“Excuse me?” Howard said.
“Vachon. Give him a call.”
Howard laughed. “Now, there’s an idea. I’ll give the head of one of New York’s most powerful crime families a call in the middle of the night. I’m sure that would go over well.” Then he got serious. “Why would they be keeping an eye on Thomas? Why should I believe they might be watching him now?”
I swallowed. “If you had a resource like Thomas, wouldn’t you want to keep him safe?”
I could see the slightest hint of worry in Howard’s eyes. I don’t think he believed it, but he was afraid to dismiss what I’d said altogether.
“Let’s say this story of yours is true,” he said. “Carlo Vachon is Thomas’s guardian angel. Was it Vachon who had him looking for the window?”
Which was the better answer? Yes, Vachon was on to them, or no, he didn’t know a damn thing about it? Maybe, if I’d had some idea of who’d actually died in the apartment, I’d know which answer to give. At one point we’d thought Allison Fitch had been murdered there, but she’d only died in the last day. Lewis had said the words “Bridget’s body” to Howard when he had arrived. I had no idea who Bridget was, but wondered if she’d been the Orchard Street victim.
While I was thinking, Thomas said, “I found it on my own. I told you.”
Howard leaned back in his chair and took a long breath. “I swear, I don’t know what to make of this.” He turned so he could look directly at Lewis. “If this is some random event, if this Rain Man freak here really stumbled upon that image on the Web site by chance, then our problems end here.”
“Yeah,” Lewis said.
“The Clinton thing, the e-mails to the CIA…debunking those details eases my mind in ways I will not bother to elaborate on.” He rubbed his chin contemplatively. “But this other matter, of Vachon…”
“I’m not buying it,” Lewis said.
Howard spun his butt around on the seat so he could address Nicole. “You’ve been rather quiet.”
She didn’t respond.
“Have you any thoughts on this matter?”
She thought a moment. “I think, if they were keeping tabs on Thomas, they’d have rescued him by now. If you feel your other concerns have been addressed, then all you have left to do is get rid of these two.”
“Yes,” Howard said. “You may be—”
I think it’s fair to say all of us just about jumped out of our skin at that moment. Someone was banging on the front door of the shop.
“Jesus,” Lewis said.
Howard looked at me. “Is that them?” When he found me speechless, he asked the same question of Thomas.
Thomas said, “Maybe.”
The banging continued. Then, shouting: “Howard! Howard, I know you’re in there!”
Howard’s eyes went wide. In that instant, he looked truly rattled, more than any other time since he’d arrived.
“Dear God,” he said. “It’s Morris.”
SIXTY-TWO
SHORTLY after putting his phone away, Morris Sawchuck said to his driver, Heather, “I’m not waiting any longer. I’m gonna find out what the son of a bitch is up to.”
“I’ll be here,” she said.
Morris got out of the town car, stormed across the street, and banged on the door of the toy shop. “Howard! Howard, I know you’re in there!”
Morris put his eyes up to the glass and cupped his hands around his head. There was a light on in the back of the shop. Then a curtain was pulled back and Howard strode toward the door. He turned back the dead bolt and opened the door six inches.
“You’re up and around,” Sawchuck said.
“Morris, Jesus, what are you doing here?”
“Open the door,” Morris said.
“Morris, you can’t—”
Morris threw his shoulder into the door and knocked it wide open, tossing Howard back and causing him to trip on a child’s pedal car from the 1950s. Sprawled out on the floor, he found himself looking up at Morris.
“What’s going on here?” Morris demanded.
“You have to leave. You don’t want to be here. You have to—”
“I’m not going anywhere! You lied to me, Howard. You lied to me about being sick, about what you’ve been doing tonight. And I’ve got a feeling you’ve been lying to me for a long time. I swear to God, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll—”
He looked to the back of the store, and the light coming through the curtain. He could see shadows moving behind it.
“What’s going on in there?”
Howard, pleading, said, “You have to leave. This is what I do for you, Morris. I keep things from you. I get things done. I make the sausages. Nobody likes to know how they’re made, but I do it for you, to protect—”
“Oh, fuck off,” he said. “This is different.”
Morris took a step toward the curtain and Howard clutched his leg. “No!” he said.
Morris stumbled and kicked, catching Howard under the chin with the toe of his Florsheims.
“Shit!” he shouted, releasing his grasp. Morris made it to the curtain in under two seconds, threw it back, and stared.
A man he recognized—Lewis, who had done work for Howard for years—and a woman, standing at the back of the room, he did not.
And two men bound into chairs.
“Hello, Morris,” Lewis said as the attorney general stared, openmouthed, at the scene before him.
Howard, out of breath, his chin bloodied, stepped through the curtain.
“Morris, I told you—”
“Who are these men?” Morris asked.
“I’m Ray Kilbride,” said one. “And this is my brother, Thomas.”
“Who are you?” Morris asked the woman.
“The fuckup,” she said.
“Untie these men,” Morris ordered. He wasn’t giving the order to anyone in particular, but it was clear he expected Lewis or Howard to respond.
Howard said, “It’s not that simple.”
“Oh, I think it is,” Morris spluttered. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but this is kidnapping. You can’t hold these men here against their will.”
“There are things you don’t know,” Howard said.
“Then tell me,” he said.
“It’s…complicated.”
Morris’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Howard. “Maybe if you talk really slow I’ll be able to understand.”
“It’s about the murder,” the one named Thomas said. “On Orchard Street.”
“What murder? What are you talking about?”
“Shut up!” Howard said. “Morris, we’re leaving right—”
From behind, Howard grabbed him by the arms and tried to steer him out of the room, but Morris shook free.
“What murder?” he asked again.
The one named Ray said, “We don’t know, but it might be someone named Bridget.”
SIXTY-THREE
THE moment I uttered the words, it was like the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. Something palpable happened to Howard, Lewis, and Nicole at that moment. Their breath was taken away and they didn’t know what to do about it.
And this man they were calling Morris, it was like he’d been hit by lightning. He seemed frozen and electrified simultaneously. Stunned by what I’d said, too shocked to react in any way but to look stupefied. And yet, I could see that wheels were turning. There was something about his eyes, like they were moving around at a hundred miles an hour, processing this latest bit of information.
In that instant, it was as though everything had changed. Some kind of balance had shifted. We were now in a very different situation from the one of five minutes earlier. Whether it meant things were better for Thomas and me, I didn’t know, although I hadn’t thought our situation could get any worse.
And about Morris. The moment he’d walked into the room, I recognized him.
I couldn’t place him at first, maybe because I wasn’t seeing him in the proper contex
t. If I’d been watching the news, I’d have known instantly. But seeing him here, in the back of this toy store, with three very bad people, I couldn’t figure out who he was. It was like when, every morning, the same person hands you your coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and then you see that person at the mall. You know you know them, but can’t figure out from where.
So it took a minute or so before I realized this man was the attorney general for the State of New York.
Morris Sawchuck.
I’d read about him. I’d seen him on the news. In fact, hadn’t there been a lot going on with him a few months back…
In the midst of everything that was happening in that room, my mind was racing. Why had he been on the news so much? Why had I seen his picture so often? And in all those pictures, wasn’t he usually shown with a beautiful—
Oh fuck.
I didn’t actually put it together until after I’d said what I’d said.
About Bridget.
Now I remembered the stories. The sudden, unexplained death of Bridget Sawchuck, the wife of New York’s attorney general. You had to read between the lines to guess what had happened. She’d killed herself.
Except Lewis had said this shop was owned by someone who’d helped him move Bridget’s body.
Oh God, Thomas, what did you get us into?
The silence that followed my comment felt as though it lasted minutes, if not hours, but in reality it was probably no more than four or five seconds.
Morris was the first to speak. And he spoke to me.
“What did you say?”
“The person who got killed. It might have been Bridget.” Now I realized the significance of what I was saying. I was talking about this man’s wife. What I didn’t know yet was whether Morris Sawchuck looked shocked because he didn’t know, or because I did. For all I knew, the man had had his wife killed.
All that was about to become clear. Or clearer.
Morris said to Howard, so calmly that it was frightening, “What’s he talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Howard said, rattling the words off too quickly. “He’s some kind of crazy person, him and his brother. They’re a couple of nutcases, going around spreading stories that could damage you. That’s what they’re doing.”
“No,” I said. “My brother found out what they did. They brought us here to kill us and—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Lewis said.
“No, let him talk,” Morris said. “I want to hear what this nutcase has to say.”
“Thomas was surfing the Net,” I said. “Whirl360. He saw someone being murdered in the window of an apartment on Orchard Street. I think it was your wife. Bridget, right?”
He nodded slowly. His face was becoming flushed.
“Really, you shouldn’t listen to—”
“Howard,” Lewis interrupted. “Enough.”
“What? Lewis, let me—”
“No, we have to bring him into it,” Lewis said. “He’s either on board, or we’ll have to kill him, too.”
“What?” Morris said, turning on Lewis. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m a survivor,” he said. “So’s Howard, and so are you. There’s only one way everyone survives this, and that’s to get on board.”
“What happened to Bridget?” Morris demanded. “I want the truth.”
The room went quiet for another few seconds. It was Howard who spoke first. “It was an accident. A horrible mistake.”
“Dear God,” Morris said. “You didn’t.”
Howard continued. “There was a woman, Allison Fitch. She was blackmailing Bridget. She was trying to damage her, to ruin you. We—I was afraid there were things she knew that could hurt you very badly.”
“Howard.”
“Politically fatal, Morris. I was going to pay her at first, I was, but it became clear that wasn’t going to solve our problem. Lewis and I talked and we decided we had to deal with the Fitch woman more…permanently.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Morris couldn’t take his eyes off Howard.
“But when it came time to do it, to take care of the problem, something no one could have foreseen came up. She wasn’t there. Fitch wasn’t in the apartment.” He paused, swallowed. “But Bridget was. She was mistaken for Fitch.”
“But…but we found her. In her old apartment,” Morris said. “You and I, we found her there.”
“She…was moved.”
“But you talked to her!” Morris said. “You spoke to her on the phone! She told you I was sucking the life out of her! She was going to kill herself!”
Howard had to look away. “I…it was faked. There was no call. I made that up.”
Morris grabbed Howard by the lapels and threw him up against the shelves, knocking that Esso tanker truck and a Batmobile to the floor with a loud clatter. “You son of a bitch!” he shouted, shaking the man. He let go of a lapel, made a fist, and drove it straight into Howard’s face. Howard yelped and fell to the floor. Morris pounced on him and was about to punch him again when Lewis locked arms around him and dragged him off.
“Stop!” Lewis said. “You can sort this out later, but right now we have to figure out what to do.”
“I’m gonna kill you,” Morris said, still in Lewis’s grasp, staring down at Howard. “You bastard! You son of a bitch!”
“It wasn’t my mistake!” Howard said. “It wasn’t my fault!” He pointed across the room. “It was hers!”
Now all eyes were on Nicole.
Morris said, “You?”
“Like they said, it was a mistake,” she said coolly.
“You killed Bridget?”
“They told me Fitch would be there. And someone was there. But it wasn’t Fitch.” Nicole shrugged. “Sorry.”
Morris said, “Excuse me?”
“I said, sorry. Not much else I can say at this point, really.”
Morris, aghast, looked at Howard, then Lewis.
Lewis said, “She’s kind of right.” Noticing that Morris was speechless with rage, he continued, “Howard, I think there’s a good-faith gesture we can make with Morris as a way of moving forward.”
“What are you talking about?” Howard said.
“We can’t bring Bridget back, but we can help make things right,” Lewis said, reaching into his jacket and taking out his gun.
He spun around, pointed it at Nicole, and pulled the trigger. I was expecting a louder bang, but the gun was equipped with one of those silencer things on the end of the barrel.
What made noise was Nicole being thrown up against the shelves, the back of her head banging into them, then dropping facedown onto the floor. Two shelves gave way and an avalanche of toys crashed to the floor. A Super Ball bounced in tall arcs across the room.
“I was going to get around to it sooner or later, anyway,” Lewis said.
SIXTY-FOUR
THE room was as still now as it had been when I’d first mentioned Bridget. Morris Sawchuck looked disbelievingly at Lewis, at Nicole on the floor.
“What in God’s name have you done?” he asked him.
“What I always do,” Lewis said. “Take care of problems for you and Howard.”
Suddenly, Morris reached into his jacket and now there was a gun in his hand, too. I guessed, when you were the attorney general, you packed heat. Lewis seemed to know instinctively what Morris was going for, so by the time Morris had his weapon pointed at Lewis’s head, Lewis had his pointed right back at Morris’s.
They stood there, frozen, guns pointed at each other.
“Let’s all try to calm down,” Howard said.
Morris, not taking his eyes off Lewis, said, “No one kills for me. No one does this kind of thing on my behalf.”
“It’s already been done,” Howard said softly, standing behind Morris. “This isn’t going to get better if you shoot Lewis. We need him.”
“Jesus, Howard, just shut up.”
Lewis had his arms locked, his finger on the trigg
er, the gun still pointed straight at Morris’s head. His stance, his posture, suggested he was more used to doing this than Morris, but the attorney general looked equally committed, ready to shoot if he had to.
“No,” Howard said. “You have to listen. Things have already been done on your behalf. Bad things. Ugly things. Things that, if they come out, you’ll never be able to distance yourself from, never be able to convince people you didn’t order yourself. Morris, listen to me. They’ll put you away forever. Not just me, not just Lewis, but all of us. You may not be able to see it, but there’s blood on your hands.”
Morris and Lewis kept their guns trained on each other.
Howard continued, “It gets worse. The whole world will believe you killed Bridget. They’re going to think you had her killed, Morris. I know you want to do the right thing here, but we’re too far past that. And things will come out about her. About Bridget. Although…” His voice trailed off. “They hardly matter now.”
Morris was breathing through his nose. In and out, in and out, his nostrils flaring with each agitated breath. Then, as suddenly as he’d raised his weapon, he lowered it and looked down at the floor, an admission of defeat. He tucked the gun back into his jacket.
Lewis slowly put his arm down, but kept the gun firmly gripped in his hand.
Even though Morris shooting Lewis might have been in my interest, I breathed a sigh of relief along with everyone else. I looked over at Thomas, expecting him to be a nervous wreck, but he had his eyes closed. I was guessing he’d had them closed through most of this.
“Thomas,” I said. “You can open your eyes.”
He did, looked briefly at Nicole’s body, then at me. He said nothing, but his eyes were pleading. They were asking me to get us out of here. My eyes didn’t have a reassuring answer.
Morris was shaking his head. Lewis and Howard watched him warily, unsure of what he’d do next.
Morris turned, brushed past Howard, threw back the curtain, and started walking toward the front door.
“Morris?” Howard said.
“What the hell’s he going to do?” Lewis said. “Goddamn it.”
Howard went after him. I could see that Lewis wanted to, as well. He gave Thomas and me a quick look, figured we weren’t going anywhere, and followed the two other men.
Trust Your Eyes Page 37
