The Shadow Box (5 page)

“For the record,” he said at last, “in your whole life,
I never heard you tell a lie. I never knew you to steal
a dime.”

“That means you'll take them on?”

 
He made a face. “You could lose more than you'd
gain.”

 
Fallon waited.

“Think of a nasty divorce, Michael. Think of a custody
battle. The husband, who might be the nearest thing to
Jesus Christ in terms of actual behavior, will hear that
he's a drunk, a philanderer, a wife-beater, and if, God
forbid, the children at issue are girls under ten, he'll hear
that he had his hand up their dresses.”

“You're saying
I'll
get dirty.”

Doyle nodded. “Win or lose. The whispers will never
stop.”

And now that look again. As if he were toying with
another subject.

“Michael . . .”

He waited again.

“Your uncle . . . never thought much of your career
choice. You being on Wall Street, I mean.”

“No, he didn't.”

“Did he ever say why?”

“Sure. He thinks all rich white Protestants are thieves.”

The lawyer smiled, in part at Michael's use of the pres
ent tense.

”I have pointed out to him,” said Doyle, “that one
finds the odd Jew on Wall Street. Even the odd Papist.
His reply was that the Jews invented commerce but the
Protestants invented greed.”

The smile flickered at the memory, then faded.

“And . . . you pushing drug company stocks. He didn't
much like that either, did
h
e.”

“There's nothing wrong with drug companies.”

“But with all the industries you might have special
ized in . . .”

“Mr. Doyle, what's your point?”

The lawyer shook his head quickly. “None. None at
all.”

Doyle signaled for the waiter.

Big Jake's advice, given while Fallon was in college,
was to do what you love and the money will follow. Un
less they won't pay you. In that case, go where the money
is, make your pile, then go do something useful with the
rest of your life.

Good advice. The kind uncles give. But Jake definitely
hadn't meant Wall Street because Uncle Jake was not a
fan of the financial community. He said that the Mafia in
its best year never pulled off scams such as are concocted
every day on Wall Street. Not just the savings and loan
robbery either. Not just the legalized piracy of corporate raiders, throwing tens of thousands out of work to further
enrich a few. He said the traffic in heroin and cocaine wouldn't exist if a bunch of rich white Protestants hadn't
put up the money in the first place. He wasn't far wrong.

Eventually, Fallon did go where the money is. But he
did it his own way and with a nod, he thought, to his
Uncle Jake's misgivings. Almost from the beginning, he
had specialized in drug companies of the legitimate kind.
First as an analyst at Shearson and later as a trader with
Lehman-Stone. Lehman-Stone had held positions in
Merck, Pfizer, and all the major pharmaceutical giants,
but mostly, of late, in European firms such as Glaxo and
Germany's AdChem.

To hear his Uncle Jake talk, however, none of these
companies was any great improvement over the Medellin Cartel. In fact, during that Tylenol scare a few years back,
when cyanide-laced bottles were turning up on supermar
ket shelves, Jake said that he would not have put it past
a rival drug company to have planted them.

An outrageous accusation. But Jake wouldn't back off.
At the very least, he said, these companies test each other's
products all the time, hoping to find some contaminant so
they can blow the whistle and force a recall. Why? Be
cause dropping a dime on a competitor can mean a wind
fall increase in market share and their own stock shoots
up in value. For that matter, it wouldn't surprise him if
some of those Wall Street bozos had planted the poisoned
bottles themselves. Two or three people die, the stock
drops like a stone, and they make a killing because they've
been shorting it for weeks.

Fallon couldn't deny that it was possible. Absurd, un
fair, and slanderous, but still remotely possible. Maybe
they also killed President Kennedy. Maybe they're aliens
out to control us by drugging us. It's possible, right?

It was no use trying to tell Jake how many people are
alive and functioning today because of the products Mi
chael's clients had developed. All the jobs they've created.
All the grants and scholarships they've awarded. Uncle
Jake didn't want to know, nor would he explain his
antagonism.

But Fallon thought he knew the reason. A shrug from
Moon, during that tirade of Jake's, had as much as con
firmed it. It had to do with Fallon's parents. Both of them,
his father in particular, had worked for a drug company
that was run, almost certainly, by white-collar criminals.

Even so, thought Fallon, it was flat-out ridiculous to
mention that rinky-dink operation in the same breath with
the Mercks and Pfizers and AdChems of the world. For
one thing, all it made were veterinary products. It was a
small manufacturer/distributor named Eagle Sales, based
over in New Jersey, long since out of business.

His father had been their accountant. His mother, as he
recalled, had worked there first. It's where they'd met. She
quit just before he was born but she would go back every
now and then, filling in for vacations and the like.

The only possible connection, and the reason that Doyle
was tap
dancing around it, was that the owners of Eagle
had skimmed the hell out of that company and his father
had probably helped them do it. No one ever said so
straight out but it had to have been true. That last year, after his mother left, there was just too much money, all of it cash, lying around that apartment.

So what?

Like father, like son?

Is that what Doyle was getting at?

Or does he think that going into a marginally related field was rooted, somehow, in some deep inner urge to
make amends for whatever his father had done? Or maybe
to succeed where his father had failed?

That was total horseshit. All of it. Doyle, in any case, did not return to that subject.

The upshot of the dinner was that Doyle would file suit
but he would then lie back and wait for heads to cool. No
one wants this to go to court. No one wants the SEC in this. Be patient and they'll settle.

Doyle did have one theory as to what was going on
here. It had to do with corporate image. Lehman-Stone
was a very conservative firm and so were its clients. But
suddenly they're getting a lot of unwelcome press. Their
name was mentioned, repeatedly, in the newspaper ac
counts of Big Jake Fallon's murder, if only in connection
with Jake's adopted son and heir. Several of the stories
mentioned that Big Jake's younger brother, Michael's fa
ther, had taken his own life.

Then, after Bronwyn was killed, one tabloid did a story
on what amounted to the Fallon curse . . . how Big Jake's
nephew seems dogged by tragedy and death. Even the
burglary made the papers. To make matters worse, that
same story reported that the Giordano brothers of Brook
lyn had placed a bounty on whomever killed Jake. The
younger Giordano, called Johnny G., was said to have
been a boyhood friend of Michael's.

The long and the short of it, said Doyle, is that Lehman-
Stone now sees that one of its traders is related to the notorious Big Jake Fallon and the infamous Giordano
brothers. They decide to disassociate themselves, and fast.

“But they don't want to look like pricks, either,” said
Doyle, “dumping a guy who's taken some really hard
shots. They won't if they can make him look like a crook.
He's Jake Fallon's nephew, right? He's Johnny G.'s pal.
How straight can he be?”

“You think that's what happened?” Fallon asked.

“It's a theory.”

“Mr. Doyle . . . Bart Hobbs has lied about me. I want
his ass in court.”

Outside the Algonquin, an unexpected snow had begun
to coat the sidewalk. It gave Doyle another excuse to argue
for that boat.

“I'm tempted to go in on one with you,” he said.
“We'll find a nice island, swim in to the beach. Who
knows? We might even trip over some sleeping native and
he'll turn out to be Moon.”

“You still haven't heard from him either?”

“Not a word.”

“I'm worried about him.”

“You worry about yourself.” Doyle squeezed his arm and grunted. “Get back to the gym, Michael. You're let
ting yourself go soft.”

He squeezed him once more, this time with affection,
then turned and walked off toward the cab stand at Grand
Central Station.

Fallon looked for a cab of his own. He did not have
high hopes. The off-duty lights of New York taxis are
known to wink on at the first flake of snow. But the Sixth
Avenue subway was only a block and a half away. He
reached it, missed one train, and stood waiting, deep in
thought, for the next.