House Revenge

by Mike Lawson

  They started to ask Sean how he’d been and what he’d been doing the last ten years—they couldn’t keep their eyes off his wife—but he cut them off and said, “Look, we need to get out of this place and go somewhere and get a real drink. I never liked any of these people when I was in high school, and I don’t like ’em now. I’m gonna hang around for another hour or so, then I’m going to drop my wife back home and I’ll meet you guys over at McGill’s so we can catch up.”

  When he met with them at McGill’s—a bar they used to go to in high school and where the owner tended to be flexible when it came to underage drinkers—Sean downplayed his success. He just said that he was in real estate and asked what they were doing these days—and got the answer he’d expected: “Aw, you know, just this and that.” Which made him wonder what sort of criminal records they’d managed to acquire in the last ten years.

  After thirty minutes of bullshit, reminiscing about the good old days when they’d tormented the weaker sheep in Charlestown, Sean got to the point. He told them he was trying to renovate an apartment building in Chelsea, turn the small apartments into decent-sized units, and there was a building inspector who was fucking with him. And that was the only way Sean could describe it: “This guy, he’s just fuckin’ with me,” he told Roy and Ray.

  For some reason the building inspector had taken an intense dislike to Sean, and the renovation had practically ground to a halt with the inspector identifying every small code violation he could find with wiring, plumbing, sprinkler systems, and so on. According to this inspector, not a single thing had been installed correctly, and Sean was constantly having to rip out work that had been completed; then, after he redid it, the inspector would find more problems. The guy was costing him thousands of dollars per day, and Sean couldn’t find any way to get him out of his hair. He’d tried to bribe the guy—that almost got him arrested—and then he said he was going to sue him, maybe even file a discrimination complaint. The inspector was black and he was going to say that the inspector was picking on him because he was white. The inspector laughed in his face.

  “I need to get this guy off my back,” Sean told the McNultys the night of the reunion.

  “We can do that,” Ray said.

  “Yeah, we can do that,” Roy said.

  Sean was worried that they might actually kill the inspector, which he didn’t want; that would be going too far. But the problem with the McNultys was the always-present rage. Imagine a teakettle, the water in the kettle simmering, almost to the point of boiling, the kettle spout barely whistling—and then, with a slight increase in temperature, steam comes billowing out of the kettle and it begins to scream. That was the way the rage simmered inside the McNultys: it was always there, and it took only the smallest provocation—an imagined slight, just a hint of disrespect—and all that barely contained fury would erupt like a volcano.

  Sean remembered once when he and the McNultys were sitting on the stoop of a three-decker in Charlestown, drinking beer, and these two teenagers a little older than them walked by. The teenagers looked like kids who came from money—nice sweaters, expensive tennis shoes—so they weren’t local guys. Well, one of the kids made the mistake of glancing over at the McNultys.

  “What the fuck you looking at?” Ray said.

  “Nothing,” one of the kids said.

  “Nothing!” Roy said—and immediately stood up and threw a full can of beer at one of the kids, hitting him in the forehead. Then he and Ray came off the porch and just pounded the snot out of those boys. That was the McNultys.

  A week after Sean spoke to them at McGill’s, the McNultys caught the building inspector alone at another construction site and beat him so badly he was in the hospital for a week and would be getting physical therapy for six months after that. Satisfied with their performance, Sean gave them the money for the down payment on the Shamrock and threw them work whenever he could: demolition jobs that didn’t require much skill—and certainly no explosives—moving furniture, hauling trash away. That sort of thing. And the job he currently had them doing for him—driving reluctant tenants out of a building—wasn’t the first time they’d performed this function for him.

  But back to the present in the Shamrock and Elinore Dobbs.

  “So exactly what are you saying, Sean?” Ray said.

  “Yeah, what do you want us to do with the old broad?” Roy said.

  Sean’s answer was: “How come you guys haven’t changed the sign on this place to McNulty’s like you’re always talking about?”

  “Because it’ll cost us a couple of grand to get a new sign, pay an electrician to wire it up, rent a cherry picker to take down the old one, and have a new one installed,” Ray said.

  Sean pretended to study the room they were in and said, “In fact, this place could use a total makeover. New sign outside, paint the exterior and interior, buff up the floors, that sort of thing. Yeah, I think I might be able to help you with all that.”

  6

  That lazy bastard DeMarco was not goofing off playing golf when Mahoney’s secretary called and said that the big man was upset, wanted to see him, and that he was being deployed to Boston. DeMarco, in fact, was working on an assignment that Mahoney had given him and had apparently forgotten about due to whatever had happened in Boston.

  DeMarco was sitting with his friend Emma on the patio of her expensive home in McLean, Virginia. DeMarco had known Emma for years—and knew very little about her. She was the most private person he’d ever encountered. He knew she was gay, a cancer survivor, and absurdly rich. How she came to be so rich, he had no idea. The reason he was visiting her today was because he also knew that she’d spent thirty years with the DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency. As near as he’d been able to figure out, she’d been a spy but she never talked about what she had done before she retired. Because of her past employment, however, she had contacts in places where DeMarco didn’t—places like the Defense Department, the CIA, and the NSA—and DeMarco asked for her help sometimes when he needed her connections. Today what DeMarco needed was a back door into the Pentagon.

  “I’m not sure you’re going to find the proof Mahoney’s looking for,” Emma said. “This happened over thirty years ago and everything wasn’t as computerized then as it is now.”

  Emma was sitting in a lounge chair sipping ice tea. She was wearing white shorts that reached her knees and a pale blue blouse that matched her pale blue eyes. She had short hair that was a blondish gray, and she was as tall as DeMarco, almost six feet. And although she was several years older than DeMarco—she was almost Mahoney’s age—she was slender and in incredible shape because, for one thing, she ran in marathons. In fact, she’d been in the Boston Marathon the year the two terrorists set off their pressure cooker bombs, but fortunately had not been near the finish line when they exploded. When DeMarco heard about the marathon attack, the first thing he did was call Emma’s cell phone and when he didn’t hear back from her for several hours, he made a reservation to fly to Boston to see if she’d been injured. When she finally called him back and said she was fine, he hardly whined at all when he couldn’t get a refund on the ticket he’d purchased.

  “But you’ll take a look. Quietly,” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But don’t be surprised if there’s no record and then you’ll have to decide if the absence of a record means he’s lying.”

  DeMarco had been pretty sure that Emma would be willing to help him in this particular case but he could never be positive because she despised John Mahoney. She thought Mahoney was corrupt, which he was; she loathed him for cheating on his wonderful wife, which he did; she believed he was a man totally lacking a moral compass—although Mahoney’s compass was no more defective than those of his fellow politicians. But in this case, DeMarco figured that Emma and Mahoney would be in total agreement.

  DeMarco’s assignment had to do with an Alabama congress
man named Clayton Sims. Sims represented Alabama’s Seventh District—the only congressional district in Alabama represented by a Democrat. Sims, who was fifty-five, had held the job for fourteen years and in order to get elected, and stay elected, in a state that voted overwhelmingly Republican, Sims was basically purple—the color you get when you mix red and blue. He voted with the House D’s, however, at least most of the time, and Mahoney had always thought he was a pretty good guy, although not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The problem was that Sims claimed to be the recipient of a Purple Heart—and Mahoney suspected he might be lying. And if he was lying, this was no small matter to John Mahoney.

  There was nothing unusual about men—and it was almost always men—claiming to be recipients of military medals they’d never earned. There were in fact numerous documented instances of men showing up at public events wearing a uniform, their chests bedecked with phony medals they’d purchased online—sometimes even the Congressional Medal of Honor—when, in fact, these imposters had never been in the military at all. Most men who lied about their military service did so because they wanted to impress people. They wanted the slaps on the back; they wanted to hear “Thank you for your service”; they wanted, these least heroic of men, to be thought of as heroes.

  Others, however, lied for financial gain. In one case a guy who’d never been in the military claimed to have been wounded in Vietnam and racked up over two hundred thousand dollars in VA benefits before he was caught. DeMarco had initially thought that the VA should easily be able to verify if a guy had served or not, or had been injured in combat or not, but the fact was that the records were so screwed up that this wasn’t always the case.

  The practice of people lying about their military service was in fact so egregious and offended so many veterans—John Mahoney being one of those veterans—that Congress, in a rare act of bipartisanship, passed the Stolen Valor Act in 2005 saying these liars should get up to a year in prison. But the act was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2012 in a 6 to 3 decision, the Supremes essentially saying the right to lie was protected by the First Amendment. In 2013, Congress, still pissed, passed a second Stolen Valor Act saying that if someone benefited in some tangible way by lying about his service, then he could end up in prison. Which made DeMarco wonder why they bothered passing the act at all since fraud had always been a crime.

  Anyway, like all politicians who’d served in the military, Congressman Clayton Sims was proud to be a veteran—and made a big deal of his service record when he was campaigning. Sims, like Mahoney, had been a marine, and in 1983 he was in Lebanon. He was there the morning Hezbollah exploded two truck bombs destroying buildings housing American and French soldiers. Of the 241 American servicemen who were killed, 220 were marines. According to Sims, he’d been walking toward the barracks to meet a friend for breakfast, and had been less than a block away when the bombs went off. He was knocked briefly unconscious and was struck in the leg by a long piece of glass that he said was curved “like one of those Muslim daggers.” He pulled out the piece of glass, used his shirt to bandage up a wound that was bleeding profusely, and then spent the next thirty-six hours trying to save marines buried and dying in the rubble.

  When Sims first came to Congress, while Mahoney was still the Speaker of the House, Mahoney met the freshman congressman, and during their initial meeting, they talked about their shared experience as marines. The thing Mahoney remembered from that conversation was that Sims said he’d been injured in his right leg. Well, Mahoney had also been injured in the right leg. His right knee had been shredded by a Vietcong grenade, and on cold days, and on days when he was on his feet too much, his knee ached liked a bastard. Mahoney remembered Sims saying it was the same with him, how, for whatever reason, his leg also bothered him when the temperature dropped. Fourteen years then passed without Mahoney giving much thought at all to Sims’s military record, although one year, when Mahoney went to Alabama to stump for Sims, Mahoney praised Sims for his service to his country—and the blood he’d shed in Lebanon.

  But then, just a week ago, Mahoney and Sims happened to be seated at the same table at a fund-raiser for men and women who’d been severely injured in Afghanistan and Iraq—men and women missing legs and arms and eyes, men and women whose brains had been so badly damaged from the concussion of IEDs that they were but shells of their former selves. Being among these veterans who’d sacrificed so much, John Mahoney’s eyes had welled up with tears more than once.

  At that dinner, one young man—a young man using two high-tech prosthetic hands to hold his knife and fork—asked Congressmen Mahoney and Sims about their military service. Both politicians, being in the company of people who’d suffered so much worse than them, didn’t say much and played down what they’d done. Sims told about being in Beirut when the marine barracks was demolished and said, “I can’t believe to this day how lucky I was, with all the debris flying, that I was only hit in the leg.” Then he slapped his thigh and said, “This baby still aches once in a while, but I’m not about to sit here with a guy like you and whine about it.”

  The problem was, he slapped his left thigh.

  One thing Mahoney knew for sure is that you didn’t forget which leg was injured in a combat-related injury, even thirty-plus years after the fact. And not when the injury was caused by a piece of glass that Sims had described as looking “like a dagger.” Mahoney was appalled at the thought that Sims might be lying about a Purple Heart. He suspected that Sims—when he was just starting out his political career—had felt the need to embellish his military record and gave himself a medal he hadn’t earned.

  But Mahoney had a dilemma. In fact, he had two. First, he didn’t really know if Sims had lied about the Purple Heart. Although it seemed unlikely, maybe Sims had just slapped the wrong leg by mistake. The bigger dilemma was that Mahoney didn’t know what he was going to do if Sims had lied. If Sims had been a Republican and Mahoney knew that he’d lied about a Purple Heart, Mahoney would have pounced like a puma, ripped Sims to shreds, and raised enough hell that Sims would have been forced to resign. But Sims was not only a Democrat; he was the only Democratic congressman from Alabama and holding on to his district by the skin of his teeth. The last thing Mahoney wanted was another Republican in the House. At the same time, he couldn’t bear the idea of serving with a politician who’d lied about a medal he hadn’t earned. John Mahoney had many faults but when it came to the military and veterans, he was above reproach. It was the only area, as far as DeMarco could tell, where he was above reproach.

  So Mahoney had told DeMarco he wanted to know the truth about Sims’s supposed Purple Heart. He didn’t, however, want DeMarco to contact the Pentagon directly or officially. Mahoney was afraid if an official inquiry was made, the media would learn about Sims’s deceit and then Sims’s fate would be out of Mahoney’s hands. If Sims had lied about the Purple Heart, Mahoney would punish the man; he just wasn’t sure what the punishment would be. And in order to accommodate his boss, DeMarco had gone to Emma because if anyone could find a way to look at Sims’s service record in a quiet, under-the-table way, it was her.

  “Thanks,” DeMarco said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of days. But right now I gotta go find out why he’s so hot for me to go to Boston.”

  DeMarco met Mahoney at his office in the Capitol. He started to tell him where things stood with Congressman Sims, but Mahoney said, “Forget about Sims for now. I’ll deal with him later.”

  Mahoney proceeded to tell him about Elinore Dobbs. The thing that surprised DeMarco wasn’t what Callahan was doing to Dobbs; that was hardly a unique story, a greedy developer doing underhanded things to move a tenant out of his way. What surprised DeMarco was Mahoney’s demeanor. Mahoney was angry, of course, but he also seemed depressed, and Mahoney wasn’t the type who got depressed. Mahoney, in fact, prided himself on causing depression in others. And he wasn’t depressed about what was happening to Elinore Dobbs. He was depress
ed by his inability to help her. He ranted to DeMarco about how guys like Callahan—guys with real money—had no respect for Congress or the law or anything else, knowing they could buy their way out of almost any situation.

  DeMarco almost said: So what else is new?

  “She’s got three years remaining on her lease,” Mahoney said, “and her plan is to fight Callahan for all three of those years. She knows she’ll have to move when her lease expires but until then she’s going to make his life as miserable as she can. The problem is, what I did up there in Boston isn’t going to help for long. In a couple of weeks the media will lose interest and the cops will back off on patrolling the place. On top of that, the mayor and the city council guys are in Callahan’s pocket, and they don’t really want to help. This means that before long, Callahan will go back to doing everything he can to force her out unless you can figure out some way to stop him.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to do that if you couldn’t?” DeMarco asked.

  “I don’t know. Figure something out. That’s your goddamn job!” Mahoney screamed.

  Oh, boy. He could tell that Mahoney was in no mood to listen to reason.

  But that was DeMarco’s job: fixing things that Mahoney wanted fixed. DeMarco had worked for Mahoney for years, starting out right after he obtained a law degree he’d never used. Instead of practicing law, he’d become Mahoney’s troubleshooter. Or at least, that’s the way DeMarco preferred to think of himself. Mahoney’s staff in D.C. handled the day-to-day political shenanigans related to passing laws—or not passing laws—but DeMarco was the one Mahoney used when he wanted something done that required a certain degree of tricky underhandedness. To put it another way, DeMarco was the guy Mahoney called when the law itself became a roadblock and Mahoney needed a way around the barricade. DeMarco was also the man Mahoney sent to collect campaign funds from those donors who wished to remain anonymous and preferred to pay in cash, which meant DeMarco was also Mahoney’s bagman—a job description he didn’t like. He had no idea, however, what he was going to do when it came to Elinore Dobbs. If a politician with Mahoney’s clout couldn’t deter Callahan, and if the people who ran the city of Boston were on Callahan’s side, then what could he possibly do? But he knew this wasn’t the time to debate the issue with Mahoney, so he flew to Boston.