Derailed

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.