House Revenge

by Mike Lawson

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  Sean couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t sound all that disappointed that he was going to be late.

  “I’m supposed to talk to a guy in Japan and he’s late calling here.”

  “At this time of night?” she said.

  “It’s morning in Japan. Anyway, the guy’s been delayed and I need to wait for his call, then after I talk to him I may need to go see one of my lawyers. So I’ll be late.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

  He started to say I love you, but she’d already hung up.

  DeMarco changed into a pair of dress slacks for dinner and a nice short-sleeved blue shirt that he thought matched his eyes. He’d been wearing shorts and a T-shirt all day because of the heat but decided to dress up a bit for dinner, as he wasn’t sure where he planned to go. He’d have a drink in the hotel bar and chat with the bartender—a kid named Sam who he was getting to know way too well—about where he might dine this evening.

  The lounge in the Park Plaza hotel was a rather funky place, but DeMarco had grown used to it. There was a dark bar with enough high-backed stools for a dozen drinkers—which was normal enough—but in the seating area were low tables surrounded by armchairs patterned with cloth resembling a giraffe’s hide. The oddest thing was the photos: large photos of models who—based on the women’s hairstyles—looked like they might be from the late fifties or early sixties. The men in the photos wore suits with narrow ties and fedoras and carried umbrellas and had dark-framed Clark Kent glasses. The most striking photo was of a pretty brunette with a Jackie Kennedy hairdo wearing a hat, a polka-dot dress, high heels, and holding two Hula-Hoops in her white-gloved hands. DeMarco wondered if the Hula-Hoops were supposed to be symbolic of something.

  He took a seat at the bar and Sam—a young stud who looked like a serious weightlifter—came over to take his order. Sam had so many muscles in his neck it made his head look particularly small; it made DeMarco think of the Michael Keaton character in Beetlejuice whose head was shrunk by a witch doctor.

  “Your usual?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, why not,” DeMarco said.

  Sam brought him a Stoli martini with a lemon twist, and said, “So how was your day?”

  DeMarco figured Sam didn’t want to hear him bitch about Boston and the heat and the fact he had an asshole for a boss, so he said, “Great.”

  DeMarco toasted the photo of the lady with the Hula-Hoops, and was just taking the first sip of his martini when he heard a woman standing next to him say, “Janet, you do this all the time. Why do you do this? We make plans and then that jerk calls and you drop everything and run to him. He’s never going to leave his wife, and you know it!” There was a brief pause, and she said, “No, Janet, I don’t want to hear it. Good-bye.”

  As she was talking she’d taken a seat on the barstool next to DeMarco and dropped a large purse on the bar that landed with a thump like it contained a bowling ball. DeMarco turned to look at her, initially irritated she was talking so loud and practically in his ear—and then he saw what she looked like. Wow!

  She was absolutely gorgeous. She was probably thirty-five, about five foot six and built: heavy breasts pressing against the thin material of a white sleeveless blouse and slim, tanned legs emerging from a black skirt that was halfway up her thighs when she was sitting. She had honey-colored blond hair that reached her shoulders and a complexion that also made him think of honey.

  She turned to DeMarco, looking exasperated, and said, “My sister. She was supposed to meet me here for a drink and we were going to have dinner together, and then she stands me up. She’s going out with this married guy and . . . Oh, never mind. I’m sorry.” Then she looked around and said, “Does this place have a bartender? I need a drink.”

  DeMarco saw Sam and waved like crazy. He did not want this woman to leave. “Hey, Sam! Sam!”

  Sam ambled over and DeMarco said, “This lady desperately needs a drink.”

  “What would you like, miss?” Sam said.

  “I’ll have a vodka gimlet.”

  “And it’s on me, Sam,” DeMarco said. “She’s having a bad day, and it’s the least I can do.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said, touching DeMarco’s forearm with a soft, warm hand.

  “I’m Joe,” he said.

  “Maria,” she said.

  Maria said that she did marketing for a pharmaceutical company. DeMarco and Emma had once had a nearly fatal experience investigating a pharmaceutical company, and he consequently did not hold the industry in high esteem. But Maria could have said that she euthanized parakeets for a living and he would have forgiven her. He’d thought her eyes were brown, but it turned out they were more green than brown, and she had the most perfect lips he’d ever seen.

  He told her he was a lawyer, and although he lived in D.C., he was in Boston all the time—all the time—on business. When she asked what kind of law he practiced he said he didn’t exactly practice law; he was more of a political troubleshooter. She seemed suitably impressed—and God knows he would have done handstands to impress her.

  They finished their drinks and he said, “I was just about to go out to dinner. There’s an Italian place a couple blocks from here. I’ve been there before and it’s good. I was thinking since your sister stood you up . . .”

  “I’d love to,” she said, again touching his forearm. “Let me just go touch up my makeup.”

  She didn’t need makeup.

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby in five minutes,” she said.

  He waited two minutes and walked out to the lobby and a couple minutes later she was coming toward him, like a vision on high heels. God, what a body she had. She took his arm and as they walked toward the door, he felt a little pinch in his right arm, the arm she was holding.

  “Ow,” he said.

  “Is something wrong?” she said.

  “No, I just felt something.” They proceeded toward the lobby doors and he noticed he was feeling lightheaded. He didn’t understand it; he’d only had one drink. He took a few more steps and his legs started to feel rubbery and he felt like he was about to pass out. “I think I need to sit . . .”

  The last thing he remembered was two men standing next to him—he didn’t know where Maria had gone—and they were supporting him, helping him walk toward the door.

  28

  DeMarco came to sitting in a leather chair, one with armrests. The room he was in was dark, but there was some light coming from a room behind him that made it possible for him to see a man sitting in a chair across from him, behind a desk. He also noticed that there was something heavy in his lap, and he was holding whatever it was.

  He started to ask the man who he was and how he got to wherever he was, and then, for a moment, he thought he was going to throw up. He closed his eyes and swallowed a couple of times, trying not to vomit. When he opened his eyes, the walls of the room seemed to be moving. It was like he was sitting on a wooden horse in a carousel, and as the carousel went around, the world spun past him. He’d been drunk before but he knew he wasn’t drunk now; whatever he was experiencing wasn’t alcohol induced.

  He closed his eyes again, trying to understand what was happening. He remembered being at the Park Plaza bar. He remembered talking to the bartender, Sam. Then he remembered Maria—gorgeous Maria. He remembered as he was walking through the lobby with her to leave for dinner, he began to feel lightheaded. Then a couple of guys he didn’t know came up to him, and helped him walk so he wouldn’t fall. But what was he doing here?

  He asked the man sitting behind the desk: “Where am I?” His words were so slurred he could barely understand what he’d just said, so maybe the man behind the desk hadn’t understood him, because he didn’t respond. He tried to stand and when he did, whatever he’d been holding in his lap fell to
the floor and landed with a thump—the thump reminding him of when Maria had put her big purse on the bar at the Park Plaza. He looked down to see what had fallen from his lap. What the hell? It was a gun, a big revolver with a shiny four-inch barrel and a walnut grip. It was so big he thought it might be a .357 Magnum. What the hell was he doing with a gun in his lap?

  He pushed down on the armrests of the chair and forced himself to his feet, but when he was standing, he couldn’t remain upright, and swayed backward and collapsed back into the chair. Goddamnit, what the hell was wrong with him? He closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, and tried to stand again. This time he didn’t fall back into the chair but only because he placed his hands on the desk to help him remain upright. And when he did, he was closer to the silent man sitting behind the desk—and he saw it was Sean Callahan. It took another second to realize that Callahan had a large, circular bloodstain on the front of his shirt.

  Callahan was dead.

  The shock of seeing Callahan made him step backward and he again landed in the chair where he’d been sitting—but the shock also helped him focus. It took him only a couple of seconds to realize what had happened; his body wasn’t functioning properly—he could barely stand, he could hardly speak, and his vision was blurred—but his mind seemed to be working okay.

  For whatever reason, Castro had decided to kill Callahan and frame him for Callahan’s murder. Maria—or whoever she was—had been sent by Castro to seduce him, and with her looks it hadn’t been hard for her at all. As they were leaving the Park Plaza, she’d injected him with some kind of drug that knocked him out; he remembered the sharp pinch in his arm right before he started to feel woozy. He also remembered Maria telling him she worked for a pharmaceutical company—her idea of a joke, perhaps. Then they—Maria and the two men who’d helped him out of the Park Plaza—brought him to wherever he was now, probably Sean Callahan’s office. Then they killed Callahan—and maybe at the time he’d been sitting unconscious in the chair in front of Callahan’s desk—and placed the murder weapon in his hand.

  He looked at his watch. He had to blink a couple of times and hold the watch about four inches from his eyes to see the hands on the dial. It was almost ten p.m. He’d left the Park Plaza bar with Maria about seven thirty. So he’d been out for two and a half hours—and he had a feeling that any minute now a couple of cops were going to come through the door and see him sitting there, a gun at his feet, and Callahan’s corpse across from him.

  He needed to get out of this room. Now.

  He stood up, wobbled, then used his shirttail to wipe the desk where he’d placed his hands and wiped the armrests on the chair where he’d been sitting. If his fingerprints were elsewhere in the room he couldn’t do anything about that. Now what should he do with the gun, which also had his fingerprints on it? If Callahan had been shot in the side of the head, he might have been able to place the gun in Callahan’s hand and hope the cops would think Callahan had committed suicide. But Callahan hadn’t been shot in the head; he’d been shot in the chest. DeMarco started to wipe the gun with his shirttail, then thought: What if they pressed my thumb down on the bullets to make it look like I’d loaded the gun?

  He didn’t have time to remove the bullets and wipe them; he didn’t have any more time, period, to spend in this room. He had to take the gun with him. The only good news was that the gun was a revolver and not an automatic so he didn’t have to get down on his knees and hunt around for shell casings. He shoved the gun into the back of his pants and pulled his shirttail over it.

  He took a last look at Callahan—You poor arrogant bastard, he thought—and staggered toward the door. He’d been drunk many times, and he could remember being so drunk on one or two occasions that he lurched from side to side as he walked—and that’s what he was doing now, moving like a sailor trying to walk on the deck of a ship that was bouncing on ocean waves. As he passed through the door of Callahan’s office, his right shoulder hit the doorframe but he didn’t touch it with his hands. He walked through a room outside Callahan’s office where his secretary most likely sat, staggered down a short hallway until he came to another door, and used his shirt to open the door so he wouldn’t leave prints. He expected to see three or four cops dressed in SWAT gear standing in the hallway, but didn’t. He was sure the cops were on their way, however.

  He didn’t know what floor he was on but he wasn’t going to take the elevator since he was afraid the elevator might have a surveillance camera. He’d take one of the fire escape stairways. Then it occurred to him there could be surveillance cameras in the hallway or in the stairwells, although he didn’t see any in the hallway. Then he had another thought: if there were surveillance cameras, he bet Castro’s guys had disabled them so there wouldn’t be a record of them carrying him into the building and into Callahan’s office. At least he hoped that was the case.

  He found the stairwell at the end of the hall, pushed through the door, and holding his shirttail against the handrail, started downward. If he hadn’t been holding the handrail, he would have tumbled down the stairs. It turned out he was on the third floor and when he came to the street level, he reached a fire door, one of those doors with a bar across it and a sign that said if he opened the door he was going to set off an alarm. Well, there wasn’t anything he could do about that. He pushed on the door lever, expecting to hear an alarm like a screaming banshee, but there was no alarm. He suspected the pros Castro used had disabled the alarm.

  He found himself out on a busy street—he had no idea which street or where he was in relation to his hotel—and started walking. He had to get as far away from Callahan’s office building as he could and he needed to get rid of the gun. He could hear sirens in the distance, but didn’t know if that was the cops headed in his direction or not. In a city the size of Boston, you could always hear sirens. But DeMarco was positive that within the last few minutes, someone had made a 911 call and claimed to have heard shots coming from Callahan’s office.

  The other thing that concerned him was street security cameras. These days there were cameras everywhere. But again, there wasn’t anything he could do about that, other than stay off the busier streets, like Boylston. If he could stick to the less heavily traveled streets, he might be okay.

  He walked to the end of the block and took a right, even though he didn’t know where he was or where he was going. He just wanted to get farther away from Callahan’s building. But where the hell was he? He looked for a street sign and didn’t see one.

  He had to get rid of the damn gun. He wasn’t going to throw it down a storm drain or put it in a trash can; every episode of Law & Order he’d ever seen showed cops looking in trash cans and storm drains on the streets near a murder scene. He came to a pizza place and glanced inside. There were four young guys who looked like college kids at the counter and the pizza guy had his back to the counter as he shoved a pie into the oven. Nobody noticed DeMarco walk in and stagger down a short hallway to the restroom. He could hear the college kids talking too loudly. They sounded as drunk as he appeared to be.

  He pushed into the restroom, went into the single stall, and latched the door behind him. He took the top off the tank behind the toilet bowl and placed the gun inside it, like some people put a brick in their toilet tank to minimize water usage. He figured one of these days the toilet would malfunction and some plumber was going to get a surprise. All he could do was hope that didn’t happen anytime soon.

  He wanted to sit down on the toilet and think and recover some more from the effects of the drug, but he needed to get farther away from the murder scene and he didn’t want the cops to catch him in the place where he’d hidden the gun. He walked down the hall and could hear the drunken college kids whooping about something, and when he walked into the dining area of the pizza place, they were still at the counter and the pizza guy was making change for their order. One kid turned as he lurched toward the door but barely glanced
at him, and then he was through the door and back on the street.

  He had to get back to his hotel. He couldn’t catch a cab as the cops might check with cab companies and a driver might remember a barely-able-to-walk drunk getting into his cab near Callahan’s office and taking a ride to the Park Plaza. He started walking again, then finally saw a building he recognized and realized he was three or four blocks from Copley Square but was walking in the wrong direction. He was headed west and needed to be going east. He turned at the next corner and started back in the direction of his hotel, staying off the busier streets as best he could. He’d gone about two blocks when he saw a BPD patrol car coming down the street in his direction. He didn’t want to do anything that might look suspicious—such as turn his back to the cop car—so he put his head down and just kept walking, praying the cop wouldn’t stop. He didn’t.

  He kept walking, wishing he had some sort of a disguise, like a hooded sweatshirt. But who the hell wears a hooded sweatshirt when it’s eighty degrees and humid outside? And he still wasn’t all that steady on his feet, but he wasn’t staggering, as he’d been earlier. A block later he came to a bar and saw a kid standing outside smoking. The kid—like about every third person you see on the streets of Boston—was wearing a Red Sox cap.

  He walked up to the kid and said, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for that cap.”

  “Are you shittin’ me,” the kid said.

  “No.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Yeah. So you want a hundred bucks for the hat or not?”

  “Shit, yeah,” the kid said.

  DeMarco took out his wallet and with some effort extracted five twenties, took the cap from the kid, jammed it down on his head, and staggered away. It wasn’t much of a disguise but he felt better for it. If he kept his head down the bill of the ball cap partially obscured his face, making him less recognizable if he was picked up on a camera. He hoped. As he was walking he heard the kid call out, “Good luck to you, man. I hope you make it to wherever you’re going.”