House Revenge

by Mike Lawson

  “I’m not moving until my lease is up. And that’s that,” Elinore said. “As for the money he’s offering, I don’t need his money. I get a percentage of my husband’s pension from the fire department, plus he had a life insurance policy I invested. I also get a small pension from the hospital where I used to work—back when I retired nurses still got pensions—and I get Social Security. So I got all the money I need. Plus, I like screwing with Callahan. I’m actually having a pretty good time taking him on.”

  DeMarco laughed but he was thinking in three years, when her lease expired, she’d be eighty-five—but he could see her still going strong until then. He could see Elinore Dobbs living to a hundred.

  “So what are you doing here in Boston, Joe?”

  “Mahoney sent me to check on you and to see if I could figure out some way to make Callahan stop harassing you. But I don’t have a clue how to do that.”

  “Well, I appreciate you coming. You want another brew? I think, just to celebrate your arrival, I’ll break my rule and have two today.”

  “Sure, why not. And maybe you can tell me more about the McNultys.”

  8

  “He wants us to whack the old broad,” Roy McNulty said. “He didn’t say it, but that’s what he wants.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Ray said.

  It was eleven in the morning and they were sitting in the Shamrock, drinking coffee spiked with Jameson’s to kick-start their day. There were no customers in the bar. Doreen Vaughn, their bartender/manager/tenant, was behind the bar, reading the Globe. Doreen was short but broad—she probably weighed in at about 180—and her upper arms were bigger than the McMultys’. Her hair resembled a dark red Brillo pad and she had large brown freckles on her face. Right now, Doreen was pissed at them. She’d asked them to change out one of the beer kegs under the bar because her back was bothering her, but they’d told her to do it herself, as they were busy.

  “Well, I ain’t gonna do it,” Ray said. “We kill her, we’ll be suspects number one and two, and I’m not risking life in prison to get a new sign for the bar.”

  “He was talking about more than just a new sign,” Roy said. “But I hear you. So, you got any ideas?”

  “No. Maybe we oughta drive over there and just look around. Maybe something will come to us.”

  “Yeah, okay. Hey, Doreen,” Roy called over to the bar. “We’re going out for a while. “

  Doreen flipped him the bird.

  They drove to the apartment building on Delaney in their old white Ford Econoline van. They had a sweet fire-engine-red Camaro that they got for practically nothing because they bought it directly from the guy who stole it, but they only drove it on special occasions. They sure as hell weren’t going to drive it to a construction site where it would get all dirty.

  On the way, some big mouth on WBZ started going on about Brady and the Patriots, and how they were going to crush everyone when the season started.

  “Aw, Brady’s washed up,” Roy said. “The guy’s damn near forty and . . .”

  Roy had been speaking to the man on the radio, but Ray answered. “Washed up? Brady? You gotta be, without a doubt, the dumbest fuckin’ white guy in Boston. Brady just won a Super Bowl and—”

  “Brady didn’t win the fucking Super Bowl. That idiot Seattle coach lost it, calling a pass on the one-yard line. And I’m telling you Brady . . .”

  They argued about the Patriots quarterback until they reached the apartment building. As they entered the building, they saw the scrawny old guy, Spiegleman, who lived on the third floor with his wife, starting up the stairs holding a Walgreens bag.

  “Hey! What have you got in that bag?” Roy said.

  Spiegleman’s head spun about and his eyes went wide with fear; he looked like a cornered rat. In fact, with his pointy nose, he looked exactly like a rat. For a minute Ray thought he might try to run up the stairs to get away from them—then Spiegleman apparently realized he could barely walk up the stairs, much less run. His voice quivered when he said, “It’s my wife’s medication, for her emphysema.”

  The McNultys walked over to him, standing close, looming over him as Spiegleman was only five foot four. “How do we know you don’t have drugs in that bag,” Roy said.

  Spiegleman looked confused. “I do have drugs in the bag. I told you. My wife’s medication.”

  “I don’t mean those kind of drugs, you dumb shit. I mean real drugs, like heroin or something. This is a drug-free zone. Says so on that sign right down the street.”

  “What?” Spiegleman said.

  Roy laughed. “Go on. Get out of here. I’m just fuckin’ with you. Can’t you take a joke?”

  They watched Spiegleman start up the stairs, moving at the pace of an arthritic snail. When he turned once to see if the McNultys were still there, he tripped slightly and would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding on to the handrail.

  “So what do you want to do now that we’re here?” Roy said.

  Ray didn’t answer. He was watching Spiegleman move up the stairs.

  DeMarco was in the office of Superintendent Francis O’Rourke, the man in charge of BPD’s Bureau of Field Services. O’Rourke was a slender, scholarly-looking man in his late fifties with wire-rimmed glasses and short gray hair. He was dressed in his uniform blues, not a suit. On the I-love-me wall behind his desk were photos of a young O’Rourke as a patrolman and one of him dressed in body armor with a SWAT team. In addition to a dozen plaques and framed certificates attesting to his service to the city of Boston, there was also a glass case holding a folded American flag and the medals O’Rourke had received when he was in the military. DeMarco noticed that one of O’Rourke’s medals was a Purple Heart.

  The Bureau of Field Services, per the department’s website, had “primary responsibility for the implementation of Community Policing and the delivery of effective and efficient police services to the community”—among other things. Mahoney had given him O’Rourke’s name, saying that; O’Rourke was the senior cop in the department responsible for protecting Elinore Dobbs.

  And DeMarco got the impression that O’Rourke genuinely cared about Elinore—although he may have been faking it to stay on Mahoney’s good side. To reach his level in the bureaucracy, O’Rourke had probably developed some acting skills.

  “You have to understand, there’s only so much we can do,” O’Rourke said. “I have patrol cars in the area and one of my men will stop in and check on Elinore periodically. But unless Callahan or those two thugs he’s got working for him do something illegal—I mean something more than turning off the power—I can’t arrest them.”

  “Tell me about the thugs,” DeMarco said.

  O’Rourke shook his head. “They’re a couple of rabid dogs. The older one, Ray, did a year when he was seventeen for stealing a car. It was actually the third time he’d been popped for grand theft auto but after getting two free passes, the judge gave him a year at Westborough. After that, he and his brother have been arrested multiple times, but haven’t actually spent all that much time in jail. The arrests were for drug possession, DUIs, shoplifting, stuff like that. One time when gasoline prices were high, they ran around for six months siphoning gas from all the cars in their neighborhood until they finally got caught.

  “But mostly they’ve been arrested for assault, usually bar fights. Some citizen would piss them off—and it doesn’t take much to piss them off—and they’d double-team the guy and pound him into hamburger. The longest time they spent in jail was two years when they damn near killed a guy who annoyed them at a Red Sox game. But their records don’t tell the whole story. They got a bar in Revere . . .”

  DeMarco knew Revere was a suburb five miles north of Boston.

  “. . . and after Mahoney called me, I talked to the chief who runs the department there. He told me the McNultys are hooked up with the mob down in Providence. They’re like . . . You ev
er been to a Home Depot and seen those guys standing outside looking for work? You know, day laborers? That’s what the McNultys are for the Providence mob. If they need a couple guys to drive a truck to pick up or deliver something, they’ll call the McNultys if they don’t have anyone else handy. The main thing they use them for is cigarettes.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  “Yeah. Cigarette smuggling is a big deal. An article in the Globe said it’s costing the state as much as two hundred and fifty million a year in lost revenue.”

  “I don’t understand,” DeMarco said.

  “You know how much a pack of Marlboros costs in Boston? Almost nine bucks. It’s even higher in New York. In Virginia, that same pack costs about five bucks, and it’s because sin taxes on cigarettes in Massachusetts and New York are the highest in the nation. So you go down to Virginia, buy a truckload of cigarettes for five bucks a pack, and sell them here for seven bucks, which the smokers like, and you make a profit of two dollars on every pack. The cigarettes get sold under the table in all the bars and mom-and-pop stores, who know they’re buying cigarettes without the state tax stamp, but they figure, hey, it’s not like they’re selling heroin.

  “Anyway, if Providence needs a couple guys to make a run to Richmond and bring back a truckload of cigarettes, then distribute the cigarettes all over Boston, they might call the McNultys. The chief in Revere figures they probably made the Providence connection the last time they were in prison.”

  “So why haven’t they been arrested?”

  “Because they’re the fleas on the dog, and the FBI and the organized crime guys in Providence are after the dog, not the fleas. They know the McNultys are there on the fringes but they’re not worth the energy for surveillances and warrants and wiretaps and all that rigmarole. And like I said, we’re talking cigarettes.”

  “What about their connection to Sean Callahan?”

  O’Rourke shook his head. “Now that’s weird. Callahan went to school with those mutts and as near as I can tell, they’re still friends. But Callahan appears to be a standup citizen. He’s big into charities and he’s on Boston’s A-list, but for whatever reason, he gives the ­McNultys work. He’ll hire them for construction or demolition work but more often as haulers. Or, like he’s doing now, as his so-called building superintendents in the building where Dobbs lives.

  “So I don’t know what else to tell you, DeMarco, except for this. Be careful with the McNultys. They’re dangerous. They’re the kind of guys who act first and think later. What I’m saying is, you make them mad, they’re liable to pick up a two-by-four and beat you to death because it won’t occur to them until later that killing you could land them in prison for life.”

  DeMarco wasn’t exactly sure what to do next, but thought he should go see a lawyer who specialized in property law. Although DeMarco may have been a lawyer, what he knew about property law could fit into a thimble. Or maybe half a thimble.

  The lawyer he had in mind was a guy named Dooley who he’d gone to law school with, and who now lived in Boston. DeMarco occasionally had a beer with Dooley when he visited the city on Mahoney’s behalf because he enjoyed Dooley’s company and liked his wife. He pulled out his phone to call Dooley, but before he could punch in the number, his phone rang. It was Elinore.

  “The McNultys are here,” Elinore said, sounding out of breath.

  “Are they bothering you?”

  “No, they’re just walking around the building. When I asked them what they were doing, they said they were doing their job, making sure everything’s working okay.”

  “So is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, for now. The power’s on and the water’s hot. The air-­conditioning’s still broke and when I asked about that, they said they had a guy coming out to look at the system, but I could tell they were lying.”

  “Huh,” DeMarco said. “But they haven’t threatened you or anything?”

  “No, but they’re up to something. I called because I thought you might want to have a word with them.”

  “I do,” DeMarco said. “I’ll be right over.”

  “Good,” Elinore said.

  DeMarco again had to park a couple blocks from Elinore’s building because of all the construction work in the area. When he got to her place, he called her and asked if she knew where the McNultys were. She said she didn’t, but suggested he go to the basement where all the equipment was—the electrical panels, the furnace, that sort of stuff.

  He descended the staircase to the basement and because the landing lights weren’t lit, kept his hand on the rail to keep from tripping and breaking his neck. He found the McNultys in a room that had a scarred workbench with a vise on one end and hand tools hanging on hooks attached to a pegboard. They were eating hoagies and drinking Budweisers and he heard one of them say, “So one thing we gotta do is put in a new bulb.”

  DeMarco didn’t know what bulb they were talking about but later he would remember that one simple sentence.

  At that moment, they saw him standing in the doorway and one of them graciously said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  DeMarco smiled. “My name’s DeMarco. And I just wanted to see you two and let you know that you’re going to end up in jail if you keep harassing Elinore Dobbs.”

  Both men immediately stood up. They were wearing cargo shorts and tight white T-shirts and tennis shoes without socks. DeMarco knew their names were Roy and Ray, but didn’t know which one was which. He did notice that one of them was missing a piece of his right ear. They were shorter than DeMarco by a couple of inches but powerfully built, with long muscular arms and big hands with knobby knuckles clenched into fists.

  “What did you just say?” The one who spoke was the one with both ears intact.

  And DeMarco thought: Oh-oh.

  “Guys, I’m here to pass on a message. I work for Congressman John Mahoney and he sent me here to let you know that he’s got Elinore’s back. And I just finished talking to a superintendent in the BPD, and he’s got her back, too. He’s going to have his cops dropping in on her to make sure she’s okay. If you guys harass her or threaten her, you’re going to get arrested.”

  “Arrested for what? Talking to her?” the other one said.

  DeMarco ignored the comment, because, for one reason, the guy had a point. They weren’t likely to get arrested unless there was a witness.

  “I’ve also got a lawyer looking into ways to sue you,” DeMarco said. “And I mean you personally, not Sean Callahan. The lawyers are going to show that you turning off the power is putting the people who live here at risk. If one of these old people dies of heatstroke because it’s a hundred degrees outside and you’ve intentionally disabled the air-conditioning system, they can put you in jail for manslaughter.”

  DeMarco didn’t have any lawyers looking into anything and had no idea if he could make a manslaughter charge stick if someone died—but he figured the McNultys knew even less about the law than he did.

  He’d expected that after his little speech the McNultys would deny that they were doing anything illegal—but that wasn’t the response he got. Instead the one with two good ears said, “We’re gonna kick your ass.”

  DeMarco realized at that moment that he should have listened to Superintendent O’Rourke. Like O’Rourke had said, these were two people with zero impulse control. They were very likely to beat him to a pulp and then, while he lay bleeding and broken on the floor, realize that they’d done something they shouldn’t have. But, as O’Rourke had warned him, they wouldn’t think about that until after they beat him half to death. It had been a mistake confronting them by himself, and even worse to do so down in the basement of the building.

  DeMarco thought about running, but didn’t. He had too much pride to run from these two. He did look to see if there was something he could use for a weapon and figured if he could make it over to the workbench there were a couple
of big crescent wrenches that would do. The problem was that these long-armed apes were between him and the workbench.

  Then the other one put his hand on the shoulder of the guy who had said they were going to kick his ass. “Not here, Roy,” he said.

  Ah, so Ray was the one with the mutilated ear—and in this case, Ray was his savior. DeMarco also later remembered the words “not here.”

  Then Ray McNulty, his savior, said, “But if you think some guy in a suit working for a politician scares us, you don’t know where the fuck you’re at.”

  After his friendly chat with the McNultys, DeMarco took the stairs to Elinore’s fourth-floor apartment. It was stifling inside even with all the windows open and Elinore’s two fans spinning. Elinore was in a good mood, however, and DeMarco suspected she was almost always in a good mood. She was listening to a radio playing rock music from the seventies and had just finished making some banana bread for the lady down the hall with Alzheimer’s. He told her about his conversation with the McNultys, leaving out the part where he’d been worried about getting beaten to death.

  She asked if he wanted a cup of coffee, which he declined. He told her he was going to talk to a lawyer to see if there was anything else that could be done about Callahan making her living conditions so miserable. Elinore said she appreciated that, but doubted a lawyer was going to do much good.

  She left the apartment with him, her freshly baked banana bread wrapped in tinfoil. After she delivered the bread to Mrs. Polanski and checked on the Spieglemans downstairs, she said she was going to a movie in a theater with air-conditioning, a movie starring Brad Pitt. Brad, she said, was a hunk and a half.

  DeMarco left the building and while standing on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, he called his old law school pal, Dooley, and suggested they meet for a drink. Dooley said how ’bout the Warren Tavern in Charlestown. Dooley now lived in a recently gentrified area of Charlestown, in a luxurious apartment constructed by a developer like Sean Callahan, and the apartment was within walking distance of the tavern.