House Reckoning: A Joe DeMarco Thriller

by Mike Lawson

  One difference DeMarco noted between Amelia Sherman and Perry Wallace was that not only did Sherman have a better haircut than Wallace, but her office was also neat and orderly. Wallace was some sort of legislative hoarder and his office contained every bill proposed in the last decade; it looked like a landfill. The furniture in Sherman’s office was dust-free and smelled of Pledge, and her desk was bare except for an outbox holding a few slim manila file folders. You could actually sit on the chairs in her office since they weren’t covered with reams of paper.

  “I have information related to Brian Quinn that Senator Beecham could possibly use to embarrass the president,” DeMarco said, leading with his best foot forward.

  Sherman frowned as if DeMarco had just said something crude and uncouth. “What makes you think the senator wishes to embarrass the president?” she said.

  DeMarco just smiled at her.

  “Okay. What do you have?” she said, smiling back.

  “I have a witness who can testify that Quinn murdered two people and was being controlled by the New York mob for years. I have another witness who will testify that Quinn shot an unarmed man when he was a patrolman, and he and the NYPD covered up the killing.”

  Except for a brief widening of her eyes, Sherman didn’t react. No oh-my-God expression crossed her face. She was probably an excellent Texas hold ’em player.

  “Why are you doing this?” she finally asked.

  “Because one of the people Quinn killed was my father.”

  She punched a button on her phone and said, “Brad, cancel my next appointment.”

  Sherman grilled him for almost an hour. By the time she was finished, she’d come to the same conclusion DeMarco had: dragging Quinn through the mud in the confirmation hearing might not be enough to convict Quinn of any crimes, but it could possibly spoil his chances of being confirmed and would be phenomenal in terms of embarrassing the president.

  One thing Sherman decided she wanted was a videotaped statement from Tony. She desired this for two reasons: First, she wanted to be able to assess before the hearing what sort of witness Tony would make. Second, she wanted Tony on record before he died. The confirmation hearing didn’t start for a couple of weeks and Sherman didn’t want to take the chance that Tony’s health might further deteriorate, so she told DeMarco to head back to New York immediately and get the video made. Amelia Sherman seemed quite comfortable giving DeMarco orders.

  Before he left her office, DeMarco told Sherman he was no longer employed so the next time he needed to see her, he wouldn’t be able to show a badge and waltz into the Dirksen Building. For years, DeMarco had denied working directly for John Mahoney and no organizational chart connected him to Mahoney. Mahoney liked things this way just in case DeMarco ever did something that could come back and bite him on the ass. Now, however, since Mahoney had fired him, he told Sherman the truth: that although he was listed as an independent lawyer employed by the House, his real boss had always been Mahoney. He also told her that when he’d told Mahoney about Brian Quinn, Mahoney’s initial reaction had been to run to the president and advise him to consider dropping Quinn—and when he threatened to blackmail Mahoney, Mahoney fired him.

  “John Mahoney is not a man I’d want for an enemy,” Sherman said.

  “Me either,” DeMarco admitted. “But that’s the way it goes.”

  Sherman picked up her phone. “Brad, when Mr. DeMarco leaves my office I want you to get him a temporary ID so he can get into this building and the Capitol for a week.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Brad said.

  Tony looked a little better than the last time DeMarco had seen him. There was more color in his face and he wasn’t struggling quite so hard to breathe. He still looked like a dying man. When DeMarco said he wanted to videotape Tony’s statement, Tony initial response was “There’s a bottle of scotch in that cabinet over there. Actually, there’re a couple bottles. The Dewar’s is what I used to drink. The one with the long name that says it’s been aged for eighteen years is what I drink now. I figure at this point, why not indulge myself.”

  DeMarco poured him the drink and said, “So. You gonna let me make the video or you want to stall some more?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. Maybe. Tell me what’s going on.”

  DeMarco did. He told him that he’d never be able to get Quinn for killing his father and Jerry Kennedy, but what he could do was derail the sweet, upward trajectory of Brian Quinn’s life. He explained to Tony about the upcoming Senate confirmation hearing and that if Tony would testify, and if the Senate could force Janet Costello to testify, then what Quinn had done would be out in the open. Tony’s testimony might not be enough to put Quinn in jail, but it would be enough to get the media interested and demanding some answers, and might even prevent him from being confirmed as the FBI director.

  “So will you make the video?” DeMarco asked again.

  Tony took a while to mull this over, sipping his scotch slowly, and DeMarco grew impatient.

  “Tony, what the hell’s the problem? It’s not like anyone’s going to throw you in jail if you testify. I mean, and I’m sorry to say this, but no one’s going to bother with you because you’re going to be dead pretty soon.”

  “Okay,” Tony finally said.

  An hour later, using a video camera he’d borrowed from Neil, DeMarco had what he wanted: Tony Benedetto telling everything he knew about Brian Quinn, his relationship to Carmine Taliaferro, and the deaths of Connors, Jerry Kennedy, and Gino DeMarco. Tony, just like the last time DeMarco had spoken to him, was exhausted by the time he finished giving his statement.

  DeMarco turned off the camera and said, “I want you to say a couple more things. I want you to say that you’re dying of cancer and you have no reason to lie. And I want you to say that you’re willing to take a lie detector test.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Tony gasped. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  23

  The day after returning from New York, the first thing DeMarco did was call Neil, but Neil wasn’t at home or at his office or answering his cell phone. DeMarco couldn’t help but wonder if Neil was ducking him.

  DeMarco had never been a camera guy, much less a video guy. He’d never seen the point in taking a million pictures of relatives and vacation scenes and then throwing all the pictures into a box and never looking at them again. Or these days, instead of throwing them into a box, you downloaded them to your computer and never looked at them again. DeMarco owned a cheap digital camera he’d used a few times on assignments Mahoney had given him but had never owned a video camera and didn’t know anything about the camera other than what Neil had shown him. Which meant, he basically knew how to turn it on and off.

  The camera Neil had given him fit easily into the palm of his hand and had a little screen that flipped out, and while DeMarco was taping Tony’s statement, he’d watched Tony on the screen. Neil had told him that inside the video camera was a little chip or smart card or whatever the hell it was called, and the video of Tony actually resided on that card and DeMarco could later transfer it to a CD or a flash drive or a computer. The problem was, DeMarco was afraid to mess with the video camera because he might screw up the video; the last thing he wanted to do was accidently delete it. Which was why he’d called Neil, because he wanted Neil to help him make copies of the video—but Neil was avoiding him.

  He called Amelia Sherman next to tell her he’d completed the assignment he’d been given, but was informed that Sherman and her boss were in Atlanta, and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Since he couldn’t reach Neil or Sherman, DeMarco puttered around the house doing the sort of chores that required just enough mental activity to keep him from thinking about Brian Quinn. He washed a load of clothes, vacuumed a couple of rooms in his house—he didn’t see the point of vacuuming the rooms he rarely used—and emptied things out of his refrigerator that were starting to look like science experiments.

  The last job he tackled was the back door, which w
asn’t shutting quite right. He took the door down and planed the edge a bit and adjusted the lock plate so the dead bolt would go in without him having to yank back on the door so hard. He remembered helping his dad one time do a similar job on their house in Queens, his dad saying doors got used so much you had to fuss with them periodically. Just one of the joys of owning a home, his dad would say.

  Unlike his son, Gino DeMarco had genuinely enjoyed working on his house and there wasn’t any job he was afraid to tackle. He reroofed the place himself and did all the plumbing work. He totally remodeled the kitchen once, putting in new cabinets and countertops. His mom wasn’t happy it took him so long—almost three months—but his father couldn’t have been happier. Gino DeMarco would have liked being a carpenter and Joe and his mom always tried to buy him some kind of tool for his birthday. It didn’t matter what kind of tool; his dad just liked tools. DeMarco never would have guessed at the time that the tool his father used best was a gun.

  That evening, he called Neil again, and again Neil didn’t answer. Neil was starting to piss him off.

  It was time for dinner, but he didn’t feel like cooking and then having to clean up the mess after he cooked, so he strolled down to Georgetown, to a Vietnamese place on M Street. The restaurant was the only one he’d ever eaten at that made trout—normally a tasteless fish—taste good. After dinner, he stopped in a bookstore, thinking maybe a good book would get his mind, at least for a while, off Quinn and his father. He left the bookstore twenty minutes later with a couple of paperback mysteries, and was thinking when he got home he’d crack open a bottle of wine and read until he drifted off to sleep.

  When DeMarco unlocked his front door, he didn’t immediately notice that the alarm system wasn’t making the little beeping sound it makes until you punch in the code. He didn’t notice the absence of the beeps because it looked like a tornado had cut a path directly through his living room.

  His home had been thoroughly and completely searched. The contents of every drawer in the house had been dumped onto the floor and seat cushions had been cut open to see if there was anything hidden inside them. The contents of cereal, rice, and pasta boxes had been emptied onto his kitchen counters and every item in his freezer had been removed and tossed into the sink.

  He didn’t bother going to his bedroom. He expected that the bedroom would be in the same condition as his living room and kitchen: clothes on the floor, drawers removed and emptied, the mattresses slashed. Instead, he immediately headed for the basement. The basement contained his furnace, a washer and dryer, a worktable, and a bunch of tools. It also contained a fireproof lockbox. In the lockbox he kept important papers: his will, the deed to the house, his birth certificate, passport, and five grand in cash for the day all the ATMs failed to work. Yesterday he’d put the video camera in the lockbox as well.

  He hid the lockbox by placing it on the basement floor behind a pile of obvious junk—pieces of scrap wood, old paint cans, and rusted gardening tools—then chained the box to a cast iron drainpipe. He figured that if anybody robbed his house, they’d recognize the junk pile for what it was—junk—and leave it alone and if by some chance they found the lockbox, they couldn’t just walk away with it unless they had something to cut the chain.

  Whoever had searched his house wasn’t fooled, however, and they brought the tools they needed: the chain had been cut and the lockbox was sitting open on the worktable. All his important documents were still in the box, but his five grand in cash and the video camera were missing.

  DeMarco went to his den next. He used to own a desktop computer but when it died, as all computers eventually do, he’d replaced the desktop with a laptop. The laptop was gone. The contents of everything that had been in his desk were on the floor and he noticed that all his CDs were missing. The CDs were mostly backup programs for his computer and copies of old tax returns.

  DeMarco figured it had taken a team to search his house in the two hours he’d been gone—three, maybe four guys. They must have been watching him and they waited until he went to the restaurant before they broke into the house. They pried open the back door using a simple crowbar but they must have had some sort of high-tech gadget that could figure out his security code before the alarm sounded. He bet they also had someone watching him while he was eating dinner, and that person was ready to call whoever was in the house to tell them when he was on his way back home.

  Whatever the case, this was a well-planned operation, not simple burglary—and DeMarco had no doubt whatsoever as to who was responsible: it was Brian Quinn. He’d sent a team to look for the Tony Benedetto video and any copies of it, which was why they’d taken his laptop and all of DeMarco’s compact discs. He figured they’d taken the cash in the lockbox to make the break-in look like a robbery—or maybe they took the cash because they were greedy bastards. He had no idea what Quinn told his men regarding the video or who DeMarco was. At Quinn’s rank, you didn’t have to explain a whole lot to the people who worked for you.

  DeMarco also knew who had told Quinn about the video.

  Only three people knew he was going to video Tony Benedetto’s statement—himself, Amelia Sherman, and Tony. He knew he hadn’t told anybody, and he was about a hundred percent certain that Sherman hadn’t, either—which left only Tony Benedetto.

  Tony had betrayed him.

  DeMarco called the cops not because he figured they could do anything useful but because calling them was a necessary step for filing an insurance claim. When the cops got there he told them the thieves had taken cash, a laptop, and a video camera. He didn’t tell them anything regarding who he suspected had sent the thieves or why they had stolen the camera.

  “Mostly, what they did was just trash the place and they only took small stuff they could carry easily or put in their pockets,” DeMarco said. “I guess that’s why they didn’t take the TVs.”

  “Didn’t you have your alarm set?” one cop asked.

  “I must have forgot,” DeMarco said. He wanted the cop to think that those responsible were just ordinary thieves and not the type of people who would have access to high-tech gadgets that could disable alarms.

  “It was probably junkies,” the cop said.

  “Yeah, probably,” DeMarco said.

  “Well, we’ll talk to your neighbors to see if they saw anything.” The cop’s tone of voice said: Don’t get your hopes up.

  DeMarco spent the next two hours restoring some sort of order to his home, documenting all the stuff that was going to have to be replaced, like his laptop, two couches, his back door, and the mattresses on two beds. Tomorrow morning, he’d call his insurance agent and somebody to replace his back door—the same door he’d just spent hours working on earlier in the day. While he cleaned things up, he tried to figure out why Tony had betrayed him. When he couldn’t figure it out, he finally just called the old bastard and asked him. He didn’t care that it was after midnight.

  “Why did you tell Quinn about the video?” he asked as soon as Tony answered the phone.

  DeMarco could see Tony there in his living room, in the dim light, gasping for his next breath, the oxygen line running to his big nose. But instead of the image of a frail old man on the verge of death, DeMarco envisioned an ancient cobra coiled in the dark, smiling.

  “Sorry, Joe, I had to do it.”

  “But why?”

  “My kid.”

  “Your kid? What the fuck does your kid have to do with this?”

  “He got himself arrested. He ain’t the brightest kid in the world, and he ain’t the toughest, either, and this was his third bust for dope-related shit. Him and a couple other morons got hooked up with some doctor selling OxyContin to junkies and the DA told him he wouldn’t make any kind of deal with him. My boy was going to go away for at least five years.

  “Anyway, when you told me how you were planning to go after Quinn in that Senate hearing, and made me make that video—”

  “Made you?”

  “Yeah. I’m
a sick old man. You took advantage of me. You scared me. Anyway, I called Quinn but I didn’t give him your name right away. I said you were a heavy hitter down there in D.C. and you’d been involved in some heavy shit in the past. I told him you were digging stuff up to use against him at his hearing and you knew about his connection to Carmine.”

  “Then you cut a deal with him.”

  “Yeah. I had to. For my kid. I told Quinn if he got the charges dismissed against Anthony, I’d give him your name and he could take it from there. I also said I wouldn’t testify at his hearing—that I’d go into a hospital so you couldn’t drag me down there—and I wouldn’t be starring in any more videos.”

  “And Quinn agreed to this?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t he? My kid’s small potatoes. Nobody gives a shit about him, and Quinn knows it. He knew if the charges against my boy were dismissed, that wouldn’t even cause a ripple in the legal system. I also told Quinn if he didn’t do what I wanted then I was going to testify at the hearing. That is, I’d testify unless Quinn killed me, in which case the video you made would have to do.”

  “So you were actually planning to do this when you made the video.”

  “That’s right, and Quinn took the deal. I gave him your name and he squeezed whoever he had to squeeze in the DA’s office, and they dropped the charges in return for Anthony testifying against the other idiots he was arrested with. My kid’s lawyer says there’s no way they can come back at him and he’s free until he fucks up again, which, knowing him, he probably will.”

  DeMarco didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he said, “You old son of a bitch. I feel like—”

  “Yeah, fuck what you feel like. You’re not gonna do shit. If you really wanted to get back at Quinn for your dad, you’d have killed the guy instead of coming up with some bullshit political thing to screw him over. You take care, Joe. Tell your mom hi for me next time you see her.”