“I guess. Kind of. We’re both Yankee fans,” trying hard to keep in the present tense when I was talking about Winston — not so easy, when I could picture him lying stiffly at the foot of the mound of garbage.
“That’s all, then. You talked about mail and sometimes about the Yankees?”
“Yes. As far as I can remember.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Would you know how Winston came into ten thousand dollars, Mr. Shine?”
“What?”You heard him.
“Mr. Boyko had ten thousand dollars in his apartment. I was wondering if you had any idea how he got it.”
“No. Of course not. How would I . . . ?” I was wondering something: if the police were allowed to check with David Lerner Brokerage and see how much stock I’d sold. It wouldn’t look good, would it? It would look, okay, suspicious. But then, why would they suspect me of giving ten thousand dollars to Winston? I was panicking for no good reason.
“There were some computers stolen from your agency. One from this floor.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Did you ever see Mr. Boyko up here when he wasn’t supposed to be?”
Computers. Palumbo was asking me about computers. Of course. Winston the thief. Winston the ex-con. He was talking to me because he suspected Winston had gotten that money from stealing some computers. He needed witnesses. Winston had stolen some computers and he’d made some money and taken off.
“Now that you mention it, I did see him up here one night when I was working late.”
“Where, exactly?”
“Just around, you know. In the hall here.”
“Was there any reason for him to be up on this floor after work?”
“Not that I can think of. I thought it was kind of strange at the time.” I was killing him again, I thought. First when he was alive and now when he wasn’t.
“Did you challenge him about that? Ask him what he was doing there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t. He was down the hall — I was in my office. I really didn’t know if he was supposed to be here or not.”
“All right, Mr. Schine.” Palumbo shut his notebook and placed it back into his hip pocket. “I think that’s all I have for you today. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, even as I wondered about that word. Today.
“I hope you find him.”
“So do I. You know, Mr. Boyko was pretty good about seeing his parole officer. He hadn’t missed a meeting. Not one. You did know he’d been in prison, right?”
“I think I may have heard something about that. Yeah, sure. Is that who told you he was missing? His parole officer?”
“No,” Palumbo said. Then he looked straight into my eyes, the way lovers do when they want you to acknowledge the sincerity of their feelings.
“Mr. Boyko and I had a kind of working relationship,” he said. “Understand?”
No, I didn’t understand.
As I walked Detective Palumbo out into the hall, wondering if the detective was going to go interview someone else—he didn’t. Still not understanding that statement: Mr. Boyko and I had a kind of working relationship.
And what kind of relationship was that?
It was only when I replayed the interview later in the day, wondering if I’d been okay with my answers, meticulously going over each Q&A to see if I’d slipped up, given the detective any cause, no matter how minute, to distrust me, that it occurred to me what kind of relationship any ex-con can have with any police detective.
What were the terms?
Because something else was bothering me. Something that didn’t make sense. It was this. People are reported missing all the time—isn’t that the usual quote you hear from bored and jaded police detectives on the evening news? The distraught parent complaining about police inaction, how their teenage daughter or son was missing for God knows how long, and the parents knew something was wrong, of course, they knew, but still the police did nothing much but take a report. Because people disappear all the time. That’s what the bored detectives say. And if they looked for every kid who didn’t come home, they’d have no time left to go after the serious criminals.
And these are kids they’re talking about — kids that they don’t exactly jump into action after. And Winston was not a kid. He was a grown man — and by the usual social standards, not a very important one. In fact, on the scale of important people, of people the police need immediately to start looking for, he’d probably be next to last, just above black transvestite heroin addicts, maybe.
Yet just two weeks after this ex-con doesn’t show up for work, a police detective is there looking for him.
What were the terms?
So I replayed the detective’s words again. Mr. Boyko and I had a kind of working relationship, understand?
And yes, I was beginning to understand now.
What were the terms?
I’d seen all the movies, I’d watched the TV shows, I’d read the papers. Police detectives were allowed to lean on ex-cons for information. Ex-cons were inclined to give it to them so as not to be leaned on. So that maybe they’d look the other way when they were trying to supplement their income with, say, a little computer theft.
What were the terms?
I know the terms, Winston.
Why don’t you state them for me so there’s no confusion.
That night in Winston’s car by the number seven train.
Why don’t you state them for me.
And why was that? Why did Winston need me to state them for him, need to hear me say the words out loud? Because in the end, it’s the words that’ll set you free. You need to give them the words if they’re ever going to believe you.
State them for me.
Policemen and ex-cons with only one kind of working relationship, really, and this is the way it works. This way. They ask and you tell. You whisper. You snitch.
State them.
If you don’t have the words, if you don’t have them sitting there on some tape somewhere, how will they ever believe you? A company big shot, a bridge and tunneler, an honest to God white-collar commuter, and he wants you to what? Say again, Winston. . . .
State them.
No, not everyone, Palumbo said.
Just you.
TWENTY-NINE
Things happen for a reason. That’s what Deanna believed. That things aren’t as random as you might expect — that there was some kind of unseen and only hinted-at plan out there. That the orchestra might be out of tune and all over the place, but there was a maestro somewhere in that hidden orchestra pit who knew exactly what he was doing.
I’d always treated that kind of thinking with a healthy skepticism, but now I wasn’t so sure.
Take the Saturday after my interrogation. Freakishly warm, pools of soft mud sucking at my shoes as I meticulously picked up after Curry in the backyard. I was concentrating on this task — covering every inch of the yard with eagle-eyed dedication — as a way to keep from concentrating on other things.
I was holding in fear and panic; I was trying not to let them out.
So when Deanna called out to me from the back door — something about auto insurance — I barely acknowledged her.
She needed to renew our insurance, she was saying. Yes, that’s what it was. I nodded at her like one of those bobble dolls they stick on the dashboard of cars — reflexive motion caused by the slightest disturbance in the air. She needed to renew our insurance, and she wanted to know where our policy was.
So I told her. And went back to the business at hand.
It was ten or fifteen minutes later when she appeared at the back door wearing an expression I was all too familiar with. The one I’d hoped to never see again.
At first, of course, I thought, Anna. Something happened to Anna and I must throw down my garbage bag and run into the house
. Where I would no doubt find my daughter comatose again. Only at that very moment I saw Anna pass her upstairs bedroom window, where the latest from P. Diddy was streaming through the closed sill. She looked fine.
What, then? So my mind backtracked, scurrying down the recent road to here — searching furiously for clues that might explain the nature of this particular disaster.
I’d been cleaning the yard; she’d come out to tell me something — yes, our insurance needed renewing. She’d asked me where our policy was; I’d told her.
In the file cabinet, of course. Under I for insurance. Right?
Except this was auto insurance. Automobile insurance that needed renewing. So in the haphazard and admittedly chaotic filing system of the Schines, it was possible that this policy wasn’t under I after all, but under A. A for automobile. In the A file.
All this occurring to me at lightning speed and, as lightning would, leaving me dazed and scorched. Possibly even dead.
Which is when I wondered about things happening for a reason. Why, for instance, our auto insurance had needed to be renewed now, right this minute, today. Why? And why at the very moment she’d asked me for help in finding our policy, I’d been so preoccupied with staying preoccupied that I hadn’t had the wherewithall to tell her I’d go get it myself.
“Where’s Anna’s money, Charles?” Deanna asked me. “What have you done with it?”
Maybe I’d always known the moment would come.
Certain things were just too massive to be hidden successfully — their very dimensions make them impossible to conceal. Their edges stick out in the open, and sooner or later someone is bound to notice them.
Or maybe I wanted to be found out — isn’t that what any psychiatrist worth his salt would say? That I might’ve been cleaning up the garden, sure, but at the same time I was yearning to clean up my life.
Hard to believe that I would’ve gone through all I had only to throw it all away on purpose. But then, things weren’t that simple anymore.
“What have you done with it?” she asked me.
And at first, I was rendered speechless. Deanna stock still on the back stoop and me standing there with a garbage bag reeking of excrement.
“I brought the certificates to a safety deposit box,” I lied through my teeth. I will take one stab at extricating myself from this, I thought, one outright denial.
“Charles . . . ,” she admonished me with my own name. As if that kind of blatant lying weren’t worthy of me. And I wanted to say, Yes, Deanna, it is. You don’t know what I’ve been up to — it is.
But I couldn’t say much of anything — not yet, not when it concerned the truth. I was dead in the water, and I knew it.
“Charles, why are you lying to me? What’s going on?”
I suppose I could’ve denied I was lying to her. I could’ve stuck to my ridiculous story about the safety deposit box—ridiculous not because it wasn’t possible, but because even if she had believed me, I would have had to produce the stock certificates on Monday, and that was impossible. I could’ve said this is my story and I’m sticking to it, no matter what. But in the end, I had too much respect for her. In the end, I loved her too much.
So even though I knew what I was about to do, knew that now that I was about to take a stab at the truth I was going to be stabbing her — I went ahead anyway.
I started with the train. That hurried morning, the lack of cash, the woman who’d helped me out.
When I mentioned Lucinda, I could see Deanna’s expression change — her features flattening, the way animals’ faces do at the first sign of danger.
“Then I had a bad day at the office,” I continued. “I was kicked off the credit card account.”
Deanna was obviously wondering what getting kicked off an account had to do with $110,000 missing from Anna’s Fund. And with the woman on the train.
I was wondering about that, too. I knew there was a connection, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Something about needing to talk to someone, maybe — or had it simply been a precursor to what followed? One step taken off the ledge before the other foot followed?
“I ran into the woman again,” I said. What I should’ve said was that I ran after, sought, meticulously looked for, this woman. But wasn’t I allowed to soft-pedal just a little?
“What are you talking about, Charles?” She wanted the Monarch Notes version now — she wasn’t interested in a prologue or an introduction, not when she could tell that her future with me was hanging in the balance.
“I’m talking about a mistake I made, Deanna. I’m so sorry.” A mistake. Was that all it was? People made mistakes all the time, and then they learned from them. I was hoping she might look at it that way, even though common sense and everything I knew about Deanna after eighteen years of marriage told me there was no chance of that. Still.
Now Deanna sat on the stoop. She pushed her hair back from her face and straightened her back like someone about to be shot who still wants desperately to keep her dignity. And me? I raised the gun in my hand and pulled the trigger.
“I had an affair, Deanna.”
P. Diddy was still seeping through the window. Curry was barking at a passing car. Still, the surrounding world was about as silent as I’d ever heard it. A silence even worse than the kind that had permeated the house ever since Anna got sick, silence so black and hopeless that I thought I might start crying.
But she did instead. Not loudly or hysterically, but the tears suddenly there, as if I’d slapped her hard in the face.
“Why?” she said.
I’d expected she would ask questions. I thought she might ask me if I loved her, this woman—or how long it had been going on, or how long it was over. But no—she’d asked me why instead. A question she was entitled to, absolutely, but a question I was unprepared to answer.
“I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know.”
She nodded. She looked away, down at her bare feet, which seemed strangely vulnerable on the green step of our back stoop, like naked newborn mammals. Then she looked up again, squinting, as if looking directly at me were hurting her eyes.
“I was going to say, How could you, can you believe it? I was. But I know how you could, Charles. Maybe I even know why you could.”
Why? I thought. Tell me. . . .
“Maybe I even understand it,” she continued. “Because of what’s happened with us lately. I think I can understand it, I do. I just don’t think I can forgive it. I’m sorry about that. I can’t.”
“Deanna,” I began, but she waved me off.
“It’s over now? This affair?”
At last a question I could more or less handle.
“Yes. Absolutely. It was once, just one time, really. . . .”
She sighed, cracked her knuckle, wiped her eyes. “Why is Anna's money missing, Charles?”
Okay. I’d told half of it, but there was still a whole other half, wasn’t there?
“You don’t have to tell me anything else about the affair — I don’t want to know anything else about it,” Deanna said. “But I want to know that.”
So I told her.
As sparingly as possible, as linearly as I could remember it—one thing leading to another leading to another—and I could tell that while it had all made sense to me, in a horrible, albeit panicked, way, it wasn’t making any sense to her. Even when I reached the part where we’d been attacked and beaten and I could see actual sympathy in her eyes. Even when I reached the part where Vasquez entered our home and put his hand on Anna’s head. Still it made no sense to her. Perhaps she could see what I hadn’t been able to—could spot the moments in this tortured tale when I could’ve done something different, when this different course of action was crying out to be tried. Or maybe it was because I’d left something out, something significant and necessary to any true understanding of events.
“So I paid him the money,” I finished. “To save her.”
“You never thought about going to the pol
ice? About going tome? ”
Yes, I wanted to say. I had thought about going to the police, or going to her, which was pretty much the same thing, really. But when I’d thought about it, I’d pictured the way she’d look—which was the way she looked now. So I hadn’t. And now I really couldn’t go to the police, even though it might not make much of a difference, since it was entirely probable the police were coming for me.
“That money,” she whispered. “Anna’s Fund . . .” saying it the way I’d heard investors mention one fund or another these past couple of years while perusing the stock pages on their way to work. That Dreyfus Fund . . . Morgan Fund . . . Alliance Fund . . . As if reciting the names of the dearly departed. Gone and never to return.
“You have to go to the police now, Charles. You have to tell them what happened and get our money back. It's Anna's. ”
I’d told her a story with a hole in it, a hole I’d hoped would be big enough to sneak through. But no. She was making a perfectly reasonable request, only I didn’t have a perfectly reasonable answer. Protecting Lucinda from her husband’s anger wouldn’t do now — not for Deanna, not when protecting her was costing our daughter over a hundred thousand dollars.
What she didn’t know was that I was protecting me.
“There’s more,” I said, and I could see Deanna deflate. Haven't you told me enough already? her expression seemed to say. What more can there possibly be?
“I asked someone to help me,” I said, thinking that I was still lying, since I hadn’t asked Winston as much as coerced him. On the other hand, Winston hadn’t actually helped me as much as set me up. “I asked someone to help me scare off Vasquez.”
“Scare off?" Deanna might be in semishock, but she was still smart enough to see the inherent flaws in my plan, and she was calling me on it. That when you ask a man to scare off someone else, there was a volatility factor of plus ten. That what starts out as a fist in the face can end up as a knife in the heart. Or a bullet in the head.
“He was threatening this family, Deanna. He came to our house. ”
When something loves me I love it back, Deanna had said to me once. That was her rule to live by, her credo, her own semper fidelis. But she was in the battle of her life now, with bomb after bomb falling all around her, and it was anyone’s guess if that love could actually survive. Judging by the expression on her face, I would’ve had to say no. She was having problems recognizing me, I imagined — recognizing this man as the generally loving and gentle husband she’d known for eighteen years. Not this guy, who’d had a seedy affair and paid blackmail money because of it and even enlisted someone to get rid of this blackmailer for him. Was it possible?
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