Siegel, James - Derailed

“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 flipped 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.