Read Online Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner - Free Book Online

him the illusion of charm at corporate cocktail parties. On the bench, he’d be free to glower and grow cantankerous without contradiction, indulging his vengeful streak well into his sunset years.
     
“So where do we go from here?”
     
“Officially no decision’s been made,” Paul poured hot water into his teacup. “We have the option of proceeding with the indictment as if it’s still 1983 or letting the whole thing drop. But there’s another wrinkle I need to talk to you about.”
     
“What’s that?”
     
“Hoolian has Debbie Aaron representing him.”
     
“Are you shitting me?”
     
“I wish. Hoolian must have gone through half the lawyers in the New York bar before he got to her.”
     
“Fuckin’ Debbie A.”
     
He pushed his suddenly foul-smelling eggs away, contemplating the ring the plate left on the table.
     
“You knew her when she was doing drug cases at our office, didn’t you?” Paul fished the teabag out of his cup with a spoon.
     
“Yeah, we called her ‘Fuckin’ A’ because she was always trying to punch holes in our testimony before she put us on the stand.”
     
How’d you know he was carrying a gun, Detective? Did you actually see the money change hands? Why didn’t you recover more of the drugs in the apartment? For about three seconds, he’d thought of having a thing with her. He liked a woman who could give as good as she got. But then he realized she would wear him out with her ferocious demands for honesty and contempt for compromise—they would have been like two buzz saws going toward each other.
     
“We gotta tread carefully here.” Paul wrapped the string around his teabag. “I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but Debbie’s already suing the police department for malicious prosecution in a civil suit.”
     
“That fuckup with Marty Delblanco in the two-eight?”
     
Francis had caught bits and pieces of the departmental gossip at various rackets. A junkie who got locked up in Harlem for raping and murdering an eighty-year-old grandmother recently freed after fifteen years on DNA evidence and recanted witness testimony. And now Debbie A. was suing on his behalf, saying the detective who’d questioned the skell had beaten him into giving a full confession. What stunned everyone was not just that the department and the city were named in the $3.2 million suit but that the detective was being held personally liable to the tune of $750,000.
     
“They say Deb’s got a hard-on for suing cops because she was married to that detective in the nine-oh who used to knock her around some,” Paul explained. “They’re divorced now. She had him locked up for domestic abuse.”
     
“But no one’s talking about making Marty pay, are they?”
     
“Indemnification’s an open question. He’s supposed to have given that kid a pretty good tune-up to get the statement. It’s not clear that anybody else should be responsible for that.”
     
Francis touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “Motherfucker, you’re not worried about that in this case, are you?”
     
Paul squeezed the remains of his tea bag into his cup. “We gotta stick together here, Francis.”
     
“What’re you talking about? I never laid a hand on Hoolian. He put himself on the scene.”
     
Paul lowered his voice. “Come on, Francis. We all know this was never the perfect investigation.”
     
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
     
Paul rested the spoon with the crushed bag on the side of the saucer, letting the silence speak for itself.
     
Francis noticed the way everything on the table seemed to get very large and then very small.
     
“You know you weren’t so fucking perfect yourself, Your Honor. I didn’t hear about the American Bar Association giving you any citation for the way you handled some of those early interviews.”
     
Paul cupped the back of his head self-consciously. “Well, can we just say there were certain things that both of us might’ve done differently?”
     
Francis threw his napkin down. “Sure, why