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

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His lawyer’s office was above a Kinko’s on Astor Place in Manhattan. Traffic raced around a sculpture of a giant black cube that seemed to balance itself precariously on a corner. Where the hell is everyone rushing to? His metabolism was still on prison time: wary, contained, hair-trigger sensitive to change.
     
In the waiting room, there was a confused-looking man in a lady’s white rubber bathing cap. He nodded knowingly, as if he were an old friend of Hoolian’s. Beside him, a bony little Asian lady was trying to corral three wayward kids waddling across the brown carpet, and a brother with legs the size of tackling dummies was talking to himself about burning mix CDs for a party. It took Hoolian a second to realize he actually had a telephone headset inside his baseball cap.
     
The secretary studiously ignored them all, a lush chubby white girl with blue nail polish and Rastafarian hair, putting caller after caller on hold, a half-done New York Times’ crossword puzzle resting next to her computer keyboard.
     
Hoolian stood before her, trying to get her attention and then realized he was staring too long again—just as he had with the Barbed-Wire Girl last night. How long are you allowed to look anyway? There was probably a rule. He held her gaze for two Mississippis and then started to turn.
     
“Yes?” She looked up.
     
“Julian Vega to see Ms. Aaron.”
     
“Oh, Julian, come on in.” Deborah Aaron peered out from behind a chipped wooden door. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
     
He glanced back at the other people who’d been waiting longer, half thinking he should apologize for cutting ahead and then thought, Fuckit. They’d do the same to him in a heartbeat.
     
He stepped into the office, closing the door after him as Ms. A. gave him her hand. “Congratulations.” A slight tug from her wrist brought him up onto the balls of his feet. She offered her cheek for a kiss, but he turned the wrong way and brushed her lips instead.
     
“Uh, thank you.” He caught the scent of lilac on her skin.
     
“Have a seat.”
     
Did a kiss necessarily mean a woman liked you or was she just being polite? He carefully lowered himself into a chair before her desk, carefully balancing his duffel bag on his lap. Other inmates had given him shit when she’d come to see him in prison, this tough New York lady with the china-doll face who talked too fast and always sounded like she was trying to catch her breath. They’d told him stories about other cons doing the nasty with the women representing them in the visiting room while the guards looked the other way and children pumped quarter after quarter into the vending machines.
     
But he wouldn’t have risked anything like that while he was locked up. The woman had driven 150 miles upstate in slashing rainstorms to see him, taking his case pro bono after he’d been turned down or run the course with a half-dozen other lawyers over the years. She’d read the correspondence he’d labored over—sometimes four or five letters a day—raising both arcane Fourth Amendment issues and glaring omissions in the court record. She took it seriously when he said he’d been framed and insisted that he’d written to Mr. Raedo at the DA’s office over and over asking to have his DNA tested without ever receiving a reply. Naturally, he’d fallen in love with her a little—hardly sleeping nights before her scheduled visits, looking up obscure citations and rules of evidence to impress her in the law library, his heart lifting as he heard the efficient click of her heels on the cold stone floor.
     
Now it was different, though. There was no correction officer watching them through a little screen window in the door. He felt a tinge of her moisture lingering on the corner of his mouth. In the clearer light of this office—a little smaller and more book-choked than he’d expected—he could see she was just holding on to a kind of careworn attractiveness. There were a few white strands in her