The Shadow Box (49 page)

Doyle, alone in his office, glanced at the notepad where
he had scribbled
Megan Cole.

“Megan, huh?” A good Irish name. And tomorrow,
Friday, is Michael's birthday. It's nice he has someone on his birthday. And it's good that she's not some old friend
from New York who might tell other friends where Mi
chael is living.

Still, thought Doyle, it wouldn't hurt to know a little
more about her. He had to call Boston anyway, the young
lawyer who had handled Michael's closing. He would ask
him to see what he could find.

Doyle made that call, then worked through a small stack of message slips, returning those calls as well. He returned
all but two.

The two calls he had not returned were from Avery
Bellows in Washington. Both were marked urgent. On the
second one, his secretary had drawn two lines under the
word. This did not seem to suggest that Bellows knew he
was bluffing.

“Shame on you, counselor,” Doyle muttered aloud.
“Never let 'em see you sweat.”

He dropped the slips in his wastebasket.

He would return them, but later. Maureen, his secretary,
is out to lunch now, he'll go when she gets back, and
then he'll call Bellows on the Priva-Fone. It ought to be very interest. . .

Doyle froze.

He had sensed, rather than heard, a presence in his outer
office. His first thought was that it was Moon. The ghost who walks. Dumb black bastard. But just in case, he qui
etly opened the drawer in which he kept his Smith & Wesson. He placed his right hand over it. With his left,
he took the phone off its cradle and pretended to tap out a
number. From outside, he heard a shuddering sigh. Wasn't
Moon. Doyle raised the revolver and aimed it.

Bart Hobbs stepped into his line of sight. Doyle knew
him from Jake's funeral and from Bronwyn's. But the Bart
Hobbs of those two occasions had been well groomed,
well dressed, and composed. This one looked like a drunk.
And this time he had a gun in his hand.

Moon saw the commotion outside the diner.

A few blocks back, on Flatbush, he had driven past a
fender bender. No police there yet but two women,
screaming at each other, had attracted a crowd. One had
her hair up in curlers. They must have been the drivers.

Now he saw what had kept the police. Three squad cars,
lights flashing, were gathered outside the diner. One cop
was taking statements from a man in an apron and from
another who carried a briefcase. The two men were ar
guing about who saw what and who was right. There were
newspapers all over the sidewalk and Moon thought he
saw a single shoe.

Just a typical Brooklyn morning.

Doyle's office was only a few blocks down but Moon kept going. He'd called Johnny G. from a drugstore out
side the cemetery. Johnny sounded real anxious to see him
but he said don't come down to the docks. Meet him
halfway, outside Blockbuster Video, the one just up Pros
pect from Villardi's Seafood Palace.

Johnny wouldn't say why on the phone. But whatever
this was about, Moon realized, he didn't want his brother
to hear it.

Aaronson was more confused than afraid. One moment
he's trying to give directions to a cab driver who barely
speaks English and the next he's punched in the kidneys
from behind, or stabbed,
or
shot, it's hard to tell, and two
men are throwing him into the cab.

They had him in the well of the backseat now. The two
men had their feet on him while the cab driver drove. One
of them kicked him in the head every time he tried to
struggle or yell and then jabbed him in the neck with something sharp. But yelling didn't seem so urgent now.

He was starting to feel all warm and dreamy.

Could he be dreaming this?

There are times when he feels like he's not in a taxi at
a
ll. He has a funny taste in his mouth. Maybe he's just
lying down.

What did he do with his other shoe? And where are
his glasses?

If he doesn't have his glasses he must be lying down.
He always takes his glasses off first but where did he
put them?

He'll find them later, he decided. Right now he has
to sleep.

Hobbs's gun was a tiny automatic, chromed, small cali
ber. He never raised it all the way. But he wouldn't put
it down either.

“It wasn't me,” was all he said. He repeated it three times. He said it through a fog.

A part of Brendan Doyle was thinking,
Just kill the son
of a bitch.

He knew he couldn't ask for a cleaner shoot than this. The man walks into his office with a gun, pupils are di
lated, he's incoherent, and best of all, he's holding this
dumb-ass little thing that he must have lifted from his
mother's purse. He's holding it at his hip, pointing more
or less forward but angled downward. It's like they held
guns in the early Cagney movies until some director ex
plained about lining up the sights. If Hobbs pulls that trigger, he'll be lucky to hit the desk.

“Doyle?” Hobbs said it again. “It wasn't me.”

It wasn't you who what? Killed Jake, you fucking
weeny? No shit. Doyle decided to risk lowering his re
volver. He eased the hammer back down.

“You want some coffee?”

Hobbs blinked a few times. A flicker of relief. A hesi
tant nod.

“Over there.” Doyle gestured toward the machine on his credenza. “You want a drink instead, the liquor's in
the cabinet underneath.”

Hobbs went for the booze. It took him a while and it
was all in slow motion but he found a fifth of Popov back
behind a bottle of Jameson's. He poured the vodka into a
coffee mug, spilling almost an equal amount. Doyle was
glad he bought cheap vodka.

“Me too,” said Doyle. “The
Jameson's.”

Drinking with him seemed a good idea. But it flustered
Hobbs because it reminded him that he had forgotten his
manners. He muttered an apology as he groped for the
Irish whiskey. Then he muttered other things as he poured.

From what Doyle could make out of it, Moon was back
in town. But so was Michael. Hobbs had seen them both
yesterday. Over in Manhattan on the street near his build
ing. And they came back this morning. They brought him
a bat and some lilies.

It wasn't Michael. Doyle knew for a fact that Michael
had never left the island. Moon, maybe, but then who was
he with? A bat, maybe, but lilies? There's no way ill hell
that Moon would send lilies and therefore it couldn't have
been Moon either.

Why ruin a good thing, however.

“Sit down, Mr. Hobbs. Tell me all about it.”

He could see that Hobbs was right on the edge. Hobbs patted his pocket, reached in for what looked like a bunch
of snapshots. Of what, Doyle couldn't see. Now he's try
ing to figure out how to pick up two mugs while holding
both the snapshots and his mother's pea-shooter.

“Mr. Hobbs . . . you don't need the gun. Come sit.”

Hobbs actually giggled. Half-giggle, half-sob.

“What you came here for is help. Sit. Let's see if we can help each other.”

Doyle set his Smith & Wesson down but he kept his
hand near it. With his left hand he made a calming gesture
toward Hobbs and then, slowly, he reached to open the
middle drawer of his desk. From it, he took out the plastic bag that contained the items from Jake's pockets, including
the copy of the annual report. Hobbs recognized it. He
sagged even more.

Doyle slid it from the bag and opened it to the inside
front cover. That page contained a photograph that was
typical of all such publications—a bunch of suits sitting
around a conference table. He knew that to ask was not
terribly smart because if he was wrong that would weaken
his hand. But he didn't think he was wrong.

“This one.” He touched his finger to the tall, thin man
in
the middle, the one with the scar. “Jake recognized
this one.”

He saw the truth in Bart Hobbs's eyes. He also saw
hatred and fear.

”I didn't
...
I didn't know him back then.”

Hobbs was talking, Doyle realized, about what hap
pened twenty-five years ago.

“That's good,” Doyle lied. “Because then is all I
care about.”

“I'm not to blame, you know.
I'm
as much a victim as—”

“Sit down, Mr. Hobbs. Let's talk about how to fix it.”

It was not that Moon mistrusted Johnny G.

But he knew that you could fill a graveyard with all the
men who were found dead in their cars after a real good
friend called and said let's meet at such and such a place.

He did two fly-bys of the Blockbuster Video store, one
with the traffic, one going slow. A more thorough look
would be on foot but he was reasonably satisfied that the place Johnny named had not been staked out. Too many
people around. There was a bus stop right across the street,
saloons on each corner, a busy Exxon station on one side and an A&P supermarket on the other. It was not a good
place for a hit.

Still, he waited until Johnny G. drove up, by himself,
and stepped out of his car to look around for him. Moon
caught his attention. That he came without bodyguards
might still mean only that he wants to look harmless. He
signaled Johnny G. to move his car into that gas station
and park it. Johnny understood. That done, Moon waved
him over, all the time watching the street. Johnny G. gave
him a dirty look.