“We didn’t know much about him,” Sal said with a shrug. He looked over at Linda for confirmation.
“No, not much,” she said. “Halle talked to me about Joe but not about his family. Really what she told me was that he didn’t have a family. He had an uncle he was close to, but he died a long time ago.”
“That’s our understanding also,” Mimi said. “He has a brother, a few years older. We’re talking to him too. Again, we don’t know if the cases are connected, but we’ll do everything we can to find out,”
“Thank you,” Linda said. Her brow knitted, like something had just occurred to her. “There was a message left, right? Something written on the wall above her bed?”
“There was,” Zochi said. Another thing clear to her was that Linda, not Sal, led this couple in everything they did. “There was her name and then some letters. The spelling of the name, though—”
“You mean ‘Holly,’” Linda said. “Like the Christmas plant.”
“Yes. H-O-L-L-Y. I’ve been referring to her that way.”
“Everyone called her Holly,” Linda said. “She didn’t like her real name. People had trouble spelling it, even saying it, sometimes. Hallelujah.”
“I know that feeling,” Zochi said.
“Well, we shortened it to Halle, like H-A-L-L-Y, but she goes by Holly. Her friends call her that. Well . . . called.” She swallowed audibly and stared as if into the barrel of a gun.
“Do you know if Joe called her Holly?” Zochi asked. Her detective haunches were up. She didn’t want to seem like she was interrogating Linda, but this seemed important.
Linda seemed to mull it over. “You know, he didn’t. He liked calling her by her real name. I remember Halle telling me once, he thought it was special. Hallelujah. We thought so too.”
“It’s a lovely name,” Mimi said. “Different.”
“It was in my family,” Sal said. “She had a hard time with it, I guess.”
“For almost everyone, it was Holly,” Linda said, as if to close off any reminiscing or discussion about the naming of Hallelujah or what it could possibly mean now. “For Joe, though, it was Halle. There was a difference in how he pronounced it.”
Zochi was about to speak but then clamped down on it. She had some thinking to do about the name thing. Better, for now, to just think.
CHAPTER 32
Bay Thirty-Fourth Street
Bath Beach, Brooklyn
10:50 p.m.
Joe had worked with a couple of people who had kicked heroin over the years. One was a witness in a gang case, the most high-profile one Joe had handled in the Bronx DA’s office. It was a murder-for-hire prosecution, and the nineteen-year-old eyewitness—Hector—had been the bagman between the gang leader and the hitman. Hector was willing to testify, but he had to “kick” first, and Hector was intent on “kicking” in his own way. It was the old-school, neighborhood way.
That process, Joe learned, was a horror in and of itself, and he hadn’t been certain Hector would survive it. Rather than something hospital based and methadone driven, it happened in an abandoned apartment building in the Four-Two Precinct with the doors and windows boarded up. The attending “medical” person was an old woman who sat outside and heard the screams and the curses, and came in to clean up puke and shit and maybe dab a forehead with a wet towel. The old woman was a legend in the South Bronx neighborhood but had no friends. She looked and spoke like a witch, and people stayed away from her. But when it came to kicking, if a person was serious, that person went to her.
Joe’s issue was alcohol, but still he wished he had that woman by his side. He had emptied or broken every liquor, wine, and beer bottle in the house, down to a couple of forgotten bottles of bitters. He had gone down to the boat and done the same thing, pouring anything that was left over the side and into the bay. Some of it, the breaking of whiskey and wine bottles that were collectible, expensive, and—in some cases—of real sentimental value, felt like self-injury. He felt a bad tingling in his hands at times as he poured out the contents and smashed the bottles, sweeping up the glass. His stomach clenched at the thought of it, but now there was nothing to drink in his immediate reach.
The really scary thing was not knowing what came next, after three or four days. He knew you weren’t supposed to think about it that way. One day at a time. It was nearly impossible, though, not to play out a string of them in search of the other side of this, whatever it would be.