As Dog Is My Witness

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “Dad knew some criminals who could find a guy?” Mahoney guessed.

  “Oh, no,” Isobel said, scandalized he’d even suggest such a thing. “Your father doesn’t know anything about this. No, I called Hyman Shapiro. He knew who to get.”

  I figured the chewing had affected my hearing. “You called who?” It should have been “whom,” I’ll grant you, but I was a little taken aback.

  “Hyman Shapiro,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Didn’t you know, Jeffrey? We used to date when I was in high school.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “There has to be a connection,” I said to Mahoney in the Trouble Mobile. “Mr. Shapiro doesn’t just pop up in conversation twice in the same week. In fact, before last Thursday, I would have bet you there was no Mr. Shapiro.”

  Mahoney, however, was not on the same continent as the rest of us Americans at the moment. “My own mother,” he was lamenting. “My own mother sets me up to get fired because she’s afraid I’ll catch a cold on the highway. Do you realize what this means? What kind of gene pool I’m coming from? It’s entirely possible I’ll be completely nuts by the time I’m fifty.”

  “What makes you think you’re not nuts now? You own a boxed set of the Planet of the Apes movies.”

  He smiled. “Yeah. She is sweet that way.”

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere, but the van was, and that’s what counted. The day wasn’t getting any younger, and I still had a major mystery to solve if I was to meet my deadline.

  I have never missed a deadline in fifteen years of freelance work, and I don’t intend to start—ever. The name of this game is “keep the customer satisfied,” to quote Simon and Garfunkel, and you don’t get a lot of second chances with editors. Snapdragon was my best-paying client (although not my most frequent), and this was only the second time I’d worked with them. There was no point in annoying an editor if I could help it.

  Besides, if I could make Mary Fowler happier for Christmas, well, maybe I’d not appear to be Alistair Sim, after all.

  “Would you focus on something for a minute?” I asked Mahoney. “I’m running out of time here, and I can’t throw you a softball while you’re driving.”

  “I’m dealing with a mother who used to date a Mafia guy, and then calls him after fifty years to hire a saboteur who comes and messes up my work. And you want me to be focused?”

  I sat back and closed my eyes. “Just for a minute,” I said. “It’s the Mafia guy I’m trying to figure out. Do you think he’s protecting me because of your mom?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure while they were catching up and she was asking him to suggest a freelance criminal, your name came up,” Mahoney said. He had a point.

  “That’s true. How would he know I’m your mom’s favorite adopted son? So Shapiro must be operating independently of that conversation, and it’s just a total coincidence. Right?”

  “No, that’s stupid,” said Mahoney, and again he had a point. Four more points, and he would be a Star of David. “It’d be like me mentioning Burt Lancaster during this conversation, and when you get home, they ask you to write the remake of Elmer Gantry.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that, except I’ve never seen Elmer Gantry.”

  “I imagine for the fee, you’d be willing to rent the video.” He had a p—. Oh, never mind.

  “So what’s your theory?” I figured there was no sense in killing the speculation just because I couldn’t think of anything that made sense.

  “I think once you began making noises in the Michael Huston thing, Shapiro caught wind of it and sent the Goon Squad after you. They followed you, and saw you following me. They reported to him, and he realized there was a connection. But he doesn’t know what it is, so he keeps them following you.”

  It made sense, but that didn’t make it true. “Then what’s all this stuff about me being in danger? And how come the Big Three didn’t react when The Mole told us your mom had ordered the hit on your cars? They didn’t seem to know.”

  Mahoney considered that. “Maybe Shapiro didn’t tell them. They don’t strike me as being that high on the food chain.”

  Since Mahoney was certainly outdoing me in this conversation, I clammed up for the rest of the ride, thinking. It took about forty-five minutes to get back down to East Brunswick.

  Bill Mahovic lived in a garden apartment complex not far off Route 18 in East Brunswick, a town that would prefer not to notice it has any garden apartment complexes. East Brunswick likes to concentrate on its extremely high standardized test scores and high rankings in the state’s school systems, and sincerely believes it is made up entirely of upper middle class single family homes. Stop an East Brunswickian at the strip mall, ask what the average price of a home there is, and see if you get a figure under $600,000. It would be inaccurate, but that’s what they think.

  Mahovic did not live in a $600,000 house. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a galley kitchen, a living “area,” and a bedroom with a double-sliding-door closet. The walls had been painted white with cheap paint so many times they no longer seemed to be any color at all—they were just walls. Something had to hold the ceiling up.

  Mahoney and I stood in the living room, and Mahovic, with a puzzled expression on his face, faced us. He’d let us in, I think, more to stop the below-zero breeze getting into his apartment and less to answer questions about his friend Kevin Fowler.

  “Kevin’s not here,” he said before we had a chance to ask. “If that’s what you’re here for.”

  Mahovic, a skinny, tall, completely unformidable “man” of twenty or twenty-one, looked like a basketball player’s valet chair. An oversized New York Knicks jersey with “Sprewell” on the back hung off his torso as if held up by a stick. He wore grey sweatpants that also seemed too large, and brought to mind a much less flashy M.C. Hammer.

  In other words, Mahovic looked like he would snap like a twig if you hollered too loudly at him in a small room. And coming from a guy my height and strength, that’s saying a lot.

  “Well, we are looking for him,” I answered. “Do you have any idea where Kevin might be?” I would have bet my mortgage payment Kevin was, in fact, in the apartment, if only because Mahovic was so spectacularly unconvincing in his delivery. I’ve seen Yogi Berra recite dialogue more naturally.

  “I dunno,” Mahovic said, perhaps exhausting his ability to ad lib. “Probably in college, right?”

  “That doesn’t seem likely,” Mahoney said. He had been standing near me in case there was trouble, but once we had a good look at Mahovic, there seemed to be little chance of that, so Mahoney was now wandering around the room looking for hiding places. Mahovic probably thought he was searching for the stash of pot that was unquestionably also in the apartment. I’m not one hundred percent sure he realized we were not representatives of the police department.

  “Huh? Why not?” Mahovic asked. He didn’t like the idea that we weren’t just going to buy whatever he said and go away. It was only eleven in the morning, and he’d just gotten out of bed, he told us.

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked, cutting off that topic of conversation for the time being.

  “Um, I work at the Krauszer’s on Route 27 in Somerset,” he said. “Mostly nights.”

  “Is that where you met Kevin?” I knew it wasn’t, but I wanted to keep Mahovic talking and see where he’d slip up. It wasn’t so much a question of if as when.

  “No, I’ve known Kev since grade school. Sixth grade. We used to hang at lunch together and dis the nerds.” Mahovic was more comfortable recalling the years when he had reached his current level of intelligence and maturity.

  Mahoney was behind Mahovic (the opposite of where he’d be in the phone book) when I asked, “So, since he’s such a close friend, I guess you know he’s not really enrolled at the University of Indiana, right?”

  Mahovic’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times, but no sound came out. This was his version of smooth covering for a friend. Made you wonder
how many of his friends had survived.

  “What do . . . what do you mean?” he asked when language once again became a possibility for him.

  “I mean that Kevin Fowler hasn’t ever been a student at the University of Indiana, that he has a phone line set up to forward his calls from here to there and back, and that he’s probably in this apartment hiding as we speak because he was involved in Michael Huston’s murder.”

  Mahovic had no pre-planned response for that, and, requiring further instructions, naturally turned to the source of his information. He instinctively went to ask Kevin, and that meant turning toward the bedroom. But before he could get there or stop himself, he ran into a brick wall named Mahoney.

  “Bedroom,” I said, and Mahoney and I headed down the hall, Mahovic behind us, complaining about our sudden desire to see where he slept. He said something about his rights, but we didn’t especially care, not being duly licensed investigators or representatives of any government agency. We simply kept walking, and let him follow us.

  The bedroom was just as bland and strewn with clothing and half-eaten pizza as the living room, but it was smaller, which gave it more a cozy bear-cave feel. You had to figure that whatever attempts Mahovic made to get women to come see the place were largely unsuccessful, since the screaming and peals of laughter that surely had resulted any time a female set foot in the room would unquestionably have inspired police reports.

  “Closet?” Mahoney asked as we walked in and found the room unoccupied. There was a sliding-door closet large enough for a person to hide in, but I shook my head.

  “Think of who we’re dealing with,” I said, and he nodded. We both dropped to the floor.

  “Hey!” said Mahovic. “What are you guys doing? There’s nobody here.”

  Kevin Fowler, hiding under the bed in the center of the room, had his face turned in my direction, and it was not a happy face.

  “Why don’t you come up now, Kev?” I asked. “I’m sure the dust coyotes under there could use the space.”

  It took a bit of coercion (and a look at Mahoney) to get Kevin out from under the bed, and once he was, to get him to leave the apartment. But I didn’t want to question him here, where he could clam up or issue bald-faced lies. I wanted to appeal to a higher authority, and have him tell his story with his mother in the room.

  He didn’t want to leave, but Mahoney—and to a much less effective extent, I—insisted, so Kevin grabbed his biker jacket and headed for the door. I noticed a small bandage on his left hand.

  “No gloves, Kev?” I asked. “It’s in the single digits out there.”

  “Gloves are for pussies,” he said.

  “Funny,” Mahoney pondered. “The only pussy I’ve ever seen wearing gloves is Sylvester the Cat.”

  Gloveless, Kevin came with us, and was just as surprised as Mahoney and I were to find the Terrible Trio outside the apartment door, leaning on their black SUV.

  “What’s up, fellas?” I asked. “The big and tall men’s shop close early for Christmas?”

  Big wasn’t smiling. “What are you doing with him?” He indicated Kevin.

  I raised an eyebrow, which was almost instinctive. “You guys know each other?” Big didn’t answer, and neither did Bigger. I turned to Biggest. “Surely you’re not going to clam up on me, too,” I said to him with a quiver in my voice. “Not you!”

  Big merely glared—not at me, but at Kevin. There was definitely some animosity between the two, because Kevin was trying as hard as he could not to look at Big while Big was giving him the kind of look Superman gave Lex Luthor. (Just as an aside, you see so few children named “Lex” these days, you have to wonder if Luthor didn’t spoil things for all of us.)

  “What do you need him for?” Big asked me again.

  “I’m taking him home to his mom for Christmas,” I told him. “He’s necessary.

  “No, he’s not,” Bigger said. “Leave him with us.”

  Kevin’s eyes widened. “No,” he said. “Don’t.”

  “I really can’t,” I told Bigger. “I need him for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Bad idea,” said Big.

  “Can’t be helped,” I told him. “Unless you want to explain to me how you know him.”

  Big smiled a little. “Wouldn’t be my first choice,” he said.

  “Then he’s coming with us.”

  Big considered, but nodded. “Okay. But we’ll be very close by. Understand?” That last part wasn’t aimed at me. Kevin nodded, obediently.

  “Let’s go,” I told Mahoney. “This is suddenly getting interesting.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mahoney argued the whole way back to my minivan, but when we arrived, he agreed he wasn’t needed any further, and could go off to prepare for Christmas with his wife and insane family. He’d have to figure out how to deal with his mother on his own time.

  Big insisted on riding in the car with Kevin and me, especially after he heard I was picking up Ethan before heading on to Mary Fowler’s house. I felt that Ethan would provide a distraction for Justin, and to be honest, I thought my son might pick up on things I missed.

  I wasn’t sure, though, whether Big was concerned about our safety, or that Kevin might say something I wasn’t supposed to hear.

  Mahoney went off to find wrapping paper, and I drove home to get Ethan. He was waiting, already bundled up, in the living room bow window, expertly repaired a month ago by Preston Burke, and fully prepared to get into the car as quickly as possible. I could see Dylan behind him, saying something he thought no one but Ethan could hear, and then saw Abby come up behind him, clearly scolding Dylan for whatever that was. Abby, true to form, had started playing for the home team again.

  Ethan got into the passenger seat when he saw Big and Kevin in the back. Big, keeping an eye on Kevin, wasn’t saying much, and Kevin wasn’t saying anything at all.

  All of them were surprised when I started driving to Karen Huston’s house.

  I wasn’t all that intent on changing the plans, but now that I was starting to have suspicions about him, any way to keep Kevin Fowler off balance would help. And the look on his face when we drove up Karen’s driveway would be a very important clue. If he had known Michael Huston, he might know his house. His facial expression would tell me that.

  The problem was, I couldn’t see it. He was behind me on the driver’s side (Big wanted to keep him out of Ethan’s way entirely), and the mirror was at an angle that made seeing him impossible. So I nudged Ethan, and when I had his attention, gestured my head toward Kevin. Ethan looked confused, and I pointed to my face. Ethan nodded, and seemed to be watching intently when we pulled into Karen’s driveway.

  Big, to his credit, said nothing. Kevin spoke up. “What are we doing here?”

  “I need to ask the woman inside a question,” I answered. “Come with us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Big intervened. “He doesn’t get out of the car, and neither do I.”

  “He does,” I countered. “I don’t care whether you do or not, but Kevin’s coming in with me.”

  “Why?” Ethan asked. Thanks, Ethan.

  “Because I need to be sure he’ll still be with us when we come out, since I need him at his mom’s house.”

  “He’ll be here with me,” Big said. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

  We sat in the driveway, the heater running, on Christmas Eve Day, preparing to visit a woman who wasn’t expecting us, but was home, as the Volkswagen Jetta in the driveway attested, and arguing about who would go inside. “There’s no way I’m leaving you two out here,” I told Big. “You didn’t want him to come with me to begin with. You’ll make him disappear before I get back. No way.” Kevin wasn’t crazy about the suggestion that he “disappear.”

  Big grinned. “Would I do that?”

  “You can bet I’m not taking the chance.”

  He nodded, finally. “Okay. But I’ll be outside the house. I don’t need her seeing me.” I didn’t k
now why, since Karen wouldn’t recognize Big, but it was fine with me that he stayed outside.

  “You want to stay in the car?” I asked Big.

  He shook his head. “No. I’ll be outside, in case.”

  In case?

  We walked to the front door, and Big walked to the side of the house, where he turned the corner and vanished. I rang the bell, and Karen soon came to the door.

  “Aaron,” she said with some surprise, eyeing Kevin with some suspicion. “How are you?”

  “Fine, Karen, but cold. May we come in?” She nodded, reluctantly, while studying Kevin and his biker accoutrements. We walked into the living room.

  Dalma, now my closest friend on the planet, came over and gave us a lovely greeting, then happily sat on the rug next to Ethan. Go figure.

  I reminded Karen that she knew Ethan, and introduced Kevin by first name only. No need to get her upset if it wasn’t necessary. “Karen, I don’t want to hold you up on Christmas Eve, but . . .

  “It’s okay, Aaron,” she said. “I don’t plan on doing much celebrating.” Nice putting your foot in it, Tucker.

  “Of course,” I nodded, looking as empathetic as I could. According to some theories, Asperger’s Syndrome carries a genetic component, and I might very well be walking, talking evidence there’s some validity to those theories. “I just wanted to ask about what you told me about Dalma, that she had bitten the person who shot Michael that night.”

  Karen looked at Kevin, as if she’d put two and two together, but she didn’t say anything to him. Kevin did react when I mentioned the bite, and looked at the bandage on his hand involuntarily. “What about it?” she asked me.

  “Was there anything besides blood on Dalma’s mouth? Clothing, fabric, maybe some leather?”

  She thought for a moment, the tears coming to her eyes again as she remembered the one night she wished she could forget. “No,” she said. “I don’t remember anything. The only way I knew she’d done something was by the blood. Now, I can’t be sure if something dropped off on the way home, but I don’t think there was anything else there when she got to the house. I don’t know . . . I was so upset.”