Slipping Into Darkness (7 page)

 

“Well, you know that he’s been writing letters for years from prison, raising all these side issues about witness statements and whether his lawyer was competent. . . .”

 

Ever since he’d left the doctor’s office this morning, Francis had been having a distracting little subband of dialogue crawling underneath his regular conversation, like a cable news report, but now it suddenly cut off.

 

“Somebody might’ve said something to me,” he allowed.

 

“So Judge Santiago had him brought down for a four-forty hearing on Rikers yesterday. And after he heard the arguments about the competency issues, he decided to grant the motion and vacate the conviction.”

 

The waitress brought his coffee.

 

“Where’s the fucking Sweet ’n Low?” Francis said, looking around. “Didn’t these restaurants always used to have Sweet ’n Low on the tables?”

 

All at once, it seemed very important to him for everything to be in its proper place.

 

“It’s right next to you, Francis.” Paul pointed to the edge of the table, just outside his field of vision. “Look, no one expects you to be happy.”

 

“No shit, Paulie.” He snatched a pink packet. “No one thought of giving me a heads-up?”

 

“What would you have said at the hearing? The issues didn’t have anything to do with you. Almost everybody Ralph Figueroa represented is looking to get their case reopened, because he was a fucking degenerate drug addict who never told anyone they had the right to testify in their own defense. They’ve overturned four of his cases in the last three months.”

 

“And it never occurred to you that I might have a problem with this? Did you forget what happened in Auburn a few years ago?”

 

“The judge was made aware there’d been an incident. I made sure to put a note about it in the case file.”

 

“An
incident?
” Francis tore open the packet and poured saccharine on the smoldering black surface. “That little cocksucker tried to take a swing at me in the corridor. Good thing the COs got between us, because I was fucking ready to have a go at him.”

 

That’s some tough talk there, Helen Keller.
At the time, he’d been caught totally off guard. Hurrying down the hall on a visit upstate to meet a potential CI when he’d heard a voice just outside the lunchroom, calling out, “Hey,
embustero.
” He didn’t see Hoolian stepping out of line and lunging at him until it was almost too late. Not that he would have recognized the kid anyway, after all those years.

 

“I should’ve had a chance to testify about that at the hearing,” Francis fumed, realizing the whole thing should have been an early-warning signal.

 

“The judge took the position that Hoolian already did sixty days in solitary for it and that’s enough.” Paul turned his palms up as the waitress brought his tea and raw carrots. “There was no physical contact, so I don’t know what else you expected.”

 

“So, that’s it? He’s off the hook? Somebody from the office buying him breakfast too?”

 

“C’mon, Francis, don’t do this.”

 

“Don’t do
what?
” The waitress put down his eggs and bacon. “Don’t remind you? Is that what you’re telling me?”

 

“No . . .”

 

“Do you even remember what this case was supposed to be about? Did you even look at the fucking file again?”

 

“Yes, I looked at the file, Francis.” Paul picked up a carrot and bit it in half.

 

“Then do you remember the kid with the bottle?”

 

“The what?”

 

“The kid with the fucking milk bottle tied around his neck.”

 

Paul stopped chewing and shifted a load of half-masticated carrot from one side of his mouth to the other. “What the hell are you talking about?”

 

“You don’t remember.”

 

“Enlighten me.”

 

Francis glanced around the restaurant, finding himself making wider arcs than usual to see if anyone was listening. “You remember she worked at Bellevue, right?” He dropped his voice.

 

“Yes. She was in the pediatric ER.”

 

“Right.
Exactly.
So just before Christmas break the year before she dies, third-grade teacher from one of the fancy-ass uptown private schools walks into the ER with an eight-year-old boy. Dad’s a big lawyer at a white-shoe firm. But the teacher knows something’s up, because he’s got bruises on both arms and severe stomach pains every day. Allison starts to examine him and sees he’s got this big lump under his shirt. And when she lifts it, it turns out to be a baby bottle tied around his neck.”

 

“I’m still not remembering,” Paul sucked his molars.

 

“So Allison does her thing, just the way we would,” Francis said. “She goes eye-to-eye with the kid. She works him, she talks to him. She plays Monopoly with him. She gets him to trust her. And then it all comes out that his father, Mr. Big Shit Corporate Hot Dog, says the kid’s been acting like a baby. Crying and wetting the bed. So if he’s going to act like a baby, he’s going to wear a baby bottle to school. A third-grader, Paulie. Isn’t that nice?”

 

He stirred his coffee again, not wanting to risk asking for milk when it could be right next to him.

 

“All the nurses were right outside the room when she was trying to get him to take the bottle off. The poor kid’s in hysterics, begging her, ‘
Please, please, nonononono, Daddy will be so mad. Please don’t make me take it off.
’ Broke their hearts. And these are tough fucking women. They’ve seen everything. They make
you
look like a goddamn choirgirl.”

 

“Francis, come on . . .”

 

“So Allison called the father up and reamed him out. This nice girl, whose mother wrote children’s books. ‘
You fuck-ING asshole, I am going to call Social Services, I’m going to call Bureau of Child Welfare on you. . . .
’ With the Jamaican nurses in the background going, ‘You tell him, girl.’”

 

“She get him locked up?”

 

“He ended up with a desk appearance ticket.” Francis stirred his coffee. “
Fucker.
And, yeah, I looked at him for the murder at the time. But that scumbag was in Gstaad with his girlfriend.”

 

“Many moons ago, Francis. Seems like the Dark Ages. Everything’s different now.”

 

“She was
one of us.
” Francis stared at him, nothing wrong with his central vision yet. “She was good people.”

 

“Hey, Francis. Don’t make me the bad guy here. It’s a complicated issue. The guy went in when he was seventeen and came out thirty-seven. A lot of people are going to say we already got our pound of flesh.”

 

“And Allison would be forty-six. . . .”

 

“All right, all right.” Paul put his carrot down. “No one’s saying we’re throwing in the towel either. This was a heinous crime. No question about it. People remember. It’s not in our interest to let murderers go free before they’ve served their full sentence.”

 

“Particularly if we’re up for a judgeship.”

 

“That’s a cheap shot, Francis.” The bristly little troops arose on Paul’s scalp. “And you know it.”

 

“So obviously it’s true.”

 

Of course, Francis had already heard the rumors. After this many years, men like Paul didn’t sit around waiting for the DA to retire or die. They took their restless vaulting ambition and they went politicking. It was natural for Paul to want to be a judge. He didn’t have the temperament or the social skills for the private sector—no wife to set off his intensity and give him the illusion of charm at corporate cocktail parties. On the bench, he’d be free to glower and grow cantankerous without contradiction, indulging his vengeful streak well into his sunset years.

 

“So where do we go from here?”

 

“Officially no decision’s been made,” Paul poured hot water into his teacup. “We have the option of proceeding with the indictment as if it’s still 1983 or letting the whole thing drop. But there’s another wrinkle I need to talk to you about.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Hoolian has Debbie Aaron representing him.”

 

“Are you shitting me?”

 

“I wish. Hoolian must have gone through half the lawyers in the New York bar before he got to her.”

 

“Fuckin’ Debbie A.”

 

He pushed his suddenly foul-smelling eggs away, contemplating the ring the plate left on the table.

 

“You knew her when she was doing drug cases at our office, didn’t you?” Paul fished the teabag out of his cup with a spoon.

 

“Yeah, we called her ‘Fuckin’ A’ because she was always trying to punch holes in our testimony before she put us on the stand.”

 

How’d you know he was carrying a gun, Detective? Did you actually
see
the money change hands? Why didn’t you recover more of the drugs in the apartment?
For about three seconds, he’d thought of having a thing with her. He liked a woman who could give as good as she got. But then he realized she would wear him out with her ferocious demands for honesty and contempt for compromise—they would have been like two buzz saws going toward each other.

 

“We gotta tread carefully here.” Paul wrapped the string around his teabag. “I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but Debbie’s already suing the police department for malicious prosecution in a civil suit.”

 

“That fuckup with Marty Delblanco in the two-eight?”

 

Francis had caught bits and pieces of the departmental gossip at various rackets. A junkie who got locked up in Harlem for raping and murdering an eighty-year-old grandmother recently freed after fifteen years on DNA evidence and recanted witness testimony. And now Debbie A. was suing on his behalf, saying the detective who’d questioned the skell had beaten him into giving a full confession. What stunned everyone was not just that the department and the city were named in the $3.2 million suit but that the detective was being held personally liable to the tune of $750,000.

 

“They say Deb’s got a hard-on for suing cops because she was married to that detective in the nine-oh who used to knock her around some,” Paul explained. “They’re divorced now. She had him locked up for domestic abuse.”

 

“But no one’s talking about making Marty pay, are they?”

 

“Indemnification’s an open question. He’s supposed to have given that kid a pretty good tune-up to get the statement. It’s not clear that anybody else should be responsible for that.”

 

Francis touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “Motherfucker, you’re not worried about that in this case, are you?”

 

Paul squeezed the remains of his tea bag into his cup. “We gotta stick together here, Francis.”

 

“What’re you talking about? I never laid a hand on Hoolian. He put himself on the scene.”

 

Paul lowered his voice. “Come on, Francis. We all know this was never the perfect investigation.”

 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

 

Paul rested the spoon with the crushed bag on the side of the saucer, letting the silence speak for itself.

 

Francis noticed the way everything on the table seemed to get very large and then very small.

 

“You know you weren’t so fucking perfect yourself,
Your Honor.
I didn’t hear about the American Bar Association giving you any citation for the way you handled some of those early interviews.”

 

Paul cupped the back of his head self-consciously. “Well, can we just say there were certain things that both of us might’ve done differently?”

 

Francis threw his napkin down. “Sure, why not? Let’s just say the whole thing was just a practice run so we could get it right the second time.”

 

“Glad you think it’s funny.”

 

“So, what do you want to do?”

 

“I think we have to take the position that the indictment still stands and this is still an active investigation,” Paul said, adopting the sagacious furrow and dignified chin of a man running for public office. “Nothing in the four-forty motion contradicts the underlying facts of the case itself. If Debbie A. wants to come after us, she’ll have to prove there was a deliberate intent to ignore specific evidence.”

 

“Right,” said Francis, the subband of commentary beginning to crawl through his head again.

 

“And she’s going to have a hard time proving that. It’s been twenty years. I don’t know where she’s going to find any witnesses. . . .”

 

Arroyo. Hernandez.
Francis was already dipping into the slipstream, trying to remember the names that came up in the original investigation. He wondered if he even had any of his old notebooks around at home.

 

“Francis . . . ,” Paul interrupted him.

 

“Wha?”

 

Paul leaned across the table, peering out from under the mask of jurisprudence one last time. “We’re sure we got the right guy, aren’t we?”

 

“Julian Vega killed her,” Francis said firmly. “The front door of that building was locked after midnight. Nobody else could’ve gotten into her apartment unless they had a key, like he did. His fingerprints were all over the murder weapon. No one else was seen leaving. Her blood was on his tool. . . .”

 

But he noticed the litany had a certain hollowness after all this time, like an agnostic’s prayer.

 

“So has anybody talked to the family yet, let them know what’s going on?” he asked.

 

“I made some calls to try to track them down through Victims’ Services,” Paul said vaguely. “But the last number I had is disconnected. They’ve moved around a lot since ’83.”

 

“So Hoolian’s out and they don’t know it yet?”

 

Paul looked abashed, reminding Francis that even the most calculating people in the world sometimes got the basic math wrong.

 

“What’s going to happen if they read it in the paper first?”

 

“I was hoping you’d try and smooth it over with them a little, Francis.” The eyebrows rose and the bristles bent back. “We want them on our side. The last thing we need is them bad-mouthing us in the press while we’re going through this again. We don’t want to look callous.”

 

“Then why didn’t you reach out before the hearing?”