City Dark(50)

This is who he is, it occurred to her. Not big, not small, but deep. It was an odd, almost intrusive thought.

So what’s in here?

Sadness. Betrayal.

Anger?

She read through each stanza again. All five had the same . . . meter? She knew nothing about poetry, but she believed that was the word. The rhythm of the thing—it was the same in each stanza, but the last two were a little different, like a song building to an end. That was odd, though, because the poem didn’t wrap itself up. It ended with the desire to ask its subject—Lois—something.

Lois, that’s what he calls her.

Yeah, but Mama, that’s what she was. The mama who walked away from him on a terrible night in a dead, hot car.

Zochi’s eyes drifted back to the first two stanzas, the ones that seemed more concise, snappy.

There’s that line he repeats.

“For what you did to me . . .”

She blinked, looked up at the old, opaque light fixture on the ceiling, then back down.

Scars.

Mute.

Dull.

Not kissed.

For What You Did To Me.

Zochi felt her heart seize in her chest.

F. W. Y. D. T. M.

At that moment, her cell phone buzzed. She wanted to throw the journal down, expel it from her hands like a snake at first believed to be a toy, but instead she closed it very carefully. The number coming up was Mimi’s.

“DNA’s back,” Mimi said, a little breathless. “Clear as a bell.”

“I know,” Zochi said. “It’s him.”





CHAPTER 42


Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Anna M. Kross Center, Rikers Island East River in the Bronx

12:45 p.m.

The week or so between Joe’s arrest—on Tuesday, August 8—and now, as he was led into the attorney visiting area to meet Aideen Bradigan, had been blurry and dim, like something lived underwater. The motions he had gone through on the day of the arrest—from his initial placement in handcuffs at 6:45 a.m., to the long wait at Brooklyn Central Booking on Schermerhorn Street, to the few minutes in the echoing courtroom—had been staid and mechanical.

Aideen had not been there for any of it, as Joe hadn’t retained her. Joe appeared without counsel, and a date was set for him to return with a lawyer. In the meantime, as he expected, no bail was set. He was in custody for the foreseeable future.

It was only when the rear doors of the DOC bus closed that Joe, with his hands cuffed behind him, began to feel his life unraveling like a spool. He was the only white man on the bus; the other guys were all Black or Latino, and he looked to be the oldest by five or six years. One of the Black guys asked Joe if he was an attorney, and if he was, why the hell he was sitting in a DOC bus on its way to Rikers like a regular crackhead. Joe just shrugged and stared straight ahead. Airplanes from LaGuardia passed low overhead as the wheels whined over the bridge connecting the island to Queens.

Rikers Island was a squat, ugly disk of land in the East River named for a Dutchman—Abraham Ryken—who gained it in the city’s infancy and created a slavery-based empire around it. Were Ryken, or one of his Rikers descendants (the name was Anglicized by the early 1800s) to return in a time machine to the island, they might be fooled into believing not much had changed. Rikers was still mostly populated by men of color, living and working in captivity.

Joe had spent a fair amount of time there, both as a prosecutor and a defense attorney. Like most people in his line of work, he never imagined he would see it as a defendant in shackles. As the bus squealed to a stop in front of the reception building, he felt the last bit of hope leak out of him like pus from an infected ear. He would be at Rikers for a few months, depending on whether, and how, he pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in the first degree. The Brooklyn DA’s office would offer nothing in terms of a plea deal, not with a DNA match on two bodies. He could throw himself upon the court’s mercy and see what happened. In all likelihood, that meant “life without the possibility of parole,” a sentence he had seen meted out to only one of his clients over the years. It meant life upstate, maybe Sing Sing in Westchester County. More likely Dannemora, near the Canadian border, or Attica out by Buffalo. Gray walls, endless winters, and God only knew what kind of daily violence and other horrors.

If I can kill myself in here, I might, he thought as he made his way off the bus and fell in line with the others.

Now, a week later, he reached the assigned attorney cubicle and beheld Aideen, her grin tight but warm. She was in a dark suit and a white blouse, her plump little hands folded on the desk. At Rikers, even for a lawyer, she stood out simply by being a short woman with blonde hair and blue eyes.

“Sit down, Joe,” she said gently, as if she knew it was a strange request.

“Aideen, I can’t.”

“You can’t what?”

“Bring you into this,” he said, sighing heavily and sitting down at last. There was a tug at his groin, and he winced. His orange jumpsuit was scratchy and badly fitted. It grabbed at his body in odd places. “By the way, I hate this thing.”

“Oh, the jumpsuit?”

“Yes. How are you, anyway?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“The kids?”

“All good. Have you been okay in here?”

“So far, yeah,” he said, his eyes widening as if he knew that was a lucky break. There had been a few bad looks and one shoving incident, but for the most part Joe had been left alone. For the first few days he was mystified at this. A middle-aged white guy could expect trouble, at least a shakedown if not a beatdown. A younger Black inmate had explained it to him, though, on the third day as they made their way back from breakfast. You ain’t got a short-timer’s look, the guy had said. That’s why no one’s messing with you. Never seen a white man in here who didn’t have a short-timer’s look—scared, like it’s a dream they can’t wake up from. But not you, old man. You look like you just got home.