Night Swimming

by Robin Schwarz

  “I don’t think it was Satchmo,” MaryAnn said.

  “Who cares? Who cares who it was?!” Charlotte yelled. “It was somebody who played the damn horn. The point is, even if it’s a short sentence, it might as well be a million years, ’cause that’s what it will feel like without Skip.”

  MaryAnn took her hand and studied her face long and hard, as if her intensity alone would beam them both out of there.

  “There is another way,” MaryAnn said quietly, leaning conspiratorially toward Charlotte.

  “There is?”

  “Yes, there is. Let me just think about this for a minute before I say it out loud. I want to make sure we can do it.”

  A minute passed. Charlotte stared at MaryAnn until she could no longer stand the tension. “Tell me already!”

  “Shhhh. Okay. I’m going to tell you, but you can’t tell a soul, not a soul. Not Dolly, not Skip, not the ladies, no one.”

  “Not Skip or Dolly?”

  “No. At least not yet. Later, when it’s over. Much later. The time has to be right.”

  “When what’s over?”

  “You are sworn to utter and complete silence for the moment. Even when it’s over. Even after we’ve pulled it off, both Skip and Dolly have to wait. You can’t make any calls. I’ll handle that. They’ll all be made from outside of my house. Can you do this, Charlotte?”

  “Yes, yes, I can. I promise. I can do it.” She paused. “Do what?”

  “Because if Tom ever knew that anyone else knew what we were planning, he’d put a contract out on me. So after I get him to agree with me—which I will—Tom has to be sure this whole plan is on the Q.T. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “You know about Tom. I told you about his family.”

  “Yes?”

  “Besides the fact that they’re total sleazebags, scum of the earth, unredeemable, unforgivable slime buckets in every way... they just may be able to help us.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve never really asked them for a favor. A big favor. They’ve thrown some stupid jobs Tom’s way so we could make a little money when things got tight, but they did it mostly for the baby. Tom’s never been a bookie or a numbers runner or really ‘in’ on the family business, but he’s blood, and they take that very seriously. It’s a big deal to them in that family.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I could ask him to ask one of his cousins or uncles or conciliators to fake a passport for you,” MaryAnn whispered.

  “Fake a passport?” Charlotte almost fell off her chair.

  “Shush! Yeah. You get out of jail, and we get you out of here. That way you don’t have to do any time.”

  “Jump bail?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess that’s what it’s called.”

  “Jeez, MaryAnn, I have to think about this. I mean, that’s against the law.”

  “And stealing two million dollars is just an oversight?”

  “Good point.”

  “You could start a new life, just the way you were starting it in Hollywood. Except this time it will be forever.”

  “Can I mull this over? I’m not asking for a lot of time. Just one night.”

  “Of course. It’s a big decision. But when you’re mulling, remember this: You won’t be in jail, Charlotte. You’ll be free. Free as a bird.”

  “Free,” Charlotte repeated it. She could taste it, like a cold glass of water on a long hot day. And then all I need to do is fall off the ends of the earth.

  “And think about two other things while you’re mulling: Where do you want to go, and what do you want your new name to be on your passport?”

  “My new name?”

  “Well, you can’t exactly travel as a known felon on your passport. For God’s sake, even I know that, Charlotte. I’m going to talk to Tom tonight. No commitments yet, so don’t worry. It’s all set in Jell-O right now. But if you decide to stay cooped up in jail and eat food that makes school lunches seem like fine cuisine, and wear stripes every day that do nothing for any woman’s figure, and spend every afternoon on laundry duty with a woman whose first name is Frank but prefers that you call her Mommy, well, then, that’s dandy. But if you decide to be free and smell the glorious air of a spring day and track down the man you’ve finally found love with, then you have to let me know. Because if that’s the case, then I want to have your passport ready to go.”

  That was enough to convince Charlotte. She didn’t need any more time to mull. It was mulled. MaryAnn had made her point. “I’ll do it, MaryAnn; I’ll do it. Set it up. I’m ready. In fact, I’m so ready, I’m late.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure sure, or half sure?”

  “Sure sure.”

  “I don’t think it’s a bad idea to go to Italy, Charlotte. Tom has family there. If you ever needed help, well, at least you’d have a place to go.”

  How bizarre all of this was. Before California, Charlotte had never been out of Gorham, and now she was going to Italy. “All right,” she agreed. Italy was as good a place as any.

  “First class to Italy, Charlotte. First class all the way.”

  “This is just so... unbelievable.”

  “And what do you want your name to be—on the passport? You have to have a new identity.”

  Charlotte barely paused. “Lila... Lila Nata.”

  “Lila Nata? How’d you come up with that so quickly?”

  “Because Lila means ‘night,’ and Nata means ‘swimmer.’ Night swimmer. Skip gave me that name.”

  “Oh ...” but MaryAnn couldn’t finish her sentence. Her voice was quivering ever so slightly.

  “Now, don’t go all sappy on me, MaryAnn.”

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath and regrouped, but not without a twinge of wistfulness. “So tonight I tell Tom what we’re planning and get him to help us.”

  “He won’t mind?”

  “After fifteen years of making me miserable, he owes me. It’s a down payment.”

  Charlotte laughed.

  “I think you may be rubbing off on me, Char. Next thing you know, I’ll be smoking marijuana behind the Knights of Columbus clubhouse.”

  Now they both laughed, and MaryAnn stood to leave.

  “I think of you as a little bird in a cage right now. And I’m gonna open that door. Somehow, it makes me feel oddly privileged to do it, too... and yet at the same time, there’s some part of me that wants to cry. Strange.”

  Charlotte watched MaryAnn leave. That was exactly how she felt. Like a little bird in a cage. But MaryAnn was opening the door... of all people. And some part of that made Charlotte want to cry, too.

  CHAPTER 70

  WELL, WELL, WELL,” Bloomberg said, approaching Charlotte’s cell. “It appears you have a fairy godmother somewhere in this world.”

  “I do?” Charlotte flashed a smile.

  “It would seem so. Someone is going to put up a bond for you to the tune of two hundred thousand dollars. A woman named Dolly Feingold in California, and, I come to find out, she’s not even a relative.”

  “Yeah, well, I once watered her flowers and fed her cat when she went on vacation, and she’s been eternally grateful to me ever since.” Both Bloomberg and Charlotte giggled as the guard let the lawyer into her cell.

  “So what happens next, Walter?”

  “There is a simple proceeding that takes place, which merely makes sure that the person signing for bail is legit. Your friend can post the money in California, and it then gets transferred into a New Hampshire court account.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “You should be out of here by the end of the day.”

  “End of the day? That’s incredible.”

  “Yup. Now, you have to remember that there are certain restrictions that come with your bail. You can’t leave the jurisdiction of the state, and you have to be at the arraignment. Remember, we spoke about that? It’s where you plead guilty or not guilty in front of the
judge.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, I remember that.” This was suddenly happening all too fast for Charlotte. When was her flight to Italy? Before or after she was supposed to plead guilty?

  “When do I go in front of the judge?”

  Walter scanned his page as quickly as an Evelyn Wood Speed Reader. Charlotte was impressed. Now, here’s a good Jeopardy contestant, all wasted on the law. “You’re set to go in front of the judge on Tuesday.”

  Today was Friday. She needed to speak to MaryAnn immediately. Tonight she would walk out of jail. She needed to speak to MaryAnn. Tonight she would finally be able to get in touch with Skip and Dolly. But where would she go? She needed to speak to MaryAnn. She needed to pull this crazy plan together in what seemed like only minutes. She needed to act natural, to stay calm and unassuming at all times. But more than anything, one thing was perfectly clear: She needed to speak to MaryAnn. She needed to speak to MaryAnn.

  CHAPTER 71

  CHARLOTTE WAS SLEEPING when she heard someone clear his throat. For a moment she thought it was Skip, and roused quickly only to turn around and see that it was not Skip who stood just beyond the bars. It was Makley.

  “Hello, Charlotte.”

  “Oh,” Charlotte said, disappointed, “hello.”

  “May I talk with you for a few minutes?”

  “Let me check my schedule.” Makley smiled, and the guard let him in.

  “I’m visiting on official business. I thought maybe you could help us in clarifying what exactly went on with Kelly while he was president at the bank.”

  “I heard his little scam was uncovered.”

  “It was. But we still don’t know the whole story. He won’t talk. He has this high-powered lawyer now, as does his brother-in-law.”

  “Is he in jail?”

  “Out on bail.”

  “You see? Where’s the justice?”

  “Well, I’m getting to that. If you can help us with whatever you know about Kelly, then maybe we can help you.”

  Maybe, there’s always a maybe. “How?”

  “The court will look very favorably on your cooperation, Charlotte.”

  The idea of nailing Kelly held great appeal for Charlotte. She hated him as much as the rest of Gorham did.

  “You know, I’m getting out on bail today myself,” Charlotte boasted.

  “Yes, I know. Congratulations. However, bail is temporary; sentencing is another thing altogether. That’s why I hope you can help us. In helping us, you help yourself.”

  Charlotte didn’t know how much weight her information would carry, but she was willing to share what she knew. As much for herself as for the people of Gorham. They had a right to know. “I couldn’t quite figure it out while I worked there,” Charlotte began, “but in going over it again and again, I started to put two and two together in California.”

  “Go on,” Makley urged.

  “Well, I started thinking how odd it was that so many people were opening up bank accounts over the phone and sending in the applications rather than coming to the bank.”

  “Over the phone?”

  “Yeah, it was a new initiative Kelly started. Sounded odd to me— who in Gorham didn’t have time to make it into the bank? for some it was the monthly family outing—Anyway, all the paperwork seemed to be in order when I checked it. Funny thing was, Kelly insisted on taking care of these accounts. He’d approve them and personally open each account. I never really got to see all the information. Kelly kept a separate file in his office.”

  “How many accounts would you say you opened like this?”

  “I don’t know. I just remember seeing names on accounts that I didn’t recognize, people who I’d never even seen in the bank,” Charlotte said, squinting as if trying to visualize the files on each one. “What I found odd was, these accounts would be dormant, and then suddenly one or two of them would have a lot of activity. And I mean a lot . Hundreds of thousands of dollars were going in and coming out of them.”

  “Were you suspicious?”

  “Yes, especially because it was only Kelly who was hovering over the activities of these accounts. He had no idea anyone had access to them. I only could get in because I had learned how in an advanced computer class the bank sent me to. Anyway, I watched Kelly become these folks’ personal banker. But that’s not a crime, is it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought, so I just watched and tried to figure it out. I didn’t make waves; I needed the job. However, it bothered me. Even after I fled, it continued to bother me.”

  “So what did you conclude about this, if anything?”

  “My theory? And mind you, Mr. Makley, it’s only a theory, but I think Kelly was skimming from other people’s accounts—real accounts—and putting them into illegal accounts, taking out whatever he could without raising eyebrows, and doing something with the money to make him more money.”

  “Yeah, but how much money does the average customer in Gorham have?” Makley wondered, as if he’d found some fatal flaw in Charlotte’s logic.

  “Well, when you think about it, there’s about fifteen hundred accounts. There’s Christmas funds, college funds, parents opening funds for their children. There’s CD’s, along with the checking and savings. Add it up. We had a surprisingly good bottom line to skim from, given the number of people, in spite of the fact we’re not rich. ‘We’ being Gorham folks, except Halfpenny, whose accounts were never touched. I checked.”

  “And if you add all that up, you can see how it could come to something. I watched Christmas funds and college funds go up and down, and I think Kelly somehow deposited the original money he scammed back into our customers’ accounts without them ever knowing it was missing. It all happened very fast. And with something like a retirement fund or a Christmas fund, you’d never check. Plus, Kelly would fool with account balances on the computer. I knew that, because in my night class, ‘Computers and You,’ they taught us to monitor irregularities in banking practices. I was good at it. It just sort of came naturally, and I got so I could figure out when these dormant accounts became flush with funds and went down again. Whatever he was doing, he and his brother-in-law, they were making money. And lots of it.”

  “We searched the banks files, and every person was accounted for. There were the correct balances, and we could find no absentee accounts opened,” Makley said.

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. Once Kelly saw the red flags going up, he knew enough to destroy them.”

  “So we have nothing.”

  “Not exactly.” Charlotte smiled. “I was certain something wasn’t right. I just couldn’t figure out what.”

  “And...?”

  “I thought maybe one day if I did figure it out, I might need copies of those accounts. See, like many people, I hated Kelly.”

  Makley’s eyes widened. It was suddenly clear that Charlotte had something on Kelly that no one else had: evidence.

  “So, before I left, I walked into Kelly’s office and copied whatever accounts I knew about off his computer. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them. Copied the activity down to the penny of their last deposits and withdrawals. See, one of the specific questions I asked in class was, how do you gain access to the inaccessible?”

  “Your teacher told you how to do that?”

  “No, the sixteen-year-old boy who sat behind me.”

  “And you still have the copies of these accounts?”

  “Yup.”

  “Where?”

  “I put them someplace I thought they’d be safe. I mailed them to Washington, D.C., and had them copyrighted.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. After I got to California, I wrote away for the appropriate forms. I copyrighted them under poetry.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Yeah, I kept thinking one day there might be poetic justice. Perhaps today’s that day.”

  Makley laughed. “Perhaps it is. Can you give me the numbers that the account is registered un
der?”

  “Got a pen?”

  Charlotte had memorized the numbers; she knew them as well as she knew her own phone number.

  “Thank you, Charlotte. Thank you very much.”

  As he was leaving, Charlotte called out to him one last time, “I just want you to know, Mr. Makley, that if I had figured out back then that Kelly was taking money out of people’s accounts for his own gain, I would have stayed and made sure this was put right. I swear on my mother’s grave, Mr. Makley. These people are my friends.”

  Makley looked back at Charlotte through the bars. “I know that.” But just before he turned to go, he asked her one last question: “And if you had known then what you know now, would you have fled?”

  “After everything I’ve been through?”

  Makley nodded.

  “Absolutely.”

  Makley shrugged his shoulders. “Huh,” he said as he climbed the stairs.

  He could not see the smile he left on Charlotte’s face, nor could Charlotte see the smile she left on his.

  CHAPTER 72

  AGLITCH? What kind of glitch?”

  Charlotte and MaryAnn sat in the cell, looking dumbfounded at Makley.

  “The clerk that handles the bond transactions went home sick this morning before processing your bail.”

  “Then get him back here, and make him do it now,” MaryAnn demanded.

  “We can’t. It’s after five.”

  “Not in California.”

  “I’m sorry, there’s just no one who can do it here.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, I’m afraid,” he said, turning to Charlotte, “that you’re going to have to spend the weekend here.”

  “Here? As in here, in this cell?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to tell you this.”

  “This is an outrage, a miscarriage of justice,” MaryAnn protested.

  “I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it. You’ll be out first thing Monday morning. I give you my word.”