“I'm afraid we're booked solid,” Fallon told him.
“Figured as much. I told Betsy—Betsy's the wife—but she had her heart set.”
“Well . . .” Fallon tried to ease her disappointment. “You know it's not really all that haunted.`'
“Comes and goes, you're saying.”
“That's a good way to put it. Listen, the whole island's pretty well booked but if you do find something, you're welcome to stop by.”
“Why, that's real friendly of you. The name's Peabody, by the way. Wally Peabody.” Nice harmless name. Almost as good as Granny Futterman.
“Michael Fallon, Wally. And it would be my pleasure to show you the house.”
In fact, he suggested, if you're in town, you might also look up a man named Parnel Minter who is on a first-name basis with half the ghosts in Massachusetts. Parker thanked him. He and Betsy might just do that, he said.
Parker said goodbye and sat staring at the phone.
Michael Fallon, he thought.
No hesitation when he gave his name. Not a care in the world in his voice. And yet there's no question that when he left New York last February, he knew he was running for his life.
What changed? All Parker could imagine was that Fallon must think it's over. But why? Because Doyle has the evidence? It didn't sound that recent. It sounded like, for some time now, Fallon’s biggest problem was whether he had enough towels for his weekend guests. No way that he's been out burning down houses.
He's not hiding. He's been stashed. He's being kept out of this while Doyle and the jig play their games. But a million bucks is still a million bucks.
“Hector?”
Let's see. They'll need a boat for this. You don't kill a man on an island and then sit around waiting for a ferry. He'd use Hector. Hector knows how to drive one and Fram Childress has one. Keeps it up in Oyster Bay. He'd use Haroun and Yahya. Haroun's a good knife and Yah-ya's done this before. He's made hits for Giordano.
Hector came in.
“You're going to make some money,” Parker told him. “And you get another shot at Fallon. Here's what I need by tomorrow.”
Bart Hobbs had begged Doyle not to leave. “Lock yourself in,” was all Doyle said. It was the same thing he said to his wife when she called. He grabbed the gun from his desk and ran out. Hobbs tried to stop him. He grabbed his arm. Doyle would have hit him if he hadn't let go.
Then Doyle yelled back from the hallway.
“Hobbs? My secretary's back. Maureen, don't let anyone go in there.”
Hobbs heard the sound of running feet as Doyle sprinted down the fire stairs. He sank into a chair.
This is how he helps me? This is how he protects me?
But at least he had his pistol. The double doors to Doyle's office seemed solid and they had two locks plus a bolt that slid into the floor. He locked them in every way he could.
“Um . . . Mr. Hobbs?” The secretary's voice. “Are you all right in there?”
He tried to say yes but no sound came out.
He went to the windows behind Doyle's desk and looked down. They were only on the second floor. He could get out that way if Michael came. Michael and the black man.
But the windows, were the kind that didn't open. He could smash one with a chair but, even then, even if he jumped to the alley below, he could see no other way to get out. There was a chain link fence, topped with wire, and beyond it an apartment building. He could climb that fence, he supposed. He was still athletic enough. But if he hung himself up at the top, he'd be right at the level of this window and ten feet away from whomever he was trying to escape.
There was a bathroom. That door had a lock as well. He would sit in the bathroom and wait in there.
Haroun, the Turk, did not like this so much.
He stood on the sidewalk watching the building that was made of brown glass. He watched for several minutes after the lawyer came running out and jumped up and down until a taxi stopped for him. And so he is gone. But how does one know what to do?
Every time Mr. Parker says a thing to Hector, Hector says, “Here is what he means, Haroun.”
English is very difficult. There is no such confusion in Turkish. In Turkish, “We don't like him” means “We don't like him,” and “Go cut his throat” means “Go cut his throat.”
Mr. Parker says many things which are equally imprecise. One time, his use of the phrase “Fuck him” very nearly caused great embarrassment. Since then, Hector always translates.
And yet, thought Haroun, he cannot do nothing. Hector says, “If you see the chance, Mr. Parker wants you to take it.”
Easy for Hector but what if it's he who misunderstood? Will Hector take the blame? Haroun did not think so. Not after the thing in the subway last winter when all Hector had to do was give a little push to a tired man with a full belly.
Haroun made a decision. Between killing and nothing there is room for other choices. He will go into that building and he will look for Mr. Hobbs. If he is no longer our friend, it is right that he be punished.
Haroun would just cut him a little.
Moon had parked a block away. On his one slow pass of Doyle's building, he saw a Con Ed crew that had chalked off a strip of pavement and was about to tear it up with jackhammers. And he saw the man who was watching. Neither had alarmed him greatly. Neither had the look of a surveillance. The Con Ed men were busy watching women and the dark-skinned man seemed in a dither.
He was talking to himself, he was wringing his hands. Any decent surveillance takes two men at least. From what Moon could see, this man was alone and he wasn't really watching the entrance. It was more the whole building. He wasn't staring up at Doyle's window either because Doyle's office was on the second floor rear.
There were other lawyers in Doyle's building. The man's wife, for all Moon knew, might be in there talking divorce. That would account for a certain wildness in his eyes. At one point, Moon thought he saw him mouth “Fuck him.” Or “Fuck her.” One of those.
Moon drove on and parked. When he came back on foot, the man was gone.
Hobbs, sitting on the lid of Doyle's toilet, heard the commotion in the outer office.
The sounds were muffled by the thickness of two sets of doors and by the chatter of a distant jackhammer. But he had heard a third door open and close and he heard Doyle's secretary ask, “What do you want?” She asked, “What do you think you're doing?” And then she tried to scream. It ended with a squawk.
Hobbs put his vodka glass down and felt for his pistol. But it could not be them, he told himself. The woman would surely know them both. He pressed his ear against the bathroom door. He heard the sound of the knob of the double doors being turned this way and that and the duller sound of a shoulder testing its strength. The next sounds shocked him. A booted foot, stomping against wood. And now of wood splitting.
Hobbs backed away. His legs became rubber. They threatened to desert him. One hand struck the glass which he had drained of vodka and sent it clattering into the sink. He lunged for it, seized it, caressed it as if he were silencing a dog. The shattered door, its hinges bent, creaked open. And suddenly, he heard a cry of pain. Then, with a sickening, splintering crash, the doors exploded inward.
Moon had kicked him low, aiming for the spine. But the man from the sidewalk had twisted as the double doors gave way and the kick caught his hip instead. The man slashed at him, blindly, with a long curved knife which Moon had not seen. Moon caught the man's wrist in passing. He bunched the fingers of his free hand and jabbed with their tips at the killer's eye. He felt only soft tissue. This blow was clean.
The man yelped and tried too late to cover it. For an instant, he probed with his fingers, searching for an eye that had been flattened and displaced. With an anguished roar, he spat at Moon and whipped his foot at Moon's crotch. But Moon was too close. Moon jabbed at his throat with a rigid thumb and then at the remaining eye. The man let out a choking wail. He wrenched himself free of Moon's grip and stumbled,
limping, through the shattered double doors. Moon saw no sign of Doyle inside.
“Moo . . . Moon?”
He glanced toward Maureen who was behind her desk, trying to pull herself up. Her mouth was bloodied. One side of her face had begun to swell. The glance took the smallest part of a second but in that time the man had whipped his knife, blindly, at the place where he thought Moon was standing. Moon ducked and covered. The spinning knife caught the top of his skull. The handle, not the blade, took skin. Now the man was clawing at his waist for a pistol. He found it. Hands slippery with blood, he fumbled for the safety.
Moon knew the weapon. It was the same Beretta, an assassin's gun, that the man in Palm Beach had carried. Moon could only imagine that this man preferred a knife. Knife men like to see your eyes. This one wouldn't, not after today. The man could not see but that gun still made him dangerous.
“Moon?”
Maureen again. The man fired toward the sound of her voice. Three pops like a hammer tapping wood, barely louder than the noise from the jackhammer outside. Maureen was safe. She was shielded by the door frame and the .22 slugs could not punch through the wall. The man got quiet. He was listening for more movement.
Doyle must be under the desk, thought Moon, although that would be unlike him. Hiding. Leaving Maureen to get beat up or cut.
“Where's Doyle?” he asked her. The man snapped a shot. Moon ignored it.
Still dazed, she shook her head. She said, ”B-bathroom.”
Inside, the man was moving by feel, trying to hobble. Moon's kick, he knew, should have broken his hip. He watched as the man fell across Doyle's desk, righted himself, and fired two more shots toward the sound inside the bathroom. The wood of that door was thin. Those did penetrate. Moon listened. He heard a scrambling inside and the sound of a dropped glass or bottle smashing against the tile. But he heard no sound of a body falling. The bullets must have missed.
Moon had his own pistol. He had the .45 Browning he had taken from Walter and could have blown this man across the room. But he wanted to take him, talk to him, snap his fingers one by one until the killer gave him the answers he wanted. The main thing, though, was the noise. He had closed the hallway door behind him. The smashing of the double doors had not caused a stir in the corridors, nor had all the hollering or the pop of that .22. One shot from Moon's weapon, however, inside a closed room, would vibrate through half the building.
“You got nowhere to go,” Moon told him from the cover of the doorway. He worked the slide of his pistol so that the man could hear it. “Put it down, we'll see about a doctor for you.”
The man moved, Moon couldn't see where, but he heard him breathing, feeling his way. Moon heard his own heart thumping as well and his head had begun to feel floaty. Better end this, he thought. He hit the floor with a roll, aiming his body toward the cover of the desk. But as he readied himself to rise, he heard three more shots, duller than the others. He heard a bubbly kind of whistle that he'd heard once before in a man who'd been lung-shot. Moon looked.
The man was sliding down the bathroom door, very slowly, his jaw slack. Moon saw three new holes in the door. The wood around these was splintered out. Doyle must have seen him through the first two holes and fired when his shadow crossed the door.
Moon made no sound. He didn't speak or say, “Come on out” or the like because he was busy saying, “Damn it” to himself. He didn't want that one dead just yet.
The lock on the bathroom door clicked. It opened a crack. And Moon thought he heard giggling. It didn't sound like Doyle.
It wasn't.
“It's a Mr. Hobbs,” whispered Maureen, thickly. It was hard for her to talk with that mouth. A shrug said she didn't know much more. “Mr. Doyle had to...he told Mr. Hobbs to wait here.”
Moon recognized him, at last, from those photographs in Florida. But if Hobbs saw him or heard Maureen, he gave no sign. He was poking the man he'd just shot. Prodding him with his shoe. Holding one hand to his mouth. That hand had a little silver gun in it.
This worked out after all, thought Moon. Doyle or no Doyle, he'd rather question Hobbs.
“You can put the gun down now,” said Moon. He rose cautiously, showing himself. “He can't hurt you no more.”
Hobbs had to have known, Moon felt sure, there was another man out here. He'd heard sounds and words from both of them. Who he thought the second man was, maybe police, maybe building security, maybe even Brendan Doyle come back, Moon couldn't say. But what he did not expect was a black man, breathing hard, blood trickling down his forehead, who he knew was the man called Moon.
Hobbs's eyes went strangely flat. His jaw went slack. He looked down at Moon's hand. Not the one with the gun. The empty one. Moon knew that he must be looking for a Louisville Slugger.
Moon tried to calm him. He showed that the hand was empty. He glanced down at it himself. But there, on the desk, just beneath his open palm, was another face that he knew. It was in a brochure, glossy paper, bunch of men, a big AdChem logo on the wall behind them. Right about here, he must have said the wrong thing. Hobbs, too, saw where he was looking.
”I can see you talked to Doyle,” is what Moon said. “Now you can talk to me.”
Hobbs, very slowly, took the gun from where it touched his lips. He lowered it. But just a little. The flat eyes took a shine. For a moment, he seemed to be hugging the little pistol. Against his chest. Just under his chin.
But then Bart Hobbs pulled the trigger.
Chapter 34
Parker looked at his watch.
Three hours had passed and still nothing from Haroun. He might still be standing on FIatbush Avenue, waiting for Hobbs to come out.
Parker tried a call to Doyle's office. He got a machine. He tried Doyle's home. No answer there either. There was no telling, therefore, whether Doyle ran home or not. If he didn't, Hobbs has to still be in there spilling his guts. But Parker wasn't sure it was that big a problem.
He'll be claiming that he knew nothing of Jake Fallon, had never laid eyes on him, and was horrified to learn that those other bad people had killed him. Doyle will know that half of what Hobbs tells him is self-serving bullshit and the rest is only hearsay. And Hobbs isn't so dumb or so scared that he'll sign his name to anything. Not until he's cut a deal—which only the Fed can make with him— and that can take weeks to negotiate because Hobbs will try to hold out for a pass.
Lots of luck.
Before any of that, however, Doyle has to think about Aaronson, to say nothing of Doyle's wife, so he's going to take this real slow. Which brings up Hobbs's wife, Jocelyn. The socialite. The tree-hugger. Hobbs will need to think long and hard about how she'll look after acid gets tossed in her face.
Parker still had time.
His immediate problem was personnel. He wouldn't be surprised if Haroun has split and is off somewhere doing hashish and sulking about being left alone. Hector claims he made it real clear that he was to ice Hobbs but some of these clowns, Hector included, have the IQ of a mothball. The only smart one is the new one, Yahya, and even he keeps looking like he'd rather be somewhere else. Like back with Fat Julie Giordano.
Hey! You wanted a career move? You made one. And no one leaves this building except Hector, no one even makes a phone call.
Parker was sorely tempted to call Giordano himself. Ask him to lend him some shooters. Those bozos tend not to be geniuses either but at least they'd blend in better up in Edgartown which sounds like a very white-bread kind of place. But best to keep this in the family. And he needs Hector anyway to drive Childress's boat—which comes with rods and reels and twin engines that sound like two Harleys—and which Childress bitched about lending but he was not in a position to say no.
He'd sent Hector out to Bloomingdale's with some money, told him to buy enough outfits for four men. He sent him to Bloomingdale's because left to Hector's own taste, they would all look like Tijuana pimps. He's to buy warm-up suits like the joggers wear but get nice quiet colors. Buy sneakers but no hig
h tops. Buy a dozen or so pairs of Bermuda shorts, T-shirts, a few golf jackets. Also some fanny packs. That's where we'll carry our weapons. On your way back, go down to Peerless and buy a couple of camera bags. Same purpose.
He would decide tonight who all was going. See if Haroun turns up. He wished he still had Walter who at least had blue eyes. But that gave him another thought. First thing in the morning, he'll send all of them out together to get short haircuts and get shaved. Most of them look like armpits.
Parker's telephone rang. He hoped it was Haroun. But, speaking of bozos, it was Paulie something or other from Villardi's Seafood Palace. He said, “Hold on, okay? Mr. Johnny Giordano would like a woid.”
“My brother,” said the younger Giordano, “has outlined your proposal for me. I had questions he couldn't answer.”
Parker knew about this one. Been to college.
“Yeah, well, we can all talk more tomorrow.”
“That's at twelve. My brother and I have another meeting at two. Some serious people will be flying in to attend it.”
“For this?”
The Shadow Box Page 28