Into the Dark

by Alison Gaylin

  “He didn’t last long in California, did he?” Brenna said.

  He shook his head. “Just a few years. Managed to get himself arrested, I believe, for something idiotic. Breaking and entering.”

  “Hildy bailed him out?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure that’s what happened,” he said. “She flew out to California. Came back with that bad penny of a boy.”

  She shook her head.

  “That young man has had one decent paying job his whole life—editing adult movies. And I’m the one who got it for him.”

  Brenna raised an eyebrow at him.

  “The fellow who runs the company owed me a few favors.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “I did it for his mother, not him. Some people are born with a work ethic. Others need one shoved down their throats.” He gazed out the window again, then shook his head. “You want to know why I lent him that money?” He looked at Brenna.

  “I’m guessing it wasn’t because you considered him a good investment.”

  He snorted. “No, Miss Spector. You are funny.”

  Brenna waited.

  “That money, he wanted for some ridiculous camera. He told me he was working on a project which would change the world—which, believe me, I put as much stock in as that film education.”

  “Did you think he’d be able to pay you back, at least?”

  “No.”

  Morasco said, “Then why?”

  Pokrovsky grinned, and for a moment, Brenna caught a flash of it—the face she’d seen in the mug shot, sharp and hard and merciless. “I lent it to him,” he said, “because I knew he wouldn’t be able to pay me back.”

  “And you were looking forward to the punishment,” said Brenna.

  “You said it,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  As they were heading downstairs to Hildy’s apartment, Brenna turned to Morasco. “What kind of person borrows money from that guy?” she whispered.

  “Same type of person whose mom does his laundry when he’s forty-five.”

  “We don’t know that she does his laundry anymore.”

  “Fair enough,” Morasco said. “How about the same type of person who drops out of film school at forty-two and gets arrested for breaking and entering and runs up a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bill with that guy because he thinks he needs some fancy camera to videotape a naked shadow . . .”

  “All right, all right,” Brenna turned to him. “By the way, I don’t know if you learned this at John Jay, but hundred-year-old mobsters aren’t always credible witnesses.”

  Morasco shrugged. “I believed him.”

  By now, they were at Hildy’s door. When Brenna knocked, Hildy opened it so fast, she almost fell in.

  “Did he hurt Robbie?” Hildy said. “Is he the reason why Robbie disappeared?”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Tannenbaum,” Morasco said.

  “It isn’t,” she said. “You don’t know Mr. Pokrovsky. He’s . . . He means well, but he’d just as soon . . . What did he say to you?”

  Brenna put a hand on her shoulder. “Nothing that would make me think he has any idea where your son is.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Brenna said. Though she wasn’t. At this point, Brenna wasn’t fully sure of anything. “Hildy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Robbie has an arrest record?”

  “A . . . a what?”

  “Mr. Pokrovsky says he was arrested in California. You bailed him out.”

  Hildy stared up at Morasco. “What is she talking about?”

  “A minor charge. Breaking and entering?”

  Hildy’s shoulders relaxed. “Oh, that.” She looked at Brenna. “That was years ago, and it was nothing.”

  Brenna looked at her. “It was an arrest.”

  “It was a prank.”

  “A prank?” said Morasco.

  “The homeowner didn’t even press charges. It was a teacher at the film school. Robbie didn’t steal anything. It was more of a dare than anything else. And anyway, it wasn’t Robbie’s fault. It was his friend’s.”

  “His friend?”

  “One of his classmates.” Her eyes narrowed. “A bad influence.”

  “Did you ever meet this friend?”

  “Only once,” she said. “I flew out to California, maybe a month after Robbie went off to film school. I wanted to see how he was doing. When I showed up at his apartment, his friend was there.” She picked at a fingernail.

  “Was the friend a woman?”

  She shook her head.

  “What was he like?”

  “Do you believe in first impressions?”

  Brenna didn’t. As someone who remembered each and every first impression she’d ever had as an adult, she knew for a fact that they were meaningless.

  “I do,” said Morasco, which made Brenna remember her first impression of him: October 16, 1998. Brenna, calling him about the disappearance of a little girl, a girl so much younger than Clea had been, but still . . . Morasco a voice on the phone—all business . . .

  “This is Detective Morasco. What can I do for you?”

  “I . . . I heard something on the news about a blue car.”

  “Who is this?”

  “My name is Brenna Spector. I’m a former private investigator.”

  “Okay, well listen. That never should have been leaked to the press.”

  “No, I’m glad it was leaked because—”

  “It was a bad lead.”

  “A bad lead?”

  “It was false.”

  “So . . . you’re saying that she didn’t get into a blue car.”

  “We aren’t looking for a blue car. Thank you for calling.” Click.

  That was cold, Brenna thinks. What an asshole . . .

  Brenna heard Morasco saying her name, which roped her back into the room, to both of them looking at her. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t catch that?”

  “We were saying we both trusted you immediately,” Morasco said.

  Brenna smiled at him. Not immediately. Eleven years later. You just don’t remember. She looked at Hildy. “But I’m taking it, it wasn’t that way with Robbie’s friend.”

  She shook her head again. “I got this awful feeling from him. I wanted to grab Robbie and take him out of there and never let him talk to this boy, ever.”

  “This was before the arrest.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That happened two months later. I knew Robbie’s friend was to blame. I knew he’d put him up to it. Robbie broke into that house because he told him to do it. And then, when Robbie needed him, that . . . that boy acted as though he’d never even met my son. He told the professor that Robbie was lying about the dare, which broke his heart. Made him flunk out of school. When Robbie came home, he was . . . he was so . . . Oh, I wished he’d never laid eyes on that awful kid.”

  Brenna couldn’t look at Morasco, couldn’t let herself think about the many questions running through her mind—questions she dare not ask Hildy for fear of alienating this poor misguided woman and never getting the one answer she really needed. He had a friend. Robin Tannenbaum, photographed with no one save his mother and his dead father, alone in his own prom picture, communicating over the Internet with a shadow . . . Three years ago, he’d had a real, flesh-and-blood friend.

  “Hildy,” Brenna said. “What is Robbie’s friend’s name?”

  A look of disgust crept into Hildy’s big eyes. “Robbie doesn’t speak to him anymore,” she said. “Even if that boy tried to call—which he hasn’t—Robbie wouldn’t ever . . .”

  “All the same.”

  She looked up at Brenna, her jaw set, breathing as though to steel herself against the sound of the name. “Shane Smith,” she said.

  Outside the apartment, Brenna texted Trent Shane Smith’s name, plus the name of the film school Hildy said her son had attended for three months, three years ago—the School of the Moving Image in Los A
ngeles. Tannenbaum’s friend from film school, she typed. Find me anything you can about him/the 2 of them. The bright sun made Brenna’s bad eye sting. She slipped on her sunglasses as a text from Trent arrived: On it.

  If he had found anything of note on Tannenbaum’s computer, Trent would have texted, called, and e-mailed already, but Brenna asked him anyway.

  Just awesome porn. Trying to hack into his e-mail tho.

  Good. As she was slipping the cell phone back into her pocket, she felt herself falling back into yesterday afternoon, panic barreling through her as Trent spun the wheel and then the slow-motion roll of the car, coming to a stop, and the air bag socks her in the face. She’s still breathing. Brenna hears a moaning behind her, Bo or Diddley, she doesn’t know, care which, and then she thinks of Trent . . . Trent, oh God, Trent, I’ll kill them, I swear, if they hurt you. Kill them with my bare hands . . .

  A car whizzed by, yanking Brenna back into the present. She slipped her phone back out of her pocket, texted Trent again: Take care of yourself.

  He replied: That’s what the porn’s for.

  Brenna grimaced. “Way too much information,” she whispered.

  “How’s Trent doing?” said Morasco.

  “Back to his old self.”

  “A blessing and a curse.”

  “Exactly.”

  Morasco opened the door to his car. “I can look into that arrest report for you,” he said.

  “You think it’s still around?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I doubt Tannenbaum would get it expunged for the sake of his porn editing job.” He started up the car.

  Brenna got another text and glanced at her phone. Finally. “The auto shop.” She turned to Morasco. “You mind dropping me off there? My car’s all ready . . .” The look on his face made her lose the rest of the sentence—the same, pained, pitying look that had crossed his face so many times within the past few days, the Lula Belle look . . .

  She remembered in front of her computer screen two nights ago, watching Lula Belle say the same words Maya had said last night, and the words came out. Lula Belle’s words. Maya’s words. Brenna’s mother’s words. She couldn’t stop them. “She’s got a gift for destruction that runs through her veins.”

  Morasco closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again. “You know,” he said.

  “Maya told me last night.”

  “Maya has heard that?”

  “She told me that my mother says it all the time.”

  “Man.”

  “My mother said it to you, didn’t she? November 9.”

  “November . . .”

  “When we went to dinner at her house. Before . . .” She turned her gaze to the car window. “Before O’Donnell’s. The parking lot.”

  “Yes. She said it then.”

  Brenna took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Why didn’t you tell me, Nick? When you were first watching that download, why didn’t you . . .”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have the ability to block something out of your mind. If I tell you something, it’s going to stay there whether you want it or not. And your mother telling me that . . .” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t want you to have to keep it.”

  Morasco turned the ignition, pulled away from the curb. Brenna watched him for a while, the eyes targeting the windshield. The mouth, closed in such a way, it was as though he’d never said a word and never would say one again. Talk about evasive. “I’m not made of glass, you know,” she said finally.

  “Obviously.”

  “What I mean is, if you had told me my mother said that to you, I could have handled it.”

  Morasco kept his eyes on the road. “Your mom told me your dad was crazy.”

  Brenna rolled her eyes. “He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? To leave all of us?”

  “I don’t know that she meant it that way.”

  “She’s mad at him. She’s been mad at him for thirty-two years. Who knows how she means anything?”

  He exhaled, hard. “She said it to Maya, too. That’s . . . that’s awful.”

  Brenna shrugged. “Maya never knew my dad. Hell, I barely remember him.” An image passed through her mind—her father, crying against the steering wheel. A fragment of a dream. Or was it a memory?

  Morasco said, “I’m not talking about your dad.”

  “Maya never knew Clea, either,” Brenna said. “And believe me, when I was her age, I’d hear stuff in school about Clea that was way worse than her inheriting a ‘gift for destruction.’ ”

  Morasco looked at her. “Your mom said that to Maya about Clea.”

  “Yeah.” Brenna frowned. “Didn’t she say the same thing to you?”

  He turned back to the road.

  “Wasn’t that what you were trying to protect me from?” said Brenna, but as she said it, she understood—the facts unfolding with a deliberate speed, like stop-action photography of a blooming flower. The distance between them over the past few weeks, the sad way he’d look at her when he didn’t think she noticed . . .

  “My mother said that to you about me.”

  “Yes.”

  “She told you that I’m crazy, that I inherited it from my dad. She said that I’m the one with a gift for destruction. Not Clea.”

  “Yes.” His voice was barely a whisper.

  Brenna closed her eyes, and again it was November 9, the four beers swimming through her system and Morasco’s chest against the back of her coat as she leaned on him, finding O’Donnell’s parking lot. She could feel the cold night air on her face again and his lips against her temple again, the rush of her blood, and again she was talking about Maya, mutant shark girl, teething at age thirteen, her words slurring and bumping into each other. She could hear Nick’s laugh, and she could feel herself turning to look at him, could feel the heat his body emitted on that night, his scratchy sweater . . . And how she’d thought she had known exactly what was on his mind . . .

  She turns to look at his face and feels his fingertips on the back of her neck and around her waist and his lips . . . like that, yes, just like lips should be and she leans into him. It’s so easy, like melting . . .

  He kisses her, and his lips are so soft and she brings her hands up to his face and feels the bones beneath his warm skin, the stubble on his cheeks. Her body gives way and for one moment, she’s here . . . here and now, and it’s perfect . . . and then it was June 25, 1994, on the roof of her apartment building with the sun on her back and the taste of champagne on Jim’s lips and Jim kissing her, so deeply, she felt as though she was losing her breath and she could’ve died in his arms and that would’ve been fine . . .

  Brenna feels Jim pulling away, but it isn’t Jim, it’s Nick Morasco, and she’s in the parking lot of O’Donnell’s and it is November 9, 2009. Her stomach sinks. She tries, “What’s wrong?”

  An emotion pulls at his features—a sadness. An ache. “We’d better get you home,” he says.

  He knows I was remembering Jim, she thinks. He felt me go away . . .

  “You okay, Brenna?” Morasco said now, as she was seeing his face in November.

  She opened her eyes. Already they were on their way back into the city, the auto shop just a few minutes away. She didn’t want to say what was on her mind, but she needed to. “Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When we were in the parking lot of O’Donnell’s, and you pulled away from me . . . Did you do it because you were thinking about what my mother had said?”

  He stared at the window. “Yes.”

  She exhaled. “So funny. This whole time, I was blaming myself.”

  “Why would you blame yourself?”

  Brenna’s phone vibrated against her hip. She ignored it. Let the call go to voice mail. “No reason.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I shouldn’t have let it ruin the moment.”

  Brenna said, “Try and have a little sympathy for my mother. Poor th
ing’s the only sane person in her family.”

  He gave her a half smile.

  “Plus, her granddaughter’s still teething at thirteen.”

  “Huh? Teething?”

  She winced. “Nothing,” she said. “Just this crazy thing my Mom said during dinner that I was joking about that night . . . You were . . . uh . . . you were laughing . . .” For some reason, Brenna felt very lonely. She looked out the window. “You’re going to want to get off at the next exit. The auto place is on 125th and First.”

  He nodded, and for a while both of them said nothing. Nick got off the FDR and headed up on 125th, and sure enough there was the auto shop, up ahead and on the right side of the street. He pulled up to it and parked the car. “I’ll make sure and get you Tannenbaum’s arrest record,” he said. “And I’ll check the blotter for October 6—see if there were any incidents involving some John Doe with a pricey camera.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey,” Morasco said. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She got out of the car and turned to him, watching her so closely through the opened window. “I’ll see you.”

  He swallowed. His throat moved with it. “Take care of yourself.”

  She watched him drive away, watched the car disappear around the corner before she remembered her vibrating phone and yanked it out of her pocket. One voice mail message, from a number she’d never seen. Brenna was about to check it when another call came in—from the same number. “Yes?”

  A male voice: young, all-business. “Miss Spector?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Detective Tim Waxman from the Twenty-fifth Precinct. I’m wondering if I could speak to you in person.”

  “Concerning . . .”

  “An acquaintance of yours.”

  One of the mechanics was approaching, but she held up a hand. “An acquaintance?”

  “He made a phone call to your house last night at around 5 P.M. from his cell phone.” Brenna felt herself in her apartment, the phone pressed to her ear, her ex-husband’s gaze on her back . . .

  “Ludlow.” She sighed into the phone. “What the hell has he done now?”

  The detective didn’t speak right away, and Brenna became aware of background noise—the hum of voices, a crackling police radio, a siren, wailing in the distance . . .