City Dark(10)

She shook her head and sat down at the bare kitchen table, crossing her legs. Below a Mets T-shirt, she had on gray yoga pants and cross-trainers. “I shouldn’t even tell you.”

“Please tell me. What happened?”

“Your mother, Joe,” she said, and the sharp rebuke in her voice, that Italian edge, was gone. “NYPD found her on the beach, on Coney Island. I guess that was Thursday night. You called me last night. Told me you’d probably have to ID her. You didn’t want to go alone.” Halle used the term “NYPD” rather than “the cops” or something more civilian-like because she was also in the business. She had gone to St. John’s University School of Law in Queens and had met Joe through an internship with Joe and Jack’s law firm when she was a second-year student. The two didn’t become involved until later, when Joe ran into her outside a courtroom one afternoon in Brooklyn. It was 2015, and Joe had just started working for the attorney general. Shoptalk that night turned into drinks, which turned into raw, wild sex at her place in Sheepshead Bay. At twenty-six, she was a little more than half his age.

“My mother?” he asked. Joe couldn’t know it, but he uttered those two words in exactly the same way he had to Zochi and Len when they had found him at Greeley’s.

“That’s who they think it was. It looks like she was homeless. They . . . they think she was murdered.”

“Oh God.” Joe dashed back upstairs for the business card. A few flashes of memory were popping into his brain, but they were only images. He was picturing a small but sturdy female detective with big eyes and short black hair. Another guy with her, big guy with kind of a moon face. He pictured them at a bar, probably Greeley’s, although he wasn’t positive, sometime late. But that was it. He couldn’t recall anything they had told him. His heart pounded. When he returned to the kitchen, he looked at Halle with a grim mix of guilt and frustration. “She was homeless? On the beach at Coney?”

“You told me they’re not sure if she was homeless.” Her voice started to break. “Joe, I hate this! I hate having to repeat this to you!” She started to cry, and he fell to one knee and took her right hand in both of his.

“I’m so sorry, Halle. I can’t make this right, but I am so sorry.”

“No,” she said, forcing tears away. “No, don’t be. This isn’t . . . it isn’t about me. It’s just frustrating, you know?”

It’s what broke us up, he thought. Of course he knew. His mouth was dry. It seemed as if he had just dreamed about his mother and brother, earlier while he was in the gray area between drunk and hungover, when sleep was fitful and thin. The anniversary of that night had just passed, and it had been haunting him all week long. “I’m sorry I called you in the first place. Afterward, I just . . . forgot.”

“You didn’t forget,” she said, staring down at the hand he had taken. “You didn’t make any memories of it. You were blacked out. Again.”

He opened his mouth to speak but then shut it. The smell of her—Halle was playfully vain and girlish and traveled in an aura of her own scent—threatened to knock him over. It was a lovely and painful contrast to the aroma he normally experienced in his big hollow house: fried food and bleach.

“The thing is, it was a bad week,” he finally said. “I knew it was coming; it happens every year. Then I had a big hearing on Tuesday, and my boss gave me the rest of the week off. It’s no excuse. It’s just . . . what happened.”

“I saw that on a docket sheet last week,” she said. “That pedophile, right? The one you got put into the psych hospital last year?” She still wouldn’t make eye contact with him.

“Aaron Hathorne, yes. This was his twelve-month review of confinement.”

“So he’ll stay confined?”

“We’re waiting on a final ruling. I think so, yeah.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess. But I mean . . . to celebrate that, you went on a three-day bender?” Her voice rose on the last word. The edge was back.

Joe sighed. “Two days. I didn’t start drinking, really, until Thursday.” His knee aching from kneeling, he stood and went to the fridge in search of grapefruit juice. He was hungover and thirsty. “I didn’t get arrested. I didn’t get thrown out of a place, at least that I know of. There are just . . . things I can’t remember.”

“Like two cops, Joe, telling you your homeless mother was found murdered on a stretch of beach?”

“I don’t have a mother!” he snapped, shutting the fridge door hard with a juice carton in hand. “I didn’t on Thursday night either, when whoever this woman was got killed.”

“You told me it was an anniversary,” she said, almost whispering. “The night of the blackout in ’77.”

“Yes, ’77.” And a good fourteen years before she was born, an inner voice chided him. You never had the right to drag her into your life, no matter how hot for it she seemed, no matter what daddy issues she has. “That was the last night she was my mother.”

“Well, the police think she was your mother. So I guess the city thinks that too, and I guess you’re responsible for her, right? You said last night you’d have to go to the morgue in Queens and ID her.”

“I’m sure I said that, but it was stupid. I can’t ID her; it’s been way too long.”