Into the Dark (16 page)

“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.”

A
s 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.

O
utside 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 Angeles.
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?”