House Reckoning

by Mike Lawson

  “Goddamnit, what do you want to know?”

  “I want you to confirm that what I’ve been told is true: that you saw Brian Quinn shoot an unarmed man, that Quinn stuck a gun in the man’s hand, and that the police brushed the whole thing under the rug.”

  “Yeah, it’s true, but—”

  “What did you mean when you said ‘the last time Quinn sent people to lean on’ you?”

  “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  “Uh, no thanks, but go ahead if you want one.” He didn’t think she was stalling; she just needed alcohol.

  She walked over to the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of white wine, and filled a glass almost to the brim. After she’d taken a long swallow—like she was drinking water—she said, “I used to go to bars after Sal dumped me. You know, singles bars.”

  DeMarco nodded.

  “I’d go hoping to pick up some guy, and if the subject of New York cops came up, sometimes I’d tell people what I saw. I’d say, hey, let me tell you just how dirty the damn cops can be. I don’t think most people believed me when I told them what Quinn had done, or they would just pretend to believe me, depending on if they wanted to go to bed with me or not. But one night, this was right after Quinn became the commissioner, I was in this bar and I probably had too much to drink and I told some lawyer my story.

  “Two days later these two cops show up at the school and the principal calls me out of class to talk with them. They didn’t tell the principal why they wanted to talk to me and later I told her some bullshit about having witnessed a robbery. I think they came to the school instead of my apartment just to show how much power they had and how they could fuck up my so-called life.

  “Anyway, they took me into an empty classroom and told me they’d heard about me shooting my mouth off about Commissioner Quinn. I’d obviously talked to the wrong lawyer. I don’t know how they got my name, though. I mean, when I would meet men in bars, I didn’t tell them my last name until after we’d gone out on a regular date. But somehow these cops—they were big, hard-looking bastards and they scared the shit out of me—tracked me down. They told me that making unfounded accusations about the police commissioner, accusations that had no basis in fact, was a good way to get into a lot of trouble. I could be sued, for one thing. Or maybe the school would find out that I was a lush and hung out in bars and picked up married men, and some of those married men had mob connections. Or maybe, they said, the IRS would take a look at my tax returns. What they meant was, I worked as a part-time waitress in the summer sometimes, and naturally, like everybody else who worked at this place, I didn’t declare my tips.

  “I mean, it was apparent these guys had researched the shit out of me. By the time they left I was crying and one of them said, ‘You got the picture now?’ Since then, no matter how much I’ve had to drink, I say nothing about Brian Quinn.”

  “How well could you see Quinn that night?” DeMarco asked. “My source told me you were sitting on a balcony that overlooked the alley where Connors was shot.”

  “The balcony was on the third floor and I used to sit on it because the landlord wouldn’t let me smoke in the apartment. And I didn’t actually see Quinn shoot Connors—I heard the shot—but when he came running down the alley to check if the guy was dead, then I could see him. I couldn’t see his face because it was pretty dark and he was wearing a cop’s hat and I was looking down at the top of his hat, but I could see what he did. I saw him pull a gun out of an ankle holster and put it in the guy’s hand and throw this can under a Dumpster. If he’d looked up, he would have seen me. But he didn’t. When another cop came down the alley—Quinn’s partner, I guess—I scooted back into my apartment.”

  “Then how’d you know it was Quinn?”

  “Because the papers said it was him.”

  DeMarco didn’t have any other questions he could think of and he rose to leave. “Thank you, Ms. Costello. Someone will contact you if necessary.”

  Costello started crying. “You goddamn people are going to ruin my life. All I’ve got is my shitty job and if I testify against Quinn I can guarantee you that he’ll come after me and I’ll get fired. I’m no lawyer, but I know damn good and well that you’ll never get Quinn if it’s just my word against the word of the entire police department.”

  DeMarco hated to admit it, but he knew she was probably right.

  18

  DeMarco knew from talking to Tony Benedetto and Janet Costello that Quinn had a partner the night he shot the paint store guy, Connors. He wanted to find Quinn’s partner. He went to the New York Public Library and used one of their computers to search back issues of the New York Times, New York Post, and New York Daily News.

  It took him two hours to learn that Quinn’s partner was a man named Stanley Dombroski; Quinn got all the press coverage for shooting Connors, and his partner’s name was only mentioned in one sentence, in one article, and never mentioned again after that. He checked the white pages online and discovered there were five Stanley or S. Dombroskis in the greater New York area. He figured if he called the NYPD and asked the cops to give him the home address of the Dombroski he was trying to find, they’d tell him to go shit in his hat. Frustrated, he called a man in D.C. named Neil and said, “Find this fuckin’ guy for me.”

  Twenty minutes later he learned that the Dombroski he wanted was now retired and lived on the Jersey shore in a town with the lovely name of Brick.

  After spending his evening at the library, DeMarco got a room in a Manhattan hotel—he didn’t feel like staying with his mom again. His knew his mother was astute enough to realize that something was bothering him, and he didn’t want to spend the evening evading her questions or causing her to worry about him. He spent a couple of hours in the hotel bar, drinking slowly, munching on peanuts, stewing over what to do about Brian Quinn.

  While he stewed, he occasionally looked up at the television over the bar. It was showing game seven of the National League Championship Series and the winner would play in the World Series. The only baseball teams DeMarco cared about were the New York Mets and the Washington Nationals, and since neither team was playing, he didn’t care who won. What he thought about instead were all the times he and his dad had gone to watch the Mets at the old Shea Stadium, and how that had always been a huge deal for him as a kid. He’d loved going to those games with his dad. Shea Stadium was gone now, replaced by a beautiful ballpark with the horrible name of Citi Field. DeMarco suspected his father wouldn’t like it any more than he did that ballparks were now being named after banks, businesses, and insurance companies.

  The next morning, DeMarco rented a car and drove to Dombroski’s house in Brick, New Jersey, which was located in a neighborhood where about half the homeowners maintained their dwellings and the other half did not. Small, well-tended lawns were adjacent to weed-filled lots; houses with clean, freshly painted siding stood beside homes that hadn’t seen paint in two decades. Dombroski’s house was sort of in the middle in terms of appearance: no dandelions in the front lawn, but the paint on the door was peeling and DeMarco was surprised the roof had survived Hurricane Sandy.

  DeMarco rang the doorbell but no one answered. He was thinking about leaving and coming back later when an old lady he hadn’t noticed called out, “He’s in the backyard.” He hadn’t seen Dombroski’s next-door neighbor because, sitting down, she was so short her head was barely taller than the railing around her porch.

  He walked around the house and found Dombroski in a plastic lawn chair sipping a beer. Next to his chair were two empty beer bottles and a cooler probably containing full ones. A radio on top of the cooler was tuned to a sports talk show and some guy was going on and on about the Yankees failing to make it again to the World Series.

  Dombroski was in his fifties, overweight, and red-faced from booze or sun or both. He was wearing an unbuttoned blue denim shirt over a white, V-necked T-shirt and khaki shorts with cargo pockets. His big feet were shod in flip-flops. DeMarco thought it was a
bit cool for shorts and flip-flops but apparently not. Dombroski looked comfortable and content sitting there enjoying the ocean view.

  DeMarco figured the view had to be the main reason why Dombroski had bought the house. The house itself was maybe twelve hundred square feet, and DeMarco had seen outhouses with more architectural appeal. It was essentially a small box with a roof and had windows so narrow they looked like gun ports. The backyard, however, was an unexpected jewel. It was only fifty feet wide and thirty feet deep, enclosed by a tilting cedar fence, but the grass was a lush green carpet and the view of the Atlantic, over the rooftops of the people who lived on the next block, was outstanding. DeMarco could see the beach from where he stood and the breakers hitting the shore.

  “Mr. Dombroski?” DeMarco said. DeMarco wasn’t exactly sure how to approach Dombroski. He wanted him to divulge nasty information about a onetime partner and he knew that the thin blue line of the NYPD held together against outsiders. But he had to try.

  Dombroski looked over at him. “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “My name’s DeMarco and I want to talk to you about Brian Quinn.”

  Dombroski turned off the radio and said, “Is that right. Are you from the Vatican? Are they thinking about canonizing the bastard now?”

  Maybe the thin blue line had a few gaps in it.

  “Not exactly,” DeMarco said.

  DeMarco decided to tell Dombroski an abbreviated version of the truth: he said he worked for Congress and was investigating Quinn.

  “Why?” Dombroski asked.

  “He’s being considered for a federal position. I can’t say which one as an official announcement hasn’t been made.” DeMarco had no idea when he told this lie how prophetic that statement would turn out to be. “Anyway, I’ve been asked to do a background check and I’ve learned something disturbing I need to ask you about.”

  “So ask,” Dombroski said. “There’s another chair over there by the door. And help yourself to a beer if you want one.”

  DeMarco placed his chair next to Dombroski’s so he, too, could enjoy the view. He popped the top on a Budweiser, took a sip, and said that during the course of his investigation he’d come to believe that when Quinn was a rookie, he shot a man named Connors, lied about Connors being armed, and then the department covered up what had really occurred.

  “Ya think?” Dombroski said and laughed—and DeMarco wondered how drunk Dombroski was. He was also wondering if everything he told Dombroski would get back to Quinn. Nonetheless, he told Dombroski that the night Quinn shot the so-called cat burglar a woman had seen him put a gun in the man’s hand.

  “You’re shittin’ me!” Dombroski said. “Why didn’t this broad come forward when it happened?”

  “She was afraid to,” DeMarco said. “She figured the department would protect one of its own and maybe come after her.”

  Dombroski made an expression that DeMarco interpreted as She was right about that.

  “So what are you looking for, bud?” Dombroski asked.

  “I want to know if a cover-up occurred.”

  “You bet one did. I knew Quinn had planted a gun on that guy and so did everyone involved in the shooting investigation. But Quinn had people pulling for him even back then.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because, for one thing, Quinn was my partner and rattin’ out your partner is usually frowned upon in police circles. The other thing was, I was dumb enough to think that helping Quinn might be good for my career. I’d been on the force for ten years before I was partnered with him and I was still driving around in a patrol car and working nights. But I knew Quinn was going places—everyone who knew him could tell he was going to rise to the top—and I knew he didn’t shoot the guy on purpose. I figured if I kept my mouth shut, Quinn would give me a hand up the ladder one day. Well, he didn’t. As soon as he was cleared by the shooting board, he asked for a new partner and never had anything to do with me again. I approached him a couple of times and sort of gently reminded him that he owed me, but the bastard just looked at me like I was lower than rat shit. He knew it was too late for me to change my story.”

  “Did you actually see him put the gun in Connors’s hand?”

  “No. By the time I reached Connors’s body, he was already holding a gun. The thing was, the gun looked exactly like Quinn’s backup piece, this little .32. I thought for a minute about asking Quinn to show me his backup gun but decided not to. I just decided to go along. So what do you want, DeMarco?”

  “I want you to testify that you thought it was a bad shooting and improperly investigated.” Before Dombroski could object, DeMarco added, “I realize the shooting board cleared him and that you don’t have any evidence, but if I can get this other witness to testify—the woman who saw Quinn put the gun in Connors’s hand—whatever you have to say will add weight to her testimony.”

  “Testify to who?” Dombroski asked. “If you think the department is going to reopen an investigation into a shooting that involved the current police commissioner, you’re fuckin’ nuts.”

  “I’m talking about testifying in front of a congressional committee.”

  DeMarco had absolutely no idea how he could get Congress to investigate a man who drank with the president’s chief of staff—not when his star witnesses were people like Tony Benedetto, Sal Anselmo, Janet Costello, and Stan Dombroski. He’d worry about that small detail later.

  Dombroski looked at DeMarco for a moment, then spread his arms in a gesture meant to take in his small domain. “Look around, my friend. This is as good as it’s ever going to get for me. I never even made sergeant when I was on the force—I don’t test too well—and that means I don’t have a king-sized pension. Then there’s the fact that my wife divorced me five years ago. She said I was stifling her, whatever the fuck that means, and she now gets half of my pension. Lucky for me, my mom died a couple years ago and . . . That came out wrong. My mom was a good woman. Anyway, when my mom died I got her house and I was able to sell it and get this place. It ain’t much, but it’s what I got. I sit here and I enjoy the view and I drink. I take walks on the beach; I go surf fishing when I’m in the mood. I bowl with some other fat retired guys once a week. That’s my life and it sucks but I’m not going to jeopardize what I have by making an enemy out of Brian Quinn. But good luck to you, and I wish you the best.”

  “You can be compelled to testify, Mr. Dombroski.”

  “So compel me,” Dombroski said.

  “And if you commit perjury you’ll go to jail.”

  “Why would I perjure myself? You never heard of the Fifth Amendment?” Lowering the pitch of his voice, pretending he was speaking from the witness chair, Dombroski said, “I decline to answer that question, Your Honor, as answering it might incriminate my fat ass.”

  DeMarco caught a shuttle back to D.C. that evening having no idea how he was going to deal with Quinn—short of simply killing the man.

  19

  DeMarco parked across from a narrow four-story building perched on the banks of the Potomac. Across the river, he could see the Pentagon. He also wasn’t that far away from the Washington Harbour, where, only a short time ago, he’d sat a contented man.

  He took the elevator to the fourth floor of the building—the only floor in the building where the names of the occupants weren’t identified on the reader board in the lobby. The fourth floor was the domain of a man named Neil, the same Neil he’d called when he was trying to find Stan Dombroski.

  Neil called himself an information broker and DeMarco had used his services many times in the past. Neil’s rates were dear but if you could afford his fees—and the U.S. Treasury could—Neil would happily tell you anything you wanted to know about your fellow citizens. Most often Neil was able to get what his clients wanted by bribing people who work in places that warehouse information on American citizens: the IRS, Google, banks, telephone, and credit card companies. If necessary, however, Neil and one of his associates—a young black man
named Bobby Prentiss, who rarely spoke—had the skills to slip through firewalls as if they didn’t exist and pull information out of whichever computer system might contain whatever you wished to know.

  Neil was sitting behind his desk, partially hidden by three computer monitors. He was dressed as he was almost every time DeMarco had seen him: a bright Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals. He was tapping with one hand on a keyboard while his other hand was stuffing a Reuben into his face, sauerkraut dropping unnoticed onto the surface of his desk.

  “Ah, DeMarco,” he said with his mouth full. “What favor does my government ask of me today?”

  DeMarco didn’t bother to point out that Neil didn’t do favors—unless you called charging people an exorbitant amount of money for an illegal service a favor. He also didn’t point out that the U.S. government was rarely involved in any legitimate capacity when DeMarco called upon Neil. DeMarco wasn’t in the mood for banter.

  “I want everything you can get me on a man named Brian Quinn. And I mean everything.”

  What DeMarco was hoping was that if Neil burrowed into Quinn’s life he’d find something tying Quinn to Carmine Taliaferro. He particularly wanted Neil to look at Quinn’s finances. As rich as Carmine Taliaferro had been, maybe some of the mobster’s money could be traced to Quinn. DeMarco firmly believed that everyone has secrets—no exceptions—and Neil was the man to find Brian Quinn’s.

  “Okay,” Neil said. “It might take me a couple of days before I can get to it as I’m in the middle of something right now, but . . .”

  “Drop whatever you’re doing and raise your fee accordingly.” DeMarco had no idea how he was going to pay Neil’s fee. He’d worry about that later.

  “That sounds fair,” Neil said, pretending he was a reasonable, agreeable fellow as opposed to the greedy shit he really was. “But can you give me just a little more information about Mr. Quinn. Like maybe an address or date of birth. You know, something to distinguish him from a few million other Irishmen who might bear the same name.”