As Dog Is My Witness (27 page)

“For where?”

“Iselin. Near Metropark.” And he gave me the address.
“I won’t be there for another twenty minutes or so, though. I have
to stop on the way.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Wrapping paper,” he said, as if it were obvious.
“It’s Christmas Eve, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was in all the papers.”

“You non-Christian types have it pretty easy, don’t
you?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Try buying eight nights’ worth
of presents on a freelancer’s salary.”

“No trees, though.”

“I’ll meet you there in half an hour,” I said and
hung up.

I called two more of Karen and Michael’s friends and
got the same glowing reports about their marriage—he took her out
to dinner twice a week, bought her gifts for no particular reason,
and actually enjoyed shopping with her—to the point where, by
comparison, I considered myself as attentive a husband as Ike
Turner.

My working methods might seem random and
disorganized, but they really are. With any amount of time on our
hands, freelancers will always find something to do. It usually
doesn’t translate into an actual paycheck, but you never know. So
the phone calls didn’t hurt, and when they were done, it was time
to drive up to the Metropark train station in Iselin and meet
Mahoney.

You probably don’t care what music I was listening to
on the way up Route 27, but since the minivan’s radio works as well
as anything else in that accursed vehicle, I can tell you it was
hard to hear. Another day, I told myself, and I could have my own
car back again.

Howard and Andrea had planned their trip to end on
Christmas Day, the theory being that there would be less traffic
leading up to and at the airport on the holiday. I believed it was
more likely that it was cheaper to fly on Christmas, but I can’t
actually substantiate that belief.

It was comforting to think of the Stein family (West)
going back to its ancestral home while I made the trip to Iselin,
which only took about fifteen minutes, because the heater in the
van hadn’t improved any since the other day. But it did continue to
bother me that I hadn’t been able to break through with Howard or
Andrea. Dylan, I figured, was a lost cause.

On Thornall Road, leading up to Metropark, Mahoney
was parked in front of a brand new Honda SUV, black and imposing,
with frosted windows. The hood was open, and Mahoney’s head wasn’t
visible as I pulled into the parking lot near the office building
served by the road.

I called his cell phone number. “You all set up?” I
asked.

“Yeah, but I couldn’t even get the wrapping paper.
Can you believe no card stores were open at seven-thirty in the
morning?”

“Amazing. The car, Mahoney, the car.”

“We are free and clear to navigate. It’s a busted
hose, I’m saying.”

“How far from being finished?”

“Whenever you say,” Mahoney answered.

“How will he get under the hood?” I asked.

Mahoney closed the hood and made sure it was locked.
“He’s going to have to go through the interior.”

“Perfect.”

We closed up our cell phones and Mahoney got into his
van and drove away, at least as far as the eye could see. I sat in
my minivan, engine off, freezing my gazangas off and cursing the
day Mahoney had decided not to get a job in a nice, warm office. He
speaks three languages (which puts him two and a half up on me),
and can converse intelligently on everything from the code of the
Samurai to the batting averages of the 1969 Miracle Mets. He
chooses to be a rental car mechanic because he considers it a
challenge. Life is often cruel, but very rarely logical.

It could also be remarkably dull, like when one sits
in a frigid minivan waiting for a sneaky rental car company
employee to show up. I filled the time trying to figure out where
I’d gone wrong with the Justin Fowler story.

I knew it should have been simple, so I figured I’d
either been distracted by all the brouhaha in my household, or I’d
been lazy, either of which is inexcusable in business, but happens
all the time. I had a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome who had
confessed to a killing and had the murder weapon in his possession.
I had his younger brother, who was perpetuating the myth he was
going to college in Indiana when he was, in fact, probably in New
Jersey the whole time, and might very well have planted the murder
weapon in a place where his older sibling found it.

There was also the clearly grieving widow, who for
whatever reasons, believed her husband was indebted to gangsters,
despite a lack of any evidence to support that position. She had a
strange relationship with her attorney, and a dog who only liked me
after we’d met a number of times.

And then, there was Mr. Shapiro. If he could be
believed (and there was no reason to think he could, aside from his
taste in ethnic baked goods), and he truly had no connection to
Michael Huston’s murder, Hyman Shapiro’s interest in the case, and
particularly in my welfare since we’d met, was especially baffling.
He had three gargantuan henchmen providing me overtime protection
from something so dangerous he couldn’t even tell me, the intended
victim, what it was. And he was willing to keep them (said
henchmen) working on the Tucker patrol until such time as Shapiro
himself deemed the threat extinguished.

It was a knot of electronics cords, all bunched
together. You know each one leads to something, and they might even
work as one if you could ever identify and free each, but it was
almost impossible to untangle each one in order to find its end on
either side.

I was awakened from this metaphorical reverie by the
approach of another rental car. Mahoney had told me the proper
stickers to look for on the trunk, but any plain vanilla car that
looks like it’s brand new is a decent candidate, and here it
came—another in a series of Chevy Cavaliers. One thing you could
say for the Mole—he was consistent and cheap. Okay, two things.

I started the minivan after he passed, when I was
sure only one person was in the Cavalier. By now, I had come to
recognize the Mole, although Mahoney, who had seen him only for a
relatively long moment and knew some of the rental company’s
employees, had not recognized him from work. He was, as everything
in my life seemed to be lately, a mystery.

The Mole stopped his car in front of the SUV, very
obviously looked around the area for any sign of Mahoney’s van
(since he probably hadn’t noticed me at all during the Easton
Avenue fiasco), and then got out and walked to the black SUV.
Again, he looked from side to side before reaching into his pocket
for whatever implement he was using to open the locks. I was
surprised he wasn’t high-tech enough to have a wireless car opener
that could be adjusted to whatever frequency would be necessary to
open the door, but apparently the Mole was quite the craftsman, and
he opened the driver’s side door quickly. He clearly was hoping to
open the door, nonchalantly reach in, pop the hood, and then get
his sabotaging in before anyone could see.

What he wasn’t counting on was the strong pair of
arms that reached out and pulled him into the SUV. The door closed
behind him, courtesy of an even stronger pair of arms. The SUV was
absolutely still, and with the frosted windows, no one would ever
have known anything out of the ordinary was going on inside it.

I decided to drive down to the SUV, rather than walk,
since walking would have to take place outside, and the minivan’s
heater, however insufficient, was better than no heater at all.
Besides, I’m from New Jersey, and the god-given right to drive to
anywhere, no matter how minuscule the distance, is strong with my
people.

As I was traversing the enormous 100-yard distance to
the SUV, I dialed Mahoney on the cell phone.

“Got him,” I said, and hung up.

It took about six seconds for the Trouble Mobile to
appear from behind the office building with Mahoney behind the
wheel. By the time I parked the minivan behind the SUV, Mahoney had
maneuvered his van in front of the big black vehicle. There would
be no escape this time.

“What took you so long?” I asked when we were both
out of our respective vehicles.

“Traffic,” he said.

We walked to the SUV as Mahoney cracked his knuckles
inside his green knit gloves (company issue). His face took on an
expression I’m hoping never to see aimed in my general
direction.

He opened the driver’s side door as I got in through
the rear door on the passenger’s side. In the car, Bigger was
holding The Mole still in the front seat, while Biggest, behind the
wheel, merely looked at him threateningly, and moved over when
Mahoney got in. Big, next to me in the back seat, grinned with a
malicious enjoyment of another person’s discomfort.

“Thanks for the help, guys,” I said to the Terrible
Trio.

“No problem,” said Big. “But you understand, our
employer is not to be mentioned in these proceedings. We’re doing
this strictly as a (and here he grinned) “
freelance
assignment.”

“That’s very amusing,” I told him.

The Mole, a blond, thin man in his late thirties, was
wide-eyed and speechless, despite the lack of a gag, or for that
matter, any vocal restraints at all. The three huge men in parkas
and the one huge man in the rental car overalls, whose face was
screaming rage and violence, were enough to keep him from trying to
bolt.

Mahoney ignored the banter between Big and myself,
and merely glared at The Mole, which probably worried him more than
the sudden change in his situation or the burly reception committee
he’d discovered in what I’m sure he thought would be an empty, easy
mark.

“I’m going to say this once, and only once,” Mahoney
said quietly to The Mole. “If you answer my questions straight,
nothing bad will happen to you. If you don’t, I can’t say the same
thing. Is that clear?”

The Mole’s eyes, already the size of silver dollars,
widened a bit more, and despite the temperature, sweat beads began
to form on his forehead. He indicated he understood.

Mahoney nodded. “Good. Now, first. I don’t recognize
you. What part of the company do you work for?”

“Company? What company?” The Mole said. It was the
kind of answer that could get a witness badly hurt in a crime
movie, but was delivered with such obvious panic and confusion that
it was hard to believe The Mole was trying to lie his way out of
trouble.

“The rental car company,” Mahoney said with an icy
calm. I was seeing a side of my friend that I’d never seen before,
and wouldn’t mind not seeing again. To Mahoney, this man had
threatened his code, his very belief in himself. And that wasn’t
something you did lightly in Mahoney’s universe.

“I don’t work for a rental car company,” The Mole
said with a slight rise in pitch. Without so much as a finger on
him, he looked like he was being physically tortured. I worried for
the SUV’s leather seats. “I was hired as an independent.”

Mahoney’s brow knitted. “Then why were you always in
a rental car?”

“I’m from out of state. I needed a car. I figured I
might as well rent from your company.”

This wasn’t going the way Mahoney had expected, but
The Mole wasn’t exactly dealing from a position of strength,
either. “If you weren’t getting my assignments from the office, how
did you get them?”

“The same way you did, through the cell phone,” said
The Mole. He started to reach for his pocket, and Bigger grabbed
his hand. “I just want to show him the receiver,” The Mole said to
Bigger.

“I’ll get it,” Bigger said, and he reached into The
Mole’s jacket pocket, and came out with a small black box that
looked like a television’s remote control unit.

“It searches cell phone frequencies until you find
the one you want,” The Mole said. “It’s not as easy as it used to
be, but you can usually find the wireless connection you’re looking
for.”

“So you’re not from my company?” Mahoney was
unusually slow in picking up the information, since he had so
expected different answers, but believed the ones he was
getting.

“No,” said The Mole. “I just do what I’m told.”

“Why? Why does somebody want my jobs sabotaged? What
do you gain by making me look bad?” Mahoney leaned over, and The
Mole, with no room in a vehicle populated by four very large men,
Mahoney included, tried to lean back, and failed.

“I’m just doing it because I’ve been paid to do it.
Honest. You’ve got to believe me!” I thought The Mole might
actually begin to cry.

“All right then,” Mahoney said, towering over The
Mole as much as he could inside a closed vehicle. “This is going to
be the last question, and you’d better answer it correctly.”

The Mole, a whimper short of a full panic,
nodded.

“Who’s paying you to do this to me?”

The Mole told him, and as soon as we heard the name,
both my mouth and Mahoney’s dropped open about three feet.