House Reckoning

by Mike Lawson

  Jerry asked him out for a beer one evening after he’d spent the day going to a dozen places looking for work. The first thing he noticed was that Jerry looked flush. He was wearing a good suit and his shoes had a shine. He paid for the beer with a fat roll he pulled from his pocket, tipping the waitress like he was a Rockefeller.

  He knew Jerry worked for Carmine Taliaferro, and he knew what Carmine was. He figured Jerry got the job because he married a Sicilian girl who was related to Carmine, but he didn’t know for sure. He also didn’t know what Jerry did for Carmine, and he never asked. He found out later, after it was too late, that Jerry didn’t make all that much and the roll he flashed that night came from one of his infrequent, lucky days at the track.

  When Jerry asked how things were going, Gino told him: no job and a pregnant wife.

  “You want me to ask my boss if he might have some work for you? I mean, just until you find something else.”

  Gino shook his head. He’d seen other guys go down that path and most of them ended up in jail. A few of them ended up dead.

  “Then how ’bout a loan to tide you over?”

  This was what Maureen didn’t understand about Jerry: he’d give you the shirt off his back if you were his friend.

  “Nah, that’s okay,” Gino said. “I’ll find work soon.”

  Two weeks later—he still hadn’t found a job—Jerry called. “I have to go down to Florida and drive a truck back up here without stopping. I need a wingman. You’ll make five hundred bucks.”

  In those days, when gas was fifty cents a gallon, five hundred dollars was a lot of money. Five hundred dollars was enough to pay the mortgage for two months.

  “What’s in the truck?” Gino asked.

  “I don’t know, and I’m not asking.”

  Gino thought at the time that he’d be a fool to take the job. The cops could be watching Carmine’s guys. Or they could be watching the guy whose stuff was in the truck. If it was guns, whoever was driving could go away for five years and crossing state lines made it a federal charge. But the thing was, the mortgage payment was due at the end of the month and he was going to have to ask somebody for a loan: his father, his father-in-law, maybe Jerry. Begging friends and relatives for money would be humiliating, particularly as he didn’t have any idea when he’d be able to pay them back. Then what would he do the month after that?

  He told Maureen he had a job driving a truck and would be gone a few days. When he saw her eyes light up, thinking he’d gotten on with the Teamsters, he told her it was just a one-time thing, that a guy just needed a backup driver. He didn’t tell her the guy was Jerry. He didn’t exactly lie to her—but it felt like a lie.

  And that’s how it all started. The next job came a couple of weeks later when Jerry said he needed someone to go with him to collect from a guy who owed Carmine money. “This guy’s big, bigger than both of us put together, and he’s kind of a nut. I just want someone backing me up in case he wants to fight.”

  “Okay, but I’m not carrying a gun.”

  “You won’t need a gun.”

  “And I’m not gonna pound on this guy if he won’t pay you.”

  “He’ll pay. Like I said, I just need you to pull him off me if he goes nuts.”

  In the beginning, he was always drawing lines in the sand, lines he said he’d never cross—and then he ended up crossing almost all of them.

  The first time he killed a man, it was basically the same sort of thing.

  He’d been working for Carmine for nearly three years and by that time he could no longer pretend to himself—much less his wife—that he wasn’t one of Carmine’s hoods. He drove more trucks filled with things he knew were stolen. He was part of a crew that emptied out an appliance warehouse in Danbury, Connecticut. One night, he and Jerry went with a guy to a dealership on Long Island and stole twenty brand-new Buicks off the lot because the guy had keys for all the cars. Gino always acted calm when he did these things but on the inside he was quaking. He realized after a while that he wasn’t really afraid of going to jail; he could handle jail. What terrified him was the way Maureen would be humiliated if he was arrested. And what would she tell Joe when he was old enough to wonder where his father was?

  He just sort of slipped into it. It wasn’t like he made a conscious decision to become a criminal. He told himself he didn’t have a choice—that he had to take care of his wife and kid—but the truth, if he was honest with himself, was that he’d taken the path of least resistance. He tried finding legitimate work, but after beating his head against a wall, getting rejected time and time again, it was just easier working for Carmine than to keep looking for a straight job.

  It didn’t take long before Carmine and Enzo Marciano, the underboss, started giving him more responsibility and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. A lot of the men Carmine employed weren’t all that reliable and some were just plain stupid. They drank too much. They got into fights in bars. They gambled. They ran around with women who weren’t their wives. Jerry Kennedy, he had to admit, was basically that kind of guy. Carmine appreciated the fact that if he needed Gino, all he had to do was call his house; if he called Jerry’s house, Jerry was likely to be out at the track or sleeping with a cocktail waitress he’d met in some joint.

  Carmine started to use him as a bodyguard when he felt he needed one. Gino paid attention, he didn’t lose his temper and let things get out of hand, and he didn’t run his mouth. But he suspected maybe the main reason Carmine used him was the way he looked. Gino DeMarco had a face that could back people down; he looked like a guy that would shoot you if he had to. And when he was Carmine’s bodyguard, he had to carry a gun. Carmine insisted on that—and another line got crossed.

  But there were things he wouldn’t do, like beat up a witness who saw one of Carmine’s thugs break into a jewelry store. The witness was a baker and his shop was across the street from the jewelry store, and he arrived at about four in the morning to start making his dough. When Carmine’s guy, so drunk he could barely walk, broke the jeweler’s window and grabbed a bunch of cheap stuff that was on display, the baker heard the window break. He saw Carmine’s guy stumbling back to his car and got the license plate number because the idiot had parked right under a streetlight.

  Everybody agreed some time in the can might be good for the thief, but he was related to Enzo Marciano. Everybody seemed to be related to everybody else in Carmine’s crew. Enzo told Gino and Jerry to go see the baker, a man in his sixties, and rough him up so he’d get the message that he wasn’t to testify. Gino refused to do it.

  “He’s a nice old guy who runs a bakery,” he told Enzo. “My mother buys her cannoli from him. I’m not gonna beat him up.”

  “Hey!” Enzo said, puffing up like a rooster, “you’re gonna do what the fuck you’re told.”

  “No, I’m not,” Gino said and left, figuring he would soon be unemployed again.

  In the end, Jerry and someone else smacked the baker around a little, not too bad, and Enzo chewed Gino out but kept him on the crew. Enzo said the only reason he did was that Gino was smarter than most of the other dummies Carmine employed, but if he ever disobeyed an order again . . .

  By this time, he and Maureen were fighting all the time. Well, they weren’t fighting; she was fighting. She cried. She screamed. She begged him to quit. She threatened to take Joe and leave him—which he knew she would never do. She ranted how he was going to end up in jail and how she’d be left alone with a son she couldn’t provide for, which, of course, made him feel like shit. He endured days of stony silence and it seemed as if he slept more on the couch than he did in their bed.

  The worst part was, he wasn’t making all that much money. If he’d been able to get steady work as a longshoreman, put in forty hours a week with a little overtime now and then, he would have made more on the docks than he was making working for Carmine. But he couldn’t find work. He tried to tell Maureen this but she didn’t want to hear it. So he did what a man does: he prov
ided for his family, which meant he kept working for Carmine.

  Every week he got paid what amounted to a base salary, but it varied and he could never tell if it varied due to the mood Carmine was in or how much cash the outfit took in that week. If he took part in a job, then he’d make more—like a commission—but how much more wasn’t tied to anything specific, like how much risk was involved or how much money they made on the job. There were a few months when he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to make the mortgage and he had to go to Enzo and beg for an advance, but he never told Maureen that.

  Everything changed the day he killed Mario Colombo.

  Mario Colombo—no relation to the Colombo family in New York—showed up in Queens one day with a dozen guys, mostly men he’d met in prison. Colombo was insane, a violent psychopath who for some reason thought he could just muscle in on Carmine’s operation. Carmine had a reputation for avoiding violence because violence was bad for business. He’d kill if he had to, but only as a last resort. So maybe Colombo thought Carmine was soft or unwilling to risk losing a bunch of his troops in a major war. But how could he possibly think that Carmine would give up without a fight? It made no sense.

  Whatever the case, Colombo roughed up a guy who owned a bar in Carmine’s territory, threatened to rape the guy’s daughter, and took over the bar to use for his headquarters. All the drinks were now on the house. A couple of days later, Carmine heard about this and sent two men over to find out what the hell was going on. They just went to talk to Colombo, to let him know he was making a serious mistake, but Colombo’s guys beat Carmine’s guys so badly they both ended up in the hospital. That same night, Colombo’s crew hit a numbers operation that Carmine’s cousin ran. They pistol-whipped his cousin and stole almost six grand in cash.

  Carmine held a meeting the next day with his senior guys. Gino was only there because he’d been assigned as Carmine’s bodyguard until things were settled with Colombo. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss taking Colombo out; it was apparent he wouldn’t listen to reason. Carmine wanted it done quietly. He didn’t want guys using machine guns, leaving a dozen dead bodies lying in the street. He said he didn’t want to read in the papers any nonsense about gangland massacres because then, the next thing you know, the FBI is assigning some cockamamie task force.

  As they were all grousing about the best way to do the job, Gino said, “How much will you pay the guy who kills him?” Carmine looked at him for a long time before he said, “Three grand. Why? Are you volunteering?” Everybody else in the room laughed. They laughed because Gino already had a reputation for not being willing to take part in the rough stuff. Carmine ignored the laughter. He had always seen something in Gino the others hadn’t.

  “Yeah, I am,” Gino said.

  “Why?” Carmine asked.

  “Because of what he did to Pauly.”

  Pauly was Pauly D’Amato, one of the guys Colombo’s people had put in the hospital. He was a little guy who made everyone laugh.

  Gino liked Pauly, but Pauly wasn’t the reason he volunteered. Joe was three years old and growing out of his clothes and he was embarrassed that his son wore hand-me-downs from Maureen’s sister’s kids. Maureen hadn’t bought a new dress for herself in probably a year and he couldn’t remember the last time they went out to dinner to a nice place, just the two of them. But the big thing was, Maureen was pregnant again. He could barely provide for one kid; he had no idea how he was going to provide for two. Three grand meant that he and Maureen wouldn’t have to live from day to day.

  “How you going to do it?” Carmine asked.

  DeMarco said, “You don’t need to know that.”

  To which Enzo Marciano had said, “Hey! Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?”

  Carmine held up a hand to silence Enzo. “You’re right. I don’t. You got a week to make it happen. If it doesn’t happen, I don’t wanna ever see your face again. You understand?”

  Gino nodded.

  He watched Colombo for three days. Whenever he moved around the city, he always had four men with him, and when he was at his bar/headquarters, there were at least twice that many guys with him. The only time he was alone was when he went back to his hotel, and even then all his men stayed down the hall from him. Some nights he’d have a woman with him, but never the same one. The women would show up after he got back to the hotel and Gino figured if Colombo was in the mood, he’d call a pimp and have a girl sent to him. Like he was ordering out for pizza.

  Gino took all the money he’d saved up to pay the mortgage, borrowed some more from Jerry, and bought a piece with a silencer. He went down to the basement when Maureen was out of the house and fired the gun a couple of times into some phone books. It was louder than he’d expected but not that loud, and it didn’t exactly sound like a gunshot when it was fired. It would do.

  On the fifth day, he went to Colombo’s hotel while Colombo and his guys were out having dinner. He took a guy with him who knew how to pick locks, and after he had Colombo’s door open, he sent the lock picker away. The lock picker was a guy Carmine had used before and he could supposedly be trusted. Gino didn’t like using the lock picker but didn’t have a choice.

  Four hours later, Colombo walked into his room and Gino stepped out of the bathroom and shot him once in the chest. And that was it. Colombo’s guys left town two days later.

  Before he killed Colombo, the only thing Gino had thought about was how to kill him and not get caught or killed himself. He didn’t let himself think about how he would feel about taking another man’s life. He thought he would experience some sort of remorse—that he would feel guilty, maybe even depressed—but he didn’t. He didn’t feel much of anything—and that bothered him more than anything else.

  He suspected the main reason why he didn’t feel bad was because of who Colombo had been: a killer and a criminal and a lunatic, and the world was a better place without him. But Gino also wondered if maybe there was something wrong with him, being so cold and unfeeling about ending the existence of another human being. He finally decided there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on his lack of remorse or guilt or whatever a normal person would feel. A man did what he had to do, he didn’t whine if things didn’t turn out right, and he didn’t brood on the past.

  Two weeks after he killed Colombo, Maureen lost the baby she was carrying and the doctors said she wouldn’t be able to have another. Now that depressed him. Neither he nor Maureen ever really got over it.

  Four or five months after he killed Colombo, Enzo escorted him to Carmine’s office, saying Carmine wanted to talk to him—except Carmine didn’t want to talk in his office. Carmine wanted to walk down to a park a couple of blocks away that had swings and teeter-totters and where good-looking young mothers would come to let their little ones play.

  They wasted some time at a store near the park so Carmine and Enzo could get cups of coffee. The store owner practically genuflected when he saw Carmine, telling him how honored he was that Carmine would stop in his humble shop, insisting the coffee was on the house. They wasted more time when Carmine recognized one of the mothers at the park, a friend of his daughter’s. He asked how the girl’s folks were doing—was her dad still having problems with his hip?—and made a fuss over the baby, saying how beautiful the little girl was—who you could hardly see as she was so wrapped up in blankets and a tiny stocking cap. Finally, they took seats at a picnic table and Carmine got down to business.

  “I want a guy named Leon Washington taken out,” he said to Gino.

  “Why?” Gino said.

  Enzo started to say something—most likely, that it wasn’t none of Gino’s fuckin’ business why—but Carmine shook his head. “Washington’s a colored guy,” he said, “and he and his brother sell heroin to the coloreds in Bed-Stuy. I’ve been their connection for years. I get the dope from a guy I know, sell it to the Washington brothers for thirty percent more than it costs me, then they step on the shit and sell it to the junkies. It’s a g
ood deal for everyone.

  “Well, Washington and his brother came to see me last week. He says he doesn’t need me anymore, that he’s got his own connection. I can tell his brother—he’s the one with the brains—knows this is a bad idea. I tell Washington, you think you can just cut me out? And he says, yeah. What are you gonna do? And I tell him, I’m gonna kill you is what I’m gonna do and find some other spook to distribute my dope for me. You know what he says to me?”

  Gino shook his head.

  “He says, well you can try. So I want Leon taken out, then I’ll deal with his brother and if that don’t work, I’ll find somebody else. The main thing is, I need to send a message. People need to understand that this isn’t the sort of thing you do.”

  “How much?” Gino asked.

  “What do you mean, how much?” Carmine said.

  “How much are you going to pay me for the hit?”

  Enzo practically came across the picnic table at him. “Goddamnit, I’m sick of you, you fuckin’ prima donna. You work for this outfit. You got paid for Colombo because it was your first time and he was a special case. But you’re not some goddamn outside contractor. The boss just gave you a job to do, and you’re gonna do it, and after it’s over, maybe you’ll get a little extra come payday. Maybe.”

  Gino shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to kill a man and risk spending the rest of my life in Sing Sing without knowing how much I’ll make.”

  Enzo said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  When Carmine looked away and didn’t say anything, Gino left.

  Two days later, he heard that one of Carmine’s other guys, a guy he didn’t know very well, tried to kill Washington and got shot. Carmine called Gino into his office the day after the funeral, Enzo sitting there with a scowl on his fat face, and Carmine said, “A grand.”

  “It’s going to be harder now,” Gino said, “now that you sent some moron to kill him.”

  Enzo looked like he was going to explode, but Carmine said, “Yeah, you’re right. Two.”