House Revenge

by Mike Lawson

  At noon, he decided he was hungry but was reluctant to leave his room. His head still ached, although it wasn’t as bad as it had been when he first woke up, and when he pulled a polo shirt over his head his ribs protested, but he was able to walk okay. The bad part was his appearance: the right side of his face was now swollen and various shades of blue and purple. He didn’t feel like subjecting himself to the stares he was going to get in the hotel restaurant, but was starving and didn’t feel like sitting inside his room any longer.

  He asked for a table for one and the hostess pretended to ignore the way he looked, then led him to a table at the rear of the restaurant so he wouldn’t frighten the other customers. He ordered a Coke and a ­cheeseburger—glad that he still had teeth and could chew the cheeseburger.

  Throughout lunch he thought about two things. The first of those was how to get back at the McNultys. There was no point running to the cops since he hadn’t seen them and couldn’t prove that they’d attacked him. But somehow, some way, he was going to get even with those two stumpy brutes. What he’d really like to do was find some way to separate them so he’d only have to deal with one of them at a time—and then give them a beating, like the beating they’d given him.

  It occurred to him that he’d encountered thugs like the McNultys before and he didn’t normally react this way. He normally tried to avoid ­violence—there was rarely an upside to violence—but he was willing to make an exception when it came to the McNultys. It had probably been a long time since they’d been given a good pounding and most likely because they double-teamed whomever they decided to fight. And a few months in jail for assault wasn’t going to change the way they behaved—but a good beatdown might. Then he thought: Who am I trying to fool? He wasn’t trying to change the McNultys’ behavior. It was a matter of male pride: proving to them—and to himself—that he was just as hard as they were, and he wanted to repay them in a way they wouldn’t soon forget.

  The problem, however, was that he was currently in no shape to fight anyone bigger than a flyweight, and if he got hit in the head again, he could end up like some punch-drunk NFL lineman. Another problem was that he’d been sent to Boston to help Elinore Dobbs, and if he ended up in jail for assault, he wouldn’t be much help to her.

  So, for now, he would forestall the pleasure of getting even with the McNultys, but if the opportunity presented itself . . .

  The second thing he thought about was how to help Elinore. He couldn’t hang around Boston forever watching over her, and at some point the McNultys would recommence making her life miserable. He had no doubt that the old gal was stubborn enough and tough enough to hang in there until her lease expired, but he could just see her sitting in her apartment during the winter, her generator running, bundled up in a ski jacket and stocking cap after they cut off her heat. He needed to come up with some way to force Callahan to back off and leave her alone. And since his friend, Lawyer Dooley, hadn’t shown him a way to use the law to protect her, he needed to come up with a different strategy.

  And then a different strategy occurred to him.

  He called Maggie Dolan, the lady who ran Mahoney’s Boston office. Maggie knew everyone in the city of Boston who was anyone. She’d be able to get him a name. Half an hour later, she called him back and said the guy he wanted would meet him in front of Elinore’s building at nine a.m. tomorrow.

  11

  The man sitting on the front steps of Elinore’s building was about seventy, a tall, lanky guy with short, bristly gray hair. When he shook DeMarco’s hand, DeMarco could feel calluses. He was wearing khaki pants, a short-sleeved blue shirt, and steel-toed work boots. His name was Jim Boyer and he was a general contractor, now retired, and had spent all his adult life on construction sites.

  When Boyer saw DeMarco’s face he shot to his feet and said, “Whoa! What happened to you?”

  “I got jumped by a couple of guys, which is one of the reasons you’re here.”

  DeMarco explained the situation to Boyer. A developer named Callahan was renovating the entire neighborhood, as Boyer could plainly see, and a little old lady named Elinore Dobbs, who lived in the building they were standing in front of, was refusing to move out so Callahan was making her life a living hell—and DeMarco wanted Boyer’s help to force Callahan to back off.

  “Here’s what I’m looking for,” DeMarco said. “I want you to walk around with me and find safety and building code violations. The bigger, the better. Then you’re going to call the right bureaucrat in OSHA or the EPA or whoever, and rat Callahan out. In other words, I want you to bring this project to a screeching halt, and if you can’t do that, I want you to disrupt it as often as possible. Then, when the work is stopped, I’m going to sit down with Callahan and explain to him that for the next three years you’re going to devote your life to fucking up this development.”

  “Oh,” Boyer said, sounding uncertain. “I told Maggie I’d help you today but I don’t know about three years.”

  “It’s not going to take three years. I just want Callahan to think I have a guy who’s willing to devote three years of his life to making him miserable if he doesn’t leave Elinore alone.”

  Boyer looked skeptical.

  “Hey, maybe it will work and maybe it won’t,” DeMarco said. “But in the meantime, Maggie Dolan will pay your hourly rate for whatever time you spend here. And if you know a couple of guys that have the kind of background you do, they can spell you if you’re busy.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Boyer said. “I’d like to help the lady but you oughta know that most builders follow the rules and projects are inspected at various phases during construction, so it might not be as easy as you think to find problems.”

  “Tell you what,” DeMarco said. “Let’s just walk around and see what you can spot.”

  “Okay, but I need to get a couple things out of my truck first.”

  They walked a block to Boyer’s truck—a Ford F-150 with a crew cab—and from the backseat, Boyer removed two hard hats, one white and one orange. “You wear the white one,” he said, “since you’re the guy in the suit. The bosses typically wear white hard hats.” The other thing Boyer took from the truck was a rolled-up blueprint.

  “The workers see a couple of guys walking around in hard hats, holding plans, they’ll think we belong,” Boyer said. “If anybody asks what we’re doing, let me do the talking.”

  They started touring the development, walking first over to where the commercial buildings—the corporate headquarters for the solar energy company, the hotel, and the office buildings—were being erected and in various phases of construction. There’d apparently been no Elinore Dobbs to slow down the other parts of Callahan’s project. Boyer was completely at ease walking around the construction site; DeMarco was worried about getting run over by a cement truck.

  “You see those two guys up there, on the scaffolding?” Boyer said, pointing skyward.

  “Yeah,” DeMarco said.

  “The most common safety violation you’ll find on any construction site has to do with fall protection. You see that section of scaffolding there at the end? There’s supposed to be a safety rail on it, but there isn’t. And that one guy, he’s got fall protection, that cable coming off the harness he’s wearing. But the other guy should be wearing fall protection, too. OSHA makes it almost impossible to work these days as they require fall protection anytime you’re more than about four inches off the ground, and you can come out here any day of the week and find a dozen fall protection violations. A month ago, a construction company over in Everett got a three-hundred-thousand-dollar fine for repeated violations.”

  DeMarco smiled. “That had to sting,” he said.

  “Well, yeah, but you gotta remember that that was the fine the company got. It doesn’t mean they paid the fine after their lawyers got involved.”

  Boyer stopped again. “And all these cranes,” he sai
d, pointing upward at the yellow construction cranes looming over the site. “Two, three times a year, you’ll hear about one of those things toppling over and killing someone because it wasn’t assembled or operated correctly.”

  “A couple years ago,” DeMarco said, “a crane working on the National Cathedral in Washington collapsed, and crushed a bunch of cars in a parking lot. But nobody got killed.”

  “That time, nobody got killed,” Boyer said. “Which is why there are about a million rules these guys are supposed to follow when it comes to cranes, and about half the time they don’t follow them. They’re supposed to use load charts to figure out the crane’s boom angle. The crane’s not supposed to lift things greater than a certain percentage of its rated capacity. They’re supposed to conduct trial lifts before hoisting people up in a box. And on and on and on. A company I used to work with over in Framingham got a seventy-thousand-dollar fine for operating a crane too close to energized power lines. If I was to spend a couple days out here just watching the cranes I know I’d come up with violations because experienced operators think they’re too smart to have to follow all the nitpicky rules.”

  Boyer watched a crane swing a pallet loaded with bags of cement over a couple guys standing beneath it, then said, “Let’s go back over to Elinore’s building. I want to take a look at those three-deckers they haven’t torn down yet.”

  On the way back to Elinore’s, they walked past the sign that ­DeMarco had already seen that showed what the new high-end condos were going to look like. Boyer stopped, looked at the sign, and said, “This could be easier than I thought.”

  “What do you mean?” DeMarco said.

  Boyer point at the sign and said, “Flannery.”

  The sign, in addition to showing an artist’s rendition of the completed structure and photos of model apartments, listed the name of the architectural and engineering firm responsible for the design as well as the name of the general contractor, which was Flannery Construction.

  “Flannery’s a shitbag,” Boyer said. “One of those guys who will cut every corner he can possibly cut, which is probably the reason Callahan hired him.”

  Boyer looked down at the footings for the new apartment complex for a moment, then started moving again, walking toward the four three-deckers that were waiting to be razed. But before they reached the houses, Boyer stopped again, this time near half a dozen industrial-sized Dumpsters where debris from the demolished buildings had been placed. He pointed at a chunk of six-inch carbon steel pipe lying on the ground near one of the Dumpsters. The pipe had a white, crusty film on it.

  “Asbestos,” Boyer said. “That’s probably a steam pipe that came from one of the apartment buildings they already demolished. A lot of the buildings that used to be here were constructed before World War II and they used asbestos for insulation back in those days, on the pipes and in the walls. Linoleum and floor tiles contained asbestos, too. To remove asbestos, you basically have to shrink-wrap the building, the workers gotta be in space suits with respirators, you have to dispose of the stuff at a hazardous waste site, and a whole bunch of other things to make sure the workers don’t end up breathing the shit.

  “I’ll bet you anything that Flannery, being the dirtbag he is, had his guys in the buildings at night when there was less chance of an OSHA inspector coming around, and they did the rip-out wearing nothing but those little paper filters over their mouths and noses. Flannery is required to have records showing what he did and how he disposed of the stuff, and knowing Flannery, he might not have ’em. Improper asbestos abatement is a showstopper.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” DeMarco said.

  “Let’s go look at the triple-deckers. I was raised in a place in Southie just like the ones on this block. It’s gone now, too.”

  The narrow three-story houses were nothing but shells, the exterior walls still standing, but the interiors gutted. Boyer pointed at one of the standing walls. “Bet you a nickel that’s lead-based paint. Lead paint is like asbestos. There’re a bunch of rules you gotta follow to remove it and dispose of it.”

  Boyer stopped abruptly. “Whoa! You see there, the soil around that hole in the ground, how oily and black it looks?” Boyer got down on one knee, pinched a bit of dirt between his fingers, and smelled it. “There used to be a fuel oil tank here and they yanked the tank out of the ground. But the tank leaked at one time and now the soil’s contaminated. You can’t just dump the dirt that’s here and you can’t leave it here. It’s hazardous waste now. The soil all around this area has to be tested for oil contamination, and whatever’s contaminated has to be properly disposed—which means, expensively disposed.”

  “Outstanding,” DeMarco said.

  “I’ve got enough right now to cause this guy some misery. And I know just who to call. There’s this one young lady who works for MassDEP and—”

  “Mass dep?”

  “The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. Anyway, this young gal is a bear when it comes to this kind of shit, especially asbestos violations. Her dad died of mesothelioma.”

  They were heading back toward where Boyer had parked his truck, DeMarco holding his borrowed hard hat in his hand, when his cell phone rang.

  He didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “This is Superintendent O’Rourke. Elinore Dobbs is in the hospital.”

  12

  Elinore was in Mass General, the same place that had treated DeMarco. She was in a room with a woman who appeared to be on life support, judging by all the tubes going in and out of her. Elinore’s right arm was encased in a cast from hand to elbow, and there was a bandage above her left eye. She didn’t seem to be sleeping, but her eyes were closed and she was making little whimpering sounds as if she was in pain. She looked so small lying there in the big hospital bed.

  DeMarco walked over to her and touched her gently on the shoulder and said, “Elinore.”

  She slowly opened her eyes. “Who are you?”

  Aw, jeez.

  DeMarco left her room and walked back to the nurses’ station. “I need to talk to Ms. Dobbs’s doctor,” he said.

  Elinore’s doctor was a woman named Webster who looked like she should still be in college—or maybe high school. She was short—about the same height as Elinore—maybe five foot two. She had short blond hair, bright green eyes, and a button nose. She was cute—and just looking at her, you could tell she was smart as a whip.

  “Do you have any idea what happened to her?” DeMarco asked.

  “The EMTs who brought her in said she’d fallen down a flight of stairs,” Dr. Webster said. “She has a broken arm. Her left ulna is cracked, which really shouldn’t be a problem, and she’ll make a full recovery from that injury. The big problem is she hit her head hard when she fell and she has a subdural hematoma, which means she has blood in the layers of tissue surrounding the brain. We may have to operate to relieve the pressure but I want to wait a while to see if the swelling subsides.

  “The problem is her age. A younger person with the same injury would probably be okay in a couple of weeks without surgery or any other form of drastic intervention. But with the elderly it’s different. As people age the tiny veins in the brain are more susceptible to tearing, and, as we age, the brain actually shrinks a little, creating more subdural space for the hematoma to expand into.”

  “She didn’t recognize me,” DeMarco said. “That lady was as sharp as a tack yesterday. There wasn’t anything at all wrong with her memory.”

  “That’s another symptom of subdural hematomas in the elderly: confusion and memory loss similar to what you see in people with dementia.”

  “Is she going to get better?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you that she’ll recover completely, but because of her age, she may not. We’re going to keep her here for a couple mo
re days, watch for swelling and internal bleeding, and maybe she’ll recover. And maybe she won’t. All I can tell you is that I’ll do my best but you should pray for her.”

  DeMarco wasn’t a big believer in the power of prayer.

  He did, however, believe in the power of revenge.

  When he stepped into Superintendent O’Rourke’s office, the first thing O’Rourke said, when he saw DeMarco’s face, was: “Jesus. What happened to you?”

  The swelling on DeMarco’s right cheek had gone down but the skin under his eye was various shades of purple, blue, and black. DeMarco told O’Rourke about the parking garage mugging.

  “Did you report the attack?”

  “No.”

  “But you think the McNultys did it?”

  “I know they did, but I can’t prove it. And what happened to me isn’t important right now. Do you have somebody investigating what happened to Elinore? I don’t believe for one fucking minute it was an accident.”

  “Calm down. And, yeah, I’ve got a guy on it. Normally, I wouldn’t treat this as a criminal matter but considering what’s been happening with Ms. Dobbs and because of Congressman Mahoney’s interest . . .”

  “Can I talk to your investigator?”

  O’Rourke hesitated, then said, “Sure.”

  The crack investigator O’Rourke had assigned to the case was a detective named Fitzgerald. He was in his fifties—most likely close to ­retiring—and a good fifty pounds overweight. He was wearing a white polo shirt with a small orange stain on the breast that DeMarco suspected was pasta sauce, wrinkled gray pants, and thick-soled, ankle-high boots, the kind he’d probably worn when he was a beat cop thirty years ago. He had a badge clipped to the front of his belt that you could barely see because of the gut flopping over the belt, and, on his right hip, in a pancake holster, a short-barreled revolver.