Slipping Into Darkness (15 page)

 

Mauler squinted slightly, as if he were watching a car coming up fast in his rearview. “What about it?”

 

“Fuckin’ pain-in-the-ass granted-on-appeal bullshit,” Francis said, playing it light. “We’re reopening the case, making sure all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“I’m going to need everything you got on file. Bloodstain cards, autopsy samples, fingernail scrapings, any clothing they’ve kept around . . .”

 

Mauler’s eyes began to swim behind his dusty lenses. “You’re telling me this is an
’83
homicide?”

 

“Is that a problem?”

 

“Well, fuck, Francis, haven’t you got any
new
cases?” Mauler threw his napkin away, reached into a desk drawer, and slid a yellow form and an inkpad at Francis. “You can start by filling this out and giving me your prints.”

 

“Bri, I’m in a little bit of a hurry here.” Francis looked at his watch, seeing it was already quarter to three. “I was wondering if we could expedite this.”

 

“Dude, it’s all about the paper trail. If the PC himself was here, he’d have to do the same thing. We can’t have people walking in and out with property and no accountability.”

 

Before Francis could argue, the phone rang next to the Secret Squirrel on the desk and Mullhearn used the opportunity to grab it and turn away from him.

 

“
Yyi-eaah, what’s happenin’, bay-bay?
” he crooned, instantly transforming from a bitter old Irish hack to smooth-talking chilled-out Quiet Storm Mack Daddy loverman. “
You miss me?
”

 

Francis filled out the first few lines of the form, trying to maintain the thin membrane of civility. He looked up and saw a sign on the wall he’d missed before: RETALIATION with a red slash through it. Naturally, that was the deal here. Mauler and he had both been serious boozehounds back in the Narco days, shotgunning Budweisers to psych themselves up for raids and swilling scotch by the quart to cool down afterward. Until Francis somehow got caught sleeping off a bender in a Manhattan criminal court judge’s chambers, with his pants off and his off-duty revolver missing. His father managed to quash the beef and get Francis off with a slap on the wrist. Thirty days’ suspended pay and a month on the Farm addressing his “issues.”

 

But when Mauler got jammed up for driving the wrong way down Astoria Boulevard six months later, reeking of Wild Turkey, he had no such higher power to call upon. So he ended up with a career counting pencils while Francis eventually got his shot at a gold shield.

 

“Bri?” Francis spoke up as he finished rolling his own prints on the form. “I think I’m all done here. Can you hook me up, maybe gimme a paper towel?”

 

“Hang on.” Mauler held up a finger. “
Listen, sugar, call me later and we’ll talk about it.
I gotta go deal with this guy. All right? I want us to both feel good.”

 

He hung up the phone and swiveled back to Francis, immediately reassuming the form of theBureaucrat That Time Forgot
.
“You were saying?”

 

“The Wallis file from ’83.” Francis looked around for something to wipe his hands with. “You should have like a barrelful of material. We collected sheets, fingerprints, carpet fibers, blood from under the victim’s fingernails. . . .”

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Mullhearn took off his glasses. “I think I remember this now. The guy wrote to us a bunch of times.”

 

“What guy?”

 

“The defendant. He’s got a funny name.”

 

“Julian Vega?”

 

“That’s the man. I must have got like twelve letters from him. One of my little pen pals. Him and his lawyers wanted to have all that crap tested for DNA. Like every-fucking-body else upstate these days. They act like it’s as easy as an EPT pregnancy kit.” He nudged the phone away, an uncomfortable topic at the moment. “Piss on a stick, get a plus sign, and you’re out of prison. I tell you . . .”

 

Francis rubbed the oily residue between his fingertips. “Wait a second. You’re telling me that Julian Vega has been writing to you, looking to use DNA to prove that’s not his blood we scraped from under her fingernails?”

 

“Well, not just to me. He wrote to the DA too. But I hadn’t heard from him in a while. I thought we weren’t in love anymore.”

 

Francis took a few more seconds to work his mind around this, a whole new idea suddenly appearing like an unknown planet at the edge of the solar system.

 

“So did he get any of what he was looking for?”

 

Mauler wiped his glasses with the fat end of his tie. “Are you kidding me?”

 

“No. Why?”

 

“Have you ever looked around back there? It’s fuckin’ Indiana Jones land. We still got a backlog from nine-eleven we’ve barely made a dent in.”

 

Francis grabbed the last of Mullhearn’s lunch napkins to wipe the ink from his fingers, remembering the chaos he’d encountered the last time he’d visited this warehouse in the spring, to look for an old rape kit. A vast sprawling aircraft hangar full of potentially misfiled evidence. Towering steel shelves crowded with 55-gallon cardboard barrels. Hundreds of getaway bikes piled up at the auxiliary, like castoffs from the Tour de France
.
A forklift operator driving back and forth over a rolled-up carpet that turned out to have crucial hair-fiber evidence from another murder case. And most bizarrely, a collection of suburban-style barbecue grills and hibachis lined up against a wall. It wasn’t like the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
it was Home Depot operated by crack fiends. Eventually he’d had to give up looking for the kit and went back to get a tearful new statement from the original witness instead.

 

“I thought they were going to clean this up,” he said, throwing the oily napkin in the nearest trash can.

 

“Clean it up?
Clean it up?
Are you on drugs? I mean, we keep pretty good records, but come the fuck on. People have been putting things in the wrong places since 1895. You could find Judge Crater in one of the evidence drums. So the short answer is:
No.
He didn’t get what he was asking for. We just had a major roof collapse in the rain take out about five years’ worth of cases. I got no idea where half that stuff is. So we told him the evidence is no longer available.”

 

“Well, he’s out now and the case is back in court, so I guess we better start looking for it.”

 

“Ah, hahahah.” Mullhearn smiled up at the clock. “I’m out of here in ten minutes, my friend. There’s a very anxious young lady needs me to talk some sense into her.”

 

Francis pictured himself getting seriously lost as he wandered the endless aisles, trying to find a couple of files with his limited vision. The way he was going, he could end up getting locked in for the night.

 

“Brian, I could really use a hand here. This case really means a lot.”

 

“You know as well as I do, nothing gets pulled here after three,” Mauler said.

 

“I would seriously owe you, my friend.”

 

“
Oh,
so are we friends now, Francis?”

 

“What do you mean?” Francis checked to make sure all the ink was off his hands. “I don’t get you.”

 

“I’m saying,
do you think we are friends now?
You and I?”

 

“We know each other,” Francis said. “There’s a relationship.”

 

“It’s funny. Because I didn’t think
there was a relationship.
I thought we were two guys who did some shit back in the day. And one of us got jammed up for it and the other didn’t.”

 

“Everybody’s got an opinion.”

 

“No, an opinion is editorializing.” Mullhearn put his glasses back on. “This is facts. One of us got his shield because he had someone looking out for him. And the other ended up in the fucking ozone. I don’t recall you getting on the phone and offering to have your old man bail me out. I’m out of here in nine minutes.”

 

“Brian, you’re gonna help me find that barrel.”

 

“Pardon me?”

 

“I said, you’re gonna help me find what I’m looking for.”

 

“The fuck I am.” Mullhearn dropped his food in the garbage.

 

“You want to spend the rest of your life feeling sorry for yourself, that’s your concern. I’m not going to tell you how to get right with what you did.”

 

Francis spoke calmly and evenly, as if he were addressing a suspect. No theatrics necessary. Just a level stare and the reasonable tone of one man telling another that a bulldozer was about to knock his house down.

 

“But I have a twenty-year-old homicide conviction that’s just been vacated. I have a murderer out on bail. I have an indictment that needs new evidence to back it up. This is what I do, Brian. Half the bosses in the department have me on speed dial and, believe me, it’s not because of my wholesome attitude and boyish charm. It’s because I fucking make them look good. And they will come down on you like fucking Godzilla’s left foot if I pick up that phone and tell them you’re not playing.”

 

“Jesus, Francis, do you have to be an asshole?”

 

“Only my wife knows for sure.” He rubbed his hands together. “And she’s not telling—or at least she’s not telling me. Now where do we start?”

 

 

14

 

 

 

COULD I PLEASE get a tall Toffee Nut latte and a slice of caramel cheesecake?”

 

Hoolian stood at the counter of the Starbucks on Astor Place, indulging his urge for sweetness. The girl at the register, in her black baseball cap and green apron, stared at him as if he’d just asked for a package of pure uncut heroin.

 

“Like sugar, don’t you?”

 

She turned away to get his order, leaving him to wonder if he’d said something wrong.

 

Yesterday, Ms. A. had told him to take a break from his legal research and lighten up a little.
Enjoy your freedom.
As if she somehow knew it wouldn’t last much beyond tomorrow’s court date.

 

So he’d deposited the three hundred dollars he’d earned working odd jobs in prison and got himself a decent close-cropped haircut at Astor Place Barbers. It went nicely, he thought, with the little hipster beard he was growing to cover the scar on his chin and the respectable thrift-store jacket-and-tie combo he bought to make a good impression on the judge.

 

He stretched and yawned, having gotten a few more hours’ sleep for once. After a long hassle with his caseworker, he’d managed to get himself placed at a halfway house in Bed-Stuy, sharing a cramped little bedroom with three other ex-cons in bunk beds. It wasn’t ideal, sharing a dresser drawer with another man and a bathroom with nine others, but the rent was sixty dollars a week and the only other serious drawback was having to attend group therapy sessions to talk about his imaginary “drug problem.” One way or the other, this world would make you into a liar if you weren’t one already.

 

The girl brought him his latte and cake and he paid her seven dollars, smoothing out each bill on the counter and calculating that he had about fifty bucks left over in food stamps to last him through the end of the week.

 

At the moment, he couldn’t think about that, though. He just needed to be away from lawyers and courtrooms and bureaucrats for a little while. He just wanted to chill awhile with Miles Davis noodling away on the stereo and pretty women talking low in the background. After all those years in a dank six-by-nine cell, a part of him leaned toward any kind of simple pleasure like a flower straining toward sunlight.

 

Want ads under one arm and his book under the other, he navigated his way around the islands of women at small round tables. Women on cell phones, women in dog collars, women reading books about Marxism and quantum physics, women in roller skates, women staring forlornly into laptop screens as if their troubles were itemized there, women holding hands with other women, women analyzing the minutiae of their lives, women in the shawls and babushkas of their grandmothers, women in FCUK T-shirts, women in camouflage jackets and peasant blouses. Women free to try on and discard different versions of themselves, women not yet saddled with heavy jowls, aching joints, porous marriages, and bad debts.

 

He staked out a table by the window and opened the paperback he’d brought along, savoring the mingled aromas of perfume, Kenyan double A, and newly washed hair.

 

For the second time in the past few days, he asked himself if it would really be so bad if he tried to settle out of court. His case was so long ago. Half the women in there probably weren’t even born when he got locked up. Why couldn’t he just be like everybody else for a while?

 

The girl he’d been checking out before was back at her table, pulling her black turtleneck over her chin and letting it slip off as she read her copy of
Les Misérables.
Her slender ankles twined themselves around the chair legs, and her hair was bundled up behind her head, a knot of unhappiness tempting some man to try and tug it to free her. He cracked the spine of his edition and started reading about the hungry traveler outside on a frigid night, the Alpine winds strafing his skin. Seeking refuge in a shanty, he scaled a wooden fence, tearing his clothes, only to find himself alone in a kennel with a snarling bulldog.

 

“So how you liking it?” he said, sneaking a sidelong glance at her.

 

Now that the turtleneck was off her chin, she regarded him as if she were a lady on horseback, a long aquiline nose and highborn cheekbones wreathed in a cloud of auburn curls. She went back to pinching tiny crumbs off the corner of her raisin scone.

 

“The book.” He showed her the used Signet edition of
Les Misérables
that he’d bought from a street vendor the other day. “We’re reading the same thing.”

 

Her tongue poked against the inside of her cheek, a bulge slowly descending.

 

“It’s long but it’s good. Right? I’m getting into it.”

 

She gave a world-weary sigh and turned back to her scone, placing a few microscopic crumbs on the tip of her tongue. She reminded him a little of Allison: squeezing just a few drops of honey into a teaspoon, licking the end of it delicately, and then putting the bear-shaped jar away so as not to be tempted.