He had made no move other than to motion Bronwyn down. She dropped to a half-crouch behind a display of junk food. Yet the robber seemed to feel threatened by him, perhaps because he was bigger and stronger. Perhaps because this bum, probably so much like the one who had killed Jake, had seen the contempt in his eyes.
What jerked the gun wide . . . what then pulled the trigger . . . was a dying spasm of the robber's brain as the Korean counterman blew it apart with two hollow-nosed bullets from the pistol he kept near the register.
The shotgun's blast caught her full in the chest. Fallon ran to her side. She died staring up at him. One eye had changed color. Or he imagined that, maybe. What he did not imagine was that she was blaming him, hating him. For not protecting her. For letting this happen.
Chapter 3
Bronwyn's service was small and private. The only people in attendance were from Lehman-Stone. Moon still wasn't up to it anyway.
Hobbs, this time, was terribly shaken. He brought with him the firm's chief of security, a thuggish-looking man named Parker, who posted guards to keep reporters from entering. They waited with their cameras on the sidewalk outside. Several of the executives could barely look at Fallon. A few seemed angry. It was as if they, too, blamed him for not taking that blast himself.
But not Hobbs. For all his grief, he tried as before to be comforting. Hobbs took him aside at the door to the chapel and explained to him, gently, that Bronwyn had already been cremated. It was done, he said, at her parents' request.
Her parents were British subjects who had retired to Portugal's Algarve. Fallon was to fly there and meet them over Christmas. The mother, said Hobbs, was too frail to travel and so had asked that Bronwyn's ashes be sent back to England, where they would be interred in a family plot.
Cremation. Fallon could not bear the thought of it. But neither, said Hobbs, could her parents bear the thought of looking at their daughter's ruined body.
“You can't know, Michael, how sorry I am.”
He supposed that he could. It was Hobbs who had brought her over, borrowed her from Lehman-Stone's British affiliate. It was Hobbs who had introduced them and assigned her to work on his team. He had even encouraged their romance and now, quite likely, wished to God that he had not.
“Get away from this town, Michael. You'll be seeing her everywhere you turn. The Palm Beach house is still yours for the asking.”
But his answer was the same. Not until Moon is stronger.
He kissed the urn that held Bronwyn's remains. It was placed in a shipping container. He put a rose in with it. He went home, numb with grief, only to find out that his apartment had been burglarized.
The building's doorman had seen no one enter or leave who was not a resident, but that in itself meant little. Burglars, in the past, had entered through the garage or by crossing from adjacent roofs.
The door to his apartment had not been forced. The interior, however, was a shambles. Missing were his laptop computer, a watch, and a few other pieces of gold jewelry. The thief had also gone through his desk and a file cabinet, but Michael had kept nothing of value in either place.
Some blank disks and a few that held data appeared to be missing. The data, job-related, was no loss. It would be of no use to anyone else and, in any case, he had copies of it at Lehman-Stone. His most grievous loss had been on top of the desk. It was his only picture of Bronwyn. She had given it to him the week before she died. She'd had it mounted in an antique shadow box frame that she said had been in her family for more than two hundred years. It was trimmed in gold filigree. Someone stole it for the gold.
The police came in force. Two uniforms first, then two detectives. This, it became clear, was because Michael Fallon's name was still fresh in their minds from the killing at the convenience store and from the newspaper accounts, a few days prior, of the funeral of Big Jake Fallon.
The police were not surprised that he'd been robbed.
“They watch for funerals,” one of the uniforms told him. “Funerals and weddings. Miserable pricks.”
Fallon, in his state of mind, could not swear that he'd locked the door or even that he'd shut it securely. The doorman suspected another tenant, a troubled young man who lived on the twelfth floor with a widowed mother. He was nineteen, had been arrested several times for petty theft, and had been in drug rehab twice. The detectives checked his apartment and found property that other residents of the building had reported stolen. But nothing of Michael's.
Ten days later, he was out of a job.
It was done suddenly. It was done brutally. No reason was given.
For those ten days he had taken at least part of Bart Hobbs's advice. Don't think about work. Give yourself some time. But having that time made it worse. He had done nothing but take long walks, go to movies without seeing them, and sit with Moon at Mount Sinai.
Moon was in his late fifties. Although solidly built, he was not an exceptionally large man except for his hands. He had the hands of a man twice his size. Uncle Jake had often said that he'd never met a tougher or more dangerous man than Moon.
“Or a kinder, wiser man,” Big Jake had added. “It's as if there's two of him.”
Now, however, he looked anything but tough and his floor nurse had her doubts about his wisdom.
Physically, he seemed much better. His speech was not as slurred and his left hand had pretty much stopped shaking. But he had also taken an unauthorized walk through Central Park. He said he needed to fill his lungs and to be out where there was life. The nurse had chewed him out for it but she let him keep his clothing if he promised to behave.
It was his mental state that troubled Michael. He had a lost and haunted look about him. Michael worried that a world without Big Jake Fallon was not a world that Moon would want to live in. At other times his eyes would take on a peculiar and almost frightening shine. He was imagining, Michael supposed, what he would do to the man who had beaten Jake Fallon to death. If he ever got those hands on him.
Moon understood that he needed to get himself together. He said it himself.
“When you hate,” he said, “but that hate can't find a place to go, it turns inward. You start hating yourself for the things you wish you'd done. You want to hurt yourself.”
“Yeah, well, I'll hurt you if you don't quit talking like that.”
The threat brought a welcome smile. “You're gonna try me now? Now that I'm old and had a stroke? Why don't you wait another year or two, Michael? Maybe I'll have cancer by then.”
“Just don't you leave me, Moon.”
Michael's own need was to get back to work, get busy.
He called Bart Hobbs to say that he'd be in the next Monday. Hobbs argued. He thought it was too soon but Michael insisted. In the end, Hobbs couldn't say no.
On the Friday preceding, however, he found a call on his answering machine from one of Hobbs's assistants. Don't bother coming in, was the message. We've cleaned out your office. Your personal effects are being sent to you by messenger. With them, you will find a document. Sign it, and you will receive a check in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. Refuse, and you will be paid through the last day you worked. Nothing more. No severance. No year-end bonus. This offer is final.
He tried to call Hobbs. Hobbs would not speak to him.
On Saturday, he went to Hobbs's apartment building. It was on Fifth Avenue, facing the park. The doorman would not let him past the lobby. On Monday, he went to the World Trade Center, to the offices of Lehman-Stone. Security guards stopped him. They escorted him from the building. He was furious. Humiliated.
The document in question was in effect an admission that he had been transferring customers' money into a dummy account and had been using inside knowledge to enrich himself. He read it, stunned, and of course refused to sign it. He gave it to Brendan Doyle, demanding that he file a lawsuit at once charging slander and wrongful dismissal.
“What have you been up to there, Michael?” asked the lawyer.
&nb
sp; “Nothing, damn it. It's a goddamned lie.”
“First let me have a talk with them,” said Doyle.
That same day, he received a letter from Moon. Moon had asked him not to visit for a few days and now he understood why. Against his doctor's advice, Moon had checked himself out of Mount Sinai. The letter said that he had been to the cemetery, had a good long talk with Jake. Right now he needs to do some traveling. Maybe go someplace where it's warm.
Moon, like Hobbs, thought that Michael would do well to do the same. Like Hobbs, he knew that the city would be too full of ghosts.
“I'm real sorry, Michael,” the letter ended. “You got twice my sorrow and here I'm running out on you. But there are things I need to settle in my head. I can't do that where everything I see is full of memories and where I lie awake all night wanting to put a real bad hurt on someone.”
Fallon took someone to mean almost anyone. Any Brooklyn burglar. Anyone who had ever been less than a friend to Uncle Jake. He would worry about Moon and he'd miss him. But he was glad to see him back on his feet. And especially out of New York.
Moon didn't write again. For the next two months, December and through most of January, he didn't call either. Michael tried a few places where he thought Moon might have gone. New Jersey, where he still had family. Or Naples, Florida, where Uncle Jake owned a condo out on Marco Island, half of which now belonged to Moon. But no luck. If Moon called or wrote after January, Michael didn't know it. By that time he was running himself.
New York had killed Bronwyn. New York had killed Jake. And then it turned its attention to him.
“Michael . . . it is not New York that was doing all this.''
“That city kills, Doc. That city eats its young.”
“And Bronwyn, incidentally, did not die hating you.”
“You weren't there, Dr. Greenberg. You didn't see her eyes. ” .
It was New York that killed Jake and Bronwyn. You can blame those crimes on society, the breakdown of family values, the decline in church attendance, or just on the lowlife bastards who committed them. But at bottom it's the city. It breeds a meanness, a predatory mindset that you find nowhere else in this country.
New York killed Jake, it killed Bronwyn, and it made a wreck of Moon. You'd think it would have been satisfied, but then, a few days later, it set its sights on the last of the Fallons. It began by firing him.
“Michael . . . it was not New York that fired you.''
“You're not listening, Doc.”
“Sure I am. You said the city breeds meanness. Your firm was in the city. Ergo . . .”
“Doctor . . . you grew up in Wisconsin, right?”
“‘Just outside Madison.''
“Yeah, well . . . in Wisconsin, tragedy is missing the first day of deer season. It's seeing the Packers get blown out by Tampa Bay.''
“Michael . . . ”
“New York fired me and then it blacklisted me.''
“Michael . . . listen to me . . . ”
”And then it tried to kill me. It tried to kill me twice.''
Chapter 4
The first attempt came on a January evening.
Fallon had rarely left his apartment since Bronwyn's service. The holidays had come and gone. He had done nothing to celebrate them, had sent no cards, and had ignored the few invitations he had received.
On that day in mid-January, Brendan Doyle called him, got his machine, yelled, “Pick up, damn it,” and insisted that Michael join him for dinner. They needed to talk. They needed to discuss the pending action against Lehman-Stone.
“No, it can't be done over the phone. You blew us off for Christmas dinner and you didn't show at our New Year's party. You're feeling sorry for yourself, Michael. If Moon were here, he'd kick your butt for you.”
Doyle said he'd be waiting at his regular table in the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel.
“I'll wait fifteen minutes. Don't make me come get you.”
Brendan F. X. Doyle was a trim and dapper little man, far smaller than his temper. He had flaming red hair, worn long and in waves, white at the temples and sideburns. For years, Michael thought he owned only one suit. He owned many but they were all light gray and double-breasted, and like Jake he wore a Knights of Columbus pin in the lapel. He stood when Michael entered and offered his hand. He was reading Michael's eyes, not liking what he saw.
The setting, if anything, had added to Michael's gloom. It made him think of his mother. She had run off when he was eleven. It was at this same table, more than twenty-five years earlier, that Doyle and his Uncle Jake had set him down to tell him what they had learned about her and to brief him on their efforts to find her.
She had written only once. The letter, postmarked Chicago, asked Michael to forgive her. When he was older, it said, he would understand how little time we have on earth. She had been given a chance at a new life. She was going to take it. His father had showed him the letter, written on his mother's stationery, but would not let him read it for himself. He read parts of it aloud, wept silently over others, then slowly tore the letter into strips and flushed them down the toilet. He was drunk for three days afterward. In fact, until the day Michael's father took his life, he was never quite sober again.
A waiter had appeared at the table.
“What are you drinking?” Doyle asked.
“Dewar's and water. A double.”
“He doesn't need a double,” Doyle said to the waiter.
Fallon chose not to argue. It would have brought on a lecture. His mind was still on his mother. Through Doyle, a pain in the ass even then, Uncle Jake had hired a private detective agency to try and track her down. In part, this was to appease her side of the family, which consisted largely of Irish cops and perpetually pregnant women named Kate or Irene. They could not accept that one of their own, a woman who attended daily Mass and received the sacraments, could possibly run off with another man.
The detectives started in Chicago. They reported, however, that she had stayed only long enough to write and post that letter. They traced her to Nevada, where, at a roadside wedding chapel, she married a man who was said to be a former Catholic priest. She did so without benefit of divorce. On hearing this, the Kates and the Irenes could only gasp and make the sign of the cross over their breasts.
The two were subsequently seen in California and later in Oregon, where the trail grew cold. Jake tried again a year later, prior to adopting Michael, but this was to satisfy the courts. No trace of her could be found. She had vanished, totally, into the new life she had chosen.
“Michael . . .”
Fallon blinked himself back to the present.
“They're gone, Michael,” the lawyer said gently. “It's time you accepted that.”
Doyle had assumed, Fallon realized, that he was thinking of Bronwyn and Uncle Jake. He did not correct him. He reached for the weak scotch and water that the waiter had left at his elbow. The lawyer sipped from his own.
“Michael . . .” He studied the ice cubes in his glass. “Have you thought any more about buying a boat?”
”A boat?”
”A sailboat. You've talked about it.”
Yes, he had, but not lately. And not for anytime soon. He'd done a fair amount of sailing, as weekend crew, with friends who lived up in Connecticut. He'd taken lessons on Cape Cod. Like half of New York City, he'd made wistful visits to the boat show at the Javits Center. Someday. The great escape. Either that or buy a ski lodge. Everyone he knew had probably dreamed of doing one or the other.
“What brings that up?”
A shrug. “You have the means and, like it or not, the leisure. Recent events notwithstanding, there are those who would envy your situation.”
Fallon studied him, frowning.
“Mr. Doyle . . . have you spoken to Lehman-Stone?”
“That's another thing. You don't need their money.”
“Need isn't the issue.”
Doyle rubbed his chin. A sigh. “Michael . . . they're
talking criminal charges.”
The frown deepened. “Charging me with what?”
A shrug. “They won't say. But they claim they've got you cold.”
Fallon's color rose.
“And you believe them?”
“Michael . . . you've done something. What is it?”
Fallon threw down his napkin, pushed back his chair. The smaller man seized his arm and hissed. “Sit, Michael. Sit down like a grown-up and talk to your lawyer.”
“My lawyer? You sound more like theirs.”
Doyle reddened. “You'll apologize for that.”
“Like hell I will. It's a frame or it's a bluff. Either way, here's you of all people telling me to fold and blow town. You can kiss my ass, Mr. Doyle.”
“They hate you, Michael. Tell me why.”
Fallon hesitated. “Now it's personal?”
“The way they're behaving . . . it's how people act when someone has betrayed their trust. What might you have done that could be perceived in such a way?”
“Like using privileged information? Nothing.”
The Shadow Box Page 2