The Shadow Box (3 page)

Her parents were British subjects who had retired to Portugal's Algarve. Fallon was to fly there and meet them
over Christmas. The mother, said Hobbs, was too frail to travel and so had asked that Bronwyn's ashes be sent back to England, where they would be interred in a family plot.

Cremation. Fallon could not bear the thought of it. But neither, said Hobbs, could her parents bear the thought of
looking at their daughter's ruined body.

“You can't know, Michael, how sorry I am.”

He supposed that he could. It was Hobbs who had
brought her over,
borrowed her from Lehman-Stone's Brit
ish affiliate. It was Hobbs who had introduced them and
assigned her to work on his team. He had even encouraged
their romance and now, quite likely, wished to God that
he had not.

“Get away from this town, Michael. You'll be seeing
her everywhere you turn. The Palm Beach house is still
yours for the asking.”

But his answer was the same. Not until Moon is
stronger.

He kissed the urn that held Bronwyn's remains. It was
placed in a shipping container. He put a rose in with it.
He went home, numb with grief, only to find out that his
apartment had been burglarized.

The building's doorman had seen no one enter or leave
who was not a resident, but that in itself meant little.
Burglars, in the
past,
had entered through the garage or
by crossing from adjacent roofs.

The door to his apartment had not been forced. The
interior, however, was a shambles. Missing were his laptop
computer, a watch, and a few other pieces of gold jewelry.
The thief had also gone through his desk and a file cabinet,
but Michael had kept nothing of value in either place.

Some blank disks and a few that held data ap
peared to be missing. The data, job-related, was no loss.
It would be of no use to anyone else and, in any case, he
had copies of it at Lehman-Stone. His most grievous loss had been on top of the desk. It was his only picture of
Bronwyn. She had given it to him the week before she
died. She'd had it mounted in an antique shadow box
frame that she said had been in her family for more than
two hundred years. It was trimmed in gold filigree. Some
one stole it for the gold.

The police came in force. Two uniforms first, then two detectives. This, it became clear, was because Michael Fal
lon's name was still fresh in their minds from
the killing
at the convenience store and from the newspaper accounts,
a few days prior, of the funeral of Big Jake Fallon.

The police were not surprised that he'd been robbed.

“They watch for funerals,” one of the uniforms told
him. “Funerals and weddings. Miserable pricks.”

Fallon, in his state of mind, could not swear that he'd
locked the door or even that he'd shut it securely. The
doorman suspected another tenant, a troubled young man
who lived on the twelfth floor with a widowed mother.
He was nineteen, had been arrested several times for petty
theft, and had been in drug rehab twice. The detectives
checked his apartment and found property that other resi
dents of the building had reported stolen. But nothing of
Michael's.

Ten days later, he was out of a job.

It was done suddenly. It was done brutally. No reason
was given.

For those ten days he had taken at least part of Bart
Hobbs's advice. Don't think about work. Give yourself
some time. But having that time made it worse. He had
done nothing but take long walks, go to movies without
seeing them, and sit with Moon at Mount Sinai.

Moon was in his late fifties. Although solidly built, he
was not an exceptionally large man except for his hands.
He had the hands of a man twice his size. Uncle Jake had
often said that he'd never met a tougher or more dangerous
man than Moon.

“Or a kinder, wiser man,” Big Jake had added. “It's as if there's two of him.”

Now, however, he looked anything but tough and his
floor nurse had her doubts about his wisdom.

Physically, he seemed much better. His speech was not
as slurred and his left hand had pretty much stopped shak
ing. But he had also taken an unauthorized walk through
Central Park. He said he needed to fill his lungs and to
be out where there was life. The nurse had chewed him
out for it but she let him keep his clothing if he promised
to behave.

It was his mental state that troubled Michael. He had a
lost and haunted look about him. Michael worried that a
world without Big Jake Fallon was not a world that Moon
would want to live in. At other times his eyes would
take on a peculiar and almost frightening shine. He was
imagining, Michael supposed, what he would do to the
man who had beaten Jake Fallon to death. If he ever got
those hands on him.

Moon understood that he needed to get himself together.
He said it himself.

“When you hate,” he said, “but that hate can't find a
place to go, it turns inward. You start hating yourself for
the things you wish you'd done. You want to hurt
yourself.”

“Yeah, well, I'll hurt you if you don't quit talking
like that.”

The threat brought a welcome smile. “You're gonna try
me
now?
Now that
I'm
old and had a stroke? Why don't
you wait another year or two, Michael? Maybe I'll have
cancer by then.”

“Just don't you leave me, Moon.”

Michael's own need was to get back to work, get busy.

He called Bart Hobbs to say that he'd be in the next
Monday. Hobbs argued. He thought it was too soon but
Michael insisted. In the end, Hobbs couldn't say no.

On the Friday preceding, however, he found a call on his answering machine from one of Hobbs's assistants.
Don't bother coming in, was the message. We've cleaned
out your office. Your personal effects are being sent to
you by messenger. With them, you will find a document.
Sign it, and you will receive a check in the amount of one
hundred thousand dollars. Refuse, and you will be paid
through the last day you worked. Nothing more. No sever
ance. No year-end bonus. This offer is final.

He tried to call Hobbs. Hobbs would not speak to him.

On Saturday, he went to Hobbs's apartment building. It
was on Fifth Avenue, facing the park. The doorman would
not let him past the lobby. On Monday, he went to the
World Trade Center, to the offices of Lehman-Stone. Secu
rity guards stopped him. They escorted him from the build
ing. He was furious. Humiliated.

The document in question was in effect an
admission
that he had been transferring customers' money into a
dummy account and had been using inside knowledge to
enrich himself. He read it, stunned, and of course refused
to sign it. He gave it to Brendan Doyle, demanding that
he file a lawsuit at once charging slander and wrongful
dismissal.

“What have you been up to there, Michael?” asked
the lawyer.

“Nothing, damn it. It's a goddamned lie.”

“First let me have a talk with them,” said Doyle.

That same day, he received a letter from Moon. Moon
had asked him not to visit for a few days and now he
understood why. Against his doctor's advice, Moon had
checked himself out of Mount Sinai. The letter said
that he had been to the cemetery, had a good long talk with
Jake. Right now he needs to do some traveling. Maybe go
someplace where it's warm.

Moon, like Hobbs, thought that Michael would do well
to do the same. Like Hobbs, he knew that the city would
be too full of ghosts.

“I'm real sorry, Michael,” the letter ended. “You got twice my sorrow and here
I'm
running out on you. But
there are things I need to settle in my head. I can't do
that where everything I see is full of memories and where
I lie awake all night wanting to put a real bad hurt on someone.”

Fallon took
someone
to mean almost anyone. Any
Brooklyn burglar. Anyone who had ever been less than a
friend to Uncle Jake. He would worry about Moon and
he'd miss him. But he was glad to see him back on his
feet. And especially out of New York.

Moon didn't write again. For the next two months, De
cember and through most of January, he didn't call either. Michael tried a few places where he thought Moon might
have gone. New Jersey, where he still had family. Or
Naples, Florida, where Uncle Jake owned a condo out on
Marco Island, half of which now belonged to Moon. But
no luck. If Moon called or wrote after January, Michael
didn't know it. By that time he was running himself.

New York had killed Bronwyn. New York had killed
Jake. And then it turned its attention to him.

“Michael . . . it is not New York that was doing all
this.''

  
“That city kills, Doc. That city eats its young.”
  
“And Bronwyn, incidentally, did not die hating you.”
 
“You  weren't there,  Dr.  Greenberg.   You didn't see
her eyes. ”
             
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