CHAPTER 7
Friday, July 14, 2017
Greeley’s Bar & Grill
Gravesend, Brooklyn
11:30 p.m.
“Joey D!” the bartender called out, using a nickname she had pinned on Joe DeSantos a couple of years before. “Wake up, babe.” He was at the end of the bar, and she was behind it but on the side closer to the door. Joe had been there most of the day, at a few different spots in the bar, and was now planted on one stool, where he had been since maybe nine, nodding off since eleven.
“Goin’，” Joe said, slurred so it was just one syllable. His head slumped forward so that he was staring straight down into his glass. “I know it’s late. I’ll go.”
“It’s not late,” she said, walking over to him. Her name was Doris. Joe loved that a thirty-year-old bartender somehow still had a name like Doris. “Joe, there are cops here to see you.”
“Cops?” He lifted his head and cleared his throat. “What cops?”
“Those two,” Doris said. He saw her gesture toward a short woman and a tall man. There were two other drinkers at the bar, but both were watching highlights from an earlier basketball playoff game, and neither seemed to be paying attention.
“Detectives, good evening,” he said as they approached. He smiled at Doris and opened his eyes wide, signaling that he was back to lucidity.
“Mr. DeSantos,” the woman began, “I’m Detective Hernandez, and this is Detective Dougherty. Can we speak with you?” Her eyes narrowed on him.
Her male partner, Joe could see, was a big, kind of bland-looking guy with a wide face and suspicious eyes. Both, he figured, were gauging how bombed he was.
“Sure,” he said, hoping he wasn’t still slurring. The word sounded smooth enough exiting his mouth, but you couldn’t always tell. “What can I help you with?”
“Mr. DeSantos, we’re here because the body of a woman was found on the beach near Coney Island. I’m sorry to tell you this, but we have reason to believe she may have been related to you.”
“Related to me?” He immediately pictured his ex-wife, but as far as he knew, she was in Florida with her new husband. “Related to me how?”
“We’re not certain, but we believe she may have been your mother.”
“My mother,” he said in puzzled acknowledgment, as if the person they were talking about had never really existed. For Joe, that was mostly true.
“Her name was Lois,” the woman, Detective Hernandez, said. Now an image swam up from the depth of his memory. He had a fleeting thought that what he was picturing most likely didn’t match the person they had found.
“My mother’s name was Lois,” he heard himself saying. But it was like he was watching himself. He saw the reaction from the two cops and drew back into his head. A fog of alcohol still weighed down his thoughts, but it was receding.
“Do you know if she also used the last name DeSantos?” the male detective, Dougherty, asked.
Joe felt his heart start to pound. He shook his head. His eyes went from the woman to the man.
“Mr. DeSantos, do you recall the last time you saw your mother?” Hernandez asked.
Joe opened his mouth to answer, then shut it again. The truth—that of course he knew exactly when he had seen her last, the exact date and approximate time even—sounded too ludicrous to just spit out.
“She abandoned my brother and me as children,” he said instead, although now the image of her in his mind, the last one he had formed from the back seat of their station wagon, was so clear that he could have described the shirt she was wearing. “I haven’t seen her in forty years.” Jesus, almost exactly forty years, he thought. To the day almost. What’s today? The fourteenth, fifteenth?
“You’ve had no contact with her at all?” Hernandez asked.
“Absolutely none,” Joe said, aware that he probably looked a little spaced out. He tried to push it back down, that last image, Lois surrounded by darkness in the hot, fetid air and looking at him with some weird mix of dread and sympathy. If she was dead, there was nothing he could do about it, except maybe try to avoid responsibility for the burial. But that didn’t seem likely. “I don’t know what to tell you, but I haven’t seen her since I was ten years old.”
“I’m sorry,” Hernandez said after a moment. Joe looked closely at her. She seemed to accept this. Anyway, he could verify it.
“Do you know . . . what happened to her?” he asked.