“Charles?”
“Yes. Charles is the person Mike’s life revolved around, before Joe and Robbie. I knew about Charles before I knew either of them.”
“But . . .” Zochi paused and squinted. “I don’t know anything about a third brother. I haven’t met Robbie, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time with Joe. I asked all kinds of questions about his family, and he’s never once mentioned a Charles.” At this, Nate’s face seemed to bloom with something between shock and embarrassment.
“Wha . . . you mean?”
“What?”
“You mean Joe doesn’t know who Charles is? Still?” The word “still” seemed to ring out like a bell.
“I can’t be sure what Joe knows,” Zochi said, quieter. She clicked her pen and readied the notepad.
“He didn’t know in 1977 when he came to live with Mike. Neither of the boys knew; I’m sure of it. I assumed, though, at some point that . . .”
“That what?”
“That Mike told Joe he had a twin brother!”
“A twin brother,” Zochi said, as if the fact was weighing down her tongue. “Identical or fraternal?”
“Identical,” Nate said, again as if it was obvious. “Wait, I mean . . . no one knows about this?”
“Well, I don’t,” she said, a frustrated tone creeping into her voice. She checked it. She was tired. They were both tired.
“Okay,” Nate said, as if it could all be rationally dealt with—this chasm of a knowledge gap between the distant past and now. “So maybe Mike didn’t tell him? Did he not get to tell him?”
“I don’t know,” she said, genuinely bewildered. “You mentioned the AIDS thing earlier. I know Mike died of that, and—” She held up a finger as if to ask him to wait, then fished for another notepad in her bag. Her heartbeat quickened as she thumbed through it. She had experienced maybe two or three moments like this in more than twenty years on the job. It was different and more powerful than that golden “gotcha” instant when a perp gave himself away with something dropped from his mouth like windfall fruit. It was better than the eminently satisfying moment in a good, fair interrogation when the poor bastard just broke down, sobbing, and admitted to what he’d done—diddling his niece or offing his boss. Nate was not a guilty party. Still, Zochi was feeling that same electrifying, game-changing sensation.
“Joe told me his uncle died before they could speak,” she said, scanning the older notes. “He was away on a trip and was called back. His uncle was in a coma and died a day later.”
“Oh, dear God.”
“Let’s go back a bit,” she said, switching notepads again, “because I need to hear as much of this as possible. Charles is an identical twin to Joe?”
“Yes. Joe and Charles were born at the old Staten Island Hospital, on Castleton Avenue. The boys’ mother was Mike’s sister, Lois. What Mike told me was that there was some terrible in utero thing that happened. Charles, in the womb, was struggling somehow, and Joe kept growing. The doctors didn’t know. But at the moment of birth, it was obvious. Joe came out first and looked like a healthy baby. Charles came out next and was underweight. Sick. Cyanotic, I think, like they had to revive him? I don’t know every detail. From what Mike told me, they had to do all kinds of tests. The child made it out of intensive care but never out of institutional care.”
“Do you know where he was institutionalized?”
“Eventually? Willowbrook,” he said. She raised her eyebrows, and he said, “Yes, that Willowbrook. The state school. It wasn’t far from the hospital.”
“The one they shut down,” she said. “The one that . . . whatshisname did a big story on.”
“Geraldo Rivera, in the early ’70s. The Staten Island Advance covered it earlier than that. It was known that conditions were bad there, but not everyone knew how bad. Mike Carroll was one of them.”
“Then why would the parents put him there?”
“From what Mike told me, Lois’s husband made that decision. Lois fought it, but there wasn’t much use in fighting that guy, or so I heard. He more or less abandoned the kid to Willowbrook, then moved the family out of Staten Island. Charles was about three. He would have been left at Willowbrook, but . . . Mike took action.”
“Action? What action?”
“He got Charles out of Willowbrook under an assumed name,” Nate said. He shrugged, as if this sounded so crazy it needed that kind of gesture to follow it up.