“Any customers catch on?”
“No.”
“Because they wouldn't, right? The stuff looked and smelled legit. And since no one expects steroids to work overnight, they just keep buying more.”
“Yes.”
“The people who made the fake steroids. Did they get caught?”
The Pakistani nodded. ”A man and his wife. From Kansas, I think. They went to prison.”
Johnny G. touched Brendan Doyle's arm to alert him to what was coming.
“Mohammed . . . how do two hicks from the Midwest, running this mom-and-pop operation, go about lining up street dealers in New York City?”
”I did not buy from them. I bought from legitimate distributors.”
“Which is how you got fooled, right? I mean, you said ‘legitimate,’ right?”
“All things are relative, Mr. Giordano.”
Johnny G. smiled. He turned to Doyle. “He's saying that even legal companies lie and cheat. No shit, right?” He turned back to the Pakistani. “How many of these distributors did they sell to?”
“Many.”
“Give Mr. Doyle a number. The one from your indictment.”
“One hundred and sixty. In twenty-eight states.”
Doyle did ask, finally, how all this connects with AdChem.
“Patience,” said Johnny G. He flipped a few more pages.
“Anyway,” he said, ”I did a little homework. The drug business, worldwide—just prescription drugs now—is around two hundred billion. I mean, think about that. The gross national product of Switzerland isn't two hundred billion.”
“And . . . where there's that much money . . .”
“There's crime. The black market in anabolic steroids alone, in this country alone, is a hundred million dollars. That figure comes from the Feds.”
“Fake or genuine?”
The younger Giordano smiled. He sat back, folding his arms.
“Mohammed,” he asked, “of all those black market steroids out there, what percent are bogus?”
“Not so much, I think. Less than one percent.”
Johnny G. seemed disappointed. He recovered. “Wait, I asked it wrong. Forgetting the caffeine and corn oil, what percent are the real thing? By real, I mean made by legal drug companies.”
“Almost all of it is real. But almost none is legal. It comes from many secret laboratories in Europe . . . Mexico . . . my country . . ,”
“But steroids is all they make, right?”
The Pakistani had to laugh.
“Tell Mr. Doyle what's funny.”
“They make everything.”
“Pills for anxiety, for ulcers, for arthritis? Anything a lot of people use. Anything they can't stop using.”
“That is so. Yes.”
“And they're all counterfeit.”
“Of course.”
“Tell Mr. Doyle . . . wait . . . Give Mr. Doyle your best guess on this. What percent of all prescription drugs, sold in this country . . . not just on the street ... I mean through drugstores and hospitals ... is counterfeit.”
”I would say half.”
Mohammed Yahya had been sent to wash his hands.
“I'm going to ask you again,” said Fat Julie Giordano. “Did Jake have a piece of this?”
“No.”
“But Michael did.”
“Julie . . . no.”
”I want to believe you, Brendan. But someone at Ad-Chem, or at Lehman-Stone, has a serious beef with Michael and we both know they killed Jake.”
Doyle blinked. “Mizda confirmed that?”
“He didn't know. But you're confirming it. Your face, right now, says that you think they killed Jake and I want to know what he was into.”
“Julie ... I swear before Christ. It is nothing like you think it is.”
“We know that AdChem supplies the gooks who make heroin. Are they also making counterfeit pills?”
“To hear Mohammed Yahya, who isn't?”
“Was the Parker guy right? Was Michael some kind of spy, you know, like . . . what do they call that in companies?”
“Industrial espionage,” his brother answered.
Doyle grimaced. He shook his head, but slowly.
“You say no. But you don't look so sure,” said Fat Julie.
He shook it again, more firmly. “Truth is I wondered. But now I'm sure. If you got him talking you'd see he's proud of all the good their products do.”
“Brendan . . . you have to help me out here.”
“Okay, listen to me,” the lawyer said quietly. “While Michael lives, I can't and won't tell anyone what I think might have led to this. I'll only tell you that it goes back to a time when Mike was a little kid. There's just no way that he could know what happened then.”
“Does Moon know?”
“Yes.”
“Gimme a number. I want to talk to him.”
“He won't tell you either. Him most of all.”
“Then he'll say so. Gimme a number.”
Chapter 14
Three days had passed since Michael's visit to Woods Hole. He had awakened each morning with Megan on his mind. Megan of the tied-off blouse and rock-hard belly. Megan of the sad and distant eyes.
He also woke with a measure of guilt because there in the background each time was Bronwyn. Bronwyn of the violet eyes. They were saying, “How could you? How could you so soon?”
Well he couldn't and wouldn't. Megan was exactly what he didn't need right now. Even if she had started to like him a little, even if she was not a fraud, she was probably more than a little nuts. No young girl lives so reclusive a life without having been seriously damaged somewhere along the way. Any idiot could see that any relationship with her was bound to be destructive. She would only make him crazy again just when his own scars were starting to heal.
“A very mature assessment, Michael.”
“Butt out, Dr. Greenberg.''
Three days.
And at the end of each of them, every night at midnight, he would look out his bedroom's front window and there would be Parnel, standing in the street below, his fingertips held to his temples. Pamel would announce his arrival by letting his bike fall over with a crash that could be heard a block away.
Days starting with Megan were bad enough. He didn't need them ending with Parnel. By the third night he had pretty much decided to take Millie's advice and invite Parnel in. Michael would listen to his pitch and be done with it. Then give him some work to do. The gutters needed cleaning anyway. Michael made himself a scotch and waited for the bike to fall over.
The crash came and he looked out. There was Parnel going into his act but suddenly something was different. He wasn't looking at the house. He was looking back down toward the docks and his hands were not at his temples. He was wringing them as if in supplication.
Fallon pressed his cheek against the window and followed Parnel’s line of sight. His heart started thumping again. There, walking up, was Megan. She was dressed in a foul-weather jacket, a thick turtleneck underneath, and jeans. She was walking with her hands in her pockets but she pulled one of them out and raised it. This was apparently to calm Parnel who was already moving toward his bike. She reached him and put a staying hand on his shoulder. He seemed to go limp. He stood there, nodding vigorously in response to whatever it was she was saying. Abruptly, Parnel left. He didn't mount his bike. He walked it. Twice, Michael saw him turn and make a jerky little bow in Megan's direction.
Holy shit, thought Fallon. There should have been thunder. All bow before Megan, Queen of the Netherworld, fashions courtesy of Sperry and Levi Strauss.
But a part of him was glad to see her.
Michael would never tell anyone what happened next. After she rang the bell, that is. After he let her in. He would not have believed it himself.
Fallon greeted her, dressed only in a robe and slippers. He told her he was out of beer but the wine was cold. He lied about the beer. Just something to say. She ignored him.
/> She began moving through the first floor, each room, very slowly. He told her that the murders had been upstairs. Where the lady in white appears. Except on Halloween when she's out eating children. But Megan didn't smile. There was no response at all. She behaved as if he weren't there.
His next move was to step in front of her, take her by the shoulders, and say, “Hey. Remember me? I live here. Michael Fallon?”
Nothing.
With one hand he lifted her chin so that she would have to look at him. He looked into those eyes. There was nobody home. The pupils were dilated. He saw hardly any green.
Amphetamines had to be the answer. Megan was stoned. But if so, her heart should have been running away and he could barely feel a pulse at her throat. Fallon stepped aside.
It was this way all through the first and second floors. She would linger at the oddest places. She would stop to touch an old portrait, for example, or an antique clock. This, he assumed, was to contact someone who had lived here. But she also stopped at a writing desk that Fallon knew to be a recent purchase. She would cock her head, as if listening, and then move on.
The third floor, Michael's floor, took the longest. He had time to pour a second scotch and nearly finish it. In his bedroom she found the Colt Python. She had touched the nightstand, moved away, then cocked her head and made a bee-line back to the drawer it was in. She opened it. Using the tips of her fingers, both hands, she picked up the big chromed revolver and brought it to her lips. She was tasting it, smelling it, he wasn't sure which.
Something else in the nightstand seemed to draw her attention. She reached a hand back in. It found his bottle of Seconal, another of Dalmane, and a third that contained his last two Valium tablets. She had shown no fear of the gun but the pill bottles clearly frightened her. And yet, wide-eyed, she brought them to her cheek. She listened to them. Then, suddenly, she threw them. She threw them back into the open drawer, then wiped her fingers against her breast as if the pills had made them unclean.
She stood for a moment, gathering herself. She looked once more at the heavy revolver. She squinted at it. A slight nod, then another, and one more.
“Three,” she whispered. “But not you.”
It was the first time she'd spoken.
“What does that mean? Three what?”
She gave no sign that she heard him. But she crossed the room in his direction, moving sort of sideways the way you might approach a ledge, and she reached out to touch him. He offered his hand but she pushed it back down. She touched his chest and listened.
She said, “Two ... no ... more than two. Many.”
She looked up at him. Abruptly. Eyes widened. “Hundreds?”
It was a question. Fallon could only shrug and shake his head. The eyes, he saw, were not in focus.
She lowered them, then placed both palms against his chest. She brought her face against it. His bathrobe bothered her. She opened it to feel his skin. She stood that way, not moving. Fallon raised his hands to her shoulders, more for balance than to embrace her. She stiffened at his touch, then slowly seemed to melt. Minutes went by. Neither moved.
Fallon had no idea what to do. Talking was no good because she wouldn't answer. He tried sitting her down but she resisted. Steering her toward his bed seemed totally inappropriate because this was as unpromisingly unromantic a situation as he had ever been in his life. It was like, one time, there was a girl left over at a party. She was too stoned or drunk to be sent home and was clinging to him. The opportunity was there, even some interest. But to act on it would have been crummy.
And yet sex was clearly what Megan wanted. She steered him, first pausing to turn off the light. He tried, gently, to break free of her but she tightened her grip. Megan-the-deck-ape was amazingly strong. He tried again.
“No,” she hissed sharply. “Don't.”
She raised one finger as if ordering him not to move.
Fallon threw up his arms in frustration. “Hundreds,” he hissed back at her. “What does ‘hundreds' mean?”
He asked this as the foul-weather jacket slid to the floor and the turtleneck was being peeled off. She shook her head sharply, then reached to undo her bra while kicking her deck shoes aside.
“Listen . . . Megan . ...”
That finger again.
The jeans and panties came off together. But with effort. They knotted at her feet and she tore free of them. Almost angrily. She guided him to the edge of the bed and, with her free hand, pulled back the comforter. She climbed in first and pulled him down with her. They lay together. Neither moved.
This was not lovemaking. This was not even sex. That girl at the party would have been a transcendent, soaring joining of hearts compared to this. This reminded him more of his first dancing lesson, aged thirteen and shy, when he could not bring himself to touch the Arthur Murray lady's waist with more than his fingertips and kept arching his back lest he chance to come in contact with her bosom.
Megan rolled over him. She straddled him, sitting upright. Fallon, for the first time, felt himself rising. Until now, he did not think it would happen. Megan felt him as well. She took him in her hand and then the damndest expression crossed her face. It was sort of a what-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-this look followed by an oh-yeah-I-remember.
They had sex, sort of. And of the unsafe kind. Not a moan out of Megan. Not a hint of heavy breathing. It took Fallon quite a while to make his plumbing work. To make it work at all, he had to envision Megan setting that storm jib, dressed in her cutoffs and that blouse tied off at the waist. To Fallon, in this circumstance, that picture was infinitely more erotic than Megan astride him, totally nude but a zombie.
Afterward, he went into the bathroom and closed the door. As he toweled himself off he looked in the mirror, grimaced, and began to have one of those listen-you-ass-hole conversations with himself. He did not get very far because he heard Megan's voice, outside in the bedroom, saying, ”Wha—what? Oh, no. Oh, God.” She was, he assumed, getting new instructions from the mother ship.
Fallon stayed in the bathroom, gathering himself, compiling in his head the list of explanations he would now demand of her. No more oblique little references, no more mystical bullshit. That done, he opened the door and came out.
Megan was gone.
Of course she was. Why should that have surprised him? The last he heard of her, from somewhere downstairs, was an agonized groan and the sound of her jacket being zipped.
That, Fallon swore, was it.
He would absolutely, under no circumstances, have anything further to do with that fruitcake. He'd just had the worst and emptiest sexual experience since Onan. He'd been a victim of date rape. And first she'd done her best to try to mess up his head. So why did she take off? Why didn't she stick around and really make a night of it by grabbing the Python and blowing his brains out?
The gun. The Colt Python. What was that business with the gun?
“Three,” he imagined, meant that it had killed three times. That came as no great shock. It doesn't have to mean, however, that the man he took it from was a triple murderer. In New York, street dealers rent these things out for the night. The going rate, according to Moon, is forty dollars. But if you use it in a crime you pay another sixty dollars and that's only if you don't shoot it. Those two were just street bums out looking for a score. That's all they were.
What did “But not you” mean? That he wasn't one of the three? That's too obvious. Maybe she was saying that she knew it wasn't him who killed with it. She could tell that by the taste. Think of all the money that's been wasted on ballistic tests and on fluoroscoping hands to see if they bore traces of powder. Think of all the innocent men rotting in prison because their lawyers never thought of bringing Megan in to lick the murder weapon.
She's even better if she gets to touch your chest.
“Two.”
Fallon's first thought was that she meant Uncle Jake and Bronwyn. But he refused to give her that much credit and, besides, she immedia
tely said, “No . . . more than that” and then, “Hundreds.”
He must have caused a plane crash somewhere along the line. And then gone into denial.
Uncle Jake was right. She started lobbing soft ones and quickly worked her way up to hand grenades. But nothing she said or did was in the least bit impressive. The physical part least of all. Okay, she found the Python but it was in his night table. Open enough of them and you'll find a few guns. You didn't find one? No sweat. You can do just as good an act with an old condom wrapper. You hold it against your forehead and say, ”I feel ... a woman. She is ... hungry. She is ... searching.”
It's all a scam. It has to be.
She shows up here again, she's going out on her ass.
Chapter 15
Doyle had those same three days in which to think about his lunch with the Giordano brothers. He still found much of it hard to believe.
The Shadow Box Page 10