“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?