House Revenge

by Mike Lawson

  From your lips to God’s ears, DeMarco thought.

  Almost an hour after he left Callahan’s office, DeMarco arrived back at the Park Plaza. Just before he reached the hotel entrance, he deposited his costly Red Sox cap in a trash can. He didn’t want any cameras in the hotel lobby to see him wearing the cap.

  He took the elevator to the ninth floor, leaning his head against the door as the elevator rose. The hallway leading to his room seemed about a hundred miles long, but he finally made it, opened the door with the key card, and collapsed onto the bed.

  As he lay there he thought: Why did Castro do it? Why did he kill Sean Callahan and decide to frame me for his murder?

  He’d given Castro two options. Option one: call in the loans he’d made to Callahan so Callahan wouldn’t be able to complete the project. Option two: simply force Callahan to walk away from Delaney Square and give up any stake he had in it. He’d told Castro that if he didn’t do one of those two things, Treasury agents were going to start digging into the money behind Delaney Square, then start freezing money and seizing assets. Well, Castro had selected option three: he killed Callahan.

  DeMarco could understand why Castro had decided to kill Callahan: killing the man was the simplest solution to the problem, much simpler than forcing Callahan to sign documents that made it appear as if he’d voluntarily decided to give up his interest in Delaney Square. In fact, DeMarco had unintentionally suggested this solution to Castro. He remembered telling Castro that if he could force Callahan to walk away from the project, it would be no different than if Callahan had resigned: the project would be finished by Callahan’s company even if Callahan were no longer around to manage the company. But he hadn’t intended—or expected—Castro to kill the man.

  But why frame him for Callahan’s murder? Castro had to know that if DeMarco was caught, and even if he was convicted, he was going to point the finger at Castro and his fiscal connection to Delaney Square. But maybe Castro wasn’t so worried about that now that he’d been forewarned that the financing behind Delaney Square might be investigated. Maybe Castro figured he could completely obscure the money trail and he wasn’t concerned about a bunch of government accountants playing with spreadsheets.

  There was also another possible reason Castro had done what he did. Maybe, and regardless of the possible consequences, Castro had decided to teach DeMarco a lesson, the lesson being: fuck with me and you end up in jail for life, no matter who you work for. If DeMarco had been found sitting in Callahan’s office with a gun in his hand, there was nothing Mahoney would have been able to do to save him. Castro was also sending a message to John Mahoney by framing DeMarco. He was telling Mahoney: See how easy it was for me to take your guy off the board. So no matter who you are—no matter how powerful and protected you think you are—maybe I’ll come after you if you don’t leave me alone.

  Whatever the case, if DeMarco survived this night, he was not going to have anything more to do with Javier Castro.

  29

  DeMarco woke up feeling tired and groggy. He’d barely slept, expecting that at any minute the cops were going to break down the door and arrest him. Thanks to the drug Maria had injected into him, his head was throbbing like he had the worst hangover in the history of hangovers. He staggered to the bathroom, ripped open an Alka-Seltzer packet, dropped the magic tablets into a plastic glass filled with water, and drank the mixture before the Alka-Seltzer even stopped fizzing.

  He looked into the mirror: he looked like hell. Unshaven, his hair in disarray, his eyes bloodshot. He remembered the romance writer—the one who didn’t look like Amy Adams—telling him he had a brutal villain’s face and the way he looked right now, he had to agree with her. He also noticed he was wearing the same clothes that he’d had on the night before as he hadn’t undressed before he collapsed onto the bed. And then a thought occurred to him: Gunshot residue!

  What if they shot Callahan by holding the gun in his hand and forcing his finger down on the trigger? He could have gunshot residue on his hand and arm and clothes. There could also be minute particles of Callahan’s blood on his clothes. Shit! He stripped off his clothes as fast as he could—the last time he probably took his clothes off that fast was the first time he got laid—and jumped into the shower. He turned the water on as hot as he could stand it and scrubbed himself, rubbing like he was trying to remove his skin.

  He got dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. He put the clothes he’d worn last night—including his shoes—into a bag from the closet intended for laundry, shoved some cash and his phone into a pocket, and headed for the door. Then he thought: The bedspread! What if he’d rubbed gunshot residue on the bedspread? He called down to the front desk and said he needed his bed changed immediately. “I, uh, got sick last night so could you send a maid up right away.” Then he ripped everything off the bed—the bedspread, sheets, and pillowcases—and dumped them out in the hall.

  He wondered how many other things he was failing to think of. He didn’t have a lot of practice when it came to destroying evidence. His biggest concern was that a surveillance camera in or near Callahan’s building had captured his image—but if that was the case, there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  As he left the hotel carrying the bag that contained his clothes, he wondered why the police hadn’t caught him last night. Castro’s people should have known about how long he’d remain unconscious from the drug pretty Maria had shot into him. But they wouldn’t have wanted the cops to enter Callahan’s office and find him passed out in a chair; if he was unconscious when they found him that might tend to support a claim that he’d been drugged and framed. No, Maria and her pals would have wanted the cops to walk into Callahan’s office with DeMarco conscious, holding the gun in his hand, maybe even leaving Callahan’s office. If they got really lucky, DeMarco in his drug-induced state might have raised the gun, not even realizing what he was doing, and the cops might have blown his ass away.

  So why didn’t it work out that way? They must have miscalculated how long he’d be out, or didn’t give him the correct dosage to match his body weight. Whatever the case, they’d screwed up.

  He supposed there was another possibility, and that was that Castro hadn’t intended for him to be caught, but that didn’t make any sense. Why go to all the trouble to frame him for Callahan’s murder, then allow him to get away? No, Castro’s people had just waited too long before they called the cops—and he was just lucky they did.

  He walked about four blocks from the hotel, randomly selected a trash can, and shoved the bag containing his clothes inside it. Near where he was standing was a Starbucks, and at that moment nothing sounded better than coffee. He ordered a large coffee and took a seat at an outside table.

  He was thinking: Now what? And just then a BPD patrol car stopped in front of Starbucks and two big cops stepped out of the car. He waited for them to walk up to him and tell him to stand so they could slap on the handcuffs, but they walked past his table without even glancing at him and into the coffee shop. His heart was hammering so hard he was surprised it didn’t burst through his chest, like the critter in Alien. The cops left Starbucks five minutes later, again not looking at him. He hoped that meant they didn’t have his picture on some look-out-for-this-raving-lunatic-killer bulletin.

  He was now back to: Now what?

  One thing he should do was see if Callahan’s death had been reported. Using his cell phone, he looked at the online Boston Globe and local TV station websites, figuring that the murder of a prominent businessman would have made the news. All he found was one small article in the Globe saying the police, responding to a 911 call, had found the body of a man in an office on Exeter Street. The man had been shot, but his name had not yet been released pending notification of next of kin. The article noted that the body had been found at approximately ten p.m. Approximately ten p.m. was when DeMarco had regained consciousness. So they obviously found
the body a little after ten—but probably not much after ten. He was one lucky SOB.

  He’d like to know what the police knew. If the article had given Callahan’s name, he could have called up his pal, Detective Fitzgerald, and talked to him. But no way was he going to do that now. How could he explain to Fitzgerald how he knew that Callahan was dead?

  He also needed to call Mahoney and tell him what had happened, but that meant going through the whole rigmarole of finding a pay phone and telling Mahoney to call him back from a pay phone. It just pissed him off that you could never be sure who might be listening to your phone calls these days. He finished his coffee and had started walking back to the hotel to call Mahoney when his cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “What did you do!” a woman shrieked. “What in the hell did you do?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Adele Tomlin, you son of a bitch! I told you not to tell Javier that I talked to you about him. I told you!”

  “I didn’t,” DeMarco said. “I told him that I learned about his connection to Delaney Square by following the money trail to a company in the Caymans. I never mentioned your name.”

  “Then how did he know?”

  “What makes you think he knows?”

  “Last night two men came to my house. They broke in about two in the morning while I was sleeping. They dragged me out of bed and showed me a picture of a woman who’d had her nose cut off. Her fucking nose had been cut off! They told me if I ever talked to anyone again about Javier that I was going to end up looking like the woman in the picture.”

  “Jesus,” DeMarco said.

  “Jesus? That’s all you have to say? Jesus!”

  “Look, Adele, you’re going to be all right. You’re safe. This whole business with Castro and Sean is over with. Just don’t ever talk about Castro again.”

  “How do you know it’s over with?”

  She was going to hear about Callahan’s death soon enough, so he decided he might as well tell her. “Castro had Sean killed last night.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “But that means it’s all over with. Castro’s not going to do anything to you. If he had wanted to do something, the guys he sent last night wouldn’t have shown you a picture. They would have killed you. He just sent them there to scare you.”

  “But what if someone else talks about him and Delaney Square? He’ll think I’m the source. I mean, my God, you should have seen that woman’s face.”

  “Adele . . .”

  “I have to get out of here. I have to go someplace where he can’t find me. You’ve ruined my life, you bastard.”

  DeMarco almost told her that there was probably no place on the planet she could go where Javier Castro couldn’t find her, but she’d already hung up.

  DeMarco walked back to the Park Plaza, went to the bank of pay phones, and called Mahoney’s office. When Mahoney’s secretary answered, he said, “Mavis, tell Mahoney to call me as soon as possible. It’s urgent and it’s bad news. I’m going to give you the number of a pay phone. Give it to Mahoney and tell him to use a pay phone when he calls me back.”

  Mavis didn’t say anything for a moment, then said, “Is he in danger?”

  DeMarco was convinced that Mavis, who’d worked for Mahoney for thirty years, was in love with the selfish, corrupt son of a bitch. And although he didn’t believe that Mahoney was in any danger, in order to minimize the time he’d have to wait for the man to call him back, he said, “Maybe.”

  Mahoney called ten minutes later.

  To make sure he had Mahoney’s undivided attention he said, “Javier Castro had Sean Callahan killed last night and tried to frame me for his murder.” He then went on to tell Mahoney everything that had ­happened—how he’d been drugged, came to in Callahan’s office with the gun that killed Callahan in his hand, and how he was lucky he hadn’t been caught. At least not yet. He also told him what had happened to Adele Tomlin, who was now terrified out of her mind and fleeing to someplace where she thought she could hide from Castro. Mahoney’s response, while he was telling the story, was mostly swear words: Son of a bitch! You gotta be shittin’ me. Fuck me!

  When he finished, Mahoney managed to utter a complete sentence: “So what are you going to do?”

  “What am I going to do?” DeMarco repeated. “Well, if I’m not arrested, I’m going to get on the next plane back to D.C. This thing’s over with, boss, and everybody lost except you and Javier Castro.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Mahoney said.

  “It means Elinore Dobbs didn’t win. She’s in a nursing home, staring at a wall, and can barely remember her own name. The McNultys didn’t win. They’re going to jail for ten years. And Sean Callahan definitely didn’t win. But Javier Castro is going to make God knows how many millions off Delaney Square, so I’d call him a winner.”

  “But what did that crack about me winning mean?”

  “It means you got what you wanted. You wanted Callahan to pay for what he did to Elinore Dobbs—and he paid with his life.”

  “Hey! Fuck you,” Mahoney screamed. “I didn’t want Callahan killed and I didn’t tell you to go lean on Castro the way you did. That was your own bright idea.”

  DeMarco started to say that he wouldn’t have gone after Castro at all if Mahoney hadn’t been pushing him, but he knew that wasn’t really the case. It had been his idea to blackmail Castro—not ­Mahoney’s—and he really couldn’t blame anyone but himself for what had happened. He took a breath and said, “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  When Mahoney didn’t respond to his apology, DeMarco said, “One thing you could do is wait until Callahan’s death is reported on the news, then call someone in the BPD, like Superintendent O’Rourke, and ask him what he knows about the murder. Then let me know so in case I need to, I can book a flight to someplace that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Mahoney said, and hung up.

  DeMarco headed toward the elevators to go up to his room and pack when his cell phone rang. Again he didn’t recognize the number and wondered if it was Adele calling him back. It wasn’t.

  “This is Fitzgerald,” the caller said.

  What did Detective Fitzgerald want? Was he calling to tell him that Callahan had been killed? Or was he calling to tell him that he should go to the nearest police station and turn himself in? He turned out to be half right.

  “Did you hear that Sean Callahan was killed last night?”

  “What!” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah. He was found shot to death in his office.”

  “My God! What happened? Who did it?”

  “We don’t know who did it. Got a nine-one-one call, and some woman said she heard a shot fired that sounded as if it came from Callahan’s office. We sent a couple guys over there and they found his body.”

  “Who was the woman who called it in?”

  “We don’t know. She had a Hispanic accent and we think she might be one of the people that clean Callahan’s building but they all denied calling about shots being fired. They said they finished cleaning Callahan’s floor a couple hours before we got the call.”

  “Couldn’t you trace the call?”

  “It came from a phone in a bar about a block from Callahan’s office, and nobody remembered seeing anyone who looked Hispanic or like a cleaning lady in the bar.”

  Maria didn’t look obviously Hispanic, and she sure as hell didn’t look like a cleaning lady, but DeMarco wasn’t going to ask if anyone in the bar had spotted a blonde with a heart-stopping body.

  DeMarco knew he couldn’t afford to sound too curious, but he had to ask: “You didn’t get anybody on a surveillance camera who might have done it?”

  “No. It’s an old building and the onl
y cameras in the place are in the elevators, but about seven last night, like three hours before the nine-one-one call, some guy wearing a ball cap and sunglasses, and holding his hand over the lower part of his face, spray painted the lenses.”

  “I’ll be damned,” DeMarco said but he was really thinking: Thank God.

  “We figured a douchebag like Callahan, who’d pull the kind of shit he pulled on that old lady, probably had lots of enemies. By the way, where were you last night about ten?”

  “Me?” DeMarco the Innocent said. “In my room at the hotel. I had a couple drinks in the bar. In fact, I met some gal in the bar around seven and thought for a minute I was going to get lucky but she had to go meet her sister. Then I just went back to my room and watched TV.”

  DeMarco was thinking that if he’d been caught on a street camera last night, he’d amend the story he just gave Fitzgerald, saying that he’d taken a walk before going back to his room. He hoped like hell that he didn’t have to amend his story.

  “Why are you still here in Boston, anyway?” Fitzgerald asked.

  “My boss is running for reelection. He’s always running for reelection. So I was just helping out with some campaign shit. I’m heading back to D.C. today.”

  That is, I’m heading back today if somebody doesn’t arrest me.

  “But Callahan wasn’t the only reason I called,” Fitzgerald said. “Before I heard about Callahan, I got a call from the McNultys. I don’t know why they called me. I guess it was because I set up that meeting for you with them at the jail and they didn’t know how to get ahold of you.

  “Anyway, whichever one called, Roy or Ray, I think the guy was crying. He told me he wanted to take that deal you offered and testify against Callahan. When I asked him why he’d changed his mind, he said he’d heard that there’s a policy where they don’t put brothers together in the same prison. I don’t know who told him this or if he’s even right, but those two jackoffs are terrified of being sent to different prisons. I was going to let you know, but then I heard about Callahan, so there’s no point now in making a deal with the McNultys.”