared of you or because it made
them
feel good.

 

“I wish I could help you out, my friend, but my hands are tied. We can’t give you any benefits and we can’t get involved with the case. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

 

Hoolian picked up the doorman’s cap and studied the inside stitching, hearing a window start to open a little in Tavares’s voice. “Well, could you maybe try and help me find somebody who used to work for Papi?”

 

“Who’s that?”

 

“It’s a long shot. Guy’s probably dead now anyway. Old Dominican porter named Nestor. I don’t even think he was in the union.”

 

“What makes you think he wasn’t in the union?” Tavares sat up, defensive, his pride challenged.

 

“I doubt he was in the country legally. I always thought my father was just paying him off the books to help out in the basement.”

 

“That doesn’t sound like what I heard about Osvaldo. Far as I know, he was a member in good standing ’til the day he died. Never hired scabs and honored every strike we had. Not a bad little organizer either, when it came time to get the vote out. I don’t think he would’ve put anyone on the payroll who wasn’t in the local. It’s up to the building’s management to figure out whether they’re here legally.”

 

“No way is this guy alive.” Hoolian put the cap aside, changing his mind and deciding he didn’t want to get suckered again. “He was probably sixty when I knew him. And he was telling people he had liver cancer.”

 

“You never know with some of these old porters. They’re tougher than cockroaches. If the cleaning fluids and carbon monoxide fumes don’t kill them, nothing will. Survival of the fittest.”

 

No.
They weren’t going to play him anymore. No one was going to fool him into thinking things could turn out right.
Leave me alone. Just let me stay in my little dark box with the bars around it.

 

“So why do you want to find him?” the delegate asked.

 

“I thought he could help with my case.”

 

“What do you mean? Like as a witness?”

 

“I’m saying it’s a long shot.” Hoolian nodded.

 

Tavares started to reach for the phone, then pulled his hand back. “You know, there’s no percentage in us getting involved. We don’t gain anything from being associated with a criminal case after all the shit we’ve gone through with the reorganization.”

 

“I hear you.”

 

“Twenty years is a long time, though.” Tavares scowled, working a finger into his ear. “And we didn’t exactly step up to the plate the last time, did we?”

 

“I didn’t say anything.”

 

Hoolian tried to arrange his features into the shy diffident expression he’d seen his father wear around Christmastime, when the tips were given out. Keep the ass on your lip. Don’t let it fall off. He realized now that the old man had been a master at hiding his true feelings.

 

Tavares removed the finger, studied it, and reached for the phone. “What’d you say this porter’s last name was?”

 

 

49

 

 

 

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Dr. Dave walked into a bar near Bellevue called the Recovery Room, ordered a Guinness draft and punched the Doors song into the jukebox with the line “CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION TO THE RESURRECTION. . . .”

 

“I’m thinking you got something to tell me,” said Francis, waiting for him in a back booth.

 

“You’re killing me with these hours, Francis. Nobody comes back with DNA results in less than a day. It’s unheard-of. Backs up the whole system.”

 

“So, what do you got?”

 

The doctor watched the sandstorm raging inside his glass, the head of the stout slowly settling. His eyes looked small and irritated from having stared at polymerase chain reactions and gel screens nonstop since they had brought the body in. Jim Morrison droned on in the background. Another one who wasn’t supposed to be buried in his own grave, Francis remembered. Probably fat, bald, and living in a condo in Florida, playing golf twice a week with Elvis and cursing every time “Light My Fire” came on the radio.

 

“There wasn’t a lot left after twenty years.” Dave turned his glass. “Mostly bone fragments and hair. But we got enough.”

 

“And? Is it Allison?”

 

“What I can tell you is this.” Dave held a finger up, refusing to be rushed. “I can definitively tell you that it’s a female. I can tell that she was also the daughter of Eileen Wallis. I can tell you that she was probably between twenty-one and thirty years old and that she was no taller than five foot three. She had no signs of osteoporosis and had never been pregnant. Her actual name is not for me to determine.”

 

“So it’s
not
the same woman whose DNA was under both girls’ fingernails?

 

“It was not.”

 

“So it probably
was
Allison buried in the right grave?”

 

“That I don’t know. The DNA we got out of the coffin does not match the sample on the pillowcase that was labeled ‘Allison Wallis’ at the warehouse. It’s possible it was a filing mistake. But what I can say for sure is that the woman in the coffin and the one whose blood we found at both crime scenes definitely have the same mother.”

 

“Fuuuck.” Francis tipped a wedge of lime into his club soda and watched the bubbles fizz up. “You’re telling me Allison was killed by her
sister?
The mom’s still saying she never had another daughter. And there’s no match for this girl, whoever she is, in any of the DNA data banks.”

 

“I don’t care. I have my gels. The same blood was under Allison Wallis’s fingernails and Christine Rogers’s. And so all I can tell you is that it’s the sister of that donor who we dug up.”

 

“And what about that other thing I asked you about? Did you compare Christine Rogers’s DNA to Eileen’s to see if they’re related?”

 

“They aren’t related, Francis. Different families.”

 

“Then I’m tapped out.”

 

Francis finished his club soda and put the glass down. Oh, to have a real drink now. Just to be able to have the clamps off his skull for a few minutes. He’d been more himself when he was drinking. Looser, funnier, not so hemmed in by caution. Braver too. He wouldn’t be skulking around, avoiding the dark places, if he were still boozing it up. No sir. He’d be bold and reckless, the way he was in the Narcotics days, first man through the door, consequences be damned, willing to do whatever it took, other men watching him with that bleary-eyed admiration again.

 

Oh shaddup, Francis, you were an asshole. Only thing almost as bad as a blind man with a gun is a nostalgic drunk.

 

“Shit, I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “Maybe my daughter’s right.”

 

“About what?”

 

“The other night, she called home from Smith, told me I’m becoming a dinosaur. Says, ‘Patriarchal modes of thinking are obsolete.’ Can you believe that?”

 

“Well, I can’t say our mode of thinking is getting us anywhere in this case.”

 

“No, I suppose there’s no argument there,” Francis conceded.

 

He studied the dead lime lying at the bottom of his glass.
Come on, God of Small Things.
Help me out. I didn’t have a drink just now when I could’ve used one. Open my mind a little wider. Let me think outside the lines. The longer these cases went on, the more you got locked into just one way of looking at them, getting stale and unimaginative from staring straight ahead all the time, missing the side views.

 

He shut his eyes. For a few seconds he went dark, imagining he was already blind. Waiting for the afterflash to stop, making himself still, and letting the visible skin of the world fall away.

 

Eventually he noticed the sounds around him becoming more defined and nuanced. He found he could distinguish the clinking of wineglasses from the heavier clunk highball glasses made. He recognized the thin tap of stiletto heels passing, with the cloddish stamp of a man’s rubber soles close behind. He realized he could pick up cues about age, regional differences, and even romantic expectations, if he listened hard enough for pauses in conversation. But when he tried to focus on one voice in the booth right behind them, he found he couldn’t quite tell if it was male or female.

 

“Francis? You all right?”

 

He opened his eyes and saw Dave staring at him.

 

“Jesus, I thought you were having a seizure.”

 

“No, just going off-road a little,” he said, studying the Guinness foam as it settled halfway down the glass. “Dave, let me ask you something.”

 

“What?”

 

“Are you sure genes never lie?”

 

“Am I
what?
”

 

“I’m not talking about a mistake on paper. I’m asking, does DNA ever get it wrong?”

 

“I told you, one in a trillion times. What’re you drinking anyway?”

 

Francis watched the tracks of brownish residue sinking down the sides of Dave’s glass, reminding him of the gel screens he’d seen at the lab. Something was ebbing away inside him, leaving him with a bleak stone-cold clarity.

 

“I think you better let me get the next round,” he said.

 

 

50

 

 

 

IT WAS LIKE music in a dream. Soft cloudy chords drifting and dissolving in the moist air. It was only as Hoolian got closer that a song started to take shape. An incandescent trill at the high end of the keyboard sweeping down into a dark moody thunderhead. An urbane stroll through the middle range suddenly tripping into a wild rampage over the black keys. And then quickly shifting right back into the elegant melody, like a drunk straightening his tie on the sidewalk after getting thrown out of a four-star restaurant.

 

The card with the union bug that Mr. Tavares gave Hoolian got him past the doorman and down into this basement. So now he turned the corner and made his way past the musty storage cages, following the sound of one of his father’s favorite songs meticulously deconstructed and put back together by a mad scientist.

 

“Night and day, you are the one . . .”

 

This was one of those Upper East Side buildings that kept its lobby and hallways pristine, while its past moldered down in the cellar. He walked by the wire-mesh cells of ancient rocking horses, dismantled four-posters, Old World Victrolas with big sound horns, wardrobe boxes, gilt-edged mirrors, tarnished silver tea services, decommissioned dining-room tables with their legs off, mounted moose heads, tongue-tied Persian rugs cinched in twine, antique lamps with shades like flappers’ dresses—all sitting in six-by-nine bins, long-forgotten inmates in a secured facility.

 

“. . . and this torment won’t be through . . .”

 

He stifled a cough from the dust, knowing he’d chase his quarry away by making too much noise before he walked up on it. The boiler rumbled next door, a steady toiling flame. Twenty years he’d been waiting.

 

He went around the corner and then stopped, watching the old man stooped over a Wurlitzer upright in a storage bin. An abrupt hiked shoulder sent a spasm down his arm and into an arthritic-looking claw. It was hard to believe someone so gnarled and decrepit was making such soaring sprightly youthful music.

 

Water flushed through one of the overhead waste pipes and the old man threw his head back, relishing the sheer pleasure of playing for himself and no one else.

 

“żQué hay de nuevo, Nestor?”
Hoolian called out to him from under a bare swinging bulb. “Remember me?”