As Dog Is My Witness

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Mahoney ignored the banter between Big and myself, and merely glared at The Mole, which probably worried him more than the sudden change in his situation or the burly reception committee he’d discovered in what I’m sure he thought would be an empty, easy mark.

  “I’m going to say this once, and only once,” Mahoney said quietly to The Mole. “If you answer my questions straight, nothing bad will happen to you. If you don’t, I can’t say the same thing. Is that clear?”

  The Mole’s eyes, already the size of silver dollars, widened a bit more, and despite the temperature, sweat beads began to form on his forehead. He indicated he understood.

  Mahoney nodded. “Good. Now, first. I don’t recognize you. What part of the company do you work for?”

  “Company? What company?” The Mole said. It was the kind of answer that could get a witness badly hurt in a crime movie, but was delivered with such obvious panic and confusion that it was hard to believe The Mole was trying to lie his way out of trouble.

  “The rental car company,” Mahoney said with an icy calm. I was seeing a side of my friend that I’d never seen before, and wouldn’t mind not seeing again. To Mahoney, this man had threatened his code, his very belief in himself. And that wasn’t something you did lightly in Mahoney’s universe.

  “I don’t work for a rental car company,” The Mole said with a slight rise in pitch. Without so much as a finger on him, he looked like he was being physically tortured. I worried for the SUV’s leather seats. “I was hired as an independent.”

  Mahoney’s brow knitted. “Then why were you always in a rental car?”

  “I’m from out of state. I needed a car. I figured I might as well rent from your company.”

  This wasn’t going the way Mahoney had expected, but The Mole wasn’t exactly dealing from a position of strength, either. “If you weren’t getting my assignments from the office, how did you get them?”

  “The same way you did, through the cell phone,” said The Mole. He started to reach for his pocket, and Bigger grabbed his hand. “I just want to show him the receiver,” The Mole said to Bigger.

  “I’ll get it,” Bigger said, and he reached into The Mole’s jacket pocket, and came out with a small black box that looked like a television’s remote control unit.

  “It searches cell phone frequencies until you find the one you want,” The Mole said. “It’s not as easy as it used to be, but you can usually find the wireless connection you’re looking for.”

  “So you’re not from my company?” Mahoney was unusually slow in picking up the information, since he had so expected different answers, but believed the ones he was getting.

  “No,” said The Mole. “I just do what I’m told.”

  “Why? Why does somebody want my jobs sabotaged? What do you gain by making me look bad?” Mahoney leaned over, and The Mole, with no room in a vehicle populated by four very large men, Mahoney included, tried to lean back, and failed.

  “I’m just doing it because I’ve been paid to do it. Honest. You’ve got to believe me!” I thought The Mole might actually begin to cry.

  “All right then,” Mahoney said, towering over The Mole as much as he could inside a closed vehicle. “This is going to be the last question, and you’d better answer it correctly.”

  The Mole, a whimper short of a full panic, nodded.

  “Who’s paying you to do this to me?”

  The Mole told him, and as soon as we heard the name, both my mouth and Mahoney’s dropped open about three feet.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The house, a large brown Victorian, was one of the largest in town, although it wasn’t at all ostentatious. The owners had needed the space because they had seven children.

  I remembered when a swing and several bicycles were on the wrap-around porch, but now it was bare, perhaps due to the weather.

  Screened-in during the summer months, the porch lacked insulation or windows, so this cold winter day, it was no place for civilized conversation, or even uncivilized conversation.

  Having dropped The Mole off at Newark Liberty International Airport (a post-9/11 compromise name so stupid there’s no point in even recounting the tale) with specific instructions to get himself good and lost, Mahoney and I stood waiting at the front door, his Trouble Mobile parked at the curb. Big, Bigger, and Biggest were probably in the neighborhood, but the black SUV was no longer visible, and neither were they.

  Mahoney’s breath, visible in the cold, was a little heavier than usual, resembling the steam that comes from a horse’s nostrils on chilly days. After a silent drive of a little less than an hour, I wasn’t sure how he was reacting to The Mole’s revelations. I didn’t think he was contemplating violence, but silence often doesn’t tell you all that much about a person’s intentions.

  There wasn’t much in the way of Christmas decoration on the house, but the string of lights that ringed the windows was, at least, colorful. Jews like me (that is to say, the kind that consider themselves Jewish, minus the messy “religion” part) like to drive around and look at the Christmas lights every year, mostly because we never have the nerve to call attention to our houses by making them look like Disney World rides. The only reference to Jews decorating their houses for a holiday had to do with lamb’s blood, and is best left unemulated in Central New Jersey. Still, I do prefer the colored lights to the current trend toward white-only, which seems not only unimaginative but somehow segregationist.

  The pause since Mahoney had pushed the doorbell hadn’t been long, but he was already shifting his weight from leg to leg, as if he expected to jump one way or the other, but didn’t know which. After what seemed an eternity, but was really about fifteen seconds, the front door opened.

  Behind it was a tall, thin, bald man in his mid-seventies, wearing wire rimmed glasses and corduroy everything, including a vest. I was glad I’d left Ethan home—the sound of all that corduroy rubbing together would have left him quivering on the ground. Sometimes, Asperger’s kids are unusually sensitive to sound.

  The man looked surprised when he saw who was at his door, but he smiled. “Jeffrey,” he said to Mahoney. “We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

  “Dad,” Mahoney said. “May we come in?”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, stepping aside to let us out of the refrigerator and into the house. “You must be freezing.” I think he was referring to Mahoney’s rather distant behavior, but we were damn cold, so I was glad to walk inside.

  It had been a good number of years since I’d set foot inside Mahoney’s boyhood home in Bloomfield. It was a lot different now, with the seven kids (Mahoney being the eldest) all grown and gone. Mahoney had tried to get his parents to sell the place and move into something more manageable, but they weren’t ready for an “active adult community,” and liked the familiarity of the house. Truth be known, they were probably happy to have all that space to themselves after the years of raising such a loud, boisterous brood.

  Things certainly were neater now. There were no jigsaw puzzles partially completed on the dining room table, no rollerblades on the floor by the door, no piles of laundry in various stages of completion, no constant flow of humanity through the kitchen, and, alas, no bearded collie named Marvin, the biggest, friendliest, stupidest dog ever.

  These days, it looked more like the kind of house two senior citizens lived in, without the burden of a mortgage. It was, indeed, a testament to retirement—Mahoney’s father from the Newark police force, and his mother from teaching art to grammar school children in Irvington. Now, an easel was prominently displayed in the living room, where one might expect a television. A model train set was cleverly constructed to follow the thick wooden molding over the dining room doors, and piles of fishing, boating, and art magazines were near the easy chairs, of which there were a goodly number.

  “Aaron Tucker,” Mahoney’s father said, looking me over fondly. “Haven’t seen you in years.”

  “I hope I don’t look all that dif
ferent, Sergeant Mahoney,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You’re still a kid,” he said with a warm grin. “And drop that ‘sergeant’ stuff. I’m retired, and you’re old enough to call me Al.”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” I said honestly.

  He was about to respond when his son, whose glances around the room added to the tension of the situation, said, “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s inside,” the elder Mahoney said, pointing through the dining room to where the family room once was, a place where the television did in fact exist, and where ex-Sergeant Mahoney had once devoted himself to his laserdisc collection. Outdated forms of technology, apparently, run in the family.

  “I need to talk to her,” Mahoney said, walking briskly through the dining room.

  “I think I’d better go with him, uh . . .

  “Al,” said Mahoney’s dad, who seemed to know he wasn’t supposed to follow us.

  I almost had to run to keep up with Mahoney, but when we made it into the family room, he stopped dead in his tracks, and I very nearly bumped into him like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon. With the camera in front of Mahoney, you wouldn’t see me. You’d just hear the Carl Stalling music and see Mahoney slightly flinch when I inadvertently smacked into his back.

  And there are those who say my generation didn’t grow up with an appreciation of fine art.

  I peered around his side to see his mother, a tall, hearty, dark-skinned woman with brown hair of a shade different than the one I remembered, in a pair of blue jeans and a green sweatshirt over a longsleeved flannel shirt. She looked up from her work in the heavily decorated room. Her work appeared to be wrapping a gift, and she immediately looked startled and a little irritated.

  “Oh, Jeffrey,” she said to Mahoney. “You’ve spoiled the surprise.”

  I moved out from behind him and she noticed me. “Aaron!” she said, opening her arms. “It’s so good to see you!”

  “Hi, Mrs. . . . She held up a finger to remind me of our decades-old agreement. “Sorry. Mom.” I wondered how my mother would feel about my calling someone else by that name, but this didn’t seem the time.

  Isobel Mahoney, born in Venezuela, walked over and gave me a warm matronly hug. Her son, stupefied, gave me a look that was neither warm nor matronly. He, for one, remembered why we were here.

  “Mom,” he said a little more forcefully, and she let go of me and faced her son, who was only a few inches taller than she. Isobel slightly shook her head.

  “Oh, fine,” she said. “If you can’t wait.”

  She walked back to the table where she’d been working and picked up a box partially obscured by green foil wrapping paper with gold bells printed in vertical rows. She held it out to Mahoney.

  “Here. Merry Christmas.”

  Possibly without even knowing he was doing so, Mahoney held out his hand and took the box from his mother. He looked at it.

  A boxed set of DVDs: the entire Planet of the Apes movie series. Mahoney, she knew, was a huge Apes fan—in every possible sense of the word “huge.”

  “Mom,” he said for the third time, holding out his hands to gesture, but looking merely confused.

  “Is that all you have to say?” Isobel frowned at her son. “Why did I bother?”

  “Mom, I came here today because of the man you sent to sabotage my work.”

  Isobel went back to the table and picked up another gift, taking the wrapping paper from Mahoney and using it on the new box. Waste not, want not, I guess.

  “Oh, that,” she said.

  Oh, that?

  Mahoney didn’t so much sit as melt into a low sofa, which at one time hadn’t been so low. His knees seemed to give up their mission and surrender to the enemy—gravity—and he sank into the sofa in a gesture of futility I hadn’t seen from him since he was eighteen years old.

  “I don’t understand. You admit you sent someone to mess up all the work I was doing?”

  She had folded and taped the wrapping paper expertly, and was wielding ribbon like most people use a fork on spaghetti. “Of course, I admit it,” Isobel answered. Even under stress, her voice never held the slightest trace of an accent. “I did it for you.”

  That was enough for me. Now I sank into the couch, too, although it wasn’t quite as long a trip, since my knees started out closer to the ground. I sat next to Isobel.

  “Aaron,” she said, “since you’re so close, would you mind lending me a finger?” She indicated a spot to hold the ribbon while she created an elaborate knot of some kind, and even without thinking, I obeyed her request. “Thanks, dear.”

  Mahoney seemed to be shrinking as I looked at him, and under any other circumstances, I probably would have found it amusing, or at least let him think I found it amusing. I decided against speaking at all.

  He finally managed words. “You did it . . . for me?”

  “Certainly,” Isobel nodded as she tied off the knot and gave me a signal to let go. “You know how I feel about you running all over the state, getting yourself into all sorts of situations in all sorts of weather. It’s dangerous. We’ve talked about it enough times before, haven’t we?”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “No ‘but’ about it,” Isobel continued, on a roll now. “I’ve told you time and again. I get out of bed worrying about you in the morning, and go to sleep worrying about you at night. But would you listen to reason? Nooooooo, not you! ‘It’s what I’m best at, Mom; I’ve got to do what I want, Mom.’ Huh!”

  She turned to me without missing a beat. “I made Christmas cookies, Aaron. Would you like one?”

  I figured she wasn’t mad at me, so I said “sure.” She reached behind her and found a plate of cookies wrapped in cellophane and ribbon.

  She pulled the ribbon off.

  “I don’t want to be any—” I said.

  “Nonsense. You go ahead,” she said, cutting me off. Mahoney looked like his head might leave his neck entirely and go flying around the room.

  “So let me get this straight. I wouldn’t quit my job, so you decided to have someone drive around after me and make it look like I couldn’t fix cars anymore?”

  Isobel nodded. “That’s right. If you weren’t going to be reasonable, I figured it was necessary to convince your employers you were slowing down. After all, Jeffrey, you’re in your mid-forties now! That’s no age to be driving all over the place with grease on your hands. It makes much more sense for you to be working behind a desk, supervising, using your brain.” I didn’t agree with her, but the chocolate chip cookies were really good. Isobel couldn’t just stop there, though. “Like Aaron does,” she added.

  I almost choked on the cookie, but managed, through the power of sheer repetition, to keep eating. It helps to stay practiced. Mahoney’s eyes were so narrow now he looked like Clint Eastwood staring into the sun.

  “Mom,” he said, barely keeping himself under control, “I understand you’re worried, but trying to get me fired isn’t going to solve the situation. You have to understand. Twenty-five years ago, I stopped living under your roof. I’m a grown man now.”

  “Then where are my grandchildren?” Ah hah! I sat back, crossed one leg over the other, and chewed my cookie, confident in the knowledge that I had twice reproduced. Well, not all by myself, but you get the idea.

  I knew for a fact that Mahoney and his wife Susan had made a very early decision not to have children, partly because Mahoney, as the eldest of seven, felt as if he’d helped raise six kids already, and wasn’t especially fond of the experience. He and Susan enjoyed their life together and didn’t want to change it. They were exactly the kind of people who shouldn’t have children, and were quite content knowing that.

  But Mahoney couldn’t tell his mother he didn’t want her to have any more grandchildren (the other six Mahoney children had provided her with nine so far) because of the chaotic way he had been raised. Isobel was not one for recriminations, particularly when aimed at her.
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  “Susan can’t have children,” he said quietly. As he spoke the words, I could hear the clever rationalization rolling around in his head: “Susan can’t have children because we’ve decided we’d be bad parents—I didn’t say she physically couldn’t have children.”

  But his mother was tougher than that. “You can adopt,” she said.

  “We don’t want to. Besides, this really isn’t about whether or not we have kids, is it, Mom?” Mahoney, awakened by the competition, was leaning forward now, rising to the occasion. I did what I do best, and took another cookie.

  Isobel, halfway through another package (the woman had nine grandchildren and seven kids, after all), stopped and exhaled. “No,” she said. “It’s not. You’re right. I just hate the idea of you out on the Turnpike in a snowstorm in the dark. Is that so awful?”

  Mahoney stood up and walked to his mother. He gestured for her to stand, and she did. And my friend embraced his mother and held her close.

  “No, it’s not so awful,” he said. “But it’s not fair for you to make my decisions for me. Suppose I decided you should move out of this house and get yourself a one-floor condo that would be easier to take care of?”

  “You have decided that,” Isobel pointed out.

  She had walked right into his trap. “Yeah,” he said, “but I didn’t hire an arsonist to come burn the house down so you’d have to move.”

  Isobel Mahoney’s face lengthened as the words hit home. She held her son, and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jeffrey.”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said through a particularly good frosted cookie. “How did you know who to hire to sabotage his cars? I mean, you’re not especially well versed in the hiring practices of automotive hit men, are you?”

  Mahoney let his mother go, and sat next to her on the other side of the sofa while she went back to her wrapping. “No, I’ve never had to do anything like that before,” she admitted. “I called on an old friend who has some expertise in that.”