Absent Friends

by S. J. Rozan

  “But you don't deny the money didn't come from New York State?”

  “That's public record.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  Wish to hell I knew. “No comment.”

  “You're acquainted with Marian Gallagher? Of More Art, New York? And the McCaffery Fund?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ms. Gallagher suggested that you, as the attorney handling the payments, would have to know the source of the funds.”

  “Did she?”

  “Would you care to comment on that?”

  “No.”

  “Is she wrong?”

  “Usually.”

  Laura Stone let go a sudden smile. “You don't like her?”

  Shrug. “You met her.”

  She reined the smile in, as though it had escaped by mistake, all business again. So, he thought, now we share a secret. Now we're buds. Good move, and well done. Probably usually works.

  She said, “But you received the money from somewhere.”

  “True.”

  “Close to $350,000 over the years, that's a lot of money. Harry Randall thought it came from Edward Spano through McCaffery. Do you want to deny that?”

  I'd love to. “No comment.”

  “What was its purpose?”

  “The money? To support Keegan's wife and child.”

  “Who would want to do that?”

  Anyone who knew them. “No comment.”

  “Would Edward Spano have any reason to do it?”

  “Not that I know about.”

  “If Spano had paid Mark Keegan to kill Jack Molloy, would he have had a reason to support Keegan's family once Keegan died?”

  If he had, you bet he would. “No comment.”

  “Why did Jack Molloy threaten Mark Keegan?”

  “He didn't just threaten Mark Keegan, Ms. Stone, he shot at him.”

  “Why did Jack Molloy shoot at Mark Keegan?”

  No change of tone. Phil had to grin. He'd have done it just that way himself. “He was drunk and from what I hear, he was crazy.”

  “He'd been like that all his life, and he'd never shot at Keegan before.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Had he?”

  Hope in her eyes, something new to uncover? Too bad. “No. Not according to Markie, no.”

  “Then why?”

  Not a secret. If he didn't say, she'd get it somewhere else, then come back at him again, confirm or deny. “Jack was a gangster. Markie had heard that Jack was the subject of a police operation and was about to get the ax. He told Jack about it.”

  “That upset Molloy? I'd think he'd be grateful.”

  “Jack checked it out. It wasn't true.”

  “Checked it out how?”

  “He called the Answer Man. How the hell do you think?”

  Her eyebrows rose at his sharp tone. She shifted in her chair. If she hadn't been wearing slacks, he'd bet she'd have tugged her hem down.

  “If it wasn't true the police were running an operation against Jack Molloy, why would Mark Keegan say they were?”

  “That's what Jack wanted to know.”

  “Did Keegan think it was true? That the police were cracking down on Jack Molloy?”

  “He told me he did.”

  “Where did he hear it?”

  “He never said.”

  “You were his lawyer, and he never told you?”

  “Never.”

  She gave him a conspiratorial look that said, Come on, we both know you're better than that, you can get all kinds of things out of people.

  Hmm, Phil thought. That's a good one. I'll have to try it.

  He didn't answer her, so after a moment she went on. “Maybe Keegan was working both sides.”

  He'd been waiting for that. “Neither side.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Markie hung around the fringes, but he wasn't in Jack Molloy's crew, and he wasn't on the NYPD payroll, either.”

  “So he said?”

  “So everyone said.”

  “True?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “But it's what Molloy thought, wasn't it? That it was Keegan himself who was ratting him out to the police?”

  “Might have been.”

  “If it were true, it could be the reason for the plea deal. To keep Keegan from revealing his source.”

  “Could be. As I said, I didn't think so. But I never knew.”

  “They dropped the manslaughter charges.”

  “It was a good deal.”

  “It could be construed as the NYPD showing gratitude for services rendered.”

  “It could. Or as overworked ADAs with no witnesses, a defendant with an infant son and no priors, and a victim no one would miss.” If there was any such thing. Jack Molloy had a brother, a father, and mother. Phil had seen her over the years, Peggy Molloy. One of the few people in Pleasant Hills with a smile for him, one of the people he'd least expect it from.

  “Even if the story wasn't true,” Stone said, “couldn't it have been planted by the police?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, though he knew exactly what she meant.

  “Maybe they couldn't make anything stick to Molloy, so they were trying to scare him, make him think they were out to get him. So he'd back off. Maybe even leave town, get to be someone else's problem.”

  Well, whatever she was, she wasn't stupid. “Markie wouldn't say where he heard it. But I looked into it at the time. I couldn't find anything either way.”

  “Or,” Laura Stone mused, “maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe somebody else wanted to scare Jack Molloy. Could the story have been planted on Keegan by Eddie Spano, do you suppose?”

  “I asked Markie that flat out. He told me if I thought he was working for Spano, I could go to hell.”

  “Any thoughts on it now?”

  Now? Now, when they're pulling thousands of bodies in small pieces from smoking rubble around the corner? Now, when ash could mean anthrax, and loud sounds made you jump? Now, when Sally's not speaking to me and Kevin tells me Fuck off, Uncle Phil? Shit, lady. Now you could ask me if Eddie Spano was the Messiah, and I'd have to say it was possible. “I haven't thought about it.”

  “What would you say if I told you Harry Randall didn't kill himself?”

  “I'd say your paper already made it clear they don't think it was suicide.”

  “There's evidence that points that way.”

  “Not strong evidence.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If the police bought your theory, they'd be camping in my office.”

  “Maybe they just haven't gotten around to you yet.”

  “Around to me? I'd be the first.”

  “You consider yourself a suspect in Harry Randall's murder?”

  “I consider myself a successful criminal defense attorney. To some cops that makes me guilty of a lot worse things than murder.”

  “Did you kill Harry Randall?”

  He stared at her. “That's a hell of a technique. Does it work?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I'm inclined to tell you to go to hell.”

  “Go ahead, as long as you answer my question.”

  “No.”

  “No, you won't answer, or no, you didn't kill Harry Randall?”

  “I didn't kill him. Is this what this is really about? The Tribune's looking for a few bad men?”

  “Harry Randall was murdered because he knew something.”

  “Harry Randall was a drunk who jumped off the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.”

  She shook her hair back from her face again. Phil was startled to see her eyes moisten. She blinked twice, and that was gone. Maybe he'd imagined it. But her voice seemed to quiver just slightly as she repeated, “Harry Randall was killed because he knew something.” The quiver vanished, though, as she went on. “One of the things he knew was that the money you've been giving to Mark Keegan's family came from, or at least through, James McC
affery.”

  No surprise there. But what else did Randall think he knew? And how do you know what he knew? Is this story a potential Pulitzer for you, or is it personal? And which is more dangerous? “No comment.”

  “But you knew James McCaffery?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it's true the money-from-the-State fiction was his idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know he'd left papers behind?”

  “Yes.”

  The lifting of the brows again. But look: her eyes weren't the clear blue of the morning sky, as he'd thought, but the deeper, opaque blue of evening. Had he been wrong? Or did Laura Stone's eyes change, like Sally's, according to rules he would never understand?

  “You know that?” Her voice took on a quick note, hope again. “Have you seen these papers?”

  “No.” And because he could tell where she was going: “I only just found out.”

  “Where from?”

  Indirectly, from you, about an hour ago. “No comment.”

  She gave him an appraising look. Well, let her figure it out.

  “Do you know what's in them? McCaffery's papers?”

  “No.”

  “Any guesses?”

  Yes. “No.”

  “What if it's this whole thing—Keegan, Molloy, where the money came from?”

  “Then we'll get McCaffery's thoughts on the matter.”

  “Would that bother you?”

  “Depends what he thought.”

  “Are you telling my readers you have nothing to hide?”

  “I'm not telling your readers anything. You can tell them whatever crap you want, just like Randall did.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  “Randall? I already told you.”

  She shook her head, her soft hair swaying. “McCaffery.”

  One missed beat, and then: “He was a hero.”

  As though he hadn't answered, with no change of tone, just the way he himself would have done it, she repeated, “What did you think of him?”

  I thought he was a lying, grandstanding, murderous hypocrite. “He was a hero.”

  BOYS' OWN BOOK

  Chapter 12

  The Water Dreams

  September 1, 1979

  By the time Jimmy gets home, Marian's there already. She has her own place, shares it with two other girls, because how would that look, if she just moved right in with him? And on the new job she stays late a lot, and Jimmy's working straight tours, so it's not that often they get to spend the night together. Jimmy sees her through the window as he's coming down the stairs from the sidewalk, stops a minute just to look at her.

  She's reading, bare legs crossed Indian-style on the big leather chair. Her back's to Jimmy. The light from the lamp is soft on the side of her face, makes little swells and shadows on her T-shirt. As he watches, her black hair—short, sharp, simpler than the other girls wear theirs—sweeps across her cheek. She lifts a hand to tuck it away again: she doesn't like to be distracted, she always says, when she's reading. So many different colors of black in Marian's hair: this has always amazed Jimmy, and amazes him now.

  Marian looks up, sees him through the window, smiles. He realizes he's grinning like a kid, wonders how long he's been doing that.

  They kiss at the door, before they speak. The night's gotten cool, but Jimmy only realizes this when his hand's touching Marian. He's aware—he's always been aware—of the solidity under the creaminess of her flesh: Marian plays volleyball with her girlfriends, she rides her bike everywhere, in high school she was on the girls' softball team, she was captain. All that just makes her skin's silky softness better for Jimmy, like it was somehow honest, somehow earned.

  Jimmy's other hand can't resist touching Marian's midnight hair.

  Marian's lips play with Jimmy's, but she does not embrace him: she snakes her arms around him, slips her hands into the back pockets of his jeans, moves him toward her that way.

  Oh God, thinks Jimmy.

  After, they lie in the darkness for a while, just together. This is not a deep, heavy darkness, like the smoke at the center of a fire, all directions the same and the blasting air itself almost solid, itself your enemy; not like your dreams, where your eyes are open, wide open, but you can't see anything and you try to shout, scream, tell someone but you make no sound. This is just the apartment in the basement of where the Cooleys live, the apartment that's Jimmy's now. It doesn't get dark that way here.

  Beyond the swaying, half-closed curtains, the soft glow from the Cooleys' porch light is backed up by lights from other porches and yards, by lit windows in the neighbors' places, and by streetlights that rise over the rooftops. The place is quiet, but the silence never gets so huge you could wander around lost in it. It's bordered, hemmed in, by a dog's bark, someone's laugh, the left-to-right flare of a car radio in the street out front.

  So, Superman, Marian says to Jimmy, and her voice close to his ear sounds to him the same way her skin feels, satin with metal under it, though he doesn't think it's iron under her voice like under her skin, he thinks it's silver, maybe gold. She asks him, How many people did you save today?

  'Bout a hundred, says Jimmy.

  Marian gives him a poke in the ribs. You weren't even on duty today.

  That's how I saved them. Stayed out of their way.

  Marian laughs, nibbles on his ear.

  How about you, he says, you save anyone?

  Nope, slow day. She rearranges the sheet they're under, smooths it. I tutored that little Jeanine, worked on her reading, but that kid, she doesn't even need me, Jimmy. She'll do great, no matter what.

  Jimmy grunts. Wasn't for you, she'd end up like her old lady. Any chance that kid has, it's because you made a project out of her.

  Well, she's a good kid. She can't help it if her whole family is bums.

  I know, Jimmy says. It's not that. It's more like, on one side is you, on the other side is her whole family and her whole life. Jimmy's hands, palms up, balance above the sheet like scales; one rises, one falls.

  Yes, I know. Marian nods. But you can't tell. One little pebble might do the trick. You can't tell unless you put it there.

  The tip of Marian's finger barely touches the palm of Jimmy's up hand. She draws little delicate circles. Then she presses, pushing down.

  Jimmy's hand resists. What if it doesn't? he asks. Do the trick?

  Marian keeps pushing, Jimmy resisting. She smiles. Her other hand grabs at Jimmy's down hand, lifts it high in the air. Then it'll do some other trick, she says. In surprise, Jimmy laughs. Marian laughs with him. He wraps his hands around hers, wraps himself around her.

  Jimmy knows Marian's right. Little Jeanine, Marian can't just give up on her. But if Jimmy told the truth, it would be this: Marian's kind of saving, he's not really sure about it, if it ever works, if it's even right.

  Marian's sure. She's sure about little Jeanine: People aren't born to be one thing or another, she tells Jimmy. People decide. Jeanine can go anywhere she wants to go.

  Jimmy doesn't argue. But he thinks about himself and fires. Markie and cars. Tom and quiet talks at Flanagan's with suit-coated men who come and go. He thinks about Mrs. Molloy's eyes when she looks at Jack, always the same look since they were kids, like she sees something bad standing behind him that the rest of them can't see. He's not really sure how many choices any of them has, about which way to go.

  But Marian's sure. She wants to do it for her job, help people find their ways to go. A career of saving people. That's what Marian went to college for, saving people.

  Business, she tells him, laughing, the first time he says this to her. Business administration, Jimmy, that never saved anyone. But Jimmy knows what she wants, he knows why she's doing it the whole time she's in college, the only one of them to go. It's so she can work at one of those places, the Red Cross or someplace, when she's finished, an important job where she can save people.

  And now she is finished, graduated back in
June up at City College, Jimmy late because he has to trade shifts, take that long train ride into Harlem. Graduation's outdoors, clear and warm and not a cloud in the sky. Jimmy's way in the back, way on the side, when the graduates march in. The wind is up. They have to hold their flat hats on and their black gowns flap and Jimmy has a little trouble picking Marian out, he's so far back and they're all dressed the same. But when the dean calls her name and she strides across the stage like someone really tall on her way to someplace important—though she's shorter than Jimmy, and she's only going to shake the dean's hand and sit down again—Jimmy watches her and knows that if he forgets his own name, forgets where home is, forgets why you fight fires, he'll always remember how Marian walks.

  When she starts the new job two weeks later—she lined this job up before she graduated, that's Marian's way, how she does things—Jimmy takes her out to celebrate. Just the two of them at Montezuma's, in St. George, they eat paella and lobsters and drink wine, neither of them knows what paella is before they order it, but it's great. Though Jimmy thinks maybe they could be eating cardboard and on this night he'd like it.

  Jimmy lifts his wineglass, offers a toast.

  To saving people, he says.

  Candlelight sparkles in Marian's wineglass and her eyes. To saving people, she says, smiles at him. Your way and mine.

  That smile, when Jimmy sees it, he'd slay dragons if they were keeping Marian from finding her way.

  Someday, he says, and though he's still smiling, his voice has gone quiet in a way that makes Marian lower her glass and really listen, someday you'll be the one. The one making decisions, how to save people, who to save.

  Marian tilts her head. Someone has to, she says.

  Her eyes are almost black, with tiny lights, some reflected from the candles, but some Jimmy's seen before, light that's always there in Marian's eyes. I'm glad it's going to be you, he says.

  And he doesn't say: And I'm glad it doesn't have to be me.

  To do the kinds of things Marian does, the things she wants to do, you have to be pretty sure you know what's good for people.

  But, Marian would say if he said this to her—he knows she would, because she has—like little Jeanine: her sister's a hooker, her mother's a drunk. How can you not be sure it would be good for her not to be like them?