Derailed

by Siegel, James

  “Actually,” I said, and Rosa leaned closer, “I came in once before. I think.”

  “You think? ”

  “I was drunk,” I said. “I think it was the same place. Not sure.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “There was this girl here.” I described Lucinda in detail, all the detail someone who’d spent countless hours staring at a woman would know. I left out things like her sexy pout and liquid eyes.

  “Oh,” Rosa said. “You’re talking about Didi. ” But she said it in a way that made me think she hadn’t exactly liked Didi.

  “Didi? Yeah . . . I think that was her name. Sure.”

  “She was a fucking puta . . . a player, you know. . . .”

  “No.”

  “Oh yeah. She comes in and sees what’s what in like two minutes, right? Sticking her tits out . . . her skinny little ass . . . parading it for the boss. I could see what she was doing. I’m down like James Brown on this bitch, right? She’s here like two days, two fucking days, and she’s doing him.”

  The boss. Raul Vasquez.

  “Where is the boss?” I said.

  Rosa shrugged. “Don’t know. He hasn’t been around. Why?”

  “No reason.” And I thought: They don’t know. I had his wallet, and he wasn’t registered at the hotel. They had no name and no one to notify. No next of kin to break the news to.

  “So, you married?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  I was trying to put it all together. I was trying to picture how it started. These poor wetbacks came into the Crystal Night Club to blow all their cash on hostesses who basically looked down on them. Lucinda was one of those hostesses. That faint accent I’d asked her about on the train—Spanish? But Lucinda hadn’t remained a hostess for long. She’d flashed her skinny ass instead and hooked up with Vasquez. You could see why he’d want to. She didn’t look like the rest of them here. She looked like someone who spent her day buying low and selling high in some office tower downtown. The kind of woman other white-collar commuters would drool over behind their morning papers.

  Was it his idea, I wondered, or hers? Who got the idea — who looked around the depressing environs of the Crystal Night Club and saw the possibilities?

  “You ain’t drinking,” Rosa said. “The rule is, if you don’t drink, I gotta talk to somebody else, okay?”

  “I’ll order another,” I said, and Rosa smiled.

  Maybe it was her. Didi. Maybe she saw how ridiculously easy it was to make these day laborers far from home fall in love with her and knew it would be even easier with guys like me. Married guys who weren’t far from home, but maybe were wishing they were. Guys who wanted someone to talk to just as much as these guys. Guys with real cash.

  When the bartender brought over another tequila sunrise, I opened my wallet to pay.

  Rosa said: “Widdoes? What kind of name is that?” She was looking at a piece of my new driver’s license. Yes, my first night as a new man. Charles Schine was dead.

  “Just a name,” I said.

  “It’s depressing,” she said. “Likewidows, you know. . . .”

  “Yes, well, it’s spelled differently.”

  “That’s true,” she said seriously.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked her.

  “Over there — ” She pointed to a back hall. “Most of them use the sidewalk,” she said, and snorted. “You should smell it at four in the morning. They don’t know no better.”

  “Well, I’ll use the bathroom,” I said.

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  When I got up from the table, I saw the thick-necked man behind the bar staring at me. I walked to the back of the room, passing Colombian, Mexican, Dominican, and Peruvian men engrossed in conversation with their respective hostesses. The conversations were kind of one-sided, though, the men leaning over the tables and talking in slurred Spanish. I thought that my conversations with Didi had been pretty much like that, too.

  One of the bathrooms said “hombres” on the door.

  I walked in that one. There was a man kneeling over the toilet. I could smell his vomit.

  I walked into a stall that had graffiti over every inch of it. Mostly in Spanish, but some English, too.

  “I have an ten-inch dick,” someone had written.

  I sat on the toilet and took a deep breath. I’d seen a third door here in the back hallway. His office?

  I waited till the other man left, then I got up and walked back into the hallway.

  There was no one there. I walked to the third door.

  It wasn’t locked. When I opened it, its rusty hinges shrieked at me and I stopped and waited, my heart somewhere in my throat.

  Nothing. The salsa music was pounding away out there.

  I slipped inside and closed the door.

  The room was dark. I felt for the light switch and found it just behind the door.

  Yes, it was his office. Had to be. It wasn't much of an office, but there was a desk, a swivel chair, a beat-up couch, a file cabinet.

  I was thinking about the man behind the bar. How he’d stared at me when I walked to the back hallway. The tendons on his neck had looked like thick strands of rope.

  I scanned the walls — they were made of fake wood. Nothing there. No wall safe, for instance. No picture that could be hiding a wall safe. Those numbers on the back of his card — they had to be the combination to a safe. If not here, somewhere. He was dead, and I needed that money back. I had to chance it.

  There was a ripped calendar hanging on the wall, but when I pushed it to one side there was nothing behind it.

  I heard footsteps outside the door. I held my breath.

  They kept going; I heard the bathroom door open and shut.

  I tried the file cabinet—it was locked. The desk drawer was open. In the back of the drawer was a sheaf of yellowed newspaper. It was a bunch of clippings. The first was an old cover of Newsday. COMMUTER JUMPS OFF LIRR was the headline. There was a picture of a body wrapped in a white sheet, lying at the side of the railroad tracks in Lynbrook, Long Island. A somber-looking policeman was standing guard over it.

  The actual article was there, too.

  “A Rockville Center man apparently committed suicide last night by jumping off a Long Island Rail Road train,” the article began. It went on to say that he was married with three children, that he was a corporate lawyer, that he’d left no suicide note. He’d been experiencing some unnamed personal problems, a family spokesperson said. Other than that, there was no explanation. Witnesses on the train said the man — his name was John Pierson — was walking to the back of the train with other commuters in order to find a seat when he simply, and without warning, jumped.

  I might’ve stopped reading right there, except one of the witnesses’ names caught my eye. The last person to see him alive — the one who actually saw him jump.

  Raul. No last name given. It listed his occupation as bar owner.

  The door opened.

  The thick-necked man was standing there staring at me.

  I was standing behind the desk with the newspaper clippings in my hand. The desk drawer was open.

  “Astoria General,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “The nearest hospital. So you know what to tell the ambulance driver.”

  “I’m sorry . . . I was looking for the bathroom . . .”

  “I’m going to have to fuck you up bad,” he said, still in that soft voice. “Two, three weeks in the hospital before you get out, okay?”

  “Look, really, I was just . . .”

  He closed the door behind him. He locked it.

  He began to walk toward me.

  I stepped back, but there was only wall behind me.

  He stopped and took something out of his pocket. A roll of coins that he wrapped his right fist around.

  He walked around the desk; he was close enough to smell.

  Then I remembered what I had in my pocket. I pulled it out and flip
ped it open.

  He stopped.

  “Detective, NYPD,” I said. Vasquez’s phony police badge. I’d stuffed it into my pocket and almost, but not quite, forgotten about it.

  “We have reports of illicit drug activity,” I said, wondering if that was how policemen actually spoke. I tried to remember the way Detective Palumbo had spoken to me that day in the office.

  “There’s no drugs here,” the man said. “You got a warrant?”

  I didn’t, of course, have a warrant.

  “You just threatened me. Do I need a warrant to arrest you?”

  “There’s no drugs here,” the man said. “I’m going to call our lawyer, okay?”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m done.”

  And I walked out right past him.

  I counted in my head. One, two, three, four . . . wondering how many seconds it would take me to get out of the bar and onto the street. And how many seconds it might take him to reconsider letting me walk out without checking my badge again or asking me to wait for his lawyer to arrive. I was up to ten when I passed Rosa, who said, “Hey, where you goin’?” . . . fifteen when I walked through the door without answering her.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I came back to Merrick later that same night.

  When no one could see me. When I could scurry up the driveway and sneak in the back door. Curry whimpered and mewled and licked my hand.

  Deanna rushed into my arms and we held each other until my arms went numb.

  “Do you know you’ve been listed as missing?” Deanna said.

  “Yes, I know. You didn’t . . . ?”

  “No. I told the detective who came here that we were separated, that I hadn’t heard from you, that I didn’t know where you were. I thought I should probably keep to that story until you told me differently.”

  “Good.” I sighed. “Look, I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “They found something of yours, Charles.”

  “My watch?” I said.

  “No.” She went into the den and came back with it in her arms.

  “They told me to come down and pick it up today. It was in the hotel safe.”

  It was big, black, and bulging.

  My briefcase.

  The one I’d handed to Vasquez in Spanish Harlem with one hundred thousand dollars of Anna’s money in it.

  What was it doing here?

  “They found it in the safe. It had your name on it.”

  My name, in embossed gold, as plain as day, even though the briefcase was covered in fine white powder. Charles Barnett Schine.

  “It’s really heavy,” Deanna said. “What do you have in there?”

  I went to open it, to show her what I had in there, but it was locked. It was heavy — heavier than I remembered.

  And I thought: Yes, of course. If you had a lot of money and you wanted to put it somewhere other than a bank, because you weren’t exactly bank material and you maybe didn’t trust banks anyway, maybe you would pick a hotel safe in the care of your friend and partner, Dexter.

  “They didn’t want to break into it,” Deanna said. “Not unless it went unclaimed.”

  I’d never used the lock before, of course. I seemed to remember that you had to program it yourself, put your own three-digit code into it. I’d never bothered to.

  I started to walk to the kitchen drawer where we kept the knives I would use to force it open, when I remembered something.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out Vasquez’s business card. I turned it over.

  Twenty-two right.

  Thirty-seven left.

  Twelve right.

  I moved the tiny cylinders. It clicked open.

  In the briefcase was the $110,000 of Anna’s money. And hundreds of thousands more.

  Things happened for a reason, Deanna always believed. And now, finally, I agreed with her.

  We talked.

  And talked.

  Straight through the night.

  I told Deanna what was on my mind.

  At first she was incredulous; she made me repeat it because she didn’t think she’d heard it right.

  “You’re not serious, Charles?”

  “As far as anyone knows, Deanna, I’m dead, understand? I think I should stay that way.”

  I told her everything I hadn’t before. The T&D Music House. The investigation they were conducting at my company. The charges that would no doubt soon be filed.

  Deanna still resisted. She put up coffee; we huddled in the basement so we wouldn’t wake Anna.

  We imagined the future. But we imagined it two ways.

  We imagined me walking down to the police station in the morning and giving myself up. We imagined it first that way. Giving myself up to the police and getting a lawyer and going to trial. And possibly losing. Conspiracy to commit murder, with exhibit A being an audiotape where a jury of my peers would hear me asking Winston to more or less go kill someone for me. A tough thing to explain your way out of. So I might end up looking at fifteen years, possibly ten with time off for good behavior, even with that separate indictment hanging over my head for embezzlement.

  Ten or fifteen years. Not the longest time in the world. Maybe even doable time. Maybe. Only there was another sentence to consider here.

  Anna had been handed a sentence, too. An uncertain sentence, true, a reprieve from the governor always a possibility. But not likely. Probably, more than possibly, a death sentence. Which meant that when I’d finished serving my ten or fifteen years, when I came out to find my family waiting for me outside the walls of Attica — it would be diminished by one. It would be just the two of us. And maybe sooner rather than later. Because there would be other nights where Anna would be found unconscious and shaking; other injections given with a trembling hand to my comatose daughter. Keeping Anna alive was a two-person job — it had always been a two-person job.

  And since we were both sitting there and imagining this kind of future, I imagined all of it. Getting the news in prison, by letter, maybe: “We regret to inform you that your daughter, Anna, passed away yesterday.” Begging for permission to attend her funeral. Being turned down. Having to see Deanna’s ravaged face through the plastic partition the next time she came to visit me.

  We imagined that future first.

  Then we imagined another. A different kind of future.

  A future someplace else. With other names. A future that would include both of us there to share in it.

  With $450,000 to support it. To support Anna.

  That’s how much was in the briefcase. One hundred and ten thousand dollars of Anna’s Fund and $340,000 from the other men they’d taken to the cleaners.

  Which was another reason to consider this second future. That briefcase. Someone might come looking for it.

  There were times that night it seemed like we were talking about someone else. That it couldn’t be our family we were discussing, that it had to be someone else’s. A more or less ordinary middle-class family suddenly becoming a different ordinary middle-class family. Was that possible? Sometimes things like that happened, didn’t they? Entire families whisked off into witness protection programs, new identities, new lives. This was different, of course.

  We weren’t going to be hidden by the government. We were going to be hiding from the government. From the New York City Police Department.

  Hiding from everyone from now on.

  In the end, it came down to a simple question. It came down to Anna. What was her best chance? What promised a longer future for her? With me or without me? It was possible I could beat the charges. After all, even with adultery thrown into the mix, I might have sympathy on my side—and a clever lawyer, too. I might beat the charges, but it was only fifty-fifty at best.

  Could we take the chance? Could we roll the dice?

  The reason to do it was Anna.

  The reason not to do it was Anna.

  I would have to disappear first — tonight.
And Deanna? She might have to wait a long time to join me. Six months, maybe even a year. And all during that time, Anna couldn’t know — we both realized that. She might say something, give me away. For an entire year or so, Anna would have to believe that her father was dead.

  We went round and round, back and forth.

  Maybe it was simple fatigue that finally beat us down. We kept hammering away at the rational and logical until they both finally switched sides.

  By five in the morning, the most logical, the most reasonable thing in the world seemed to be to disappear off the face of the earth.

  I never turned myself in.

  I died.

  FORTY-SIX

  I left that night.

  But before I walked out, before I held Deanna for what seemed like twenty minutes with neither of us saying a word, I tiptoed upstairs and looked in on my daughter.

  She was fast asleep, with one arm thrown over her face as if she didn’t wish to see something. Bad dream, maybe. I whispered good-bye to her.

  I didn’t have a destination.

  My destination was anywhere far from there.

  I took a Greyhound bus at 6:00 in the morning that was headed to Chicago. It seemed as good a place as any.

  I sat next to a thin and restless prelaw student who was on his way back to Northwestern.

  “Mike,” he said to me, and put his hand out.

  “Lawrence,” I said. “You can call me Larry.” It was the first time I’d really used my new name — that I’d said it out loud. It felt odd, like seeing myself with a beard. I would have to get used to it.

  Mike was a sports junkie; he wanted to be a players agent when he graduated, he told me. I was going to tell him that maybe I could help him, that I knew one or two agents, having used athletes in commercials for years, but I stopped myself. From now on, I wasn’t in advertising. From now on, I'd never been in advertising. Which got me thinking about what I did do if someone asked. And what I would do whenever I got to where I was going.

  Except for a teaching degree I’d gotten from Queens College — not because I particularly wanted to be a teacher, but because I didn’t know what else I was going to do back then — advertising had been it. How was I going to make a living now?