House Reckoning: A Joe DeMarco Thriller

by Mike Lawson

  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.”

  DeMarco didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say—but Jake must have thought he was confused.

  “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  DeMarco followed his broad form out of the office and about ten feet down the corridor. Jake stopped in front of a glass case containing a coiled fire hose and a red fireman’s axe. He pointed at the case and said: “That’s you.”

  “Which one?” DeMarco asked. “The hose or the axe?”

  “Whichever one Mahoney needs at the time.”

  Well, that clarified everything.

  Jake walked back to his office and dropped back into his chair. “Let me give you an example. Two years ago, Mahoney goes to a banquet in Cornhusk, Nebraska, Indiana, one of them places. He’s seated next to the lieutenant governor’s wife, who turns out to be a good-looking woman. The lieutenant governor’s not there because he just had his prostate removed. Well, Mahoney, of course, he can’t help himself.

  “Last month, the wife of the lieutenant governor calls Mahoney. She says she’s found Jesus. She’s been saved. Halleluiah! And in order to make things right with the Lord, she feels compelled to tell the world what a sinner she’s been. So my job—and this is hardly the first time Mahoney’s dick has caused him problems—was to take care of the lady from Cornhusk.”

  “What did you do to her?” DeMarco asked.

  “I didn’t do anything to her. I just talked to her. I told her how confessing this one little transgression wasn’t going to be good for anybody, the press being the cruel, heartless jackals they are. When that didn’t seem to deter her, I pointed out that she had cosigned a document with her husband, something related to a development in South Cornhusk, and if people understood what was behind that document she could be talking to a U.S. attorney instead of her Lord and savior.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” DeMarco said before he could stop himself. He was about to begin a job where blackmail was apparently standard operating procedure.

  “The other thing is, Mahoney will sometimes loan his fire hose, meaning you, to his buddies. Or his codefendants, as I like to call them.”

  Jake seemed to think that was funny; DeMarco didn’t. “I’ve got a law degree, you know. I’ve even passed the bar already. I think—”

  “Kid, every third guy you bump into in this town has a law degree. Hell, Mahoney’s even got one, if you can believe it. And if the boss needed a lawyer, why the hell would he come to you? You’ve been out of school for about two minutes, you didn’t exactly graduate at the top of your class, and then there’s your father. Uh, may he rest in peace.”

  Jake sucked on his unlit cigar briefly before he continued with DeMarco’s orientation. DeMarco was beginning to wonder if he ever lit the damn thing or if it was just some sort of nasty pacifier.

  “Look,” Jake said. “There are a lot of guys like us here in this town.”

  Us? DeMarco didn’t want to be included in us.

  “Some of ’em work for the private sector, so-called consulting firms with names that don’t make any sense. Others have government staff positions like me, and now you, that don’t fit into a particular box on somebody’s org chart. We’re the guys the politicians turn to when they need things done that they’d just as soon not read about in the Post. And most of the time we stay under the radar like we’re supposed to, but every once in a while somebody screws up and everybody goes crazy. The most famous example, of course, being Watergate. I mean, what do you think guys like Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson were? They were red fire axes.”

  “Are you saying that if Mahoney asked you to break into some politician’s headquarters . . .”

  “Oh, hell no. What do I look like, a cat burglar? Although there was this one time . . . Well, never mind that. Anyway, stop looking so worried. I was a Boston cop for twenty years, and this job’s a piece a cake compared to that.”

  Jake glanced at his watch. “It’s time to go meet the boss.”

  DeMarco thought they’d be taking the stairs up to the Speaker’s office, but Jake led him out of the Capitol. They caught a cab on Independence, and five minutes later entered a small restaurant on Capitol Hill.

  Mahoney was sitting at a table at the rear of the restaurant with four other men. DeMarco didn’t pay much attention to politics but he recognized Mahoney: the full head of white hair, the handsome features, the mean blue eyes—or at least they looked mean to DeMarco. He was only five eleven—the same height as DeMarco—but he looked bigger than that, maybe because he was so broad across the chest and shoulders. He was also heavy in the gut but it was a hard gut, not a soft, flabby one. Mahoney glanced briefly over at DeMarco and Jake, then looked away.

  “We’ll just sit here at the bar until those other guys leave,” Jake said. “You wanna drink? I’m buyin’ to celebrate your arrival.”

  DeMarco said no, not bothering to add that drinking at nine in the morning didn’t seem like the way to put his best foot forward his first day on the job. Jake ordered a Bloody Mary.

  “Who are those guys?” DeMarco asked, figuring it was time for him to start learning the lineup.

  Jake glanced over at Mahoney’s table. “Three of them are union big shots. God knows what Mahoney’s plotting with them. Oh, that reminds me. If you have a political opinion about anything, keep it to yourself. Nobody, including me, gives a shit about your opinion.”

  This was the first thing DeMarco had heard that didn’t surprise him.

  “Now the fourth guy at the table, the one sitting on Mahoney’s right with the really bad haircut? That’s Perry Wallace, Mahoney’s chief of staff. Wallace is the most devious, diabolical, conniving prick you will ever meet in your life and he’s also a no-shit genius. Think Machiavelli with a Boston accent. You do not ever, ever wanna get cross-wired with Perry Wallace.”

  Maybe he should’ve had the drink.

  Ten minutes later, the three union men shook hands with Mahoney and left the restaurant. Wallace sat with Mahoney a couple more minutes, his lips barely moving as he talked to him, then he, too, left. As he walked by DeMarco, Wallace looked at him for only a second but DeMarco had the impression of a camera’s shutter opening and closing and Wallace depositing his image in some sort of mental file cabinet.

  Jake drained his Bloody Mary and said, “Let’s go say hello.”

  DeMarco had planned to walk up and stick out
his hand and say “Joe DeMarco, sir. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.” But he didn’t. The look in Mahoney’s eyes stopped him two feet from the table.

  “The first thing I want you to do is get a decent suit,” Mahoney said. “The amount I’m paying you, you should be able to afford one.”

  DeMarco restrained himself from looking over at Jake and pointing out that dress standards for Mahoney’s employees didn’t seem consistent. He also didn’t point out that Mahoney wasn’t paying him; the taxpayers were. He found out before long that John Mahoney viewed the U.S. Treasury as a large, not-very-well-guarded cookie jar and he stuffed his paw into it whenever he pleased.

  “The only other thing I wanted to tell you is you got six months before Jake retires to prove to me that you’re not a total idiot. Your aunt thinks—”

  “Actually, Connie’s not my aunt, sir, she’s my godmother.”

  “Do I look like I give a shit?” Mahoney said. “And don’t interrupt me when I’m talking. Now like I was saying, Connie thinks she’s got me by the short hairs, but I got news for you. I won’t fire you because that might piss off Connie, but if you fuck up, what I will do is temporarily detail your ass to the Department of Transportation. They’re trying to get a road or railroad or some goddamn thing built across a reservation in South Dakota and I’ll let them borrow you and the law degree you barely got. Then you can spend the next ten years fightin’ with the Indians about some treaty that was signed the day after Custer was scalped. Now, beat it.”

  As they were leaving the restaurant, Jake said, “I thought that went pretty good.”

  Five and a half months later, DeMarco walked into the office and found Jake lying on the floor, on his back, his unlit cigar stuck between his fingers. His third heart attack had arrived. DeMarco checked Jake’s pulse, then pulled out the bottle of Maker’s Mark that Jake kept in the file cabinet. He found out his second day on the job there wasn’t anything else in the file cabinet because Jake had a saying: They can’t subpoena air.