THE SHADOW BOX
BY
JOHN R. MAXIM
More praise tor John R. Maxim's THE SHADOW BOX
“TOP-NOTCH WRITING, GREAT ACTION,
MEMORABLE CHARACTERS—WHAT MORE
COULD ANY SUSPENSE READER WANT?”
New York-Times bestselling author Michael Palmer
”A SLICK, ENGROSSING ENTERTAINMENT WITH
PLAUSIBLY MOTIVATED CHARACTERS AND
CHILLING DETAIL ON AN UNDERGROUND
ENTERPRISE THAT'S EVIDENTLY AS
REMUNERATIVE AS NARCOTICS.”
Kirkus Reviews
“FAST-PACED . . . PULSE-POUNDING
ADVENTURE . . . MAXIM'S MASTERPIECE . . .
A VIOLENT, GRIPPING THRILLER . . . LIABLE TO
KEEP YOU UP FEVERISHLY TURNING PAGES
UNTIL THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING.”
Lansing State Journal
“SCARY . . . MAXIM KNOWS HOW TO PULL HIS
READERS IN WITH SOME WILD PLOT TWISTS.
JUST AS GOOD IS HIS CHARACTERIZATION.
EVEN THE SECONDARY CHARACTERS . . .
ARE VIVID. CREATIONS.”
Chicago Tribune
“TERRIFYING ... A CRACKERJACK THRILLER ... A COMPLICATED STORYLINE THAT MAXIM PLAYS OUT WITH SKILL, BOOSTING THE NARRATION WITH FLUID WRITING AND WELL-DRAWN CHARACTERS. HE ALSO REVEALS ENOUGH FRIGHTENING DETAILS ABOUT THE DRUG BUSINESS TO SCARE READERS OFF PRESCRIPTIONS FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
Chapter 1
The killing was to be done just so.
Exactly as ordered. Any improvisation would be punished.
This man, this Jake Fallon, would leave his nephew's apartment building some time between ten and midnight. He would be without a bodyguard. The taxi was to be waiting for him. During the ride back to Brooklyn, the driver was to talk to him of baseball. First of baseball, and then of the driver's wife and children. Nothing else.
But when the time came, when this Fallon climbed into the taxi, and had waved goodbye to his nephew, he was clearly in no mood to talk of baseball. The driver had been warned that this might happen.
“He'll probably have a lot on his mind about then,” said the man who had sent the driver. “Just keep saying your lines. He'll rise to the bait soon enough.”
Jake Fallon, however, had said nothing at all except to give his address and to say what route should be taken. The driver knew these things already. Last night and this morning he had practiced the run from the nephew's building—it was high on Manhattan's West Side—to Fallon's fine brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. He had rehearsed, each time, what he would say in the taxi. He rehearsed what he would say when Fallon knew he was to die. He had worked very hard on his English. He had to learn many things about baseball.
The driver turned south on the FDR Drive. The bridge to Brooklyn was ten minutes away and the Pierrepont Street house was only ten minutes more after that. It was time to try again.
“Such a wonderful game is baseball,” he said.
From in back there was only a grunt.
“Only two years have I been in this country and already I am a fanatic. But here it is November. Until April there is no more baseball. Waiting will be hard.
The man in the back only shrugged. He had been expected to agree.
The driver reached into a bag at his feet. He pulled out a baseball and held it to the partition where his passenger could see it.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked his silent passenger. “It is a home run that was hit by the great Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants and I myself caught it. You don't believe? It was on television. Millions were watching when I caught this ball.”
His passenger managed a smile.
”I know,” said the cab driver sadly. ”I talk too much when I am nervous. My wife, tells me this all the time. It is why she told me to work tonight. She says ‘please don't come to the hospital. She says I'll drive everyone crazy.”’
“Hospital?” The man raised one eye. “She's sick?”
Now about children. “Not sick. She is at last going to give me a son. She thinks it's a daughter but I know it's a son.”
“Either way, you should be there.”
A sigh. “Of course you are right. I will call when I get you home. Are there pay phones near this Pierrepont Street?”
“Not at this hour. You can call from my house/”
This time it was the driver who smiled.
He had studied this man as he entered the taxi. This man known as Big Jake Fallon. The one who had sent him said, “This guy is no pussy. Don't take him head-on.” But he did not seem so dangerous. In years past, perhaps, but now he was old. He was a man in his sixties and he had a big belly.
The nephew, who had come down with the girl to see him off, was younger and fit. His turn would come soon. He might at least make it interesting. Also the bodyguard. But that one would be someone else's job. His death was also to be done just so. They meant to bury the bodyguard alive.
“That was your son?'' he asked Big Jake Fallon. “From his looks he could hit home runs for the Yankees.”
“My nephew. And no, Mike mostly played football.”
“That beautiful girl was his wife?”
“She's ... his fiancee.”
“They will have handsome children. Perhaps, one day, their sons and mine will play for the—”
“Yeah . . . maybe. That's my house on the left.”
This was almost too easy, thought the driver.
The man had punched out a code that unlocked the door and turned lights on all over the house. There was no wife. No one else would be home. Jake Fallon entered and bade him to follow. A ceramic umbrella stand stood in the hall. A baseball bat sat among the umbrellas. To the right was a room that was nothing but sports. Photos of boxers and basketball players and men wearing football helmets. All with autographs and words of friendship toward Jake Fallon. But much of the room was baseball. There were bats on the wall and a few under glass.
Fallon pointed toward the phone at one end of the room.
“Make your call,” he said. “Then feel free to look around if you like.”
He turned and walked to a book at the room's other end. It was a dictionary, a large one, that rested on a stand. Fallon leafed through the pages. As he did so, he muttered one word. The word was “Adler.” The driver heard it clearly.
His instructions from this point were clear. It is to be slow, it is to be painful, and the weapon must be a bat.
He is to be given the hope that begging for his life might save him. Make him plead. Try to make him soil his trousers. Tell him then, and only then, why he is to die. Say, “This is from Armin Rasmussen.” It was a name that the driver did not know. But this Fallon, he was assured, would remember it well.
The driver took a bat from a trophy case. He caressed it with his hands, reading the names of the players who had signed it. Jake Fallon glanced back at some sound that he'd made. He was not alarmed. He was accustomed, no doubt, to his treasures being touched. He turned back to the book, flipped one more page, and found what he was looking for. Cursing softly, he straightened. He took a long breath. By the time he released it, the driver had crossed half the room.
His instructions were to start with the knees. But the shoulders were better. You can't draw a weapon if your shoulders are smashed.
The driver raised the bat. He swung it with all his might.
Chapter 2
His housekeeper found the body the next morning. She had to be treated for shock: The police sent a car for his nephew, Michael. He was needed to make the identification.
Michael Fallon had to do so by the suit that his uncle had worn that evening, and by
his rings, and by the Knights of Columbus pin on his lapel. There was little left of his face.
“I'm real sorry, Mike,” said one of the detectives.
Michael could barely speak.
“Where was Moon, by the way?”
Moon was Jake's friend, his bodyguard. More than that, he was family.
“He's...up in the Catskills,” Michael managed to say. “Uncle Jake had a piece of some middleweight. Moon's helping to train him.”
That Moon should have been here was left unsaid.
The detectives could only guess what had happened. Jake would have arrived there some time before midnight. They would pin it down further from the cab company's records. He walked in on a burglar who was looting his collection of sports memorabilia.
The detectives had known Big Jake Fallon. It was just like him, one said, to fight. Forget his age. Man to man, he said, Jake could probably have taken his assailant. But the burglar had one of Jake's baseball bats. It was probably what he'd gone there to steal.
The police said he must have been an amateur. Maybe some strung-out junkie. Maybe some local kid who had seen it while delivering groceries. A pro, they said, would have known that much of Jake's collection—especially a bat signed by all of the 1969 World Champion Mets and inscribed to Big Jake Fallon—would be impossible to sell. And a professional would not have panicked. This one did.
He went into a frenzy. Big Jake had apparently tried to ward off the blows with a heavy oversized dictionary that he kept on a stand in his study. Perhaps, thought one of the homicide detectives, he'd gone in to look up a word. He heard a noise behind him, turned, probably saw the bat and grabbed the dictionary to use as a shield. It did no good. It was knocked across the room, smashed out of its binding. Then the man with the bat broke both of Jake's arms.
Jake must have kept fighting. He knew how to use his feet. He must have hurt the burglar, maybe marked him. The police could think of no other reason that the thief went so berserk. He kept pounding Uncle Jake long after he went down. His ribs, his shoulders, his head. He stopped, from the look of it, only when the bat split in two.
Michael's fiancee, Bronwyn, arrived at the house. He had asked her not to come but she did. She said this was no time for him to be alone. She took him away from there.
It was Bronwyn who helped get him through those first few days. She took charge of arrangements for the funeral. She had met Uncle Jake only once. And Moon not at all. Neither knew that she existed until he called his uncle to announce that he was engaged. Jake had come that night to meet her.
The engagement had been a sudden thing. He'd known Bronwyn for barely three months. He had kept her a secret from Jake and Moon because he still could not believe his own luck and because he didn't want either of them grilling her. Moon, especially, had a history of making some of his woman friends want to grab their coats and run. Moon could be scary. And he happened to be black. Bronwyn said that Moon's absence was all the more reason to have his uncle over now. Without Moon to encourage him, she said, he might be on his best behavior.
And he was. In fact Bronwyn, by dessert, had him wrapped around her finger. The dinner she prepared was part of it. She said the easiest way to a man was through his stomach. Bronwyn did it all from scratch. She'd been planning the menu for a week.
She didn't do his ego any harm either. She told him how thrilled she was to finally meet him. She said that before coming here she'd read everything she could about New York City and there was scarcely a book that failed to mention the notorious Big Jake Fallon. She got him telling stories about New York pols, about the fight game, about his “handsome nephew,” and especially about Moon. She heard the sanitized versions of most of them.
She was so beautiful that night. She wore a simple black sheath, bare at one shoulder, with very little jewelry because the dress didn't need it. No jewel could compete with her eyes. They were violet in color, the only violet eyes he had ever seen. The dress showed off her flawless skin. Her dark hair was cut in a modified shag with the ends teased forward to frame her face. She was tall and sleek and her every move showed a dancer's grace.
The major hurdle, Fallon had thought, would be the fact that she was English. Jake was not overly fond of Brits. Nor was he likely to be thrilled at the prospect of his nephew marrying a Protestant. But in Bronwyn's case, he seemed ready to make an exception.
After dinner, the dishes cleared, she sat down to play a nocturne by Chopin. To her gratified surprise, Jake recognized the piece. And Bronwyn played it like an angel.
If it bothered Jake at all that this had happened so quickly, or that the wedding could not be in the Church, he gave no sign. His eyebrow went up only once. That was when he saw Bronwyn's things in the bathroom and realized that she'd already moved in. She'd moved in, in fact, only two weeks after he met her.
Jake would have given his blessing. Michael was sure of it. But toward the end of the evening, a change had come over him. Bronwyn noticed it. She asked him if anything was wrong. He assured her that it was nothing, another matter entirely that he had suddenly remembered. Apologizing to them both, he said that he'd better call a taxi.
There was no need for that, Bronwyn told him. There were always plenty of cabs cruising down 82nd Street. They walked him down and flagged one at the curb. He was dead an hour later.
Moon was not at the funeral either.
He was in Mount Sinai Hospital. He had suffered a mild stroke within hours of being told that Big Jake Fallon was dead. It was Bronwyn who had him brought down from the Catskills and saw that he had the best of care. Thank God for Bronwyn.
She arrived at the service with the entourage from Lehman-Stone, the investment banking firm for which they both worked. It was where they met.
Bart Hobbs, their boss, was in the lead.
Hobbs was a slight but elegant man, old money, all the right schools. He had always seemed nice enough, Fallon supposed. But his niceness had a scripted feel to it. It was as if someone had written down for him what he was expected to say in a given situation. He came with several top executives, all in identical dark suits, all with grim but bewildered expressions. Even Avery Bellows, a former senator, now head of their Washington law firm and a lobbyist for Lehman-Stone's clients, had flown up from the nation's capital.
The cause of their bewilderment was the rest of the crowd. It must have seemed that below a certain social level, every name in New York was there. There were the deputy mayor, two councilmen, several sportswriters and columnists, theater people, ballplayers, many priests and nuns. At least a dozen prizefighters showed up, including three former champions. Big Jake Fallon had known them all.
Brendan and Sheila Doyle came in with two carloads of hoods up from Brooklyn. Brendan Doyle was Jake's lawyer. He was also Michael's. Jake's estate, it turned out, was to be evenly divided between Michael and Moon after a list of smaller bequests was distributed. His longtime housekeeper got a generous pension.
Bronwyn mixed easily. She always did. In the church and at the reception afterward, the Lehman-Stone delegation had formed a tight little knot, counting the minutes until they could decently retreat to a world they understood.
Bronwyn would not permit it. In her gentle way, she chided them, forced them to circulate. Perhaps as punishment for his being standoffish, she led a horrified Bart Hobbs into the thick of the Brooklyn crowd and, through Doyle, introduced him to the Giordano brothers, the elder of whom had sixteen indictments, no convictions, unless you'd count a couple for simple assault. Actually, they had something in common: an interest in finance. The Giordanos were loan sharks who, in addition, pretty much controlled the Brooklyn docks.
Hobbs, having survived that encounter, was getting new instructions from Bronwyn. He caught Michael's eye, called him over, and made a show of handing Bronwyn a set of keys.
“Michael, I have given Bronwyn an order,” he said. “She is to take you to my home in Palm Beach. She is not to take no for an answer. Your flight is tomor
row at noon. You two are to stay there as long as you like, soak in my pool, take walks on the beach, hold on to each other, take care of each other. I don't want to see either of you until you both feel ready to come back to work.”
Bronwyn studied the ceiling, looking pleased with herself. She had probably written that out for him.
But Michael declined with thanks. He could not leave New York because he wouldn't leave Moon. Two nights later, Bronwyn Kelsey was dead.
She died because at the end of the second day, the sadness and the exhaustion having caught up with her, she wanted a cigarette. Her first in a year.
He urged her to forget it, just go to bed. But she reached for her coat. There was a convenience store, not far, just over on Columbus Avenue. She said that if she left now, she could get there before it closed. He could not very well let her walk there alone. They arrived at the store five minutes before closing, just as another New York lowlife was getting ready to rob it.
She should not have died that night. What made it all the harder to bear was that, if anything, it should have been him. The robber had been standing by the cooler, waiting for them to make their purchase and leave. But Bronwyn had lingered at the magazine rack. The robber pulled a cap down over his face and a sawed-off shotgun from his coat. He aimed it at the young Korean counterman who stood frozen. The shotgun then swung toward Michael.
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