The Shadow Box (42 page)

End it? Hobbs wanted to shout out that it would never
have happened,
need
never have happened, if the good
Baron had kept his head. But part of the blame was his
own. He had seriously underestimated Michael.

“Were you aware, incidentally, that he's some kind of
martial arts expert?”

“An impressive young man.”

“Those two he crippled . . . Parker's men. Parker
doubted their story at first but according to some of Mi
chael's college classmates . . .”

The Baron had raised an eyebrow. “You've been inter
viewing these people yourself?”

“I'm not a fool, Franz. I only speak to—”

“
Franz,''
the older man said icily, ' ‘is one of my chauf
feurs. I am the Baron Franz Rast. The distinction is considerable.”

Again, Hobbs held his tongue with difficulty. The Baron
sipped his capuccino, now gone cold. He put it down. “You were saying, Mr. Hobbs?”

“That
...
I only speak to Parker. Parker speaks to them. He wants more money for this, by the way.”

“He is well paid as it is. If he thinks he can black
mail me . . .”

Hobbs curled his lip. “Blackmailing
us,
my dear Baron, is how he got his job in the first place. The money, as it
happens, is to hire better people.”

A grunt. “Who speak English, I trust.”

“And who know the city better. He says he would have
done so at the outset if he'd had decent information on Michael Fal
l
on. He's now lost two dead, the Jamaican is
back in prison, and the Pakistani is still missing.”

“Two dead? Who are the two?”

Hobbs tapped his photographs. “The taxi driver, re
member? Palm Beach?”

”I know about that one. Who is the other?”

“The idiot who managed to shoot Bronwyn.”

The Baron pursed his lips. “That was hardly the Fallon
boy's doing. But the taxi driver . . .” His expression
turned thoughtful. “To be skilled in the martial arts is one
thing. But that business by your pool was an act of cruel and calculated savagery.”

You should know, you old bastard, thought Hobbs.

“Is that boy really capable of such an act?”

Hobbs raised an eyebrow. “You can ask? After what
he did to two armed attackers? And now he's armed as well. He took that Jamaican's—”

The Baron gestured dismissively. ”I should think he
would be. Karate or the like is not a magic shirt. I'm sure its practitioners are shot with great regularity by people
with lesser skills and greater sense. Will Parker find him,
Mr. Hobbs?”

“He says he will. He's sure he will.”

“How comforting.”

“We've had some bad luck. But Parker says—”

“Bad luck?” Franz Rast felt the veal rising. “Three
failed attempts plus one botched burglary and you call that
bad luck? And this latest absurdity. Did we really expect
a man born and raised in New York City to stalk us
through the Maine woods in the hope that he might catch
us sloshing about in hip-waders?”

“You agreed, as I recall, that it was worth a try.”

“Absent
a less desperate idea, Mr. Hobbs. And I'll say
again. The way to find that boy is through that lawyer.”

Hobbs rubbed his chin nervously. He took a breath to
prepare himself. “I've . . . just had a call from Bellows.
I'm afraid there's more bad news.”

Blood drained from the Baron's cheeks as he heard the
details of Doyle's amended suit. Slowly, his color rose
again. Two thin fists crashed down upon the table. His bodyguards straightened. Other diners turned their heads.
Franz Rast brought his napkin to his lips.

“End this, Mr. Hobbs,” he hissed.

He rose to his feet.

“For the sake of my digestion, to say nothing of your
future, put an end to this once and for all.”

Hobbs bit his lip. ”I will . . . speak to Parker.”

The Baron closed his eyes. He shook his head slowly.
“Mr. Hobbs, I will teach you the German word for ‘in
competent.’ The word is
unbefugt.
Chew on it. Let it roll

on your tongue. One would have to summon gutter lan
guage to find a word more apt than
unbefugt.``

He threw his napkin at Hobbs's array of photographs.

”I will speak to Mr. Parker myself.”

Hobbs, seething, watched the Baron go.

They had been through this before. And it
was
bad luck.

Bronwyn. Such a terrible loss. Steering
Michael into
that convenience store at the precise moment when its
owner, who had only that morning bought a pistol on the
street, must have been praying to his Buddha that some hooded addict would try to rob him again. What else was
that but damnable luck?

The shotgun going off not into Michael, not even into
a display of beef jerky, but into Bronwyn, who had moved
well away from the line of fire.

It goes on and on.

A professional burglar who arrives at Michael's building
to find the police already there and the apartment already
burgled. The one suspect, a building resident who swore
on his life, which it nearly cost him, that he knew nothing
about it.

Add the reflexes of a fat black woman who didn't know
Michael Fallon from Bull Connor and would have cared
even less if she'd had a chance to stop and think.

Add two inept muggers to whom it never occurred that
if a white man fails to cross the street when he sees them
approaching, he's probably as ready for them as that Ko
rean was.

And of course that was it, thought Hobbs. By that time,
Michael knew. Somehow he knew, or at least suspected,
and he was ready. He disabled those two, disarmed them,
and then he asked them for names.

The Jamaican, the only one who spoke English, swears
that he told him nothing. That Michael asked them noth
ing. The Pakistani confirmed it. Not a word, they say, was
spoken by anyone. Not even by Michael.

Perhaps.

But Michael did have that pistol aimed at the Jamaican's knee and he did choose not to shoot. Why such generosity?
Was it in payment, after all, for a satisfactory answer? Did
the Jamaican, in fact, tell Michael that it was the taxi
driver, not they, who beat his uncle to death?

Parker says no.

To begin with, says Parker, the only way they'd know
that Walter did that job would be if Walter told them. And
Walter, by all accounts, was none too popular with his
third world brethren, who thought he was a patronizing
shit and a snob about being half Belgian. He would hardly
admit to capital murder just to be one of the guys.

But say he did, says Parker. And say the Jamaican gave
his name to Michael. Why then did Michael not wait for
the police and tell them, “These two just tried to kill me.
They say they work for a man named Philip Parker who is chief of security at Lehman-Stone. Parker's boss is a
man named Bart Hobbs. Hobbs ordered the death of my
uncle but these two say they didn't do it. They say that a
certain taxi driver did.”

Why, instead, did Michael walk away?

Why did he then vanish for all these months?

Very well. Parker makes a valid point. Those two told
Michael nothing. And he knew nothing, at least that he
could prove. This is all well and good until we get to the
question of why he would resurface after several months, beat that taxi driver to death, and then start burning down
the homes of everyone who's been involved in this.

Parker was just full of answers to that one.

“In the first place,” says Parker, “you never should
have fired him. That just pissed him off. It made you
the enemy.”

Hobbs snorted. “So he went off for three months and
sulked about it? Then he decided that a suitable revenge
was to burn my house in Florida?”

”I would have.”

Hobbs closed one eye.

“Come on,” said Parker. “At the uncle's funeral, you
tell the guy, take Bronwyn, go use the Palm Beach house,
take a couple weeks' R&R.”

“At your suggestion.”

Parker's eyes became hooded. “Mine. Yours. The
Pope's. Don't start that shit, Mr. Hobbs.”

“I
only meant . . .” Hobbs had to look away.

Parker stared for another beat. “Anyway . . .
we
had
Walter down there
house-sitting
. Did you hear anyone tell
him to do more than that?”

Hobbs winced at the mention of the taxi driver's name.
He disliked using or even knowing their actual names and
Parker was fully aware of that. Parker was getting a bit
too fresh lately.

The man, in any case, had left the city immediately
after the Jake Fallon business was finished. Parker posted
him to the Palm Beach house. It's true that he, Hobbs,
had heard no order given. And yet he knew. If Michael
had gone down there, Walter and Bronwyn would have
arranged an understandably despondent suicide.

Some security guard. Some suicide.

“What's your point?” he asked Parker.

”I don't know. Could be Fallon smelled a rat but I
doubt it. Maybe after he thinks about it he just says, ‘This
hypocritical prick’—no offense—‘offers me this house
he's so proud of and then he fires me. You want me to
use your house? Okay. I'll go grill some steaks on your living room floor.’ ”

How he detested this man, thought Hobbs. With his foul
mouth and crooked teeth. The hooded eyes and perpetual
sneer of a bully. He probably has a tattoo. Hobbs took a
breath and waited.

“But then,” Parker went on, “you have to believe that
this kid ran into Walter, who is no pussy himself, kicked
the piss out of him, and then killed him. From what we
hear, the kid can handle himself but there's a big jump
between fighting and killing.”

“Even if he found out somehow that this man had—”

“Whacked his uncle? We've been through that. The
only people who could finger him are you, me, the Baron,
and Bronwyn. It sure as hell wasn't us and Bronwyn was
in no shape to make a deathbed confession. It wasn't Wa
lter
because how would that leave him better off? They
went there to burn the house, he was there, and they took
him out. It's that simple.”

“They? You're saying that it wasn't Michael?”

“Not alone, it wasn't.”

“The black man? The one called Moon?”

A shrug. “No one's seen him since he walked out of Mount Sinai.”

“But the same questions apply. How would he know?
And why would he have waited this long?”

“Mr. Hobbs . . . think about it.”

“Enlighten me.”

Smug son of a bitch. His theories change with the wind.

“All it is,” insisted Parker, “somewhere, somehow,
they got a few names. But other than that, they don't
have shit.”

Hobbs
had
thought about it. He'd been trying to believe
just that. But the call from Bellows,
if nothing else, had
put an end to any such self-delusion.

Michael hadn't run, exactly. And he certainly did not
go off to sulk. He had merely gone underground.

Witness the fact that he laid a false trail to Cape Cod.
An elaborate trail. Even down to his gas receipts. Witness
the
probability
that he had two or more men positioned
to cover his departure. Parker's people had seen them.
They said they had hard faces and they wore their cloth
ing loosely.

So Michael clearly had allies. Probably those “investi
gators” of Doyle's. He went underground when it dawned
on him that nearly everyone he saw seemed to want to
kill him. And he spent those three months digging. Dig
ging and planning.

What is it he wants? Revenge, certainly, but with a new
wrinkle. He now wants ten million dollars' worth.

But then why all the arson? Why the campaign of
terror?

“To spook you,” says Parker, as if the answer were
obvious. “To me, that means they still can't prove a
thing.”

Perhaps.

But at least Parker, swine that he is, is
doing
something. He has people out looking. For Michae
l
, for Jake
Fallon`s
shadow whom the Baron wants dead just as much, and
now for Victor Turkel. And for the missing Pakistani
whom Parker seems
to think
he'll find hiding from the
INS in some Muslim sanctuary such as Jersey City or
the Bronx.

Hobbs left the dining room.

He made his way through the lobby, toward Fifth Ave
nue, then thought better of it. He opted for the side en
trance opening onto 61st Street. This is what it's come
to, he thought bitterly. Bartholomew Harriman Hobbs III, chewing Maalox by the handful, sneaking out through side
doors while that vindictive old bastard hides away in his
tower.