“Of course, I begged him to get help. If not for himself, then certainly for Charlie. So he underwent a series of appointments with (it makes me shudder to even type his name) Dr. Pearl at Capital District Psychiatric. To my surprise, Richard seemed to come around after a while. Whatever treatment Pearl had been prescribing worked. For a full year, all talk of ‘taking care of Charlie’ in order to beat fate was dropped. I began to feel that Richard was cured.
“Or so I thought at the time.
“But then, I have to be perfectly honest: the manuscript is not entirely truthful. I guess after all this time, and after all that had happened, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell the whole truth. Until now.
“One warm afternoon in may, I ran the bath for little Charlie. I got out all his toys, his favorite boats and rubber animals, and I set him inside the bath with them. Then I waited for Richard to come home. When he did, I told him I had to go out. Just a quick ten-minute trip out to the grocery store. But it was while I was driving that it suddenly came to me in this horrific wave that began at the tip of my toes, shot up into my spine, and traveled all the way up into my head: I had left Charlie alone with Richard.
“I remember pulling off to the side of the road, paralyzed with fear, just sitting there behind the wheel knowing I had to get home immediately. That to waste any more time meant certain death for Charlie. So I got myself together and made it home as fast as I could. Even now I can still recall the horrible weighted feeling of running up those stairs to our apartment. The too-heavy, heartbroken feeling; the panic and the nausea.
“When I made it to the top of the landing I found that the door had been locked. Locked after I left. I had to fumble around for my keys, my eyes so out of focus with anxiety I had to try five or six different keys until I could get the right one, all the time screaming for Richard but getting no answer.
“When I finally got the door open I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the hammer under the sink. I can still see myself sprinting the center hall of the apartment, with only the white light from the bathroom leaking out onto the polished wood floor. When I got to the open door, I found Richard bent over the tub, a video camera in his hands. I hit him over the head with the hammer. He dropped like a stone beside the tub.
“But it was then, when my husband fell to the floor unconscious, that I saw little Charlie laid out in the tub, his eyes closed, his lips sealed tight, his face blue and white. I fell to my knees and threw my arms around him and lifted him out of the tub. I screamed, ‘Breathe, baby, breathe!’ And when I got nothing I held him tighter and slapped him on the back again and again. ‘Breathe, Charlie!’ I screamed, with one more solid slap to the back. Then suddenly his eyes opened and the bathwater drained out of his lungs through his mouth, and he coughed and sputtered. Finally he began to cry.
“That’s when I knew I had him back.
“I never took the time to dress him. I just wrapped him in a blanket. I was so panicked I hardly noticed the camera Richard had been holding—the camera he had been using to film the murder of his own son. I was so frightened at the thought of this that I just ran away with Charlie. I knew what Richard was capable of, knew how many connections he had. That for me, there would never be any hiding from him. But as for Charlie? I knew then that I could use his near death as his saving grace, as a rebirth, if you will. I knew that if I got him out of the apartment and away from Richard forever, I could save his life.
“So I did something no mother should ever have to do. I called Detective Ryan, told him I wanted Charlie put up for immediate adoption, that I would explain later and that for now the arrangement had to be strictly between him and me. You see, Ryan had worked closely with Richard and Wash Pelton and the governor on the campaign, strictly as a private consultant and strictly unbeknownst to his superiors in the state. He had been hired to address issues of safety and security, to deal with the constant telephone and letter threats that had been coming in since the campaign’s inception. And with a drug deal going down in the prisons, he stayed on for something completely different. I could not immediately explain my motives to Ryan other than to suggest that if he attempted to speak to Richard about it, I would immediately blow the lid off his little agreement with my husband, that I didn’t care what happened to me so long as Charlie was safe and hidden from his father for the rest of his life. As far as Richard went, he would never know what happened to his son. As far as he knew he had completed whatever psychotic task he had set out to accomplish. I told him I simply panicked, hit him over the head with the hammer, then called someone to take the body away. I never told him who took the child, only that the person could be trusted and no matter how much he threatened or beat me he could never get it out of me. From this day forward, I told him, we have no marriage. Maybe he could keep my body because he had that kind of power. But in the end he would have no real power over me.”
Val took time out for a steady breath. I could tell she was holding back tears. That it would be only a matter of time until she could not hold them back anymore.
“But the story is not necessarily a sad one,” she went on, slow, steady, controlled. “Because in the end, Charlie lived, despite his father. I’m quite certain that to this day he has no idea that Detective Ryan and his wife are not his natural parents. Because how much will a child recall from his first two years? Not even Richard knows it’s the same child. To this day he just assumes I had the body disposed of quickly because deep down I feared being implicated too, which is partly the truth. The irony is that at Richard’s request, Ryan arranged the funeral and burial for our child, and as you might have already guessed, there is no body in Charlie Barnes’s grave. At the same time—and this is what causes me the most grief—there is, in a sense, no more Charlie.
“So I wrote Godchild thinking that perhaps by writing about the sadness and grief I could make it all go away. I thought it would be okay because I implicated only myself in that novel. What I didn’t realize was that people would consider the fiction to be so real.
“It was only a few months after publishing the book that I learned of Richard’s plot to harm you in exchange for ‘a piece of the action’ at Green Haven Prison. Wash Pelton and the governor, along with Richard’s public-relations help, had big plans for expanding and for building more prisons under the guise of increased arrests and a dismantled parole system. They were in the process of expanding their operations south of the border, in Mexico, having already begun on a deal with the Contreras Brothers for the drug trade existent inside and around some of Mexico’s prisons. It was their plan to open up a whole new lane of drug traffic between Mexico and New York. The projected profits would have been huge.
“The whole bunch of them were infected with greed to the point of murder. The point is that Richard’s attempt to kill Charlie had nothing to do with fear or anxiety or even an insurance settlement for that matter (although we did receive a substantial settlement, of which I never touched a single dollar). Quite simply it had everything to do with murder, and never was this knowledge more apparent than when I discovered my husband on more than one occasion watching the video of the drowning inside his office. It was at that time I threatened to expose the whole thing to the world. To just write the real story. But Richard threatened to lay blame for Charlie’s death on me alone. He could do it too. He had the resources. And there was always Godchild. So I went to Mexico, to write about the drug trade and maybe, in the process, expose my husband’s operation. But what I never considered was how vulnerable I’d be; how I’d be handing Richard an opportunity to do away with me once and for all. As for you, Keeper—please don’t take this the wrong way—you would have made the perfect patsy.
“Now I sit here heavy hearted and I hear a voice calling for me and I know my death is only a matter of time. So I’ve decided to fool fate, take matters into my own hands, accept the inevitable on my own terms.
“I’d like to be able tell you how much I appreciate all you’ve done for me, fro
m saving my life to giving me the courage to finish the true version of Charlie’s story, even if it is not entirely the truth (after all, in the end, Charlie lived! ). I feel I can trust you to keep our secret safe, because in Richard’s case, it really is the thought that counted —the intent to kill.
“So I won’t thank you at all. But rest assured, it was worth the effort. Somewhere along the way a soul was saved. And for that, someone will surely thank you.
“Sincerely yours, Renata Barnes.”
The room was consumed in a blistering silence, each of us just waiting for the other to be the first to speak. And when Val folded up the pages of the letter, stuffed them neatly back inside the envelope, and said, “Well, I guess that’s that,” I could have wrapped my arms around her and kissed her. I might have done it too, if it hadn’t been for the drain in my shoulder.
But the feeling of relief was as short-lived as it was deceptive.
Because those were the only words that any of us spoke.
After a while, Tony released a breath.
“So Ryan’s the real winner in this thing,” he said. “I still don’t know how he did it, but he managed to play three separate sides. Little Charlie’s side, Barnes’s side, and the side of law and order. He knew full well he could be implicated once he was let in on Richard’s plan to kill Renata. On the other hand, he knew he could profit big time from sticking with his old boss too. But in the end he decided to protect the kid.”
“In the name of the law,” I said from the bed.
“In the name of all that’s right and decent,” Tony said. “If you can imagine such a thing.”
He set his blue fedora gently on his head and walked out.
That left Val and me. But we had very little to say to each other. In the end she simply slid off the bed, made her way to the picture window that looked out over the medical center parking lot, and proceeded to have a good long cry.
For the both of us.
Chapter 71
Three more days passed before I got medical permission for Val to drive me home.
Not downstate to Stormville, but back to Tony’s place.
The guest room. The same room that overlooked Eagle Street and the telephone poles stapled with the faded image of the Bald Man. The same room that looked out onto the top floor of the governor’s mansion and the white-marbled, Governor Rockefeller Plaza beyond it where state workers flocked day in and day out like lemmings to the sea. I was to be Tony’s guest for “as long as it took,” because, after all, he felt responsible for the entire affair. He’d been duped by Barnes just as I had. What’s more, he was out quite a few bucks and made a fool of in certain circles that must go unmentioned here.
The room was a spacious one, with twin beds, its own bath, and a picture window that also looked out onto Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the oldest Roman Catholic church in Albany. The church where Val and I were to have been married two Saturdays ago. A nurse had instructed Val how to change the dressings on my wound, and by the second day on our own, she had become an expert, silently peeling back the gauze and the tape, bringing her nose to the oily dressing, giving it a slight sniff to make sure infection hadn’t set in.
She slept on the second of the twin beds, while I slept on the one closest to the bedroom door, having sent her son, Ben, off to his grandmother’s. We shared our morning and evening meals in the bedroom, eating off hand-painted wooden trays that Tony had brought back from a vacation in Spain the previous year. We didn’t talk much about the case. Only about the fact that Barnes was facing a grand jury in a week, the charges against him ranging from Murder One (for the supposed death of his toddler son) to two counts of Conspiracy to Commit Murder (the plots to have me and his wife assassinated) to Murder in the Second Degree (Fran’s murder) to at least a half dozen or so assorted charges that would place the man behind bars for many more years than he had left to live. All this, and the feds had yet to examine his personal video collection for what it might reveal.
I might have made it a point to see the man, tell him exactly what I thought of him for what he did to Fran and me. I never did —not that it would have been physically possible with my sore shoulder and two sore legs (one knife wound, one bullet). But I lay back on the bed at night and I dreamed about how a meeting like that might go down:
In my mind I see myself walking the length of the basement corridor of the Albany County Lockup. I am alone, no guard sergeant to escort me. From out of the depths of the prison I hear the voices of the caged and the corrupt shouting out for me.
When I make it to the end of the corridor, the inmates press their bodies up against the bars, stick their arms through the spaces between them, wave their fists in the air. They chant, “Kill the motherfucker,” over and over again, banging the heels of their work boots against the concrete to the rhythm of their chant.
“Kill the motherfucker!”
I walk the very center of the block, on top of the yellow stripe that marks the floor, three tiers of cells on either side.
Streamers made from toilet paper fly down, shooting stars from the topmost cells. Some of the streamers are on fire.
“Kill the motherfucker!’
The chant is endless.
When I finally make it to Barnes’s cell, I see him curled up on his cot, back pressed up against the wall, knees pressed into his chest. He is dressed in his county blaze-orange jumpsuit, his rimless glasses crooked on his nose. He is crying like a baby. “Don’t kill me,” he says, his voice barely audible above the voices of the inmates. I say nothing. I just look at him, into his cold blue eyes.
I pull a set of keys from my pocket.
The keys will open the cell door.
I slip the key inside the lock.
Barnes screams, “No! No don’t!”
I close the cell door behind me and slowly make my way to him, pulling my .45 out of its holster, pressing the barrel up against his forehead, thumbing back the hammer….
But it was only a dream. And a sad one at that. So I said nothing about it to Val or Tony. I simply allowed the fantasy to play over again and again in my head like a videotape. After a time, I actually looked forward to lights out, pulling the covers over my chest, setting my head carefully back on the pillow, bringing the dream into focus.
Had the fantasy become an obsession?
Yes and no.
Yes, in that I found I could not sleep restfully until I played the scene out completely in my mind.
No, in that I knew it would always stay just a dream, that I no longer could possibly carry out the act, that although I’d had my chance for revenge, I now had no choice but to let the law take its course. I had to relegate Barnes’s fate to due process, or to whatever the gods of law and order had in store for him.
When Tony came home on the third day of my at-home convalescence and told me as nonchalantly as possible that they found Barnes dead with a foot-long shiv stuffed down his throat inside his cell at the county lockup just an hour ago, I was not the least bit surprised. Thinking like a former warden, I was simply curious about how the COs could have allowed anyone to get that close to him.
But Tony just waved his hands in the air as if to say, “Oh, you know, probably just one of those careless mistakes we all make from time to time.”
It seemed that somebody had somehow left the cell door open during lockdown just after evening chow. No one knew how it could have happened or who might have been responsible. But several inmates were able to get inside his cell, and as you already know, Barnes was about to become infamous. His was to be the trial of the century for Albany County. “So it was only a matter of time until somebody knocked him out,” Tony said. “Better for him that it happened now, rather than later.”
He started walking out of the bedroom. But he stopped once he got to the door. He turned. “Oh, and did I mention that just this morning the good Dr. Pearl and his cronies were involved in a terrible auto accident on their way to pick up a patient in Poughkeepsie? Of cours
e, they can all breathe okay as long as they don’t turn off the machines.” He came back in and set his briefcase on the end of the bed, opened it, came back out with a large manila envelope. He tossed it onto the bed. “One hundred eleven grand,” he said. “Your share of the take minus the cost for the damages to Bill’s Grill along with the APD you had to grease in order to stay out of lockup.”
He told me to count it if I wanted.
“Why would I want to do that?” I said.
He went to leave once more but then stopped himself yet another time.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I almost forgot something else,” he said, reaching into the interior pocket of his blue blazer, pulling out a small card, tossing it onto my lap.
Val came over to me as soon as he was gone. She picked up the card, flipped it over to examine it, front and back.
It was larger than a business card but smaller than a playing card, and it had a picture of the Virgin Mary on the front, her hands clasped in prayer, a set of blue rosary beads threaded between her fingers.
On the back was a prayer. “The Hail Mary,” Val said.
On the bottom of the card, just under the last stanza of the prayer, was printed the name Richard R. Barnes. Beneath that, the dates September 14, 1952-ApriI 6, 2003.
When Tony was finally gone, Val and I stared into each other’s eyes.
“Two questions,” she said. “How in the world could anyone have had these printed in just an hour’s time? And second, why would Tony, of all people, have these printed at all?”
I started to laugh then, hard, my eyes tearing.
“Well, I’m glad you find this so amusing,” Val said. “Here is your chance to see Barnes face a court of law, and some renegade inmates kill him before the trial even begins.”
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