“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.