Slipping Into Darkness (25 page)

 

The place itself was nothing special. A pale green room with a checked floor, nine beat-to-shit desks, a couple of autographed pictures from the cast of
NYPD Blue,
and a corkboard collection of police patches from Culpepper to Nutley, N.J. Eleven-by-eights of the PC and his deputies overlooked a set of Arts and Crafts wood blocks spelling out the name of one of the most elite detective squads in the city, and therefore the world. Any murder that happened between 59th Street and the tip of the island—whether it was in a Fifth Avenue penthouse or a Washington Heights shooting gallery—was within its jurisdiction, and even after ten years, Francis still got a little charge out of having a front-row seat at the circus every day.

 

This was where he was always meant to be. God knows, he would’ve had trouble fitting in anywhere else. How would he ever find another tribe to belong to, people who spoke the same language? The stories and humor here never translated; normal people didn’t think it was funny, a little skell bitching about how somebody almost cut his “gigolo” vein in a fight or half-wit hit men using Idaho potatoes as silencers. He watched the silver subway cars turn into trickles of mercury in the sun, a moment of somber reflection interrupted only when he turned his eyes and saw a young detective named Steve Barbaro pawing through the box of phone records on his desk.

 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Yunior?” he said, moving his Rolling Stones lips-and-tongue mug out of harm’s way.

 

“Skumpy wanted me to make sure you hadn’t made any of these calls already,” Yunior said with a nod toward another detective two desks away. “No sense in redundancy.”

 

Francis looked around at the four other detectives who’d come in early to work the Christine Rogers case, wondering why none of them had bothered to defend his turf for him.

 

“You couldn’t have just asked?”

 

The kid shrugged. He was probably going to be a decent detective one of these days, but he needed a little seasoning. Skinny Italian guy who went to Dartmouth and thought he had to prove he could bark and bite like the Big Dogs.

 

“This is what the chief wanted too,” Yunior said.

 

“Since when?”

 

“Ask him yourself.”

 

Yunior jerked his thumb toward the lieutenant’s office, where Jerry Cronin Himself, now chief of Manhattan detectives, had commandeered the desk and started making calls. Francis realized he must have missed seeing him out of the corner of his eye when he walked into the squad room.

 

“What the fuck, JC?” He marched into the Fish Bowl without knocking.

 

“I gotta go.” The chief put the phone down and looked up. “Good morning, Detective.”

 

“Do I look
redundant
to you?”

 

JC gave him a sour-ball squint. The years had just made him smaller and tighter. His hair had turned into a wafer-thin discus on top of his head, and his skin looked rope-burned, marking him as the perfect high-blood-pressure candidate. He seemed to spend most of his days fretting about the commissioner’s mood swings, his dream of holding court in a corner booth at P. J. Clarke’s, with Sinatra sending over a bottle of Hennessy’s, long forgotten.

 

“We thought the Christine end of things could use a fresh set of eyes,” he said.

 

Francis shut the door behind him, aware of everyone in the squad room watching the two of them through the glass.

 

“There a problem, JC?”

 

“That’s some report you got from the ME’s office.” The chief shook his head. “A match for the same
woman?
”

 

“It’s gotta be a mistake.” Francis turned and saw Rashid Ali walk into the squad room with a new box of medical records. “All three samples look like they could be from Allison Wallis, and we
know
that’s not right. As soon as I get a comparison swab from the mother, it’ll get straightened out. I already have a call in to her.”

 

“Eh . . .” The chief curled his lip.

 

“Wha?”

 

“I gotta call from Judy Mandel from the
Trib
this morning, wants to know why we’ve got the same guy working both cases.”

 

“I didn’t talk to her,” said Francis. “She’s the one racked up Dick Noonan from the Six-oh about the thing with the teacher and the bomb on the school bus. . . .”

 

“We’re thinking you might want to take a step back.”

 

“A step back?”

 

“Some people are a little concerned about the way this case is developing,” JC said. “They think you’re a little too close to it.”

 

“Is this you talking, Jerry, or somebody a little higher up the food chain?”

 

“You’re the detective. You figure it out. They just want to make sure no one can accuse us of having tunnel vision.”

 

“Come again?” Francis cupped a hand behind his ear.

 

“They don’t want it to seem like there’s a vendetta. Looks a little funny. Hoolian gets his conviction overturned and, bang, right away you’re looking at him for another murder.”

 

“Excuse me, Jerry, I’m not the one making the connection.” Francis splayed a hand over his heart. “Christine’s friend at the hospital said she was ‘obsessed’ with Hoolian. Her words, not mine. Anybody think I planted those newspaper clips in her drawer? For crying out loud, Crime Scene found a video in her VCR with stories about Hoolian from the local news taped on it. And Rashid just showed her super a Polaroid, and the guy says he’s seen Hoolian on the block the last few weeks. So don’t tell me I’ve got blinders on.”

 

“Well, if the DNA’s telling us it’s a woman, why aren’t we looking at that?”

 

“We
are
looking at women.” Francis insisted, a little stridently. “We’re cross-referencing the staff lists at both hospitals, to see if there were any females who worked with both Christine
and
Allison. We’re going back over their phone records, recanvassing both their buildings separately, reinterviewing both their families to see if either of the victims had a problem with a woman.”

 

He glanced back out at the squad room and felt a throb in his temples when he saw Yunior was still standing at his desk.

 

“All I’m saying is a little church-and-state separation can’t hurt,” said JC.

 

“So, that’s it? You’re cutting me off at the knees? Jerry, I’ve known you twenty-two years.”

 

“Then we can afford to be honest with each other.” The chief lowered his voice. “If it turns out you fucked up that case in ’83, you better believe you’re not going to be number one on the borough list to make First Grade come April.”

 

Francis turned his head again, aware that until about a quarter-second ago the whole squad room had been watching the two of them. It didn’t matter if he’d lost a little peripheral vision. You put five of the best detectives in the city together in a room and none of them are looking right at you, you can be damn sure you’re under suspicion.

 

“Boy, you got some pair of balls on you,” he said.

 

“C’mon . . .”

 

“No, you c’mon. You think you’d have a driver and an assistant chief’s pension if I didn’t walk in a room and get a statement out of Julian Vega?”

 

“Hey, who was the one who let you walk in the room in the first place?” JC’s ears reddened. “Way I remember it, the Turk wanted you out writing traffic summonses on Staten Island after your little stint on the Farm. I got you that shot, my lad. So don’t talk to me about gratitude.”

 

“
Fine.
Then we’re in it together. So don’t be trying to cut and run on me, you miserable fuck.”

 

Over the chief’s shoulder, Francis saw a shroud of wax paper fly up in the wake of a passing train and then drift back lazily over the arches of the West Side Highway, disappearing from his line of sight a second before it should have.

 

“You know, you really shouldn’t call the assistant chief ‘a miserable fuck,’” JC said quietly.

 

“All right, I misspoke. You
ungrateful
fuck.”

 

JC crossed his arms. “Jimmy Ryan’s back in the task force for this. He’s gonna be the primary on the Rogers case, and Steve Barbaro’s gonna be helping him out. And nothing’s going to change that.”

 

“Then I guess Oz has spoken.” Francis took a deep breath, filling his lungs for ballast. “But you gotta let me follow through with Eileen Wallis.”

 

“Why’s that?”

 

“Kill two birds with one stone. We’re gonna need to ask her if there were any women Allison was having a problem with,
and
we’re gonna need to get a DNA sample from her to eliminate Allison as a donor. I’m the one who has the relationship with the family. You send Ryan and Yunior, she’ll jump out the fucking window. Then you’ll know what bad press is.”

 

JC sucked his teeth. “You already put in a call?”

 

“I was about to take a ride, you want to come along.”

 

“Fucking Francis. You’re like one of those real estate developers, borrows so much money from the bank, they can’t afford to let him go broke. How did I get so tied up with you?”

 

“I guess it was written in the stars, my friend.”

 

A southbound train passed outside, drizzling track dust on detectives’ cars parked below the el.

 

“Just do me a favor and keep an open mind,” said JC.

 

“I’m wide-open, baby. I’m looking at the whole goddamn canvas. I’m receiving on all wavelengths. I’m living seventy-millimeter IMAX Dolby Surround Sound. I contain multitudes. My name is legion.”

 

“Well, good.” JC sat back, satisfied for the moment.

 

“But I’m telling you right now,” Francis said from behind his wrist. “The same guy killed both these girls.”

 

 

27

 

 

 

HOW DID IT go at the catering hall last night?”

 

Hoolian looked up as Ms. A. walked in at lunchtime and found him in the dowdy little wood-paneled conference room she shared with the immigration lawyers down the hall, surrounded by cardboard boxes of trial transcripts and the 1983 New York Telephone records that she’d finally pried out of the DA’s office.

 

“Ai-ight,” he said. “I met a lady.”

 

“Uh-oh.”

 

“It’s all right. It was cool. She was waitressing at the bat mitzvah. We talked on the train for a long time and then we went and got a slice at Sbarro on 34th Street.”

 

“You tell her what your deal is?” She sat down on the edge of the conference table.

 

“Nah. You think I should have?”

 

“Kind of hard for me to say,” she equivocated, a dating expert in courtroom pinstripes. “It
is
a tough sell.”

 

“Tell me about it. ‘Yo, I just got out of jail after twenty years and I’m still under indictment. Wanna go out with me?’”

 

“It
would
give me pause,” she admitted, her right leg swinging slightly.

 

He noticed she looked more put together today. Not just the pinstripes and pumps and the skirt rising above her knee when she crossed her legs, but a little more makeup and mascara. She wore a white silky blouse with one button discreetly open at the top, revealing a silver necklace on a bare collarbone. Her hair was a slightly more vivid shade of yellow. Why hadn’t she looked this good when she went to court for his case?

 

“So, what do you think I should do? Should I tell her?”

 

“Jesus, Julian, I don’t know. If you tell her right away that you’ve been in prison for killing a woman, you’re going to scare her off for sure. But if you wait, it’s going to seem like you were hiding something.”

 

“Yeah. That’s how I was thinking too.”

 

“I guess I’ll have to think about it a little. I hadn’t expected it to come up so soon.”

 

She donned a pair of glasses and saw he’d been taking notes on a legal pad. “So, what are you looking for?”

 

“You asked me to pitch in a little. So I was trying some of these old phone numbers Allison called after I left her apartment that night.”

 

The glasses were a second pair of eyes, he realized. For once, she was looking at him not just as a lawyer but as a woman, trying to figure out what somebody else would see in him.

 

“Oh, I should’ve told you not to bother,” she said. “Most of those numbers are disconnected. I checked already. It’s been twenty years. Everybody hasn’t just been in a state of suspended animation.”

 

Was she trying to say that he had? Her flippancy stung him a little, until he noticed that Brooklyn hadn’t even had an area code of its own before he went away.

 

“Yeah, sure, I figured. I just thought I’d give it a shot anyway. . . .” He flipped through the pages, avoiding her eye for the moment. “Did you notice Allison kept calling these same two numbers after I left her apartment that night?”

 

“Yes, I did notice that.” Ms. A. nodded. “I should’ve told you. She called her brother in Manhattan twice and her mother out in Sag Harbor twice.”

 

He put the records down, a little disconcerted. “But that’s good. Isn’t it? Proves she was still alive when I left.”

 

“It also indicates she might have been pretty upset over something that happened while you were there and maybe wanted to talk to somebody about it.” She angled her glasses.

 

“Oh.”

 

He leaned back, with an uncomfortable twinge in the side of his neck.

 

“The prosecution could still say you went back downstairs, got your house keys, and let yourself back in after she was asleep,” she said. “Same as you let yourself in when you stole her photo album.”

 

“What does that have to do with anything? They didn’t put me away for twenty years for taking an
album.
”

 

“Hey, I’m on your side.” She reached down, patting his arm. “Remember?”

 

He looked up at her uncertainly. My lawyer. The one who got me out of my cell.
You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her, homey.
On the other hand, she
had
been a prosecutor. And in his mind, that was like being a vampire or in the Mafia. You could act like you’d changed, but you never really stopped looking for blood.