The Shadow Box (2 page)

It was Bronwyn who helped get him through those first few days. She took charge of arrangements for the funeral.
She had met Uncle Jake only once. And Moon not at all.
Neither knew that she existed until he called his uncle to
announce that he was engaged. Jake had come that night
to meet her.

The engagement had been a sudden thing. He'd known
Bronwyn for barely three months. He had kept her a secret
from Jake and Moon because he still could not believe his
own luck and because he didn't want either of them grill
ing her. Moon,
e
specially, had a history of making some
of his woman friends want to grab their coats and run.
Moon could be scary. And he happened to be black. Bron
wyn said that Moon's absence was all the more reason to
have his uncle over now. Without Moon to encourage him,
she said, he might be on his best behavior.

And he was. In fact Bronwyn, by dessert, had him
wrapped around her finger. The dinner she prepared was
part of it. She said the easiest way to a man was through
his stomach. Bronwyn did it all from scratch. She'd been
planning the menu for a week.

She didn't do his ego any harm either. She told him
how thrilled she was to finally meet him. She said that
before coming here she'd read everything she could about
New York City and there was scarcely a book that failed
to mention the notorious Big Jake Fallon. She got him
telling stories about New York po
l
s, about the fight game,
about his “handsome nephew,” and especially about
Moon. She heard the sanitized versions of most of them.

She was so beautiful that night. She wore a simple black
sheath, bare at one shoulder, with very little jewelry be
cause the dress didn't need it. No jewel could compete
with her eyes. They were violet in color, the only violet
eyes he had ever seen. The dress showed off her flawless
skin. Her dark hair was cut in a modified shag with the
ends teased forward to frame her face. She was tall and
sleek and her every move showed a dancer's grace.

The major hurdle, Fallon had thought, would be the fact
that she was English. Jake was not overly fond of Brits.
Nor was he likely to be thrilled at the prospect of his
nephew marrying a Protestant. But in Bronwyn's case, he
seemed ready to make an exception.

After dinner, the dishes cleared, she sat down to play a nocturne by Chopin. To her gratified surprise, Jake recog
nized the piece. And Bronwyn played it like an angel.

If it bothered Jake at all that this had happened so
quickly, or that the wedding could not be in the Church,
he gave no sign. His eyebrow went up only once. That
was when he saw Bronwyn's things in the bathroom and
realized that she'd already moved in. She'd moved in, in
fact, only two weeks after he met her.

Jake would have given his blessing. Michael was sure
of i
t
. But toward the end of the evening, a change had
come over him. Bronwyn noticed it. She asked him if
anything was wrong. He assured her that it was nothing,
another matter entirely that he had suddenly remembered.
Apo
l
ogizing to them both, he said that he'd better call
a taxi.

There was no need for that, Bronwyn told him. There
were always plenty of cabs cruising down 82nd Street.
They walked him down and flagged one at the curb. He was dead an hour later.

Moon was not at the funeral either.

He was in Mount Sinai Hospital. He had suffered a mild
stroke within hours of being told that Big Jake Fallon was
dead. It was Bronwyn who had him brought down from
the Catskills and saw that he had the best of care. Thank God for Bronwyn.

She arrived at the service with the entourage from
Lehman-Stone, the investment banking firm for which they
both worked. It was where they met.

Bart Hobbs, their boss, was in the lead.

Hobbs was a slight but elegant man, old money, all the
right schools. He had always seemed nice enough, Fallon
supposed. But his niceness had a scripted feel to it. It was
as if someone had written down for him what he was
expected to say in a given situation. He came with several
top executives, all in identical dark suits, all with grim
but bewildered expressions. Even Avery Bellows, a former
senator, now head of their Washington law firm and a
lobbyist for Lehman-Stone's clients, had flown up from
the nation's capital.

The cause of their bewilderment was the rest of the
crowd. It must have seemed that below a certain social
level, every name in New York was there. There were the
deputy mayor, two councilmen, several sportswriters and
columnists, theater people, ballplayers, many priests and
nuns. At least a dozen prizefighters showed up, including
three former champions. Big Jake Fallon had known
them all.

Brendan and Sheila Doyle came in with two carloads
of hoods up from Brooklyn. Brendan Doyle was Jake's
l
awyer. He was also Michael's. Jake's estate, it turned out, was to be evenly divided between Michael and Moon after
a list of smaller bequests was distributed. His longtime
housekeeper got a generous pension.

Bronwyn mixed easily. She always did. In the church
and at the reception afterward, the Lehman-Stone delega
tion had formed a tight little knot, counting the minutes
until they could decently retreat to a world they
understood.

Bronwyn would not permit it. In her gentle way, she
chided them, forced them to circulate. Perhaps as punish
ment for his being standoffish, she led a horrified Bart
Hobbs into the thick of the Brooklyn crowd and, through
Doyle, introduced him to the Giordano brothers, the elder
of whom had sixteen indictments, no convictions, unless
you'd count a couple for simple assault. Actually, they
had something in common: an interest in finance. The
Giordanos were loan sharks who, in addition, pretty much
controlled the Brooklyn docks.

Hobbs, having survived that encounter,
was getting new
instructions from Bronwyn. He caught Michael's eye,
called him over, and made a show of handing Bronwyn a
set of keys.

“Michael, I have given Bronwyn an order,” he said.
“She is to take you to my home in Palm Beach. She is
not to take no for an answer. Your flight is tomorrow at
noon. You two are to stay there as long as you like, soak
in my pool, take walks on the beach, hold on to each
other,
take care of each other. I don't want to see either
of you until you
both
feel ready to come back to work.”

Bronwyn studied the ceiling, looking pleased with her
self. She had probably written that out for him.

But Michael declined with thanks. He could not leave New York because he wouldn't leave Moon. Two nights
later, Bronwyn Kelsey was dead.

She died because at the end of the second day, the
sadness and the exhaustion having caught up with her, she
wanted a cigarette. Her first in a year.

He urged her to forget it, just go to bed. But she reached
for her coat. There was a convenience store, not far, just
over on Columbus Avenue. She said that if she left now,
she could get there before it closed. He could not very well let her walk there alone. They arrived at the store
five minutes before closing, just as another New York lowlife was getting ready to rob it.

She should not have died that night. What made it all
the harder to bear was that, if anything, it should have
been him. The robber had been standing by the cooler,
waiting for them to make their purchase and leave. But
Bronwyn had lingered at the magazine rack. The robber
pulled a cap down over his face and a sawed-off shotgun
from his coat. He aimed it at the young Korean counter
man who stood frozen. The shotgun then swung toward
Michael.

He had made no move other than to motion Bronwyn
down. She dropped to a half-crouch behind a display of
junk food. Yet the robber seemed to feel threatened by
him, perhaps because he was bigger and stronger. Perhaps because this bum, probably so much like the one who had
killed Jake, had seen the contempt in his eyes.

What jerked the gun wide . . . what then pulled the
trigger . . . was a dying spasm of the robber's brain as
the Korean counterman blew it apart with two hollow-nosed bullets from the pistol he kept near the register.

The shotgun's blast caught her full in the chest. Fallon
ran to her side. She died staring up at him. One eye had
changed color. Or he imagined that, maybe. What he did
not imagine was that she was blaming him, hating him. For not protecting her. For letting this happen.

Chapter 3

B
ronwyn's service
was small and private. The
only people in attendance were from Lehman-Stone. Moon
still wasn't up to it anyway.

Hobbs, this time, was terribly shaken. He brought with him the firm's chief of security, a thuggish-looking man
named Parker, who posted guards to keep reporters from entering. They waited with their cameras on the sidewalk
outside. Several of the executives could barely look at
Fallon. A few seemed angry. It was as if they
,
too
,
blamed
him for not taking that blast himself.

But not Hobbs. For all his grief, he tried as before to
be comforting. Hobbs took him aside at the door to the
chapel and explained to him, gently, that Bronwyn had
already been cremated. It was done, he said, at her par
ents' request.