City Dark(17)

Blackout.

That’s what he had experienced, and it was haunting him now that he was faced with these strange circumstances. It’s also why Halle had been so upset. The true nature of the matter was that Joe didn’t have a “true nature” when he was in a state like that. If he willed himself to reflect on it long enough, it chilled him to the bone.

Blackouts were an occasional consequence of drinking that he still hadn’t gotten a full handle on, or at least that was the official explanation he gave to himself. It was deceptively easy to dismiss the problem; in two years of working for his former and now current boss, Craig Flynn, he hadn’t missed so much as a morning meeting. He functioned, solidly, during the week. It was just weekends, and sometimes Thursdays, when he let loose.

Wrong. It’s more than letting loose. You go way, way too far.

That was a reality he could not avoid, even with the cleverest distortion of thought. What Halle had said on Saturday morning was basically true: It wasn’t that Joe had forgotten what the detectives had told him, along with most of the other events of the past weekend. It was that his brain hadn’t encoded most of those events in the first place. That’s what a blackout was—a failure of memory to encode because of the temporary loss of function to parts of the brain. There might be flashes of memory, things that made it into the vault when brain activity momentarily snapped back into gear, but most of it would be lost, never recorded.

It was a consequence of binging, both heavy and steady. Probably, he just hadn’t stopped—other than maybe passing out for a few hours—until Saturday. That’s when he had woken, his head pounding, to find a detective’s business card that made no sense to him. Any functioning person acknowledging a bender like that would know it was time to make some changes, and a part of Joe’s brain was making that argument.

There was a convenient counterargument, though, and one he still didn’t recognize as classic drunk logic: Okay, sure, so maybe most guys wouldn’t let a bender draw out the way you still sometimes do. We’ll work on that. But, hey, most guys haven’t been as far down as you’ve been and come back so strong!

That rejoinder—“But look where I am now!”—dominated whatever self-evaluation Joe put himself through. He would acknowledge, in the long run, that he needed to quit. He’d known that for years. But it was because he’d been so relatively balanced with liquor the past twenty-four months that he hadn’t bothered to stay on the wagon.

He could get and stay dry for a few days at a time. He was doing his job, competently and cheerfully. His boss and his coworkers loved him. The judges liked him. These things were well and good, but they also marked the point where functioning alcoholics halted self-analysis. If he was killing his liver or his social life, the argument went, well, that was a reckoning he’d face later. The important thing—for now, at least—was that he could face the world and be dry when he needed to be.

Ah, but dry isn’t sober. And you, Joe DeSantos, really need to get sober before something else happens that you don’t have a memory of. This he could not argue with. For the moment, he did not believe that he’d somehow made his way over to a deserted stretch of Coney Island and murdered his estranged mother. Still, he had carefully cleaned his shoes and swept the sand away. And he was racking his brain for a memory of where he’d seen the woman’s face before—for some explanation of the recognition that had flashed in his mind.

More foreboding, even, than either of those was the realization that he was allowing himself to fall deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole when he did start drinking hard. That process was going to hurt him if he wasn’t more careful.

You or someone else, he thought, resigned to sleep remaining far away. You or someone else.





CHAPTER 15


Monday, July 17, 2017

Kings County District Attorney’s Office, Sex Crimes Unit

Brooklyn

7:45 a.m.

“Thanks for coming in early,” Mimi Bromowitz said as Len and Zochi settled into the two chairs before her desk. Zochi filled hers like she was made to sit there—a plump but lovely little woman with big dark eyes and hands clasped in front of her. Len looked gangly and oversize in his, legs parted like a split tree trunk. “Anything in terms of a suspect?”

“Nothing,” Len said, shaking his head. “I hate it, but it’s starting to look like a dead end.”

“Oy, really?”

“You know how it is,” Zochi said with a steep shrug of her right shoulder. “You hope for a great lead up front. We pounded the pavement. Didn’t find one. We’re not giving up, but . . . it’s a shit case so far. Looks random.”

Mimi sighed. She had gone over their DD5s from the remainder of the weekend. Both detectives had gotten overtime to work the case in its first forty-eight hours, a window of time that wasn’t just the stuff of Hollywood.

With a case like the one involving Lois, a woman who lived on the fringes of society in the city that never sleeps, the window of opportunity closed fast on tracking a random killer. People without homes or considered “vagrant” weren’t insulated the way nonmarginalized people were. Their patterns were less traceable. They could come in contact with an almost limitless number of people at all hours of the day and night, far more than what most would consider normal. New York was hardly unique that way; cities had served as bottomless pits for the disappeared since ancient Rome and long before. But more than most places, New York was an organism that churned and flushed away everything, like the estuarial waters licking around its edges.