Free Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner Page A

dense.
     
“Tell me about it. I served damn near twenty years for something they framed me for. . . .”
     
“Julian, I’m on your side.” She put her hands up. “Okay? I’m just trying to tell you what the facts are. The reality is, this is a high-profile case. I remember it from my third year at the DA’s office. It was all any of the women there ever talked about, because we were all the same age as the victim. And, unfortunately, people haven’t forgotten. So now Paul Raedo is up for a judgeship. He can’t afford to look like he’s backpedaling.”
     
“Fahhkk.” The air went out of him. “So I could wind up going back upstate? Is that what you’re telling me?”
     
“Listen, you’ve been through a lot and I can see how upset you’re getting, so here’s what I’m proposing we do.” She rubbed her pearls one by one with a kind of half-conscious tenderness. “I’ll call Paul back and see if we can work out a deal for the calendar call next week. You plead guilty and Judge Bronstein would give you time served and that would be that. . . .”
     
“ No. ”
     
Ms. Aaron let go of her pearls and looked at the door nervously. She probably thought she was being so sane and reasonable. But she hadn’t been at his cousin’s this morning. She hadn’t heard his last surviving kin declare, I don’t even fucking know you . She hadn’t seen the way that little girl looked at him from behind the refrigerator. That look was going to stay with him like a knife in the back.
     
“I ain’t pleading to shit,” he started, then stopped himself, hearing how two decades of prison life had eroded the benefits of a good education. “ Excuse me. I am not pleading to shit. I want my name back.”
     
She put her head down. “Julian, let’s be honest with each other,” she said. “You’ve spent more than half your life in prison already. Don’t you want this to be over?”
     
“Hell, yeah.”
     
“Then why wouldn’t you just want to cut your losses? I know how vindictive Paul Raedo and Francis Loughlin can be.”
     
“And if I plead guilty to what they set me up for, how am I going to hold my head up? Huh? Could I get to be a lawyer like you with a felony conviction? Would I be able to get a mortgage and buy myself a decent place to live?”
     
Her expression had changed while he was talking. There was a pair of scissors opening behind her eyes now.
     
“Julian, it’s time to get practical,” she said. “I know how hard you’ve worked to keep this case alive. But there is a limit to how far wishful thinking will take you.”
     
“What do you mean?”
     
“I mean, over the years, you can convince yourself that you’re innocent and you’ve been screwed by the system. But if we keep going in this direction, we’re going to end up back in court and the facts are going to come out. And they don’t always turn out to be what you want them to be.”
     
Fury made his mind go white. “You calling me a liar?”
     
“I’m saying I don’t want to see you get hurt any more than you already have been.” She patted her chest for emphasis. “And, frankly, I can’t afford to invest any more resources into a civil suit that isn’t going anywhere.” She came around and sat on a corner of the desk. “Wrongful imprisonment is a notoriously hard case to prove. You’re going to have to show that the police and prosecutors deliberately ignored or corrupted evidence that could have exonerated you.”
     
He fell silent for a few seconds, the weight of the duffel bag pressed into his lap. All the things he’d collected and saved while he was away. The dull-bristled toothbrush he needed to replace; soup cans he’d bought at the commissary and couldn’t bear to throw out; the little alarm clock he’d fixed up in small-engine repair; the tube socks he’d worn doubled up when he was up to his ankles in snow in the prison yards up by the Canadian border, trying to watch fucking farm reports on the outdoor TV; the copy of Childhood’s End he’d had in his Jansport bag that day