As Dog Is My Witness (29 page)

“No, it’s not so awful,” he said. “But it’s not fair
for you to make my decisions for me. Suppose I decided you should
move out of this house and get yourself a one-floor condo that
would be easier to take care of?”

“You
have
decided that,” Isobel pointed
out.

She had walked right into his trap. “Yeah,” he said,
“but I didn’t hire an arsonist to come burn the house down so you’d
have to move.”

Isobel Mahoney’s face lengthened as the words hit
home. She held her son, and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m
sorry, Jeffrey.”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said
through a particularly good frosted cookie. “How did you know who
to hire to sabotage his cars? I mean, you’re not especially well
versed in the hiring practices of automotive hit men, are you?”

Mahoney let his mother go, and sat next to her on the
other side of the sofa while she went back to her wrapping. “No,
I’ve never had to do anything like that before,” she admitted. “I
called on an old friend who has some expertise in that.”

“Dad knew some criminals who could find a guy?”
Mahoney guessed.

“Oh, no,” Isobel said, scandalized he’d even suggest
such a thing. “Your father doesn’t know anything about this. No, I
called Hyman Shapiro. He knew who to get.”

I figured the chewing had affected my hearing. “You
called
who
?” It should have been “whom,” I’ll grant you, but
I was a little taken aback.

“Hyman Shapiro,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Didn’t you know, Jeffrey? We used to date when I was in high
school.”

“
T
here has to be a
connection,” I said to Mahoney in the Trouble Mobile. “Mr. Shapiro
doesn’t just pop up in conversation twice in the same week. In
fact, before last Thursday, I would have bet you there
was
no Mr. Shapiro.”

Mahoney, however, was not on the same continent as
the rest of us Americans at the moment. “My own mother,” he was
lamenting. “My own mother sets me up to get fired because she’s
afraid I’ll catch a cold on the highway. Do you realize what this
means? What kind of gene pool I’m coming from? It’s entirely
possible I’ll be completely nuts by the time I’m fifty.”

“What makes you think you’re not nuts now? You own a
boxed set of the
Planet of the Apes
movies.”

He smiled. “Yeah. She
is
sweet that way.”

This wasn’t getting me anywhere, but the van was, and
that’s what counted. The day wasn’t getting any younger, and I
still had a major mystery to solve if I was to meet my
deadline.

I have never missed a deadline in fifteen years of
freelance work, and I don’t intend to start—ever. The name of this
game is “keep the customer satisfied,” to quote Simon and
Garfunkel, and you don’t get a lot of second chances with editors.
Snapdragon
was my best-paying client (although not my most
frequent), and this was only the second time I’d worked with them.
There was no point in annoying an editor if I could help it.

Besides, if I could make Mary Fowler happier for
Christmas, well, maybe I’d not appear to be Alistair Sim, after
all.

“Would you focus on something for a minute?” I asked
Mahoney. “I’m running out of time here, and I can’t throw you a
softball while you’re driving.”

“I’m dealing with a mother who used to date a Mafia
guy, and then calls him after fifty years to hire a saboteur who
comes and messes up my work. And you want me to be
focused
?”

I sat back and closed my eyes. “Just for a minute,” I
said. “It’s the Mafia guy I’m trying to figure out. Do you think
he’s protecting me because of your mom?”

“Yeah, I’m sure while they were catching up and she
was asking him to suggest a freelance criminal, your name came up,”
Mahoney said. He had a point.

“That’s true. How would he know I’m your mom’s
favorite adopted son? So Shapiro must be operating independently of
that conversation, and it’s just a total coincidence. Right?”

“No, that’s stupid,” said Mahoney, and again he had a
point. Four more points, and he would be a Star of David. “It’d be
like me mentioning Burt Lancaster during this conversation, and
when you get home, they ask you to write the remake of
Elmer
Gantry.
”

“I wouldn’t mind that, except I’ve never seen
Elmer Gantry
.”

“I imagine for the fee, you’d be willing to rent the
video.” He had a p—. Oh, never mind.

“So what’s your theory?” I figured there was no sense
in killing the speculation just because I couldn’t think of
anything that made sense.

“I think once you began making noises in the Michael
Huston thing, Shapiro caught wind of it and sent the Goon Squad
after you. They followed you, and saw you following me. They
reported to him, and he realized there was a connection. But he
doesn’t know what it is, so he keeps them following you.”

It made sense, but that didn’t make it true. “Then
what’s all this stuff about me being in danger? And how come the
Big Three didn’t react when The Mole told us your mom had ordered
the hit on your cars? They didn’t seem to know.”

Mahoney considered that. “Maybe Shapiro didn’t tell
them. They don’t strike me as being that high on the food
chain.”

Since Mahoney was certainly outdoing me in this
conversation, I clammed up for the rest of the ride, thinking. It
took about forty-five minutes to get back down to East
Brunswick.

Bill Mahovic lived in a garden apartment complex not
far off Route 18 in East Brunswick, a town that would prefer not to
notice it has any garden apartment complexes. East Brunswick likes
to concentrate on its extremely high standardized test scores and
high rankings in the state’s school systems, and sincerely believes
it is made up entirely of upper middle class single family homes.
Stop an East Brunswickian at the strip mall, ask what the average
price of a home there is, and see if you get a figure under
$600,000. It would be inaccurate, but that’s what they think.

Mahovic did not live in a $600,000 house. He lived in
a one-bedroom apartment with a galley kitchen, a living “area,” and
a bedroom with a double-sliding-door closet. The walls had been
painted white with cheap paint so many times they no longer seemed
to be any color at all—they were just walls. Something had to hold
the ceiling up.

Mahoney and I stood in the living room, and Mahovic,
with a puzzled expression on his face, faced us. He’d let us in, I
think, more to stop the below-zero breeze getting into his
apartment and less to answer questions about his friend Kevin
Fowler.

“Kevin’s not here,” he said before we had a chance to
ask. “If that’s what you’re here for.”

Mahovic, a skinny, tall, completely unformidable
“man” of twenty or twenty-one, looked like a basketball player’s
valet chair. An oversized New York Knicks jersey with “Sprewell” on
the back hung off his torso as if held up by a stick. He wore grey
sweatpants that also seemed too large, and brought to mind a much
less flashy M.C. Hammer.

In other words, Mahovic looked like he would snap
like a twig if you hollered too loudly at him in a small room. And
coming from a guy my height and strength, that’s saying a lot.

“Well, we are looking for him,” I answered. “Do you
have any idea where Kevin might be?” I would have bet my mortgage
payment Kevin was, in fact, in the apartment, if only because
Mahovic was so spectacularly unconvincing in his delivery. I’ve
seen Yogi Berra recite dialogue more naturally.

“I dunno,” Mahovic said, perhaps exhausting his
ability to ad lib. “Probably in college, right?”

“That doesn’t seem likely,” Mahoney said. He had been
standing near me in case there was trouble, but once we had a good
look at Mahovic, there seemed to be little chance of that, so
Mahoney was now wandering around the room looking for hiding
places. Mahovic probably thought he was searching for the stash of
pot that was unquestionably also in the apartment. I’m not one
hundred percent sure he realized we were not representatives of the
police department.

“Huh? Why not?” Mahovic asked. He didn’t like the
idea that we weren’t just going to buy whatever he said and go
away. It was only eleven in the morning, and he’d just gotten out
of bed, he told us.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked, cutting off
that topic of conversation for the time being.

“Um, I work at the Krauszer’s on Route 27 in
Somerset,” he said. “Mostly nights.”

“Is that where you met Kevin?” I knew it wasn’t, but
I wanted to keep Mahovic talking and see where he’d slip up. It
wasn’t so much a question of
if
as
when.

“No, I’ve known Kev since grade school. Sixth grade.
We used to hang at lunch together and dis the nerds.” Mahovic was
more comfortable recalling the years when he had reached his
current level of intelligence and maturity.

Mahoney was behind Mahovic (the opposite of where
he’d be in the phone book) when I asked, “So, since he’s such a
close friend, I guess you know he’s not really enrolled at the
University of Indiana, right?”

Mahovic’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times,
but no sound came out. This was his version of smooth covering for
a friend. Made you wonder how many of his friends had survived.

“What do . . .  what do you mean?” he
asked when language once again became a possibility for him.

“I mean that Kevin Fowler hasn’t ever been a student
at the University of Indiana, that he has a phone line set up to
forward his calls from here to there and back, and that he’s
probably in this apartment hiding as we speak because he was
involved in Michael Huston’s murder.”

Mahovic had no pre-planned response for that, and,
requiring further instructions, naturally turned to the source of
his information. He instinctively went to ask Kevin, and that meant
turning toward the bedroom. But before he could get there or stop
himself, he ran into a brick wall named Mahoney.

“Bedroom,” I said, and Mahoney and I headed down the
hall, Mahovic behind us, complaining about our sudden desire to see
where he slept. He said something about his rights, but we didn’t
especially care, not being duly licensed investigators or
representatives of any government agency. We simply kept walking,
and let him follow us.

The bedroom was just as bland and strewn with
clothing and half-eaten pizza as the living room, but it was
smaller, which gave it more a cozy bear-cave feel. You had to
figure that whatever attempts Mahovic made to get women to come see
the place were largely unsuccessful, since the screaming and peals
of laughter that surely had resulted any time a female set foot in
the room would unquestionably have inspired police reports.

“Closet?” Mahoney asked as we walked in and found the
room unoccupied. There was a sliding-door closet large enough for a
person to hide in, but I shook my head.

“Think of who we’re dealing with,” I said, and he
nodded. We both dropped to the floor.

“Hey!” said Mahovic. “What are you guys doing?
There’s nobody here.”

Kevin Fowler, hiding under the bed in the center of
the room, had his face turned in my direction, and it was not a
happy face.

“Why don’t you come up now, Kev?” I asked. “I’m sure
the dust coyotes under there could use the space.”

It took a bit of coercion (and a look at Mahoney) to
get Kevin out from under the bed, and once he was, to get him to
leave the apartment. But I didn’t want to question him here, where
he could clam up or issue bald-faced lies. I wanted to appeal to a
higher authority, and have him tell his story with his mother in
the room.

He didn’t want to leave, but Mahoney—and to a much
less effective extent, I—insisted, so Kevin grabbed his biker
jacket and headed for the door. I noticed a small bandage on his
left hand.

“No gloves, Kev?” I asked. “It’s in the single digits
out there.”

“Gloves are for pussies,” he said.

“Funny,” Mahoney pondered. “The only pussy I’ve ever
seen wearing gloves is Sylvester the Cat.”

Gloveless, Kevin came with us, and was just as
surprised as Mahoney and I were to find the Terrible Trio outside
the apartment door, leaning on their black SUV.

“What’s up, fellas?” I asked. “The big and tall men’s
shop close early for Christmas?”

Big wasn’t smiling. “What are you doing with him?” He
indicated Kevin.

I raised an eyebrow, which was almost instinctive.
“You guys know each other?” Big didn’t answer, and neither did
Bigger. I turned to Biggest. “Surely you’re not going to clam up on
me, too,” I said to him with a quiver in my voice. “Not you!”

Big merely glared—not at me, but at Kevin. There was
definitely some animosity between the two, because Kevin was trying
as hard as he could not to look at Big while Big was giving him the
kind of look Superman gave Lex Luthor. (Just as an aside, you see
so few children named “Lex” these days, you have to wonder if
Luthor didn’t spoil things for all of us.)