House Revenge

by Mike Lawson

  The McNultys knew they were screwed—and they knew it was ­DeMarco who’d screwed them.

  “What are we going to do about the bar?” Roy said, and for a minute Ray thought his younger brother was going to cry. And he could understand why; he felt like crying himself. They’d just put up the new McNULTY’S sign, telling the whole world that the bar was theirs, and now they might lose the place.

  “I guess we could let Doreen manage it while we’re inside,” Ray said. “I mean, shit, she’s the one who basically manages it now.”

  “Do you think she’ll try to rip us off?” Roy said.

  “Probably. But that’s better than losing the bar. At least we’ll have it to come back to when we get out.”

  It was funny, but neither McNulty really considered running. They’d never lived anywhere but Boston and had only traveled outside of the city a handful of times. And when they were away from Boston, they always felt out of place and always wanted to return home immediately. Furthermore, if they ran, how would they live? They could try to sell the bar before their trial and then run, but as the bar was the collateral they’d given the bondsman, he’d stop them from selling it if he could. Then even if they could sell it, they’d probably only get a hundred grand or two. How long could two men, who would have to pay for rent and food and booze, live off a hundred grand? Four, five years if they worried about every penny they spent? Whatever the case, they certainly wouldn’t make enough from selling the bar to live on for the rest of their lives.

  So, if they split before their trial, they’d have to find some shitty place to live that wouldn’t cost them an arm and a leg—like fuckin’ Penntucky—and eventually get jobs to support themselves. But as they’d never had real jobs before, what kind of jobs could they expect to get? Dishwashers in a restaurant? Washing cars? Their livelihood had always depended on the bar and knowing people—like that asshole Soriano—who could steer them toward petty crimes.

  They also knew they could do the time. The longest stretch they’d done in prison was two years, but they knew they could do ten if they had to. They weren’t going to go nuts or slash their wrists. They’d probably end up having to join some white gang so the coloreds wouldn’t kill them, but that was okay. Plus, they’d lift weights every day, and because they wouldn’t be able to drink, they’d come out in great shape. And while they were in prison, they’d make connections that would be invaluable after they were free. Prison, for career criminals, was a great place to network.

  Yeah, they’d survive—provided they could do the time in the same place. As long as they had each other’s backs, they’d always be okay.

  “What are we going to do about DeMarco?” Roy said.

  “We’re gonna kill him,” Ray said.

  18

  What DeMarco wanted to do was skedaddle back to Washington.

  He didn’t like the idea of remaining in Boston with the McNultys on the loose, but he didn’t have a choice. He wanted—and Mahoney wanted—Callahan to pay for what had happened to Elinore Dobbs. Callahan was the person really responsible for her condition; the ­McNulty brothers were just the tools he’d used.

  He did have one idea for how to deal with Callahan, but he didn’t want to play that card just yet. What he could do was offer the McNultys a deal: in exchange for a reduced sentence, they would agree to testify that Callahan had ordered them to kill or injure Elinore, and then the cops might be able to get Callahan as an accessory to attempted murder. Mahoney, of course, would have to lean on the right federal and state prosecutors to make this happen.

  DeMarco didn’t like this idea, however, because that would mean that the McNultys would spend less time in prison and he wanted them to spend a lot of time in prison to make up for Elinore. So he preferred to come up with something else when it came to Callahan.

  Callahan, however, was a whole different animal than the ­McNultys. He wasn’t a petty criminal, and he was rich. This meant that if he was committing crimes, they would be complicated, well-camouflaged crimes, crimes involving things like tax evasion or whatever laws developers stretch to maximize their profits. Callahan was not going to be maneuvered into doing something as stupid as picking up a crate of machine guns, and DeMarco figured he had a snowball’s chance in hell insofar as proving Callahan was doing anything illegal. And even if he did learn that Callahan was breaking the law, thanks to his wealth, he would have a flock of well-paid lawyers helping to make sure he didn’t spend a day in jail.

  As for continuing to disrupt the project on Delaney Street, what would be the point? Elinore was no longer there and, in the end, no matter what problems DeMarco caused him, Callahan was going to complete the project and make a fortune.

  So what was he going to do about Callahan? Ultimately, whether he liked it or not, he and Mahoney might have to be satisfied that they’d used Callahan’s money to put the McNultys in jail, and Callahan was not only going to get away with what he’d done to Elinore he was going to become even richer.

  As the old saying went: life sucked, and then you died. That is, life sucked for folks like Elinore, and it sucked for guys like the McNultys, but not so much for people like Callahan who lived in a mansion on Beacon Hill with a gorgeous young wife.

  It occurred to DeMarco that he really didn’t know all that much about Callahan and that he should do some research. Or maybe doing research was just a way of pretending he was doing something productive since he didn’t know what else to do.

  He went to the hotel restaurant—after a while a hotel room made him feel claustrophobic—plugged the power cord for his laptop into a convenient outlet, and ordered a pot of coffee. Callahan had been featured in a couple of Boston publications showing pictures of developments he’d completed, his historic home on Beacon Hill, and his two most recent wives. Five years ago, Forbes included Callahan in an article about up-and-comers in the real estate world, and he even had his own Wikipedia page. DeMarco was fairly sure he’d never have his own Wikipedia page unless he assassinated Mahoney.

  DeMarco learned that Callahan hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, which surprised him. He hadn’t been poor as a kid, but he hadn’t been rich, either. He went to a community college, got a business degree, then hooked up with a guy named Carl Rosenberg. Rosenberg flipped houses, owned and managed a midsized apartment building in Chelsea, and was the brains behind a couple small developments: a strip mall near Medford and renovating some public housing in Dorchester. DeMarco wondered how Rosenberg felt about his protégé becoming such a huge success.

  About the only other thing DeMarco learned was that Callahan wasn’t the until-death-do-us-part type. He married his first wife, a lady named Connie, when he was twenty-one and then divorced her just four years later. With a little effort, DeMarco found Connie’s Facebook page. At the age of forty-six—a year younger than Callahan was now—Connie was a dark-haired, attractive woman, the mother of three children by her second husband, and she liked gardening. In other words, to judge by her photo and profile, she as a nice forty-six-year-old mom who liked to putter in the garden—but certainly not a bombshell.

  Callahan’s second and third wives were bombshells—tall, long-legged, blue-eyed, curvaceous blondes. When he saw a photo of Callahan’s second wife, he noticed that she looked enough like his third wife to be her sister—or, considering their age difference, her mother. But so what? The man liked young blondes. That hardly made him unique.

  After an hour, DeMarco decided he hadn’t learned anything online that would help him nail Callahan, and he was tired of sitting and pecking on a keyboard. He needed someone who could give him a better idea of the way developments were structured and financed, someone who might have some insight into how developers like Callahan bent the law to be so successful. It occurred to him that Callahan’s old business partner, Carl Rosenberg, might be a good guy to talk to.

  DeMarco called Rosenberg’s office and Ro
senberg answered the phone himself. DeMarco said he’d like to meet with him, and naturally Rosenberg asked why. DeMarco thought about lying, saying that he was interested in purchasing the apartment building Rosenberg owned in Chelsea, then decided not to.

  “It’s about Sean Callahan and his development on Delaney Street,” DeMarco said. “I work for Congressman John Mahoney and he doesn’t like the way Callahan has treated the tenants he’s trying to force out of a building he wants to demolish.”

  “Yeah, I saw Mahoney’s press conference with that old lady,” Rosenberg said. “Sean can be a real . . . Let’s just say he plays hardball.”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Rosenberg, about the way Sean plays,” DeMarco said.

  “Sure, why not. I’ll be here until three this afternoon. I’m located at . . .”

  DeMarco thought about walking to Rosenberg’s office—it was a little over a mile from the Park Plaza—but decided to take a cab. It was too hot and humid for walking, and he didn’t want to drive his rental car because finding a parking space in Boston was like trying to find the Holy Grail. As he was waiting for a taxi to pull up to the hotel entrance, he glanced across the street—and saw the McNulty brothers, illegally parked in a loading zone, driving a ten-year-old blue Toyota Corolla.

  “There he is,” Ray said to Roy.

  They were driving Doreen’s car, which Doreen was not happy about—but they’d been forced to use her car since their van had been impounded by the ATF when they were arrested and they had to give the bondsman their Camaro.

  The McNultys, like DeMarco, didn’t have a plan. They weren’t ­planners—they weren’t strategic thinkers—they were opportunists, like vultures. In this case, they were hoping an opportunity to kill DeMarco would present itself as they considered him responsible for the many years they were about to spend in prison. And they wanted to kill him in such a fashion that they wouldn’t be arrested for murder—but that’s as far as their thinking had gone.

  They’d found DeMarco by simply calling hotels in Boston, starting with five-star establishments and working their way down a list they found on the Internet. They figured a guy who wore a suit would stay at a nice hotel. They asked whoever answered the phone if they had a guest named Joe DeMarco registered, and an hour after they started calling, they struck gold at the Park Plaza. The clerk at the Park Plaza said, “Yes, we have a Mr. DeMarco staying here. Do you want me to ring his room?”

  “Yeah,” Ray said, and then hung up while the phone was ringing.

  “So now what?” Roy said, after his brother told him that DeMarco was at the Park Plaza.

  “I dunno,” Ray said. “I guess we go over there and check the place out, see if we can spot him.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Roy said—even though it wasn’t a plan at all.

  And that’s what the McNultys were doing when DeMarco stepped out of the Park Plaza to catch a cab.

  Shit, DeMarco thought, when he saw the McNultys parked across the street. What were those two thugs doing?

  DeMarco thought briefly about walking over to confront them, but at that moment a cab stopped in front of him and the hotel doorman opened the rear door of the cab.

  DeMarco gave the cabbie Rosenberg’s address, and as they were driving, he looked back to see if the McNultys were following. They were. Son of a bitch.

  The first thought that crossed his mind was that they were planning to get even with him for their arrest, either kill him or beat him so badly he ended up in the hospital again. He could think of no other reason why they’d be following him. It wasn’t like he was a witness to the crime they’d committed so they couldn’t be planning to intimidate him into not testifying against them. It was possible that they wanted to understand how he’d gotten the Providence mob to cooperate with him and wanted to question him. Naw, these guys didn’t want to talk to him or question him or intimidate him. They wanted to kill him.

  The cab stopped at Rosenberg’s address and when DeMarco stepped out of the cab, his initial impulse was to point at the McNultys when they drove by to let them know that he knew they were following him. Then he decided not to. Right now he knew they were tailing him, and they didn’t know that he knew. Maybe there was some way he could use that to his advantage—but until then, he needed to be careful.

  He wished he had a gun.

  “I wish we had a gun,” Ray said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Roy said.

  After they were arrested, the ATF not only searched their van and impounded it as so-called evidence, they also executed search warrants on their apartment and their bar looking for more weapons and any other evidence related to the assault weapons charge. At McNulty’s, the ATF found a sawed-off shotgun they kept behind the bar in case some punk tried to rob them, and in their apartment they found an unregistered .45 automatic. The shotgun was illegal because it was sawed off, and the pistol was illegal because it was not only unregistered but the McNultys, being convicted felons, weren’t allowed to possess firearms. These additional weapons charges were piled on top of the greater charge of being in possession of ten machine guns, but the bottom line was that they didn’t have a gun.

  “We could talk to Sheenan,” Roy said. “He could hook us up with a piece.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “But if we get caught with a gun on us, they’ll revoke our bail and we’ll end up sitting in a cell for six months before the trial.”

  “You got a point there,” Roy said.

  “Plus, shooting this fucker’s too good for him,” Ray said. “It’ll be over too quick. I want to break every bone in his body before we kill him.”

  “We oughta get a couple of baseball bats,” Roy said. “They can’t revoke our bail if we got a bat in the car. We’ll just say we were going to a batting cage to, you know, relieve the stress.”

  “Not baseball bats,” Ray said. “They’re too long. I think we should get those little bats they use to smack fish with. What the hell do they call those things?”

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” Roy said. “But I don’t know what they call ’em. Little fish bats, I guess.”

  “Yeah, those would be perfect,” Ray said. “We slip them inside our jackets and—”

  “Our jackets! It’s ninety-eight fuckin’ degrees outside.”

  “You know, you say the dumbest things sometimes.”

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, Ray wishing they’d brought a cooler filled with beer and crushed ice.

  “I wonder what he’s doing inside that building,” Roy said. “I wonder who he’s seeing.”

  “I wonder what he’s still doing in Boston,” Ray said. “He came here to help that old broad, but she’s out of the picture now. Then he stuck around to fuck us up with the ATF and hung around for the arraignment, but why’s he still here?”

  “I don’t know,” Roy said. “But you got a point. He could leave at any time and head back to D.C., although I suppose we could fly down there and get him if we have to.”

  “The judge said if we left the state, he’d revoke our bail.”

  “How would anyone know we left? It’s not like we got those ankle monitors on.”

  “Because if we flew, there’d be a record of us flying. And we could even get stopped by those TSA guys if our names are on some kind of watch list.”

  “Why would our names be on a watch list? We’re Americans, not fuckin’ terrorists.”

  “You know, those watch lists aren’t just used for . . . Aw, never mind. We can’t afford to fly there anyway, and it’ll take us eleven hours to drive there. We just need to work fast and take care of him before he splits.”

  19

  Rosenberg’s office was on Westland Avenue, about two blocks from Christian Science Plaza with its magnificent reflecting pool and a domed cathedral that looked like it belon
ged in Venice. The church was called the First Church of Christ, Scientist—making DeMarco think of Jesus holding up a test tube to see if He’d gotten the experiment right. If the experiment was the human race, He had some work to do.

  Rosenberg’s office was on the third floor of an older brick building, and as soon as DeMarco stepped inside, he could see that Rosenberg’s office was also his home. He wondered if Rosenberg had fallen on hard times since he’d worked with Sean Callahan. In Rosenberg’s living room, in addition to a small television set and a short sofa, were file cabinets and a desk with an ancient Dell computer on it. Behind the desk were black-and-white photos of historic Boston buildings: the Old North Church, Faneuil Hall, and the Old State House on Washington Street. DeMarco liked the photos.

  Rosenberg was in his seventies, with wavy white hair that swept back over his ears and touched his collar and a neatly trimmed white goatee. He was dressed in a beige linen suit, a red bowtie, and brown-and-white saddle shoes. He looked spiffy, like a Jewish Colonel Sanders. His eyes crinkled into a smile when he saw DeMarco, and DeMarco got the impression that he was like Elinore Dobbs had been before she was injured: no matter what life tossed at him, he remained a perpetually cheerful, optimistic person.

  Rosenberg pointed him to a chair and said, “So, Joe, what’s on your mind?”

  DeMarco again elected to tell Rosenberg the truth. He told him how Mahoney met Elinore, the sorts of things that Callahan had done to force the old woman to vacate the building, and how Callahan eventually won when Elinore took a convenient tumble down a flight of stairs.

  “And you seriously think Sean was responsible for her getting hurt?”

  “Yeah, I do,” DeMarco said. “I think he told the McNultys to do whatever was necessary to get her out of the building, and those two morons rigged a trip wire across the stairs hoping to kill her. Now that poor woman can barely remember her own name.”