Slipping Into Darkness (46 page)

 

Hoolian nodded along pleasantly, becoming an actor for the occasion, his facial expressions and modest gestures having nothing to do with the storm of emotions raging in his head.

 

“Julian, what are your plans for the future?” a girl reporter with bobbed hair and tiny teeth called out.

 

“I dunno,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go for my law degree. I already know the system pretty good. . . .”

 

He saw a few of them already starting to peel off as Ms. A. stepped up to say they had no further comment at the moment. The spotlight was moving on. They had what they needed. There was no reason to linger. He realized his exoneration was probably only a page-three story. All the juice had been in the original accusation. He saw some of the correspondents take their microphones and start to run down the block, where another story had obviously caught their attention. Through the crush of bodies, he caught a glimpse of Tom Wallis looking white-faced and terrified. Ms. A. had said he’d be coming to court this afternoon to be arraigned for his sister’s murder. A pruny old lawyer in a natty bow tie stood at his side, batting away questions. Hoolian didn’t give a damn what they did to Tom in prison. But as the crowd moved by, in a traveling swarm, Hoolian saw that the mother was with them as well, a spectral presence in red hair and tinted glasses. He thought she must be the loneliest woman on the planet right now. How could you go on, knowing that your only son had killed your only daughter? You’d either have to go crazy or do yourself in.

 

He watched them all go up the steps and through the revolving doors, entering the immense gray machine he’d just gotten out of.

 

So that was it. The circus was leaving. Tom would be the headline tomorrow. The Julian Vega story was over. Shouldn’t the sky be splitting open? Shouldn’t a heavy rain be coming down and washing the streets clean? Shouldn’t the sun be rising in the west and setting in the east? Shouldn’t God be making his own presence known and explaining himself? Shouldn’t there just be . . .
more
somehow?

 

But the day had no special character. A lawyer in a Burberry coat stepped in front of him to hail a taxi. A couple of reporters straggled behind, talking to Ms. A. about her other cases. A police car hurtled past with its siren on, paying him no mind at all.

 

He should have been overjoyed. It was finally done. He could do anything now. But instead, he felt lost and a little afraid. He watched a fleet of yellow taxis go by and it dawned on him that every single driver, even the newest immigrant off the plane who barely spoke English, had something he lacked—a license. He wasn’t even sure which was the gas pedal. All at once, he was awash in all the unfamiliar details of daily life. Insurance deductibles, health-care premiums, tax-deferred savings. He’d heard of them but had been afraid to ask anyone what they were. How would he ever catch up?

 

He realized he was at sea out here. He’d work on his civil suit for a while, but once that was settled, he wouldn’t know what to do. Without this case, without this cause, his life would have no direction, no structure, no organizing principle. And once he opened the clenched fist inside him that had been holding him together for so long, everything he had would blow away.

 

All of Foley Square seemed to spin around him. Everyone moving by him with a sense of purpose that made him feel more shiftless, lonely, and vulnerable. A blue-and-white Department of Correction bus pulled around the side entrance of the courthouse, to take prisoners from the holding pens off to jail. He had a premonition that if he wasn’t careful, he’d be taking that ride again soon himself.

 

But then he felt the tremor of the Lexington Avenue subway right beneath his feet and in the gust of wind coming up through the grating he sensed, for just an instant, the presence of his father.

 

He’d find his way, he told himself. Something would tell him where to go. And as the last of the reporters finally walked away, he saw that Zana had been standing with Eddie at the rear of the pack all along, waiting for him. And as he staggered over to them in gratitude, he saw that the boy was holding, like a fallen banner he’d picked up in the street, a half-unfolded, crayon-annotated map of the New York City subway system.

 

“Can we go to Coney Island now?” the kid asked, like he was sick of waiting.

 

 

59

 

 

 

JUST AS FRANCIS turned from the Starbucks counter holding two scalding-hot cups of coffee, an ungainly girl with a shaved head came zooming out of his blind spot on Rollerblades, flailing her arms and heading right at him. It was too late to get out of the way and there was no room to move. But somehow he managed to catch her in his arms, spin her around gracefully like a waltz partner, and let her go without spilling a drop or burning either of them.

 

“Surprised you made it,” said Hoolian, once Francis had navigated back to the table and sat down, slightly red-faced and worse for wear.

 

“Yeah, they ought to make people take their skates off when they come in.”

 

“I meant I was surprised you showed at all.”

 

Francis handed him his coffee, a little surprised to find himself here as well. When he first got the word from Deb Aaron a few weeks back that Hoolian wanted a sit-down, just the two of them, he’d simply crumpled up the pink message slip and dropped it in the wastebasket, the way any sensible person would. But over the next couple of days, he noticed that it somehow didn’t go out with the rest of the trash but stayed there lodged in a corner of the basket, like a discarded organ still pulsing.

 

“Case is over.” He shrugged, glad he’d insisted they do it in a public place. “We might as well be strangers.”

 

They stared at each other in awkward silence for a while, and then both turned to look out the window at the same time. A fine pre-Christmas dusting was falling over the construction site near Cooper Union, the kind of precipitation that could turn into rain or snow at a moment’s notice.

 

“You know, I hate this weather.” He watched the orange netting on the upper floors start to disappear in the mist. “First dead victim I saw was right before Christmas. Old lady got killed up in Harlem and lay there a week. Body all bloated. Maggots crawling out of the eye sockets. The smell was so ripe that guys with twenty years were throwing up. I washed my uniform three times afterward. But you know, you can’t just throw your hat in the Maytag with the rest of your clothes. I had to leave it. So the next time I was on foot patrol, it rained. And that awful smell just came washing down all over me again, running straight down my face. It brought it all back, like I was still in that apartment.”

 

“There you go, motherfucker. You can’t get away from some things. Sorry you didn’t catch pneumonia.”

 

Francis gave him the once-over, noticing Hoolian had on the same tweed jacket and maroon shirt he wore to court every time. He was wearing the same black tie as well, knotted a little too tightly around the throat. So much for letting things go. This probably did not mark the beginning of National Brotherhood Week.

 

“So, what’d the city give you for a settlement anyway?” Francis reached for a napkin and blew his nose, still not able to get rid of the cold that had been nagging him since Thanksgiving. “Fifty, sixty thou?”

 

“I’m getting my life together.” Hoolian pointedly ignored the question and pushed his face across the table. “But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to make up for what you did to me.”

 

Eighty, ninety grand, Francis figured. With a third going to Deb Aaron as her contingency. Otherwise, Hoolian would’ve shown up wearing a brand-new flashy designer suit, just to rub his old adversary’s face in it.

 

“You’re probably lucky you got anything.” Francis looked past him. “I don’t know how your lawyer ever thought she could prove malicious intent.”

 

“You know what you did,” Hoolian said in a cutting voice.

 

“I worked the case as hard as I could. Never anything personal.”

 

“You flaked me and we both know it.”

 

“Believe what you like, son. It’s nothing to do with me —”

 

“Why the fuck did you do that anyway?”

 

Francis forced a smile. “You seriously expect me to answer?”

 

“I had my whole life ahead of me, man. Look at this. . . .”

 

Hoolian made a sudden move for his inside pocket and Francis lurched back.

 

“Easy now.” Hoolian’s eyes glimmered with amusement as he took out an old yellowing business envelope and laid it on the table between them.

 

“What’s this?” Francis leaned over it, his blood pressure rising.

 

“Just open it.”

 

Francis hesitated and then smoothed back the flap, his veins starting to pump like fire hoses at a three-alarm.

 

“If this is a sample of Allison Wallis’s DNA you been carrying around for twenty years to use at a crime scene, I’m telling you right now that I’ll shoot you in the head, right before I shoot myself.”

 

“Just open the fuckin’ envelope, man. Don’t be a pussy.”

 

He took out and unfolded a brown-stained folded-up letter, set it down on the table, and then studied it awhile, trying to make sense of the words.

 

“. . . we are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted into the class of 1988 . . . Additional materials will be sent to . . .”

 

His jaw slowly retracted into the lower part of his face. “Is this your college admissions letter or something?”

 

“I’ve been carrying it around for twenty years.” Hoolian nodded. “It came the second week I was in Attica. I just sat on my bunk, reading it over and over. They were going to give me a full scholarship.”

 

Francis wiped the table beneath the letter to make sure it wasn’t damp. “And what do you want me to do with it?”

 

“I want you to keep it, man. I want you to put it right next to your family pictures. So you look at it every day the rest of your life.”

 

Francis grunted, as if he’d just had a medicine ball heaved at him.
Why the hell did I come today?
I should be home, spreading salt on the sidewalk and making sure all the storm windows are closed. I should be trying to get my kids on the phone. I should be helping my wife paint the bathroom while I still can. I’m not even getting paid for this.

 

“I just want you to tell me one thing.” Hoolian pushed the letter more toward Francis’s side of the table, trying to get him to take it. “How do you live with yourself, knowing what you did?”

 

“Nature of the beast,” Francis said casually, even as he found he couldn’t quite meet Hoolian’s eye.

 

“And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

 

“I had a dead girl on my hands. I did what I thought I needed to do.”

 

“And so you needed to set me up?”

 

Francis found himself shifting and fidgeting, like some common criminal just brought into the precinct.

 

“I’m sorry you got caught up when we should’ve been looking at somebody else,” he said carefully. “It’s every cop’s worst nightmare. In twenty years, I never had another case like that. . . .”

 

“Sorry I got
caught up?
”

 

Hoolian pushed back from the table and several of the women sitting near them looked over.

 

“That’s all you have to say to me? You’re sorry I got ‘caught up’? Like I’m Charlie the fuckin’ tuna in a net?”

 

“Well, what else do you want?” Francis dropped his voice, embarrassed.

 

“I want you to admit it.”

 

“Admit what?”

 

“What you did to me. I want you to say the words.”

 

“Why’s that so important to you?” Francis turned sideways, his legs getting cramped.

 

“Because it
is.
You took the best damn years of my life. I got so much hate for you, man, that it’s poisoning me.”

 

“Still?”

 

“Yes,
still.
How am I supposed to get past it? Tell me that. I thought everything was going to be okay now, but I’m still all fucked up about it. I can’t relax. I can’t smile most of the time. I can’t eat in a restaurant without trying to bring the silverware back to the front. I can’t even enjoy being in the first fucking adult relationship of my whole life.”

 

Francis shook his head, silently insisting it all had nothing to do with him.

 

“It got so bad the other day, I went back to my old school and I saw the priest who wrote my college recommendation. Ninety-seven years old and still remembers my last report card. And you know what he said to me? He said I had to
forgive
you.”

 

“Might be something to that.”

 

“But how can I forgive you when you won’t even say what you did?”

 

Francis’s eyes drifted down to the letter on the table again and he felt a subtle increase of pressure inside his chest.

 

“I’m sorry, son. I can’t give you what you’re asking for. That’s just never going to happen.”

 

Get up.
His head was sending messages to the rest of his body. You don’t have to stay here. You’re under no obligation to take this. Just because everybody else needs to confess doesn’t mean you have to.

 

“I figured you’d say that.” Hoolian clasped his hands, nodding furiously and trying to keep himself under control. “I really did. But you know what kills me anyway?”

 

“No. What?”

 

“It’s knowing you’re going to do the same thing to somebody else that you did to me.”

 

“No, I’m not.” The throb of blood was so loud in his ears, it sounded like footsteps across the ceiling.

 

“Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you? You’re not fucking
sorry.
You’re not having to pay for what you did.”

 

Francis felt the pressure in his chest move, becoming more spread out and harder to sit with comfortably. “You always end up paying.”

 

“What do you mean, ‘you always end up paying’? That’s just some weak shit people say to get you out of their office. You’re not paying. Look at you. You’re fat and sassy. You’re probably about to retire with all your benefits and half your salary. You’re not suffering —”