Slipping Into Darkness (8 page)

 

“I didn’t think there was any way we were going to lose.”

 

Francis watched the look of genuine astonishment spread across Paul’s face, the absolute amazement that anyone could consider the same set of facts he had at his disposal and come to a different conclusion. And in that instant, he saw the totality of the man’s strength and weakness. That utter certainty of his own righteousness that had made Paul a successful prosecutor and a near-total failure at every other kind of human transaction.

 

“All right, I’ll reach out to them,” said Francis. “But you’re going to owe me big-time, Judge.”

 

“Francis, let me count the ways.”

 

“Just help me find our waitress,” he said, having finally ascertained that there was, in fact, no milk on the table. “This coffee’s too strong.”

 

 

6

 

 

 

HOOLIAN WIPED HIS tired eyes and studied the subway map, eventually finding the route from Coney Island to his lawyer’s office. His own flesh and blood turning him out like some scabby, flea-ridden dog. He fingered his father’s Saint Christopher’s medal. Wishing he’d at least had a chance to catch a shower before he got chased out. He thought he could still smell prison on his skin.

 

The train sliced through a graveyard, rows of low-lying tombstones darkened like a smoker’s teeth by air pollution.
Land of the dead. You are now departing from the land of the dead. Please have your passport ready.

 

His lawyer’s office was above a Kinko’s on Astor Place in Manhattan. Traffic raced around a sculpture of a giant black cube that seemed to balance itself precariously on a corner.
Where the hell is everyone rushing to?
His metabolism was still on prison time: wary, contained, hair-trigger sensitive to change.

 

In the waiting room, there was a confused-looking man in a lady’s white rubber bathing cap. He nodded knowingly, as if he were an old friend of Hoolian’s. Beside him, a bony little Asian lady was trying to corral three wayward kids waddling across the brown carpet, and a brother with legs the size of tackling dummies was talking to himself about burning mix CDs for a party. It took Hoolian a second to realize he actually had a telephone headset inside his baseball cap.

 

The secretary studiously ignored them all, a lush chubby white girl with blue nail polish and Rastafarian hair, putting caller after caller on hold, a half-done
New York Times’
crossword puzzle resting next to her computer keyboard.

 

Hoolian stood before her, trying to get her attention and then realized he was staring too long again—just as he had with the Barbed-Wire Girl last night.
How long are you allowed to look anyway?
There was probably a rule. He held her gaze for two Mississippis and then started to turn.

 

“Yes?” She looked up.

 

“Julian Vega to see Ms. Aaron.”

 

“Oh, Julian, come on in.” Deborah Aaron peered out from behind a chipped wooden door. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

 

He glanced back at the other people who’d been waiting longer, half thinking he should apologize for cutting ahead and then thought,
Fuckit.
They’d do the same to him in a heartbeat.

 

He stepped into the office, closing the door after him as Ms. A. gave him her hand. “Congratulations.” A slight tug from her wrist brought him up onto the balls of his feet. She offered her cheek for a kiss, but he turned the wrong way and brushed her lips instead.

 

“Uh, thank you.” He caught the scent of lilac on her skin.

 

“Have a seat.”

 

Did a kiss necessarily mean a woman liked you or was she just being polite? He carefully lowered himself into a chair before her desk, carefully balancing his duffel bag on his lap. Other inmates had given him shit when she’d come to see him in prison, this tough New York lady with the china-doll face who talked too fast and always sounded like she was trying to catch her breath. They’d told him stories about other cons doing the nasty with the women representing them in the visiting room while the guards looked the other way and children pumped quarter after quarter into the vending machines.

 

But he wouldn’t have risked anything like that while he was locked up. The woman had driven 150 miles upstate in slashing rainstorms to see him, taking his case pro bono after he’d been turned down or run the course with a half-dozen other lawyers over the years. She’d read the correspondence he’d labored over—sometimes four or five letters a day—raising both arcane Fourth Amendment issues and glaring omissions in the court record. She took it seriously when he said he’d been framed and insisted that he’d written to Mr. Raedo at the DA’s office over and over asking to have his DNA tested without ever receiving a reply. Naturally, he’d fallen in love with her a little—hardly sleeping nights before her scheduled visits, looking up obscure citations and rules of evidence to impress her in the law library, his heart lifting as he heard the efficient click of her heels on the cold stone floor.

 

Now it was different, though. There was no correction officer watching them through a little screen window in the door. He felt a tinge of her moisture lingering on the corner of his mouth. In the clearer light of this office—a little smaller and more book-choked than he’d expected—he could see she was just holding on to a kind of careworn attractiveness. There were a few white strands in her ash-blond hair, some circles under her eyes, and her dimples were starting to become deep permanent grooves. In the next few years she’d either lapse into premature hagdom or become the kind of second-act hottie who always had younger guys eager to bring her coffee in bed.

 

“Sorry I couldn’t stick around and give you a ride from Rikers after the hearing,” she said with a strained smile. “But the babysitter had to go home early because
her
kids were sick. And I had no one covering for me. . . .”

 

“’S all right. I found my way.”

 

“Oh, I’m so glad.” She stopped, reminding herself to inhale. “You get a good night’s sleep at your cousin’s?”

 

“Uh, yeah. Felt good. You know.
La familia.
”

 

He knew it was wrong to start off the day lying to his attorney, but what else was he going to say? A part of him was still a little Nuyo-Rican boy in a
blanco
school, wanting to impress the girls.

 

“Uh-huh, that’s great.” She nodded absently. “So how you like being a free man?”

 

“It’s a-ight.” He looked around, noticing a child’s finger painting next to her law degree on the wall, its taped corner flapping over an air vent. “I keep thinking you-all are going to tell me it’s a joke and I have to turn around and go back.”

 

“No, it’s no joke. But we do have some serious things to discuss.”

 

He hugged the duffel bag to his chest, hearing a hint of sternness. “So, what’s the DA saying? Are they gonna let the charges drop?”

 

“I’m afraid I had a very testy conversation with Paul Raedo this morning.” The words went off like a string of firecrackers too close to his ear. “They’re taking the position that the judge vacated your conviction on a ‘technicality.’” She crooked her fingers into quotation marks. “But the underlying indictment still stands.”

 

He fell back in his chair, knowing it was all too good to be true.

 

“Let’s face it. We got lucky yesterday.” She sat forward, leveling with him. “Your old lawyer had four of his cases overturned in the last few months. It happens sometimes, but not usually all at once. We were swimming with the tide.”

 

Lucky?
Rage started to gurgle up inside him again. If he’d been lucky, he wouldn’t have been set up in the first place. If he’d been lucky, his father wouldn’t have hired Ralph Figueroa. That drug-addled old bastard never told him he had the right to testify on his own behalf or that they’d been offered a five-to-fifteen plea bargain by the DA. Turned out he’d been screwing up cases for years—missing deadlines, showing up unprepared, filing the wrong papers. And taking $12,000 of Papi’s life savings. The lawyer was living in a nursing home in Florida now, probably drinking out of the toilet and blissfully ignorant of the fact that four separate state judges had been forced to set aside old jury verdicts because of his gross negligence.

 

“I’m sorry, Julian. It’s politics.”

 

All at once he was back in the courtroom again, swimming in pure adrenaline terror and the itchy gray suit his father had bought him. The foreman reading the verdict as he felt his body go cold.
Guilty, guilty, guilty . . .
Every time they polled a member of the jury, he lost a few more degrees of body heat. His teeth were chattering by the time the guards took his arms and stood him up, so hunched over that he could barely turn around to say good-bye to Papi as they walked him back to the pens.

 

“All right, hold it, hold it.” She could see the blood drain from his face. “This is all just posturing and jockeying for position. Everything’s probably going to be just fine.”

 

“
Probably?
” he squawked. “Ms. A., don’t talk to me about
probably.
Just tell me what I have to do and let me do it.”

 

“Look. This is an unusual case.”

 

He noticed how she had to consciously slow herself down and pause to take a breath every few sentences, as if she were used to dealing with people who were either hard of hearing or willfully dense.

 

“Tell me about it. I served damn near twenty years for something they framed me for. . . .”

 

“Julian, I’m on your side.” She put her hands up. “Okay? I’m just trying to tell you what the facts are. The reality is, this is a high-profile case. I remember it from my third year at the DA’s office. It was all any of the women there ever talked about, because we were all the same age as the victim. And, unfortunately, people haven’t forgotten. So now Paul Raedo is up for a judgeship. He can’t afford to look like he’s backpedaling.”

 

“Fahhkk.”
The air went out of him. “So I could wind up going back upstate? Is that what you’re telling me?”

 

“Listen, you’ve been through a lot and I can see how upset you’re getting, so here’s what I’m proposing we do.” She rubbed her pearls one by one with a kind of half-conscious tenderness. “I’ll call Paul back and see if we can work out a deal for the calendar call next week. You plead guilty and Judge Bronstein would give you time served and that would be that. . . .”

 

“
No.
”

 

Ms. Aaron let go of her pearls and looked at the door nervously. She probably thought she was being so sane and reasonable. But she hadn’t been at his cousin’s this morning. She hadn’t heard his last surviving kin declare,
I don’t even fucking know you
. She hadn’t seen the way that little girl looked at him from behind the refrigerator. That look was going to stay with him like a knife in the back.

 

“I ain’t pleading to shit,” he started, then stopped himself, hearing how two decades of prison life had eroded the benefits of a good education. “
Excuse me.
I am not pleading to shit. I want my name back.”

 

She put her head down. “Julian, let’s be honest with each other,” she said. “You’ve spent more than half your life in prison already. Don’t you want this to be over?”

 

“Hell, yeah.”

 

“Then why wouldn’t you just want to cut your losses? I know how vindictive Paul Raedo and Francis Loughlin can be.”

 

“And if I plead guilty to what they set me up for, how am I going to hold my head up? Huh? Could I get to be a lawyer like you with a felony conviction? Would I be able to get a mortgage and buy myself a decent place to live?”

 

Her expression had changed while he was talking. There was a pair of scissors opening behind her eyes now.

 

“Julian, it’s time to get practical,” she said. “I know how hard you’ve worked to keep this case alive. But there is a limit to how far wishful thinking will take you.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I mean, over the years, you can convince yourself that you’re innocent and you’ve been screwed by the system. But if we keep going in this direction, we’re going to end up back in court and the facts are going to come out. And they don’t always turn out to be what you want them to be.”

 

Fury made his mind go white. “You calling
me
a liar?”

 

“I’m saying I don’t want to see you get hurt any more than you already have been.” She patted her chest for emphasis. “And, frankly, I can’t afford to invest any more resources into a civil suit that isn’t going anywhere.” She came around and sat on a corner of the desk. “Wrongful imprisonment is a notoriously hard case to prove. You’re going to have to show that the police and prosecutors deliberately ignored or corrupted evidence that could have exonerated you.”

 

He fell silent for a few seconds, the weight of the duffel bag pressed into his lap. All the things he’d collected and saved while he was away. The dull-bristled toothbrush he needed to replace; soup cans he’d bought at the commissary and couldn’t bear to throw out; the little alarm clock he’d fixed up in small-engine repair; the tube socks he’d worn doubled up when he was up to his ankles in snow in the prison yards up by the Canadian border, trying to watch fucking farm reports on the outdoor TV; the copy of
Childhood’s End
he’d had in his Jansport bag that day Detective Loughlin asked him to stop by the station house. The envelope he’d been holding on to. The mementos from the life he’d thought he’d have. The
years.
They’d been stolen from him, stripped away like a mugger taking his wallet, rifling it for cash, and tossing it in the gutter. That was what made it keep hurting. That no one gave a damn. No one was keeping score. No one was trying to be fair. They’d ground his face into the dirt and had themselves a good time going. He’d try to move on and live with it, smiling and shrugging, go-along-to-get-along Hoolian, but it would be incubating inside him like the creature from
Alien.
Until one day it came bursting out with gnashing jaws and dripping teeth, leaving just a useless husk behind.