It was surrounded by a check-cashing place, a hairdresser, a corner bodega, and two burned-out buildings. A man selling roasted chestnuts and what looked like unpeeled ears of corn had set up shop in the middle of the block. Another man who looked suspiciously like a drug dealer was checking his beeper and talking into a fancy-looking cellular phone in front of the building.
I asked the car to wait for me. The driver didn’t seem very happy with the idea, but he had the kind of job where you couldn’t exactly say no.
“I may have to circle,” he said.
I didn’t answer him — I was staring at the building and wondering if I could make it through the door. There were three men loitering in the entranceway, and none of the three looked like anyone you’d ask for directions. They looked like three-fifths of a police lineup, men you don’t put your hand out to unless it contains your wallet.
And I was carrying more than my wallet today; I was carrying my wallet plus one hundred thousand dollars.
As soon as I eased myself out of the car, I heard the click of the door locks. You're on your own, they said. And I was; and on 121st Street between First and Second Avenues, I was pretty much the center of attention, too. I imagined that Lincoln Town Cars made very few stops here, as did well-dressed white men carrying expensive leather briefcases. The chestnut seller, the drug dealer, the three men guarding the entranceway of building number 435, all were looking at me like a hostile audience demanding something entertaining.
I didn’t know whether to run up the steps like a man in a hurry or walk up the steps like a man on a stroll, and I ended up somewhere in between — a man who’s not quite sure where he’s going but is still anxious to get there. When I reached the landing where the cracked asphalt was liberally scribbled with chalk and spray paint (“Sandi es mi Mami; Toni y Mali . . .”), I ended up acknowledging the three doormen the way most New Yorkers acknowledge anyone: I didn’t. I kept my eyes averted — on the doorstep, an island of worn tire tread separating brown cement from curled yellow linoleum.
“Hey . . .”
One of the men had said something to me. I was hoping the man had been addressing one of his friends, but I was pretty sure he’d been talking to me. A man wearing oversize yellow basketball sneakers and dress pants — all that I could actually see of him, since I had my eyes trained down by my feet.
I looked up into a middle-aged Spanish face that might have been okay behind the counter at McDonald’s, but not in the middle of Spanish Harlem with one hundred thousand dollars sitting in my briefcase. Besides, the face looked upset with me, as if I’d just complained about the Happy Meal having no French fries in it, and where exactly was the pickle on my burger?
I kept moving, continued to make like a halfback in the opposing secondary as I kept those legs pumping. Just about through the door, too — since the door was permanently half-ajar and offered no resistance.
“Whereyou going?”
The same man as before, speaking in heavily accented English, with the emphasis on you, the intonation important here, since I might’ve thought the man was being helpful otherwise: Tell me where you’re going and maybe I can help direct you there . No — the man was questioning my very validity for being there.
“Vasquez,” I said. The first thing that entered my head, besides Help . If you gave a name, it sounded aboveboard. Maybe they knew that name, and maybe they wouldn’t want to fuck with it. And maybe even if they didn’t know that name — Vasquez, who’s that? — they’d still be leery of poaching in someone else’s territory. A man alone was fair game, but when he wasn’t alone, who knew?
Anyway, it worked.
I kept walking through the doorway, and they didn’t stop me. There was no elevator, of course; I took the steps two at a time. Lucinda was waiting for me — He’s going to hurt me, Charles. Maybe the end was waiting for me, too.
The stairway smelled of bodily fluids: piss and semen and blood. I slipped on a banana peel that turned out to be a used condom and nearly fell down the stairs. I could hear ghostly laughter coming from somewhere I couldn’t see, the kind of laughter that might be funny or might not be. It was impossible to tell.
When I knocked on the door, Vasquez opened it. I got one word out before I was dragged in and slammed up against the wall. He slapped me across the face. I tasted blood. I dropped the briefcase onto the floor and tried to cover up. He slapped me again. And again. I said, “Stop it — I have it, there. . . there.” He kept slapping me, open-handed wallops that sneaked in between my upraised arms.
And then, suddenly, he stopped.
He dropped his arm, uncurled his fist, took a deep breath and then another. He shook his head; he exhaled. And when he finally spoke, he sounded almost normal. As if he’d just needed to vent his anger a little bit before coming back to himself.
“Shit,” he said, as if he were saying glad that’s over with. “Shit.” Then:
“You got the money?”
I was breathing too fast, like an asthmatic searching for air. My face stung where Vasquez had slapped it. But I managed to point to the floor. To the briefcase. The apartment had at least two rooms, I thought — I could hear someone from the room next door. A soft sniffling.
“Where is she?” I said, but my lip was swollen and I sounded like someone else.
Vasquez ignored me. He was opening the briefcase and turning it upside down, watching as stacks of hundred-dollar bills slithered across the floor.
“Good boy,” Vasquez said, the way you might to a dog.
I could hear her clearly now from the next room. The apartment — what I could see of it — had almost no furniture. The walls were streaked with dirt and scarred with cigarette burns. They were painted the color of yolk.
I said: “I want to see her.”
“Go ahead,” Vasquez said.
I walked through the half-open door, which led to the rest of the apartment. The room was dark, the window shades pulled down. Still, I could make out a chair against the back wall. I could see who was sitting on that chair.
“Are you okay?” I said.
She didn’t answer me.
She was sitting very still, I thought. Like a child on a church pew who’s been told repeatedly to be quiet. She didn’t look hurt, but she was sitting there dressed only in a slip.
Why was she in a slip?
I could hear Vasquez counting the money from the next room: “Sixty-six thousand one hundred, sixty-six thousand two hundred . . .”
“I gave him the money,” I said.
But maybe not soon enough. I’d said, Sorry, I don’t have it — and Winston had ended up dead and Lucinda had ended up here in her underwear. I wanted her to move, to answer me, to stop sniffling — to understand that no matter what had happened to her, no matter how many times I’d failed her, the end was within sight. I wanted her to walk across the finish line with me and not look back.
But she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t responding.
And I thought: I have to do something now . I’d taken Anna’s money, I’d gotten Winston killed, I’d let Lucinda be snatched off the street. I’d done this all to keep a secret, and even if Lucinda was one of the people who’d wanted me to keep it, I had to do something.
Vasquez walked into the room and said: “It’s all here.”
I was going to get out of here, and I was going to go to the police. It had gone too far. It was the right thing to do. Only, even as I told myself in no uncertain terms what was necessary here, even as I steeled myself for what would be an unpleasant—okay, even horrible—duty, I could hear that other Charles beginning to whisper into my ear. The one who was telling me how close we were. The one who was saying that what’s past is past, and now I was this close to getting out of it.
“Okay, Charles,” Vasquez said. “You did good. See you. . . .”
He was either waiting for me to leave or was about to leave himself.
“I’m taking her with me,” I said.
“Sure. You
think I want the bitch?”
Lucinda still hadn’t said anything. Not one word.
“Maybe you better stay home from now on, Charles. Back in Long Island .” He had my briefcase in his hand. “Do me a favor, don’t try some crazy shit like before — you ain’t gonna find me anyway, see? I’m . . . relocating.”
And he left.
I stood there listening to his footfalls growing softer down the stairs, softer and softer till they disappeared completely.
I’m . . . relocating.
For some reason, I believed him, but maybe only because I wanted to. Or maybe because even Vasquez knew you could bleed someone only so much before the body was declared officially dead.
“I thought he was going to kill me this time,” Lucinda whispered slowly. She was staring at a point somewhere over my head. Even in the darkness I could see she was trembling. There was blood on the inside of her thigh. “He held the gun to my head and he told me to say my prayers and he pulled the trigger. Then he turned me over.”
“I’m taking you to a hospital, Lucinda, and then I’m going to the police.”
Lucinda said: “Get out of here, Charles.”
“He can’t get away with it. He can’t do this to you. It’s gone too far. Do you understand me?”
“Get out of here, Charles.”
“Please, Lucinda . . . we’re going to report this, and — ”
“Get out!" This time she screamed it.
So I did. Iran . Down the stairs, out the front door, back into the waiting car, feeling all the while one distinct, overpowering, and guilty little emotion.
Overwhelming relief.
TWENTY-EIGHT
For two weeks or so, I believed.
Believed that possibly the worst was over. That, okay, I’d been tested, tested severely — a modern-day Job, even — but that it was entirely possible things were going to work out in the end.
Yes, it was hard to look Anna in the face these days, very hard. Knowing that the money I’d painstakingly accumulated for her was, for all intents and purposes, gone. That my carefully constructed bulwark against her insidious and encroaching enemy was virtually depleted.
It was hard, too, looking at Deanna—who trusted me, maybe the very last thing in life she did trust — knowing what I’d done with that trust.
Hardest of all, of course, was thinking about the people I couldn’t look at. Lucinda, for instance—whom I’d failed not once, but twice. And Winston. Whom I’d failed right into the grave. Their pictures clamored for my attention, like needy children demanding to be seen. Look at me . . . look. I tried not to, I tried tucking Winston away in places where I couldn’t find him. But I always did. When I picked up an ordinary piece of office mail, or read an article about the winter baseball meetings — he’d say hello. I’d see him lying there the way I’d left him. I’d close my eyes, but the pictures wouldn’t go away. Like the flash of a camera that remains seared on your eyelids.
Still, I was hopeful.
Hoping for two things, really. That Vasquez had actually meant what he said, that he realized the well was good and dry now and he wouldn’t be coming back. That he had relocated.
And I was hoping that I could rebuild Anna’s Fund. That through diligent and constant cheating, through the auspices of the T&D Music House, I could build it back to where it was before. That I could do this before I might actually need it. Before anyone noticed it, either.
For two weeks, then, this is what I clung to.
Then there was a man waiting for me in reception. That’s what Darlene said.
“What man?” I asked her.
“He’s a detective,” Darlene said.
I thought of Dick Tracy. At first I did — remembering the Sunday comics I used to press into Play-Doh, then stretch into funhouse mirror versions of their former selves.
“A detective?” I repeated.
“Yeah.”
“Tell him I’m not here,” I said.
Darlene asked me if I was sure.
“Yes, Darlene. I’m sure.” Letting just a touch of annoyance into my voice — because annoyance covered up what I was actually feeling, which was, okay, fear.
“Fine.”
And the detective left. After which Darlene informed me that it was a police detective who’d been waiting for me.
The next day he was back.
This time he was sitting there in full view as I exited the elevator. I wasn’t actually aware he was the police detective until he got up and introduced himself as such.
“Mr. Schine?” he said.
And I immediately noticed that if he was a rep, he was devoid of reels, and if he was someone seeking employment, he was minus a portfolio.
“I’m Detective Palumbo,” he said, just like in the movies and TV. That New York accent, the kind that always seems somehow phony in the darkness of a movie theater.
Purpetration . . . dufendunt . . . awficcer.
That’s how Detective Palumbo sounded — only no matinee looks here. A genuine double chin and a stomach that never met the Ab Roller +. Of course, he carried a real badge.
“Yes?” I said. A dutiful citizen just trying to be helpful to an officer of the law.
“Could I have a word with you?”
Of course. No problem. Anything I can do, Officer.
We walked past Darlene, who gave me a look that seemed somewhat reproachful. I asked you if you really wanted me to tell the detective you weren’t there, didn’t I?
We walked in, I shut the door behind us, we both sat down. And all that time, I was having a disturbing conversation with myself. Asking myself myriad questions that I couldn’t answer. For instance, what was the detective here for? Had Lucinda reconsidered and gone to the police herself?
“Do you know Winston Boyko?”
No. Detective Palumbo was here about someone else. He was here about Winston.
“What?” I said.
“Do you know Winston Boyko?”
Okay. What were my options here? No, I don’t wasn’t one of them. After all, there were a number of people who could swear just the opposite — Darlene, Tim Ward, and half the sixth floor.
“Yes.”
Detective Palumbo was scribbling something in his little notebook that he’d produced almost magically out of his coat, scribbling away and seemingly waiting for me to embellish a little.
(A detective comes to see you and asks you if you know this obscure mailroom employee and you say . . . what is it? Yes. That’s it. No curiosity about why?)
“Why do you want to know, Detective?”
“He’s missing,” Detective Palumbo said.
A lot better than He's been found dead. I could cry all I wanted about this unexpected interrogation, but a Winston missing was better than a Winston found.
“Really?” I said.
Detective Palumbo had a red mark on the bridge of his nose. Contacts? A slight nick on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving? I checked out his face as if it might hold a few answers for me. For instance, what he thought I knew.
“For over two weeks,” Palumbo said.
“Hmmm . . .” I was down to monosyllabic responses now, being as my brain was off somewhere else furiously constructing alibis.
“When was the last time you saw him?” Detective Palumbo asked.
Good question. Maybe even a trick question, like who was the last left-handed batter to win the American League MVP award? Everyone says Yastrzemski, everyone, but it’s a trick — it’s really Vida Blue, left-handed wunderkind pitcher for the Oakland As. The kind of question Winston would have loved, too.
When did you last see him?
“Gee, I don’t know,” I finally said. “A few weeks ago, I think.”
“Uh-huh,” Palumbo said, still scribbling. “What exactly was your relationship, Mr. Schine?”
What did that mean? Wasn't relationship the kind of word you used for people who had one? Lucinda and me, for instance. If Palumbo was asking me what k
ind of relationship Lucinda and I had, I would’ve said brief. I would’ve said sex and violence, and you can forget the sex.
“He works here,” I said. “He delivers my mail.”
“Yeah,” Palumbo said. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh.” Palumbo was staring at the picture of my family.
“So I guess you’re interviewing. . .everyone?” I asked, hoped.
“Everyone?”
“You know, everyone who works here?”
“No,” Palumbo said, “not everyone.”
I could’ve asked him, Why me, then? I could’ve asked him that, but I was afraid of the answer I might get back, so I didn’t. Even though I was wondering if Palumbo was expecting me to ask him that.
“So . . . is there anything else I can — ” I began, but was interrupted.
“Whenwas that again? The last time you saw him?” Palumbo asked, pencil poised and waiting — and I was reminded of an image from one of those British costume dramas that continuously turn up on Bravo: the Crown’s executioner holding the ax above his head, only awaiting the signal to strike.
“I don’t remember, exactly,” I said. “Two weeks ago, I guess.”
I guess. Couldn't hold someone to a guess, could you? Couldn’t drag them downtown and haul them before the court on a wrong guess.
“Two weeks ago? When he delivered your mail?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever get together with Mr. Boyko, you know, socially?”
Yes, once in a bar. But it was business.
“No.”
“Did Mr. Boyko ever talk to you about himself?”
“How do you mean?”
“Did Mr. Boyko ever talk about himself? To you?”
“No, not really. About mail . . . you know.”
“Mail?”
“Deliveries. Where I wanted something sent. Things like that.”
“Uh-huh. That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Yes.”
“Well, what else?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said pretty much. What else did he talk to you about?”
“Sports. We talked about sports.”
“Mr. Boyko is a sports fan, then?”
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