House Reckoning

by Mike Lawson

  “Okay.”

  It took Gino three weeks to do the job, but in the end Leon Washington became part of a strawberry field in Jersey and Carmine started doing business with his brother.

  And that’s the way it went for more than twenty years. He worked as a bodyguard and as a regular guy on Carmine’s crew, meaning he stole things and collected from people who owed Carmine money. He was a bagman, delivering money to judges and cops. When Carmine had drugs to sell, Gino made sure whoever was buying didn’t try to steal the dope instead of paying for it. And when Carmine wanted someone killed he would do it, but only if the price was right and only if the guy he was being asked to kill was another criminal.

  The killings changed him, however. He’d always been a quiet man but after he became Carmine’s enforcer—and that’s who he was—there was no point kidding himself about that—he became even quieter, hardly ever talking when he didn’t have to. A shrink might have been able to explain it—how the guilt or the shame or whatever it was had altered him—but all he knew was that he felt separate from other people. He was no longer the man he used to be; he’d become a man he didn’t want to be.

  After he killed Washington, he stopped going to confession—there was no point telling a priest he’d killed someone when he knew he was going to do it again—and since he stopped going to confession, he stopped taking communion, too. He still went to mass with Maureen and Joe—Maureen never asked him why he stopped taking communion—it was like she knew—and when he was in church, he would just go to some place deep inside himself and whatever the priest was saying became nothing more than white noise to him.

  The only time he was ever really happy was when he was working on the house or doing something with Joe. Those were the best times—tossing a football to Joe in the park or becoming totally immersed in fixing something around the house. He remembered one time when he spent an entire week one July putting a new roof on the house, up there with his shirt off, sweating in the sun, Joe climbing the ladder to bring him lemonade Maureen had made. When it was done, he and Joe sat up there on his new roof together looking out over the neighborhood. That had been a great week.

  So life went on and he continued to work for Carmine. What he wouldn’t do, however, was kill a citizen—some ordinary schmuck who’d pissed Carmine off or who was going to testify against one of Carmine’s thugs or somebody Carmine just wanted out of the way so he could muscle in on something. When Gino refused to do what Carmine wanted, Enzo would scream at him and Carmine would get pissed and give the job to somebody else. But he didn’t fire Gino. Instead, he gave him the silent treatment. It seemed that between his wife and his boss, somebody was always giving him the silent treatment.

  4

  As Gino DeMarco sat in a bar mulling over his past and future, waiting for his wife to go to sleep, Carmine Taliaferro sat in his den watching his fish swim around in the tank. One of the little yellow fish was moving kind of slow, turning in small circles. He hoped it wasn’t dying. He’d always liked that little fish.

  His four-year-old granddaughter was with him, jabbering nonstop about anything that popped into her head. The girl was a talker, just like Carmine’s daughter. And just like his wife, for that matter. He could hear his daughter and his wife in the kitchen going on and on about something son-in-law had done, and at the same time his granddaughter was wondering out loud if grandpa had a cat and would the cat eat all the fish. It felt like his head was gonna explode.

  “Sweetie,” he said to the little girl, “why don’t you go tell Grandma to give you some ice cream.”

  “I don’t want any ice cream,” she said.

  “Sure you do. Go on. Go see Grandma. Go get some ice cream. Grandpa’s gotta make a phone call.”

  “I know how to make a phone call.”

  Jesus. “Stephanie!” he yelled. His daughter, who looked just like his wife when she was her age, stuck her head into the room.

  “Yeah, Pop?” Stephanie said.

  “Take Katie into the kitchen, will you? I gotta make a call.”

  “I told him I know how to make phone calls,” Katie said, standing now, little hands on her little hips, glaring at him—another gesture that reminded him of his wife. His wife, daughter, and granddaughter were like those Russian boxes: you opened one box, and inside it was an identical smaller box. Then you open that box, and . . .

  Finally he gets them both out of the room and shuts the door.

  He didn’t need to make a phone call. He just needed to think.

  Like he’d told Enzo, he needed the kid; the kid was an investment in the future whereas DeMarco, as good as he was, had too many scruples and was a hard guy to control. The other thing, and nobody knew this but him, was that he’d ordered the kid to kill Jerry Kennedy. If DeMarco ever found that out . . . Well, he couldn’t take the chance.

  Kennedy had always been a drunk, but most of the time he kept the drinking under control. The gambling, however, got way out of hand. Kennedy was a compulsive gambler, the kind of guy who couldn’t control the urge—the kind of guy who would bet on a cockroach race—and he ended up owing a bookie in Atlantic City more than twenty grand.

  Then, a week ago, Kennedy gets nabbed by the feds. Unbeknownst to Carmine, Kennedy had been transporting dope for a guy in Trenton, trying to make enough money to pay off the bookie in Atlantic City, and the dumb shit sells the dope to an NYPD undercover. The feds immediately took over the case for interstate trafficking, but according to Carmine’s source, the feds really took it over because they thought they might be able to force Kennedy to testify against Carmine. The feds didn’t even arraign Kennedy—they didn’t want Carmine to know they had him—and they were hiding him somewhere, trying to make a deal with him. And, by the way, they were offering him Witness Protection if he agreed to cooperate.

  Carmine wouldn’t even have known about Kennedy’s arrest if it wasn’t for his source in the Bureau, who was just a secretary. Carmine had thought that Kennedy was off on a bender or shacked up with some broad, and that’s why he hadn’t seen the damn guy in a while. But the secretary heard about Kennedy getting arrested and she knew Kennedy worked for Carmine.

  The secretary worked for a big shot down at Federal Plaza, near Foley Square, and she kept her ears open for things that might concern Carmine. The only reason she helped him was that she had a daughter with a weird skin disease and couldn’t afford the cream and shit her daughter needed. If the government had paid her better, she probably wouldn’t have told Carmine anything. The problem, however, was the secretary didn’t know where they were keeping Kennedy and she couldn’t find out—and Carmine needed to know because he needed Jerry Kennedy dead.

  Carmine figured that Kennedy’s nuts were in a three-way vise. The guy from Trenton whose dope he’d lost probably wanted Kennedy to pay for that, the Atlantic City bookie definitely wanted his money back, and the feds were going to put Kennedy in jail for years if he didn’t cooperate. Witness Protection would solve all of Kennedy’s problems. He’d be a fool not to make a deal.

  So Carmine needed Kennedy dead, but he couldn’t use DeMarco because DeMarco would never agree to kill his best friend. He didn’t really want any of his other guys to kill Kennedy, either. For one thing, none of them was as good as DeMarco but the main thing was, people could never keep their damn mouths shut. If he used one of his own people, the word would eventually get back to DeMarco.

  He finally decided to force the kid to kill Kennedy.

  The kid’s name was Quinn. Brian Quinn. He was a cop. He was a tall, slim, good-looking young guy who would eventually end up with the kind of face you expected generals and presidents to have. He fit in well at the NYPD, which was a lot like the Catholic Church in America, where all the bishops and cardinals were wops and micks. Quinn’s dad had been a well-liked NYPD detective, two of his uncles were cops, and Quinn’s rabbi—his mentor in the department—was currently the chief of D’s.

  Quinn also married above his station. His
wife was a good-looking woman but more important, her father was a federal judge and her mother was the daughter of serious Wall Street money. Quinn’s mother-in-law was beaucoup rich and she was Quinn’s ticket into the inner circle of the people who really ran New York. She was most likely disappointed her daughter had fallen for an Irish cop, but over time she would become quite impressed with her son-in-law.

  So Quinn was going places. He was getting a law degree at night and Carmine figured that within a year he’d have a detective’s shield, and after that, as bright and connected as he was, the sky was the limit for young Officer Quinn.

  But as smart as he was, Carmine owned Quinn because being smart doesn’t help when it comes to bad luck.

  Brian Quinn had done one stupid thing in his life, maybe the only stupid thing he ever did or would ever do again: he shot an unarmed man and lied about it.

  He was working the graveyard shift in Queens when he and his partner—an overweight, not-too-bright Polack named Dombroski—got a call from dispatch saying a man just tried to break into a woman’s house. The burglar was white, over six feet tall, wearing a black jacket and a blue or black stocking cap. The attempted robbery happened less than three minutes before they got the call, and Quinn and Dombroski were right there in the neighborhood.

  Dombroski drove around hoping to spot the burglar on the street, and Quinn caught a glimpse of a man walking down an alley. (Quinn found out later the alley was a shortcut the guy sometimes used.) Quinn told his partner to drive to the other end of the alley to block off the guy’s escape, and Quinn went into the alley on foot after the man. Quinn’s version of the story was that he yelled at the man to put his hands up, the guy spun around, pointing a gun, and Quinn had to shoot him. What actually happened was the guy was holding a can of beer and when Quinn yelled, the guy was startled, he swung around fast, and all Quinn saw was something metallic in his hand so he fired.

  He ran to the man to see if he was still alive. He wasn’t. Quinn wasn’t a particularly good shot but he had hit the guy right in the heart. Then he saw the beer can and realized he had just shot his career in the heart. He now had about five seconds to make a decision because Dombroski was jogging down the alley toward him, so he did what he knew other cops had done. He pulled his backup piece out of his ankle holster, placed it in the man’s hand, and tossed the beer can under a Dumpster.

  Quinn’s story stank right from the start, and everybody knew it.

  The man he’d killed was a drunk named Connors who worked in a paint store. The good news, at least from Quinn’s perspective, was that Connors had a record. When he was eighteen—which was twenty years ago—he and another dumbass broke into an old lady’s house, stole a few things, and then tried to pawn the shit to the only honest pawnbroker in New York. He did seventeen months for that. But that was the only good thing about Connors in terms of him being a viable suspect.

  Connors had never owned a gun in his life. He was five foot seven and fat, not over six feet tall. The jacket he was wearing the night he was killed was red, which might have looked black in the right light, but he didn’t have a stocking cap. NYPD detectives—guys who worked for Quinn’s rabbi, the chief of D’s—showed the woman Connors’s picture and the detectives got her to admit that yeah, Connors was maybe the man she saw for three seconds trying to jimmy open her window. It was strange that Connors didn’t have a jimmy on him; he must have tossed it, they concluded, when he tossed the stocking cap.

  In the end, thanks to his rabbi and his father-in-law, the federal judge, and a call from Quinn’s mother-in-law to the mayor, it was deemed a good shooting and a fat drunk who worked in a paint store became a sly cat burglar who’d been ripping off houses in the neighborhood for the last five weeks. The department stopped short of giving Officer Quinn a commendation for ridding the city of this menace.

  But this was when Lady Luck entered Brian Quinn’s charmed young life.

  When Quinn shot Connors, bad luck really had nothing to do with that. Quinn was practically a rookie, he was probably scared chasing a man he thought was a burglar down a dark alley, and he reacted without thinking when he saw something flash in Connors’s hand. It was just a case of bad judgment combined with inexperience and too much adrenaline—but it wasn’t a matter of luck.

  Nor did luck have anything to do with Quinn’s decision to try to cover up the killing. That was just Quinn thinking he was smart enough to get out of the situation, and lying about what really happened was better than admitting he’d made a mistake that could blemish his spotless record. Where Lady Luck walked into the picture was in the form of another lady named Janet Costello, who had insomnia.

  Janet taught fifth grade at a public school in Queens. She also had twenty-twenty vision. Janet, in other words, was a good citizen and a reliable witness. When she couldn’t sleep, which was almost every night, she liked to sit on her balcony—a balcony the size of a doormat with a view of an alley—and smoke and drink white wine. Her landlord wouldn’t allow her to smoke in her apartment.

  Janet was also the girlfriend of a man named Sal Anselmo. Janet had been raised in Queens and she knew Sal from grade school and dated him all through high school. She was heartbroken when he married another girl—and he was still married to the other girl and had three kids—but he came around one time when Janet was feeling lonely and vulnerable and she was now his mistress.

  Janet saw Quinn put his backup gun in Connors’s dead hand that night; she saw him toss the beer can under the Dumpster. If Quinn or his partner had ever looked up—instead of down at the dead man—they would have seen Janet sitting two floors above them, her hand clamped over her mouth. A couple of days later, Janet sees in the papers that Quinn is now some sort of hero for killing an unarmed man. She thought about going to the police and telling them what had really happened but was afraid to because she knew how the NYPD protected its own. So she called Sal and asked what he thought she should do. Sal said, “You keep your mouth shut, you fuckin’ dummy,” and then Sal told his boss, a guy named Tony Benedetto, who then told his boss—Carmine Taliaferro.

  Carmine had several NYPD cops on his payroll. They kept him informed of investigations that might hurt him, kept him up to speed on problems his rivals were having, and, most important, they didn’t usually arrest his people. But he could always use another cop, particularly if he could purchase him with blackmail instead of cash.

  Carmine didn’t approach Quinn right away, though. Patience was possibly Carmine Taliaferro’s greatest virtue and the thing that distinguished him more than anything else from the gonzos who worked for him. Instead, he took a week and did his homework on Quinn and learned about the cop’s father-in-law, the judge, his rabbi, the chief of D’s, his richer-than-God mother-in-law, and the fact that he’d already passed the sergeant’s exam and was getting a law degree. Now Carmine really wanted this cop.

  Ten days after Quinn killed Connors, Carmine set up a meeting with Quinn and explained the facts of life to him, the main fact being that he now worked for Carmine. Carmine admitted that Quinn might be able to impugn an eyewitness but he told Quinn that this particular witness was a prosecutor’s dream. He didn’t, of course, give him Janet Costello’s name. When Quinn said he didn’t believe there was a witness, Carmine said, “Then how do I know exactly what you did, pulling your gun out of an ankle holster and tossing the beer can under the Dumpster? Plus I had a guy go down there and photograph the beer can—there’s some graffiti on the wall behind the Dumpster so you can tell it was really in that spot. And when my guy took the photo, he put a copy of the Times against the wall so you can see the date. I now have the can and I’m about a thousand percent sure it will have your fingerprints on it.

  “There’s one other thing you need to think about, Officer Quinn,” Carmine said. “When this witness comes forward and tells what you did, you ain’t gonna be the only guy who gets in trouble. Whoever investigated the shooting and helped you hide the truth is also going to have their di
cks lopped off. Think about that, Officer Quinn. How’s that going to look, you getting the whole department in trouble because you lied your ass off?”

  At first Quinn tried to bluster and bullshit his way out, saying how his pals on the force would come down on Carmine’s operation like a ton of bricks, but in the end he caved.

  “So what do you want?” he asked.

  “Just information,” Carmine said. “You keep me informed of things that can help me. And if you don’t produce, then I don’t need you, and my witness talks to the press and Connors’s widow gets a big-mouth lawyer to sue the department.”

  A month goes by and Carmine gets nothing out of Quinn. He knows what Quinn’s trying to do: he’s trying to find the eyewitness and trying to find something he can use against Carmine. And this was about the time that Jerry Kennedy gets nabbed by the feds. Carmine called up Quinn and told him: “You find Kennedy for me and if you don’t, I’m gonna end your fuckin’ career.”

  Carmine walked through the bingo room in the basement of St. Sebastian’s, a hundred crazy women there, shrieking every time a number was called. The grand prize that night was fifty bucks and the women acted like they were playing for a million.

  Quinn was waiting for him in a little room that looked like a workshop, a bunch of tools hanging off a pegboard, a broken cradle they used for the Nativity scene sitting on the floor. Carmine had donated all the statues and shit for the Nativity scene.

  “So where is he?” Carmine said.

  “I don’t like meeting with you,” Quinn said. “Why couldn’t we do this over the phone?”

  “A, I don’t give a shit what you like, and B, I don’t like talking on the phone. So where is he?”

  Quinn told him: a crummy motel outside Poughkeepsie, more than an hour’s drive from New York.

  “Are they protecting him?” Carmine asked.

  “No,” Quinn said. “I mean they don’t have agents or federal marshals guarding him. They figure as long as only a couple people in the U.S. attorney’s office know where he is, he’s safe.”