House Reckoning (9 page)

Just when he didn’t think he could drive any farther he finally spotted a pay phone. He lurched from this car and called Taliaferro. He didn’t know what he’d do if Taliaferro didn’t answer.

“I’m hurt,” he told Taliaferro. “I got the guy but he hurt me bad.” He didn’t want to say DeMarco’s name on the phone and he didn’t want to say that he’d been shot. “I’m in a phone booth, five blocks east of the pier. I don’t know the address. I need a doctor and I can’t go to a hospital.”

He didn’t hear what Taliaferro said because he passed out.

Quinn woke up in a bedroom—not a hospital room—but had no idea where he was. He was still wearing his pants and socks but his shirt was gone. His left shoulder was covered with white bandages and it looked like a professional had applied the bandages. He noticed a glass filled with water sitting on a nightstand next to the bed and realized he was incredibly thirsty. He reached for the glass with his right hand but the pain in his left shoulder hit him when he did, and he knocked the glass off the nightstand and it shattered on the floor.

The bedroom door opened and a man entered the room. He was in his forties, tall and skinny, and his dark hair was receding rapidly. His face was sallow and the whites of his eyes had a yellowish tinge, and Quinn’s first impression was: junkie.

“Good,” the man said, “you’re awake.”

“Where am I?” Quinn asked.

“My house in Queens. You’re going to be all right. The bullet didn’t hit anything important but you’re going to need therapy to regain full use of your arm. Since I’m guessing you don’t want to go to your regular doctor, you’re going to have to come back here and see me a couple of times to make sure you’re healing properly. I’m not a therapist but I know enough to help you and I’ll do what I can, but don’t be surprised if you lose some range of motion. I’ll put your arm in a sling and you can tell people you fucked up your shoulder doing something, a fall, whatever.”

Quinn wasn’t worried about what he’d tell the people at work. He wouldn’t take off his shirt in front of them and he could explain the sling like the doctor had said, by claiming he’d done something at home that had dislocated his shoulder. His wife was the problem. The night he killed Jerry Kennedy he’d told her he was on an undercover assignment working directly for the chief of D’s, something really hush-hush that could be a big break for his career. He’d told her the same story tonight when he left the apartment to head down to Red Hook, that he was pulling a double shift because of the same undercover assignment. To explain the bandage on his shoulder, he could tell her that he had to sneak into an abandoned building to watch some criminals and he ran into a jagged piece of rebar or sheet metal. He’d say it wasn’t a serious injury and that he’d been treated by a doc at the emergency room, but that she couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Hmm. He’d give it some more thought, but that would probably work.

“I’m going to call Carmine now,” the doctor said, “and you and he can decide how to get you home.”

“Do you know who I am?” Quinn asked.

“No, and I don’t want to know.”

10

Joe was in bed, asleep, and the doorbell ringing woke him up. Irritated, he wondered who could be calling so early; it wasn’t even seven. A moment later, he heard his mother scream.

A man in a suit and a uniformed cop were standing in the doorway. His mother was sitting on the floor, her knees up against her chest, sobbing into her hands.

“What did you do to my mother?” Joe said.

The man in the suit said, “Son, my name’s Detective Lynch. I’m sorry to tell you this, but your father’s dead. He was shot and killed last night.”

His mother had been expecting this to happen all her life, but when it finally did, she fell apart. Joe’s Aunt Connie had to take care of all the funeral arrangements because Maureen DeMarco couldn’t even get out of bed. Joe was simply numb. It felt like there was a cold, empty place inside his chest and it felt like the place would remain empty the rest of his life.

The cops had no idea who’d shot his father, and Joe could tell they weren’t trying all that hard to find the killer. They figured, just like everybody else figured, that Gino DeMarco’s death was connected in some way to Carmine Taliaferro’s criminal operations. One gangster killing another wasn’t exactly at the top of the NYPD’s priority list.

His mother didn’t want to have a viewing or a wake for her husband. There was a simple funeral mass at the church and Joe was surprised by how many people came. Half of them were neighbors and relatives; the other half was a bunch of shifty-looking guys dressed in cheap suits. There was one large floral arrangement near the casket, an expensive wreath about three feet in diameter made from roses. None of the neighbors could have afforded the wreath. The priest made an announcement at the end of the mass saying that the family would be going alone to the cemetery—meaning his mother didn’t want Taliaferro and his hoods there.

As they were taking the casket out to the hearse, Joe saw Taliaferro and a couple of his men standing at the back of the church, near the baptismal font. Taliaferro was in his early seventies and short—maybe five seven or five eight and slightly built. His gray hair was thin and he wore glasses with heavy black frames. He didn’t look like a tough guy; he looked like somebody’s grandfather. One of the men with Taliaferro was Enzo Marciano, Taliaferro’s underboss, and the other guy was Tony Benedetto, who Joe knew was one of Taliaferro’s top guys.

Joe walked up to Taliaferro and said, “Do you know who killed my father?”

“I’m sorry, Joe, but I don’t. And that’s the God’s honest truth. I have no idea what he was doing over there in Red Hook. I swear on the heads of my wife and daughter.”

Before Joe could say anything else, his mother was at his side.

“You stay the hell away from my son,” she said.

“Maureen, I just wanted to say how sorry—”

Maureen DeMarco slapped him across the face. She slapped him so hard the glasses went flying off his head.

Taliaferro didn’t do anything and Joe took his mother’s arm and said, “Come on, Ma. Let’s go.”

Enzo handed Carmine his glasses, looking embarrassed for his boss, the way Gino’s wife had slapped him in front of everybody. But Carmine wasn’t really thinking about what Maureen DeMarco had done; the woman was understandably distraught. What he was thinking was that Gino’s kid was a hard-looking young bastard, and he looked just like his old man. He’d better make damn sure that Joe DeMarco never found out what really happened with Gino.

Four months after his father’s funeral, Joe passed the Virginia state bar exam. He was actually surprised he passed it on the first try. He knew people a lot smarter than him who had to take the exam more than once.

The police still had no idea who had put three bullets into his father.

Joe still had an empty place in his chest.

11

Joe DeMarco soon found out that he couldn’t get a job. It appeared that no city prosecutor’s office—or public defender’s office—or any other law office on the eastern seaboard—wanted the son of a mafia hit man on their payroll.

Hit man. That’s what the papers in New York started saying after the funeral. Gino DeMarco wasn’t just some ordinary hood who worked for Carmine Taliaferro; according to “sources close to the investigation,” his father had been the enforcer for the Taliaferro family. One unnamed source, who supposedly worked for the FBI, speculated that Gino may have killed as many as twenty people.

Carmine Taliaferro denied this, of course, saying he was just a businessman and that he hardly knew Gino DeMarco. He only went to his funeral because he lived there in the neighborhood.

Joe talked to a professor at his law school and asked if he could sue the papers for libel, slander, whichever one applied. The professor said not a chance—and, by the way, now that he had a law degree, maybe Joe should know the difference between slander and libel.

Eight months after graduating, he still hadn’t found a job and was living with two other guys in a dump in Alexandria, working as a bartender to pay his share of the rent. His Aunt Connie called one afternoon as he was getting ready to leave for work.

“I got you a job,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“You remember that guy, Mahoney, I was telling you about?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you’re working for him. Sort of.”

“Sort of? What does that mean?”

“You’ll find out.”

“Why in the hell would the Speaker of the House give me a job?”

Connie laughed. “Because I’ve got his big balls in my hand, that’s why. At eight o’clock tomorrow morning, you go to a room in the subbasement of the Capitol and—”

“The subbasement?”

“Yeah. Your new office has a sign on the door that says
COUNSEL PRO TEM FOR LIAISON AFFAIRS
.”

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. Mahoney invented the name to protect him from the man in that office. You’ll find out. Anyway, there will be a guy in the office named Jake. Jake’s retiring pretty soon. He just had his second heart attack and he’s going to teach you the ropes before he retires or has another heart attack, whichever comes first. You’ll be a GS-12.”

“Really?” DeMarco said. That was a
great
starting salary. Most lawyers starting out with the government were GS-11’s, which meant that he’d make about ten grand a year more than the average new hire.

“If you survive the first year, I mean if you don’t end up in jail or testifying to a congressional ethics committee or appearing before a federal grand jury . . .”

“What?”

“. . . I’ll make Mahoney make you a GS-13. This is the best I can do for you, sweetie, and I’m not exactly doing you a favor. Maybe after some time has passed, after folks have forgotten all about your dad, you can find something else. I sure as hell hope so.”

12

As DeMarco approached the Capitol, he was actually feeling pretty good about his new job in spite of what his Aunt Connie had told him. Not only was his salary better than he’d ever expected to receive just out of school, this could be the start of a bright future: working hand in hand with the Speaker of the House, getting an insider’s view of politics, making connections that could help him the rest of his life. Who knows? Maybe he’d end up being a politician himself—district attorney of Arlington, congressman from some district in Virginia. Or a lobbyist. He’d heard stories about the sluglike trail of slime that lobbyists left in their wake, but they made good money and they couldn’t all be bad.

His mood dimmed somewhat when he reached the subbasement and its utilitarian corridors with exposed pipes and ventilation ducts overhead. The subbasement was nothing like the grand Rotunda two floors above with its painted ceiling and all the pictures on the walls. The small, flaking gold letters on the frosted glass of a battered door—
COUNSEL PRO TEM FOR LIAISON AFFAIRS
—whatever the hell that meant—didn’t look too impressive, either.

He knocked and a voice called out, “Come on in. It’s not locked.”

The man sitting behind the desk looked like he deserved the heart attacks he’d had: a jowly meat-eater’s face, a big gut testing the limit of every button on his shirt, a classic, bulbous boozer’s nose. A stubby, unlit cigar slick with spit was clenched between two hairy knuckles. He wasn’t dressed the way DeMarco had pictured a big-time political operator, either. He wore a black and white checkered sport coat, a hunter green shirt, off-the-rack polyester slacks, and a tie with some sort of Hawaiian motif. He was the fashion equivalent of a four-car pileup.

“I’m Jake,” the fat man said. “You must be the new guy. Mahoney’s already pissed at you and he hasn’t even met you yet.”

Great.
But DeMarco decided not to say anything; if Jake didn’t know his Aunt Connie was blackmailing Mahoney, why tell him?

“So sit down,” Jake said, pointing to the only other chair in the room. “And relax, for Christ’s sake.”

The office was also less than he’d imagined, a lot less. It was the size of a small tool shed and the only furniture it contained was a gray, sheet metal four-drawer file cabinet, a scarred wooden desk, and two wooden chairs all looking like leftovers from Truman’s era.

“I’ll take you over to meet the boss in half an hour,” Jake said. “Actually, we’re supposed to be there now, but since Mahoney’s always late, we’ve got plenty of time.”

DeMarco just hoped Mahoney didn’t blame him if they were late. “Are you going to give me some sort of, uh, orientation before I meet Mr. Mahoney? I mean, I’m really not too clear on what I’ll be doing.”

“You’ll be doing whatever Mahoney tells you to do,” Jake said, “and he’ll give you all the shitty jobs he doesn’t want his staff wasting their time on. Or that he doesn’t want them to have their fingerprints on. You won’t be writing speeches or attending meetings with bureaucrats or researching all the bullshit buried in the bills. He’s got a bunch of smart kids who all graduated from Harvard who do the day-to-day political crap. You will be doing quite a bit of what Mahoney likes to call
fund-raising
, meaning you’ll be his bagman when he wants money from sources he doesn’t like to list as contributors.”