House Reckoning (5 page)

Ten days after Quinn killed Connors, Carmine set up a meeting with Quinn and explained the facts of life to him, the main fact being that he now worked for Carmine. Carmine admitted that Quinn might be able to impugn an eyewitness but he told Quinn that this particular witness was a prosecutor’s dream. He didn’t, of course, give him Janet Costello’s name. When Quinn said he didn’t believe there was a witness, Carmine said, “Then how do I know exactly what you did, pulling your gun out of an ankle holster and tossing the beer can under the Dumpster? Plus I had a guy go down there and photograph the beer can—there’s some graffiti on the wall behind the Dumpster so you can tell it was really in that spot. And when my guy took the photo, he put a copy of the
Times
against the wall so you can see the date. I now have the can and I’m about a thousand percent sure it will have your fingerprints on it.

“There’s one other thing you need to think about, Officer Quinn,” Carmine said. “When this witness comes forward and tells what you did, you ain’t gonna be the only guy who gets in trouble. Whoever investigated the shooting and helped you hide the truth is also going to have their dicks lopped off. Think about that, Officer Quinn. How’s that going to look, you getting the whole department in trouble because you lied your ass off?”

At first Quinn tried to bluster and bullshit his way out, saying how his pals on the force would come down on Carmine’s operation like a ton of bricks, but in the end he caved.

“So what do you want?” he asked.

“Just information,” Carmine said. “You keep me informed of things that can help me. And if you don’t produce, then I don’t need you, and my witness talks to the press and Connors’s widow gets a big-mouth lawyer to sue the department.”

A month goes by and Carmine gets nothing out of Quinn. He knows what Quinn’s trying to do: he’s trying to find the eyewitness and trying to find something he can use against Carmine. And this was about the time that Jerry Kennedy gets nabbed by the feds. Carmine called up Quinn and told him: “You find Kennedy for me and if you don’t, I’m gonna end your fuckin’ career.”

Carmine walked through the bingo room in the basement of St. Sebastian’s, a hundred crazy women there, shrieking every time a number was called. The grand prize that night was fifty bucks and the women acted like they were playing for a million.

Quinn was waiting for him in a little room that looked like a workshop, a bunch of tools hanging off a pegboard, a broken cradle they used for the Nativity scene sitting on the floor. Carmine had donated all the statues and shit for the Nativity scene.

“So where is he?” Carmine said.

“I don’t like meeting with you,” Quinn said. “Why couldn’t we do this over the phone?”

“A, I don’t give a shit what you like, and B, I don’t like talking on the phone. So where is he?”

Quinn told him: a crummy motel outside Poughkeepsie, more than an hour’s drive from New York.

“Are they protecting him?” Carmine asked.

“No,” Quinn said. “I mean they don’t have agents or federal marshals guarding him. They figure as long as only a couple people in the U.S. attorney’s office know where he is, he’s safe.”

“Aren’t they afraid he might split?”

“No. He doesn’t have any money and he doesn’t have a car and he’s got too many people looking for him. He’s safer in that motel than he would be on the street.”

“How did you track him down?”

“I took a couple days off work and started following the most likely attorneys.”

Carmine nodded. Smart guy.

Carmine didn’t say anything for a long time. He just stared at Quinn while Quinn glared back at him. The young cop really hated him.

“I want you to kill him,” Carmine said.

“Forget it,” Quinn said.

“Quinn, if you take care of Kennedy, you’ll be all paid up with me. I’ll never contact you again.”

“And I’m supposed to just take your word for that?”

“No. I’ll give you the name of the witness who saw you shoot Connors. I’ll also give you the beer can with your fingerprints on it. But the main thing is, you’ll have the name of the witness. You can whack her for all I care. She don’t mean shit to me. But the easiest thing to do is just scare her if she becomes a problem. You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure something out once you have her name.”

Carmine could now see the gears spinning inside Quinn’s handsome head, analyzing the pros and cons of killing Jerry Kennedy. He was most likely thinking that once he knew the name of the witness, he could do just like Carmine had said and find a way to neutralize her. He was probably also thinking—or maybe
rationalizing
was a better word—that Jerry Kennedy was scum, not an honest citizen, and he could justify Kennedy’s death at least to himself if not to a judge.

“Okay,” Quinn said, “I’ll do it. But I don’t ever want to hear from you again.”

“You won’t,” Carmine said, but he was wondering if it was a bigger sin if you lied inside a church.

Brian Quinn not only got a law degree from St. John’s University; he also received an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He spent time on high-profile assignments, including a couple of task forces where the NYPD partnered with the feds. He rose through the ranks even faster than Carmine had thought he would. But that was all in the future.

When the lives of Brian Quinn, Jerry Kennedy, Gino DeMarco, and Carmine Taliaferro crossed, Quinn was only a couple of years older than Gino’s son, Joe.

5

Gino didn’t understand why Jerry wanted to see him, but he couldn’t refuse. All Jerry had told him was that he was in big trouble and needed to talk and couldn’t talk on the phone. He told Gino he was staying in a run-down shithole near Poughkeepsie. He also said he was a dead man if Gino told anyone where he was.

“Oh, and one other thing. Can you bring me a bottle of bourbon? I don’t have a car and there’s no place near here to buy booze. I’m about to crawl out of my skin, I need a drink so bad.”

The first thing Jerry did as soon as DeMarco stepped into the motel room was take the booze out of his hand and pour himself a drink. After he’d swallowed the first drink, he poured another and said, “You want one?”

Gino shook his head; he could tell Jerry didn’t want to share the booze, not sure when he’d be able to get more.

Jerry looked like hell. He was the same age as Gino but looked ten years older because of all the alcohol and cigarettes, and because the only exercise he got was shuffling cards. But now he didn’t just look older than he was, he looked like he might be sick, his face that pasty gray color you see in guys who’ve just had heart attacks.

“Why did you want to see me, Jerry?” Gino asked. “And what are you doing in this place?”

He told Gino the story, about the bookie he was into for twenty grand and the gangster in Trenton whose heroin he’d lost when he was arrested. The feds were now offering him Witness Protection if he’d tell them everything he knew about Carmine’s operation, and he was going to take the deal.

“I’ll never be able to pay back the guys I owe money to. And the guy in Trenton . . . He’ll kill me.”

“Carmine will kill you if you rat him out,” Gino said.

“Yeah, if I was in a prison he would. Or if I hung around New York. But if the feds set me up in fuckin’ Idaho, Montana, someplace like that, he’ll never find me.”

Gino wasn’t too sure about that. “What about your family?” he asked.

Jerry shrugged. “Me and Arlene, we’ve been through for years and my son’s an asshole. I won’t miss him at all. But my daughter, she’s a different story. That’s one of the reasons I called you, Gino. I want you to look out for Julie after I’m gone.”

“I don’t have the money to take care of your family,” Gino said.

“I’m not asking you to take care of them. I’m just asking you to keep tabs on Julie, and if she needs something and if you can do it, I’d like you to help her out.”

“Sure,” Gino said. He was the girl’s godfather, after all.

“The other thing I wanted you to know, and it’s the main reason I called you, is I swear I’m not going to tell the feds anything about you.”

“What are you saying, Jerry? Are you worried I might kill you?”

“Yeah, I am. I mean, I know you wouldn’t want to but if you thought I was going to give them something that would land you in jail, then I think you probably would. You wouldn’t have a choice. So I’m telling you, right now, I’m not going to say a word about you. You’re safe.”

“But Carmine isn’t,” Gino said.

Jerry shrugged again, that New York shrug that said:
Hey, what can you do?

Before Jerry could say anything else, there was a knock on the door and Jerry jumped like a firecracker had gone off in the room. He hissed at Gino, “Did anyone follow you here?”

“No.”

Jerry went to the door and yelled, “Who is it?” The motel room door didn’t have a peephole.

“John Tallman. Clerk for Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Mayhew.”

“What do you want?”

“I just want to give you some papers from Mr. Mayhew. It’s about your relocation, Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Mayhew wanted you to have them tonight so he could talk to you about them tomorrow. Now please open the door.”

Jerry waved Gino toward the bathroom, and Gino went inside and closed the door. A moment later he heard a shot.

Without thinking, Gino pulled his .38 and jerked open the bathroom door. Jerry was on the floor and a man was standing in the doorway holding a revolver, also a .38. As soon as the man saw Gino, he fired at him and Gino fired back. They both missed.

The man who’d shot Jerry took off running. Gino went to his friend and knelt down and checked for a pulse. Jerry was dead. He stepped over the body and went after the shooter, but the shooter had already reached his car. Gino fired again and blew out the back window of the shooter’s Dodge but missed the driver. He did get the last four digits of the license plate.

Gino looked around to see if any of the motel’s other lodgers had come out of their rooms to investigate, but none of them had. The crummy motel only had six units and he didn’t see a light on in any of them. He wondered if the feds had rented all the rooms to protect Jerry. Whatever the case, he didn’t see anybody who might have seen him. He went back to Jerry’s room, wiped his prints off the bathroom doorknob, and picked up the bourbon bottle, which was the only other thing in the room he’d touched.

On his way back to Queens, he stopped at a pay phone and called Carmine. “I need to talk to you. Tonight.”

“Why?”

Carmine had to know that whatever Gino wanted to talk about had to be damn important because protocol demanded that he go through Enzo Marciano if he had something to pass on to the boss.

“Not over the phone,” Gino said.

“Okay. I’ll meet you at the place with Sinatra’s picture.”

There were a million places in New York with Sinatra’s picture, but Gino knew where he meant.

Gino was sitting at a table with a beer in front of him but it didn’t look as if he’d taken a drink. He’d probably just ordered the beer to keep the waitress from bugging him. Carmine ordered a sambuca, and after it arrived, he said, “So what is it?”

“Somebody killed Jerry Kennedy tonight and I want to know if you ordered the hit.”

“What!” Carmine said. He wasn’t pretending to be shocked—he
was
shocked. First that Quinn had dealt with Kennedy so quickly, but even more shocked that Gino knew Kennedy was dead. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “Who killed him? I haven’t seen the damn guy for a while, but I figured he was on a bender. And how the hell do you know he’s dead?”

So Gino told Carmine what Carmine already knew: that Kennedy owed money to a bookie, lost two kilos of heroin belonging to a gangster in Trenton, and the feds had stashed him in a motel outside Poughkeepsie, where they’d been trying to sweat information out of him. The part that was a surprise to Carmine was that Kennedy had called Gino and asked Gino to come see him.

“Why did he want to see you?” Carmine asked.

“Because he wanted me to look out for his daughter after he went into Witness Protection. And because he was afraid I might kill him if I thought he was going to testify against me, and he wanted me to know that he wouldn’t.”

“Then some guy just knocks on the door and shoots him?” Carmine said.

“Yeah, a young guy, a kid in his twenties. And I want to know if you sent him.”

Carmine pretended to get pissed. “Hey! If I had decided to kill him—and I would have if I’d known he was gonna rat me out—then that would be my business. I’ve put up with a lot of your shit over the years, but don’t you go forgetting who I am.”

DeMarco, the bastard, just stared at him.

“Anyway, I didn’t order the hit. I already told you I had no idea Kennedy had been arrested. Maybe the guy who killed him worked for the guy whose dope Kennedy lost. You know, the guy from Trenton.”

He watched Gino absorb the lie—and he thought Gino believed him.

“Okay,” Gino said, “and I apologize for . . . for insulting you.”