The Shadow Box

by Maxim, John R.

  Anyway, he still hadn't seen her eyes. Maybe he was wrong about the eyes.

  “Pretty boat,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  She was busy replacing a block on her traveler. She had not looked up when he approached. But when he spoke she seemed to stare, for just a beat, at nothing. Fallon saw the logo of the boat's maker.

  ”A Cheoy Lee,” he said. “It's what . . . thirty-six feet?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Full keel?”

  She shook her head. “Shoal draft. Centerboard.”

  “Um ... my name is Michael Fallon.”

  She paused for a moment, chewed her lip. She nodded slightly but did not volunteer her own.

  Another stare. She seemed to be concentrating. She would still not look at him but now he could see her eyes. They were not gray. They were an olive color. Why, he wondered, does he have this thing about eyes? But he was right about them being sad.

  “Fallon,” she repeated. “You're the man who bought the Taylor House?”

  He was startled. But pleased.

  “Could I ask how you knew that?”

  “Small island, Mr. Fallon. And you're wasting your time.”

  She went back to her work on the traveler.

  ”I . . . didn't come about the laughing children. If that's what you think.”

  “They're called starlings.”

  “Starlings?”

  She nodded.

  “Um . . . What's that? Some psychic term for lost juvenile spirits?”

  She looked at him at last.

  “It's a bird term, Mr. Fallon. You have starlings in your attic. Sometimes they get in the walls. It can sound like giggling.”

  She turned away again.

  “Then the house isn't haunted?”

  “It wasn't until now.”

  For the second time this morning, Fallon was getting steamed. He moved a step closer to ask what the hell that crack was supposed to mean. Suddenly, the muscles in her shoulders tightened. She dropped the block and spun to face him, the screwdriver in her hand as if it were a weapon. He stepped back quickly, both hands raised, his expression one of bewilderment. At this, she seemed to catch herself. She let out a breath and lowered the screwdriver to her side.

  ”I have work to do, Mr. Fallon.”

  He stood for a moment, slowly shaking his head. “Have we met before?” he asked.

  “No.”

  ”I mean, were we enemies in some other life? Did I do something rotten like take your parking space?”

  She ignored the sarcasm.

  “So if all I did was walk down here and admire your boat, why are you being such a rude little shit?”

  She glared at him. Another deep breath. For an instant there, her eyes almost softened. When she spoke, her voice was husky.

  “You're a violent man, Mr. Fallon.”

  He blinked.

  “And you're a dangerous man. Excuse me, but I don't find that so attractive either.”

  This was when he walked away.

  He had tried to respond but he began to stammer. And she was about to say something else. It would have been one more good twist of the knife or some sophomoric crack like “That's easy for you to say.”

  If she had, he might have hit her after all.

  No, he would not have.

  Because he was not violent and he was not dangerous. Somehow, however, that rap had been following him since he was in his teens. But just because you know how doesn't mean you do it. Except for those two last January, and except for working out with Moon, he hadn't hit anyone since his freshman year in college. Unless you'd count . . .

  The hell with it.

  Small island, huh? That probably explains it.

  Someone, probably Millie Jacobs, had passed the word that he might be popping in on Megan who is, incidentally, not so goddamned pretty after all. Well . . . she is. But only until she opens her mouth.

  Or maybe Millie just told Madam Cassandra, in which case the word could have spread to Bangkok by now. But what frosted him the most, and concerned him the most, was this stuff about his reputation. It meant that Millie had checked up on him. Or maybe the Daggetts' lawyer had. He would have to find out whom they talked to. And, since he's here, he might as well start with Megan.

  Fallon turned back toward the boat.

  “You're right. You did nothing to deserve that.”

  She said this as he approached. She was sitting in the cockpit, her knees drawn up against her chest. He saw that sadness again.

  “Thank you,” he managed.

  “But I still can't help you, Mr. Fallon.”

  “It's Michael, and I don't think you can either. So why don't we try starting over?”

  She looked at him. The eyes were definitely olive. They seemed to be asking what's the point. But she acknowledged, with a sigh, that maybe she owed him one.

  “I'm out of beer,” she told him. “But I might have some wine in the cooler.”

  Fallon stayed until the next ferry back began boarding. She assured him, over that glass of wine, that she'd heard almost nothing about him. Then, looking away, she asked what he'd heard about her. He told her the truth, or most of it. A good gutsy sailor who owns a great boat and was also a “pretty little thing” made coming for a look very hard to resist.

  That made her smile. It also made her blush.

  As he stepped from her boat, she reached a hand to help steady him. Her touch sent a curious thrill through his arm.

  “Michael . . . it's good that you came,” she said to him.

  He answered, “I'm glad we met too.”

  ”I meant to the island. It's good that you came here when you did.”

  Fallon boarded the ferry with a glow on his face. But his mood had begun to darken by the time it reached mid-channel. By the time it docked he was muttering to himself.

  Here he was, he told himself, just having gotten his head halfway straight, suddenly letting himself get interested in a witch named Megan. Witch, or wacko, or con artist. One or all of the above.

  Forget it, Michael. You don't need this. Here's a girl who can't say goodbye without telling you your fortune. She's the absolute polar opposite of Bronwyn and that's probably why you were drawn to her. It's called overcompensating, or negative rebounding, or some damned thing like that. Except that you both like boats, you have zero in common with her.

  He knew what his Uncle Jake would have said.

  “Keep walking, Michael. She's setting you up.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Because that pretty little girl runs a scam. She'll keep lobbing these little soft ones at you, mixed in with those distant stares, until you beg on your knees to be a paying customer.”

  He wasn't sure he believed that. At least he didn't want to.

  But even if she's straight, he thought, you just know that she'll turn out to be a loon. And delusional. What will we bet that she's ridden in a UFO? She's probably been to Venus. Snuck off there for a weekend with Parnel Minter.

  Millie's niece from Nantucket was sounding better by the day.

  Back in Vineyard Haven, he checked out the whaler, put a deposit on it, then drove straight to Edgartown and Millie Jacobs's office. Millie swore that she had never spoken to Megan.

  He could not very well ask Millie who else on the island might have said that he was violent or who else might have been looking into his past. That would be like sending up a flare. Instead, he changed the subject, chatted for a while about the real estate market, then asked if she had a copy of his credit history handy. Millie pulled the report from her desk and handed it to him. She said it showed a perfect record. He saw nothing in her eyes that said she wondered why he's asking.

  Credit reports list inquiries. He knew that he could be traced to Martha's Vineyard by anyone who wanted him badly enough. But the only inquiry had been by Millie's firm after he put down his deposit.

  No one, he decided, had told Megan much of anything. She had
merely seen steam rising. She had seen his temper and could not resist laying a little mysticism on him. That was all there was to that.

  Chapter 13

  “Okay/’ said Johnny Giordano. “You want to know why we brought Yahya.”

  The Pakistani straightened in his chair and dabbed a napkin to his lips as if he knew that his moment was at hand. It was now his turn to be the teacher.

  “One reason,” explained the younger Giordano, “is corroboration. Mizda talked to Yahya, Yahya talked to me. I wrote down what sounded important but you might have questions of your own. The second reason is you're not going to believe the rest of this unless he's here to swear to it.”

  “I'm listening,” said the lawyer.

  ”A couple of years back, Yahya spent eight months in a federal pen. Tell Mr. Doyle what you got busted for.”

  He set down the orange juice that Fat Julie had ordered for him and pulled his chair forward. But Fat Julie put a hand on his arm. He turned to Brendan Doyle.

  “You know I'd do anything for Jake, right?”

  The lawyer shrugged and nodded.

  “Same goes for Moon and Michael. This Parker character, this Hobbs, anyone you think was involved in killing Jake, going after Mike, I'd dust them in a minute. Johnny here never popped anyone but he feels the same way.”

  Doyle waited.

  “The thing is, we smell money here. Very serious money. I'm going to say this real clear so you won't have any doubt on where we stand. We're doing this for Jake and we don't want nothing from your pocket. But if there's a way to score, I know you're going to find it. Me and Johnny want in.”

  “You have my word.”

  “You gonna tell me why Jake died?”

  Doyle looked away. “I'm not sure yet.”

  “But Jake and Mike . . . they're both connected?”

  “That's not clear yet either.”

  “Then you're fucking blind, Brendan. Either that or you're jerking us around.”

  Doyle held his temper. He chose his words carefully.

  “Julie ... if they are connected, the reason why Jake died is private. It stays in the family.”

  The gangster studied him. “You won't tell me?”

  “No.”

  Fat Julie rubbed his chin. “If I ever found out,” he asked, frowning, “is it anything that would make me and Johnny feel ... I don't know . . . like disappointed?”

  “You're asking me if Jake was dirty?”

  “Big money, Brendan. Anyone can get tempted.”

  “Not Jake. Not for one damned second.”

  Fat Julie nodded slowly. He patted the Pakistani's arm. “Tell Mr. Doyle how you make your living.”

  In the beginning, it was Doyle who was disappointed.

  That the man was a street dealer had already been established. His story had the sound of a routine drug arrest. But he realized, as he penetrated Yahya's singsong accent, that this was not about heroin, not about cocaine. This man sold Pharmaceuticals.

  The crime for which he actually served time, he said, was the selling of anabolic steroids. But he sold many kinds of pills. He said that Indian and Pakistani doctors, not all, but some, who had immigrated to this country and found it difficult to build a practice except as abortionists, would establish what are known as prescription mills. Patients, none of them actually ill, would come in and these doctors would write prescriptions. The patients would pay them three or four times the cost of a normal office visit, fill the prescriptions, and turn the drugs over to the street dealers.

  Then, of course, there were the salesmen who worked for the major drug companies. All of them had thousands of sample packets that they were to distribute to the doctors they called on. Some would hold out these samples and trade them to street dealers in return for recreational drugs. A sealed sample packet would command a premium price because the buyer could be confident that it was genuine.

  “Genuine as opposed to what?” Doyle asked.

  4‘We'll get to that.”

  “Okay, these sales on the street. This is a specialty? I mean, you're telling me this is a whole separate breed of drug dealers?”

  Johnny G. rocked his hand. “Your local pusher can pretty much get you any pills you want. But for some, yeah, I guess you'd call it a specialty.”

  “Suicide stashes, for example,” said Fat Julie. “For them, you want to buy from someone reliable.”

  “Suicide stashes?” Doyle repeated blankly.

  “Say you got cancer like my old man had. You want to be able to pull the plug when you're ready but maybe your doctor has scruples about this. A lot of them say they'll help but, time comes, they get cold feet. So you want to have something handy that'll put you to sleep, no mess, no fuss.”

  “Wouldn't I have pain pills? Sleeping pills? Wouldn't they do the job?”

  “Washed down with vodka, right? That might make you throw up. And even if you knew the right dose, it could take hours. Someone might drop by, find you, and you'd wake up in the hospital with your stomach pumped out and feeling stupid. Worse, from then on your wife might lock up the pills.”

  Doyle grunted. “So what's in a suicide stash?”

  The younger Giordano read from his notes.

  “Darvon, two thousand milligrams, you're dead in an hour. Darvon sucks as a pain killer—you're better off with aspirin—but it's toxic as hell. The stash comes with two Seconals because Darvon won't put you to sleep either.”

  He read on.

  “Dilaudid's good. You only need two hundred milligrams but that can be a hundred pills. Same with Amytal. However, you're dead with fifty Seconal and only thirty Nembutal. Darvon's also only thirty. By the way, don't let anyone sell you morphine or methadone unless you take it intravenously. The next morning, all you'll be is rested.”

  “Johnny .

  “And take a Maalox. Like I said, you don't want an upset stomach.”

  “Johnny, it's fascinating. But this is big money?”

  “Since AIDS? It's getting there. Then you got the clinically depressed, the white-collar unemployed, the—”

  A skeptical frown.

  “Mr. Doyle . . . this is not about doing it. It's like with abortion. It's about having the choice.”

  Johnny G. returned to his notes. “You heard of a drug called Xanax?”

  Doyle nodded. “For anxiety, right? Sheila takes it now and then.”

  “If she takes it, Brendan, it's not just now and then. And Xanax is the anxiety drug. Annual sales, worldwide, just this one drug, are about two billion a year. Maybe much more, but I'll come back to that. The drug's a gold mine because it's pretty much addictive. You try to quit taking it and the withdrawal symptoms are worse than what made you start taking it in the first place. Start taking Xanax, you're on it for life.”

  Doyle was confused. He wanted to ask what this had to do with AdChem but he was reluctant to break Johnny G.'s rhythm.

  “You're going to tell me it's become a street drug?” he asked instead.

  Giordano nodded. “But why, right? Why not just go to your doctor? Mohammed, tell him who buys Xanax from you.”

  “Those who do not have a doctor. Many cannot afford one.”

  “Come on. Who else?”

  “Heroin addicts. Those on methadone maintenance programs.”

  “Tell him why.”

  “Methadone by itself gives no high. Methadone taken with Xanax gives a high very much like heroin.”

  Doyle reached inside his jacket. He pulled out a notepad of his own. He wrote, Flush Sheila's pills. He began to make a second note but could only draw a question mark.

  “Here's the thing,!’ said Fat Julie Giordano. “Johnny here could go on for an hour about this. He's got for instances up the ass. Now ... we don't touch drugs, we don't, deal drugs, but we know drugs. We're wise guys, right? We're supposed to know what's going on. And yet, until Johnny scrounged up Mohammed Yahya here, looking for someone who could talk Pakistani, we knew shit about this.”

  “M
ohammed,” said his brother, “tell him about the steroids you were selling.”

  “They were fake.”

  “Did you know that when you were selling them?”

  “No.”

  “What were they really?”

  “The pills were only caffeine tablets. The liquid steroids were corn oil. It came in vials of the type used for blood samples. A little camphor was added to give it a medicinal smell.”