“It wouldn’t be five grand,” she said. “I looked it up. You could have her cremated for less than two thousand.” He was aware again of how devoted she had been to him, some pickled suit with a crumbling law practice. He burned anew with guilt.
“She doesn’t deserve my involvement,” Joe said. “And she certainly doesn’t deserve yours. Thank you for looking into that, Halle. I mean it. But she doesn’t.”
“It just seems wrong. It’s not my business, I know.”
“I made it your business, so it is.”
“She’s your family!”
“She was once. She destroyed what was left of my family.”
“She paid for that,” Halle said. Her eyes were pleading, and he wasn’t sure where this desperation was coming from. “Look at how she was found, out there like a stray dog. Whatever she did to you, she was punished for it. Life did that to her. She shouldn’t have to pay again now.”
Joe stared back for a long moment, then sighed. “I’ll go.”
“Good. I’ll take you. I drove here. We can stop at my place, and I’ll get changed. You might need to sober up anyway.”
Halle’s apartment in Sheepshead Bay was close to where she had grown up, a couple of miles east. While she waited in the kitchen, Joe found the remainder of an outfit. He was looking for his loafers, the ones he hadn’t worn since Thursday. Normally he would wear boat shoes, but they were getting smelly. The damn loafers were nowhere to be found, though, so it was back to the boat shoes. He gave them a spray of Lysol.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said when he’d returned. “I’m grateful, but you really don’t.”
“What else am I doing today? We’re still friends, right? Get cleaned up. You know this is the right thing to do.”
It’s also the smart thing, he thought. He couldn’t express it to Halle, but the truth was, it would look odd if word got out in his professional circles—and it would—that his mother had been found murdered and Joe wasn’t stepping up to claim her body. The circumstances really didn’t matter. Going through the motions and making the arrangements were what a person did, at least when that person was a responsible adult and an assistant attorney general.
A responsible adult. That’s a laugh. You have basically no reliable memory from around seven o’clock on Thursday until twenty minutes ago.
CHAPTER 10
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
Jamaica Hills, Queens
2:15 p.m.
The identification process at the medical examiner’s office had gone to video a few years back. There were still cases where the dead were viewed from behind glass—the gut-wrenching stuff of movies and television. Now, though, the identifying person was escorted to a small waiting room just off the main reception area of the office. A large monitor sat on a desk, and the face of the deceased was displayed via closed-circuit television.
Halle was in the reception area while Joe waited to view the dead woman. He had explained to a staff attendant that there was virtually no hope he’d be able to provide a positive identification. The staffer, a tired-looking older Black man with sad eyes, had simply shrugged. Joe didn’t have to view her if he thought it was futile.
He wanted to, though. He was an attorney and had been in law enforcement for years. He had seen bodies in morgues and other places. It would not shock him. He also suspected that there might be a bit of closure in it. Even if he couldn’t match the face that he was about to see with the last one in his mind, maybe this face would provide some final ending to a terrible, drawn-out story. He would rather have a last image of his mother to replace the ghost that still walked in his head. Maybe seeing what she had become would shut a door once and for all.
He settled in the chair before the monitor. The staffer asked him if he was ready. A second later the monitor lit up. The view was of a woman’s head against a stainless-steel table. He took in the face, sunken and dreadfully pale. He blinked and wiped his eyes, then looked again.
Hollow cheeks. Long, thin nose, a little bent.
He was glad that Halle was not in the room as he stiffened in the chair. Joe DeSantos had no idea who the woman on the table was, but he was certain that he had seen her within the last two weeks.
CHAPTER 11
Bay Thirty-Fourth Street
Bath Beach, Brooklyn
3:10 p.m.
“Oh shit,” Joe said as Halle’s car pulled up to his house. Their time at the medical examiner’s office had been brief, but traffic was terrible both ways. “Not him.”