Slipping Into Darkness (45 page)

 

“What are you saying to me, Francis?”
he asked in a tense staccato voice.

 

“I’m saying things happen in a family that no one outside it can understand. And this girl, Christine, might’ve intimated certain things that she shouldn’t have.”

 

Bad smells were beginning to emanate from Tom, even as he sat here expressionless, in his oxford shirt and khaki pants.

 

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

 

Francis pulled a little garbage can from under the table and parked it beside Tom’s chair. “Do what you need to do.”

 

“I can’t believe you’re saying this to me. I used to have some respect for you.”

 

“You used to have some respect
for me?”
Francis’s lip curled.

 

Tom started to rise, but Francis pushed him back down, with the flat of his palm to the chest.

 

“Sit the fuck down,” he said. “We’re not through here.”

 

He wiped his hand on his pant leg in disgust. He saw the one-way glass quiver and knew Jerry Cronin and the rest on the other side were probably all having coronaries.

 

“I know what you did to her.” Francis pressed in on him, closing the distance. “I know you had her put henna streaks in her hair so she’d look a little more like your sister. I know you gave her some of your old science fiction books. I know you were trying to get back to that thing you had with Allison. . . .”

 

It was no good. He’d lost him. He knew it the second he wiped his hand on his pant leg, like he’d just touched something less human. He’d broken the bond and his own rule with that gesture, letting the suspect know exactly what he thought of him. Tom was just staring at him now, unblinking. Not feeling the heat at all anymore.

 

“My lawyer,” he said. “I’ve heard enough.”

 

Words weren’t going to do it this time, Francis realized. He needed another kind of leverage.

 

“Okay, we don’t have to talk anymore,” he said. “I just want to show you something.”

 

He opened the file folder that had been sitting in the middle of the table, undisturbed until this moment.

 

“Here, this is Christine.” He took out a Polaroid that Rashid had taken at the crime scene: the girl with her trachea severed and her blood seeping into the bathroom grout. “I can see why you went for her. She’s kind of the same type as your sister. Maybe a little older-looking. Not so much of that little-girl thing happening. But you can’t always get so hung up on age, can you?”

 

Tom kept staring, his expression unchanging even as the smells from him started becoming more pungent and unhealthy.

 

“And this is Allison.” Francis took out a second photo before Tom could object. “But I guess you knew that.”

 

Tom looked down at his sister’s one intact eye staring up at him from the bloody lava pit he’d made of her face.

 

“Come on, look at it.” Francis leaned over, almost putting his hand on the scruff of Tom’s neck. “What’re you afraid of? She’s dead. She’s not gonna tell anybody how you used to do her.”

 

Tom tried to turn away, but his pupils jerked back twice as if drawn by magnets. “Come on, Tom. Is this helping you? Is this giving you
closure?”

 

Without warning, Tom bent over and threw up next to the garbage can, spattering Francis’s shoes.

 

“Okay.” He rested his forehead on the table after he was done. “I think I’d like you to let me either call a lawyer or go home and see my girls.”

 

“Tom, I got news for you.” Francis reached for a box of Kleenex. “You’re not seeing your girls tonight.”

 

 

57

 

 

 

IN A WAY, he’d always been a stranger to her, sealed off, distant, and unreachable. Eileen stood by the pass-through window, watching him from behind at the kitchen table. Whose child was this, reading the papers the day after he’d been arrested and eating his way through two pints of ice cream, one after the other, without gaining any weight? Where did he get that habit of constantly rubbing the middle of his forehead with one finger? Certainly not from her or his father, that potbellied satyr. She realized now that from the very moment the nurse at Lenox Hill had put him on her chest, damp and blue, staring at her in eerie silence, there’d been something in him that she didn’t quite recognize.

 

It was as if he were only disguised as a member of their family; alien and frightening things were going on behind the nearly invisible eyebrows. At first, she told herself she was just imagining it. He wasn’t that different from other boys. A little sneaky sometimes, a little furtive. But then she began to notice that he was a devastatingly good liar, as if one side of him were wholly unaware of what the other side was doing. Who broke that vase, Tom?
Jesus, I dunno, Mom. I was out all day.
What happened to that money I left on top of the dresser?
I never saw it.
The bigger the lies got, the more she realized he was deliberately keeping parts of himself hidden from her.
Why is your sister crying? What did you say to her? What were you doing in her room last night?

 

It must have started when he was about eleven and she was six. No, she still couldn’t think about it. It was like staring at the sun. You could know a thing was there but not be able to look at it. It would burn the eyes right out of your skull. She listened to the rhythmic clank of his spoon on porcelain in the empty kitchen.

 

She’d tried. She took him to the cream of the Upper West Side therapists and psychiatrists. But they could never figure out who or what had damaged him. Tom always insisted no one had ever touched him, and as far as she knew it was true. There was just a terrible hunger inside him. Some things you couldn’t explain. So she sent him away, first to boarding school and then to live with his father, when she knew she couldn’t control him anymore. But he kept coming back with a greater appetite. How could you keep a brother and sister apart? Each time they saw each other the attraction was stronger, as if they were continually rediscovering long-lost parts of themselves.

 

She’d thought growing up and getting married would change him, cure him of whatever it was that had made him that way. But the girl he chose was ill-equipped and overmatched, in no way up to the task. She was like Thumbelina: a small person who would never get any bigger. Hardly more than a child herself, barely able to handle the demands of city living, let alone raising two small girls in a wolf’s den.

 

When Eileen tried to talk to her about the future this morning, saying they couldn’t pretend anymore, they had to make themselves strong and think of the girls, she’d just shut down and had one of her sinking spells. Sat on the quilt with the lights low and the E! channel playing, surrounded by magazine articles about chronic fatigue and Epstein-Barr virus, saying all she wanted to do was sleep. Tom had told her it was all lies, false witnesses, murderers and crooked investigators trying to divert the blame from themselves. Everything was going to be all right because
he said it was going to be all right.
And how could Eileen blame her? For most of her life, she’d been the same. Only slowly waking up now that the sun was beginning to scorch the earth.

 

She heard Stacy, six years old and the spitting image of her aunt at the same age, coming down the stairs, looking for dessert.

 

“Daddy, is there any mocha almond fudge left?” She appeared at the far kitchen doorway, crossing her ankles and chewing the end of her braids the way Allison used to.

 

“I’m sorry, sweetie.” From the pass-through, Eileen saw him deliberately take the Häagen-Dazs carton off the table and place it on the chair beside him, where the child wouldn’t see it. “We don’t buy that anymore. Mommy thinks you guys are getting a little heavy.”

 

Stacy stuck out her lip in disappointment.

 

“Come here, baby,” Tom said. “Daddy’s had a hard couple of days. He needs a hug.”

 

Reluctantly, she went to him, dragging her ballet slippers over the tiles, the soles making a sound like match heads sliding across charcoal.

 

“Can I run a bath for you instead?” He put an arm around her.

 

“Oh-okay.” She leaned against him and sighed dramatically.

 

“’At’s my girl.”

 

Eileen felt herself go impossibly stiff, watching his hand drift down and squeeze the little pink heart patched onto the back pocket of her jeans. A voice in her head screamed as his hand stayed there and kept squeezing, as if it were her very own heart in his grip. Not wanting to see it, but not daring to look away. Finally he let go, but the voice kept screaming.
A thing doesn’t stop. A thing doesn’t stop until you make it stop.

 

She climbed the stairs and crossed the landing into the bathroom so she’d be there waiting to take over from him when they came up.

 

 

58

 

 

 

ON MONDAY MORNING Hoolian found himself back in Part 50 of the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, like a time-traveler in a
Twilight Zone
episode returned to the very instant his life fell apart.

 

“The
People of New York
versus
Julian Vega,
” the clerk called out.

 

He stood up and instinctively assumed the classic guilty-looking defendant’s pose, hands behind his back, head bowed, glancing once over his shoulder, checking to see if Zana or any of the other people he’d left messages for had shown up.

 

“Ms. Aaron.” Judge Bronstein raised her voice, making sure the press in the back rows could hear her.
“Approach.”

 

Ms. A. stepped up beside him, straightening her lapels.

 

“Your Honor, we’re filing a motion to dismiss the indictment against Mr. Vega.”

 

“Mr. Raedo?” The judge looked left to the prosecution’s table. “Any last-minute issues you want to raise?”

 

“No, Your Honor. We’re not going to oppose it.”

 

The ADA didn’t even bother to look up. Just pretended to fuss with his papers, like he had more important matters on his mind. It made Hoolian feel small, disrespected, as if the value of his life wasn’t even worth acknowledging. He had half a mind to go over, grab that
hijo de gran puta
by the back of the neck, and bounce his face off the table two or three times, to remind him of his manners.

 

“Okay.” The judge slammed the gavel. “The indictment is dismissed. Mr. Vega, you are free to go. On behalf of the court, I’d like to say what happened to you is very unfortunate. No one goes into this business to send innocent people to prison. . . .”

 

Her voice seemed to fade as she kept talking and gesturing. He found himself getting light-headed and disoriented, missing some of what was being said.

 

“. . . And so I personally want to wish you good luck with the rest of your life and if you’re ever in my courtroom again, I hope it’s only as a visitor.”

 

He heard hollow fake-sounding laughter from the press section as the judge reached down to offer a withered bony hand that somehow made him think of thorny rose stems wrapped in thin tissue. As he stood on tiptoe, shaking it, he felt Ms. A. tugging on the back of his jacket, prompting him to another task.

 

He turned and saw Paul Raedo waiting, his hand offered limply like a beggar’s cup.

 

For a moment, everything seemed to freeze. The court officers, the assembled reporters, the other attorneys waiting for their cases to be called, all leaned forward to see what he would do. Coppery-tasting saliva gathered at the back of his mouth, bringing up the urge to hock in the man’s face. It was the least Raedo deserved. But then his eye fell on the row right behind the defendant’s table, where his father had sat day after day at the original trial in his best lobby suit, trying to show the world what kind of people they really were.

 

He pressed his lips together and offered his hand, silently cursing himself for his good manners.

 

“All right, man.” He squeezed until he had the minor satisfaction of seeing the prosecutor wince. “There you go.”

 

“I’ll call you about the settlement.” Ms. A. leaned over Hoolian’s shoulder. “Think in the low sevens.”

 

“I’ll be in the office.” Raedo wrung his hand out. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

 

Out in the lobby a few minutes later, Hoolian hesitated before the metal detector, instinctively putting his arms out.

 

“It’s all right.” Ms. A. came up behind him and touched his elbow. “You don’t have to let them search you anymore. We’re
leaving.
”

 

He edged past the Phantom Tollbooth-like frame, still bracing for a guard to call,
“Halt.”
Instead, the court officers just went on searching bags and waving their wands over the people heading
in
to the courthouse, as if he’d suddenly become invisible to them.

 

He followed Ms. A. through the revolving doors and out to the sidewalk, with the uncanny sensation that he was moving backward through time.

 

Two dozen news cameramen and reporters had set up under blue scaffolding over the pavement, not far from where they’d been standing the day the jury found him guilty nineteen years, eight months, and twelve days ago.

 

“Julian, how you doing?”

 

“Julian, do you feel vindicated?”

 

“Julian, are you bitter?”

 

He looked up, recognizing this last voice as the one that had been calling,
“Hooleeyaaan,”
over and over in falsetto outside the 19th Precinct. He saw that it was a short bearded guy with a press pass from the
Post
who had pages falling out of his notebook; his midsection was soft and inviting, as if you’d never get your fist out once you buried it there.

 

“We’re not going to have any further comment, for the moment.” Ms. A. stepped up to the microphones as the bright lights went on and the camera shutters started clicking. “We believe the cause of justice was finally served today. Mr. Vega wishes to thank all his supporters. He’s looking forward to spending time with his friends and family. . . .”