S. J. Rozan

by Absent Friends

  “I will.”

  She would; of course she would. “He'll lie to you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Bitter or not, Marian drank. “Because he lied to me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he got the money from Jimmy.”

  “How do you know that's not true?”

  “Because it's ridiculous.”

  “In what way?”

  “Every way! Jimmy was a firefighter, where would he get so much money? And why on earth this absurd charade? He was Markie's closest friend. If he had money and wanted to help Sally out, why not just give it to her?” With horror Marian heard her own voice rising. She tried for a look of righteous indignation. “He's hiding something. Phil,” she added, to make sure this reporter, who seemed a little dim, would understand. “He's trying to blame something on Jimmy because Jimmy's dead. And because Jimmy's a hero, so whatever he was up to—Phil—if he can hook it to Jimmy, it won't look so bad.”

  Laura Stone asked, “Where do you think the money came from?”

  Enunciating very clearly: “I have no idea.”

  “Captain McCaffery didn't tell you?”

  “Jimmy?” A swift rush of blood filled Marian's face. Had this slow-witted reporter not heard anything she'd said? “How would he have known?”

  “Did Sally Keegan know?”

  Finally, a change of path. Breathe in, out. “No, I told you. Sally believed that money came from the State.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We all did.”

  “Why did Mark Keegan kill Jack Molloy?”

  “You must know this! Jack shot at him.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how do you know what happened?”

  “It's what Markie said.” Marian poured herself more coffee, added milk, made sure this time to include sugar. “And if you know I wasn't there, why are you asking me about it?”

  “I'm sorry if this brings up unpleasant memories.”

  “These aren't my favorite memories to dwell on, but that's not my question.”

  “I'm just trying to follow up on Mr. Randall's story.” Diffident smile, and then: “Why did Jack Molloy shoot at Mark Keegan?”

  “I don't know. Probably no reason. Jack was drunk.”

  “He'd shoot at a friend just because he was drunk?”

  “You never knew Jack, Ms. Stone. What are you getting at?”

  “What's your theory on where the payments to Mrs. Keegan originated?”

  Anger blazed through Marian again; but then into her mind sprang a picture, a friend's black dogs she'd seen playing tag in a field. The two zigzagged, broke this way and that, barking and yapping, taking turns being the chaser and the chased. Neither caught the other until one lay down, as if exhausted. The second trotted over to sniff, and the first leaped up and threw him into the mud.

  She said carefully, “I really can't imagine. Well, except for Mr. Randall's fantasy.”

  “His fantasy?”

  Marian sighed, making sure to keep it subtle, not theatrical. “It's obvious what he was digging for. If someone paid Markie to kill Jack, and then Markie died, they might have kept paying. Mr. Randall wanted me to say that was possible.”

  “Was it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “If it were, though, who would that have been?”

  “Oh, please!”

  “Mr. Randall seems to have thought it was Edward Spano.” Stone answered her own question. “Could it have been?”

  Marian gazed across the room to a large photograph of the lush growth in a neighborhood garden MANY had funded, a garden far enough uptown to have escaped the dust and ash. “I can believe Eddie would do something like that, yes. But I can't believe it would be Markie.”

  “But it was.”

  Alarm gripped Marian's heart, though her voice did not change. “How do you know that?”

  “It was Mark Keegan who killed Jack Molloy, I mean.”

  “Well, yes.” The grip slackened, her heart slowed. “But it was self-defense.”

  “So Keegan said.” Stone scowled at her recorder again, peering through the plastic to watch the tape rolling. As Marian relaxed, Stone, still adjusting buttons, said in preoccupied tones, “That could explain the payments to Keegan's family. Especially if someone else knew.”

  “What do you mean? Will you stop fiddling with that thing?”

  Stone looked up quickly. “I'm sorry. I'm just not very good with equipment. I'm not sure it's working. What did you say?”

  “What did you mean about the payments?”

  Stone frowned, then brightened, as though remembering. “If someone knew Mark Keegan had been paid to kill Molloy, the payments might have kept coming to keep her quiet.”

  “Her? You mean Sally? No. No possible way.”

  “Can you think of another explanation?”

  “I don't think that's my job, Ms. Stone.”

  “No.” Stone sighed. “No, I suppose not. What would McCaffery's role in this have been?”

  “Role? Jimmy? Even if that were what happened, which is insane, Jimmy would have had nothing to do with it.”

  “How do you know?”

  Levelly, Marian met the other woman's eyes. “I knew Jimmy.”

  “You broke up with him shortly after Keegan died.”

  “What happened between Jimmy and me has nothing to do with this!” Marian snapped. “And”—her voice chilled—“it's certainly none of your business.”

  “I'm sorry.” Stone seemed mortified. “That's not what I mean. It's just, you'd broken up by the time the payments began. He'd moved to Manhattan. I just wondered how you can be certain what he was involved in.”

  “You seem to know a lot about us.”

  “It was in Mr. Randall's story and his background research. Do I have it wrong?”

  “No. Not the facts. But the article twisted the facts. It was full of nasty innuendo. About Jimmy, about what he might have done. And by extension, about me.”

  “That's why I'm here,” Stone said earnestly. “I'll be speaking to other people, of course, but I've come to you first because you have a stake in it.”

  “What stake do you mean?” Too sharp, Marian admonished herself. Stay calm, keep control.

  “The McCaffery Fund.” Stone sounded surprised that Marian might be thinking of anything else. “You stopped taking contributions.”

  “A matter of form,” Marian replied. “To reassure contributors. Just until these absurd allegations about Jimmy are cleared up. Which I have no doubt will be soon.”

  “Meanwhile, I'd like to give you the chance to correct any misunderstandings based on what Mr. Randall wrote.”

  “Those were not misunderstandings. Those were a reporter's attempts to smear as many people as possible on the basis of extremely flimsy supposition. Especially in the face of these extraordinary times, that was unconscionable.”

  Laura Stone asked, “Do you know what was in his papers?”

  Oh, these twists and turns, they were wearying. “Whose papers? Harry Randall's?”

  “No. James McCaffery's.”

  Marian did not move; but her body suddenly felt ponderous, weighted down, as if the pull of gravity had doubled. “What do you mean? What papers?”

  “McCaffery apparently left papers. Possibly about this. Harry was on his way to see them the day he died.”

  In a corner of her mind, Marian registered: Harry. Not Harry Randall, not Mr. Randall. All pretense dropped.

  Marian summoned strength. “Who said this?” she demanded. “That Jimmy left papers?”

  “Someone told Harry about them.”

  “Someone lied.” That was not enough. “And even if he left something, who's to say it has anything to do with Jack and Markie? Jimmy could have had any number of things on his mind.” Marian wondered if that sounded as hollow to Laura Stone as it did to her.

  “Yes, of course,” said Sto
ne, equally falsely. “It's just, the person who told Harry about the papers said they were ‘hot stuff.'”

  “Hot stuff?”

  Stone nodded.

  Marian shook her head. “I don't believe it.”

  But it could be true. Jimmy, just like Marian herself, had never liked lying; but his reasons were different. He'd always said the truth would refuse to be hidden—it would “burn through,” that was how he'd put it—and lies you told would trip you up. It was too hard, he always said, lying was too hard.

  It could be that that was what Jimmy's papers were about. The truth, burning through.

  All right. One thing Marian understood was the importance of cutting her losses, especially when the chance still existed to bear away some small victory. “I'm sorry,” she told Stone. She checked her watch, as though the time elapsed meant something. “I have another appointment. We need to bring this to a close.”

  Stone's eyes rested on Marian, and Marian felt as though she were being probed for gaps, weaknesses where a trickle of water, introduced but barely noticed, could burst the wall, become a drowning flood.

  Deep within herself, Marian felt the rumbling of a vast, awakened anger. Before it could gather and explode, however, Laura Stone was on her feet, packing her scattered notebooks and pens, the irritating tape recorder, smiling, thanking Marian for her time. “I can find my way out,” she said. Nevertheless Marian accompanied her down the hallway, shook her hand; not to do so would be rude. She closed the polished oak door behind the reporter and turned back toward her own office. As she asked Elena to please clear the table in the small conference room and leave the untouched plate of cookies by the coffee machine for the staff, she realized the only coffee gone from the carafe was what she herself had had.

  PHIL'S STORY

  Chapter 7

  Breathing Smoke

  October 31, 2001

  Phil spent the morning as he had to, with clients, with other attorneys, doing research, making calls. He moved fast. He fired orders at Elizabeth, his paralegal (she was used to it, she was young and sharp, driven and smart, going to law school at night, she wanted someday to be the lawyer he was, Phil knew that). He demanded decisions by deadlines he invented and rejected deadlines laid down by his opponents. As usual he was in the office before either Elizabeth or his secretary, Sandra, and had work laid out for both of them by the time they came. He could see from how they said “Good morning” that they knew about Randall and wanted to talk, but Phil wasn't ready yet. He had work to do first, real work in the real world that had nothing to do with arrogant reporters or sainted heroes, work from the world of Phil's life up until now. He wasn't ready to close the door on that life yet.

  The trouble he was in might have made another man more cautious, but it set Phil free. He'd always flown high, pushed the limits, found the line by crossing it. Now he was accused—only in the pages of the Tribune and the public mind so far, but you couldn't miss the scent of the storm racing behind the wind—of going so far over the line that no reason, no explanation, would be enough.

  What use was caution now?

  He would rise or fall on the truth behind the truth in Harry Randall's story. Meanwhile, nothing he did could bring a risk that measured up. So Phil was free to go out on limbs, take chances, require this and refuse that. Into his cell phone he snapped and shouted; the midmorning meeting with co-counsel on a RICO case sent them, the other two, stomping from his office lock-jawed and fuming. Drafts of memos flew from his computer. He signed letters as fast as Sandra brought them. In the middle of a conference call on a totally other matter, he had an idea even he thought was harebrained for Mrs. Johnson's defense. But it might work, and God knew nothing else was going to. When he got off the phone, he sloshed coffee into his mug from the pot that was always on and outlined his inspiration to Elizabeth in a rapid-fire volley of half-sentences as he stood at her desk. Unfazed by his delivery, she jotted down key words and said she'd look into it.

  When he'd hired Elizabeth two years ago, he'd been Mr. Constantine, and she'd been Ms. Grant. Phil took no liberties with intimacy. He could call her Lizzie, she said out of nowhere, working very late with him one warm April night a few weeks after she'd started. Everyone called her Lizzie, she told him, everyone always had.

  Phil had three texts and half a dozen computer windows open in front of him, but a new note in Elizabeth's voice reached him in his distraction like a fresh breeze drifting into a crowded room. He looked up. The color in her cheeks was high, but her eyes were frank and stayed on his. The small smile that lifted her lips suggested an offer but no promise, held something unsaid but nothing coy. She had long hands, nails short but polished anyhow, and a gold clip in her thick dark hair.

  A looming court deadline had forced Phil to break a date with Sally: he should have been on a ferry hours ago, on the windy deck watching Brooklyn slide by, and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge—he liked that side of the boat, not the other, where the Statue of Liberty was—as the secretive shadowed hills of Staten Island grew and the towers of Manhattan, always lighted, receded.

  And he thought, Why? Or, looking at Elizabeth who wanted to be Lizzie, Why not? It wasn't as though he'd been faithful to Sally all these years, he didn't pretend that. In the eras when by mutual treaty they'd been banned from each other's lives—in practice, he from hers, Phil ever the one to come and go, to propose terms, Sally the one to accept or reject—Phil had always hoped to be intoxicated. Bewitched. Mesmerized and possessed. To fall under another spell that would counter Sally's. When Sally's door was barred, he'd always turned to his own world, prowling through it in search of a sorceress to free him.

  Several times he'd thought he'd found her. A lawyer, a writer, a painter, once even a cop: wild nights, stolen days, two people swept away. But always the time came when the winds died down. And the salt smell from the deck of the ferry would start to come to Phil at strange times: in his office, in Grainger's, in court.

  That spring night two years ago he'd met Elizabeth's eyes—plain brown eyes, exactly what they seemed to be, nothing hidden to challenge him with; Sally's were the clear green of emeralds, or pale like spring grass, or gray-green like the ocean reflecting low clouds, and why they changed he never knew—and he shook his head. “Go ahead and call me Phil,” he'd said. “But I wouldn't recommend ‘Lizzie.' This is the big leagues.” He went back to his books and his keyboard. From that night she'd changed her name, made it formal and professional, and he'd called her by it. Though a month passed before she could be counted on to answer to it.

  At midday Phil closed a file on his computer, rubbed his hands over his face, turned his chair to face the window. Six floors below, the paths of pedestrians made a sharp-angled latticework on street and sidewalk. Without the cars, the traffic lights, though switching, were meaningless and ignored. In this new downtown, people had to find their own ways and their own rhythms.

  Phil swiveled his chair back and called through the open door into the outer office. “You guys come in here a minute?”

  Elizabeth and Sandra, neither of them guys, showed themselves in his doorway. Sandra carried a pad and pen. Phil tried to remember if he'd ever seen Sandra's hands empty. “Should I order some lunch?” she asked.

  “After. This won't take long. Sit down.” He waited until they did. “You saw the news,” Phil said, no lead-in. With Phil there never was. “That Tribune reporter.”

  Elizabeth nodded. Sandra said, “Died yesterday. Killed himself.”

  Phil rested his gaze on her, then flashed a grin. “You don't read the Tribune.”

  “Never did.” Sandra wore lipstick and no other makeup, kept her graying hair cropped Army-close. She was long divorced and nobody's fool. She had started with Phil a scant few years after he'd set up his practice, not soon enough to be there for the Keegan case, the indictment, and the negotiated plea, but in time to take the phone call from Greenhaven that Markie Keegan had been stabbed by another prisoner and was dead.

/>   Elizabeth told Sandra, but with her eyes on Phil, “The Tribune story implied Randall didn't jump. They think someone killed him.”

  Sandra raised her eyebrows, a skeptical question, a doubt.

  “The Tribune may be blowing smoke,” Phil said. “I'm not sure what they're after. But listen.” He looked at Elizabeth, at Sandra. “The escrow account. The Keegan account. Neither of you ever touched it. You don't put money in, you don't write the checks. True?” He asked the question as he would in court, and as in court, because he knew the answer, he didn't wait. “If there's something wrong with it, you're clear.”

  “Is there something wrong with it?” Elizabeth, fearless like himself.

  “I don't know.” Thirty years of reading eyes and posture had given Phil a fairly good idea of when he was being lied to and an unerring sense of when—as now—he was believed. “The money came from someone who wanted Keegan's family to have it. The . . . donor . . . wanted to stay in the background. I had no reason to think the money was tainted. But I didn't ask. And I knew it didn't come from the State, and I never told the client.”

  “How bad is that?” Elizabeth would have asked a surgeon to explain his choices as he lifted his scalpel, even if she were the one on the table.

  “I thought there was no basis for a suit against the State. This way the widow at least got something. But that wasn't my decision. The lie effectively prevented her from exercising a right to sue that she might have used. That's enough to nail me to the wall even if the money's clean.”

  “And if it's not?”

  “Then the obvious question is what I—or whoever was paying me—wanted hidden that a lawsuit might have uncovered.”

  “About what happened to Keegan in prison?” Uncharacteristically, then, Elizabeth hesitated.

  No, he thought, you can't back away from this shit. He finished for her. “Or about Keegan.”

  “Was there something to know about him?”

  “If there was, I never knew it. But I can't prove that.”

  Phil watched Elizabeth mentally file, index, and cross-reference everything he'd just said. When she was done she brought out the next question. “Who was paying you?”