by Lawson, Mike
The only other guy who scared him that way was Delray, although he would never have admitted it out loud. And he’d fight Delray if he ever had to, even though he figured he’d probably lose. Delray was just as strong as him, and no doubt he was just as tough; he’d done time in worse places than Bayside. But it wasn’t his size or even the stories Gus had heard about him. It was the way he never talked, the way he held himself—and, of course, that fuckin’ eye of his. All Gus knew was that he’d have liked it better if McGruder had assigned someone else to come with him to visit Gleason.
He picked up Delray at Logan Airport in Boston, and the whole way to Portsmouth the only thing the guy said to him was, “Pull off over there. I gotta take a leak.” When they reached Gleason’s shack, Gus said, “This is the place. See the truck?” Delray didn’t respond.
Gleason, Gus had to admit, did a good job. It helped that he was scared shitless—so that didn’t require any acting on his part—but he also kept the story straight and said just what he was supposed to say. At one point, just to remind him of the box he was in, Gus picked up a picture and said, “This your grandkid?” When Gleason nodded, chin trembling like he was going to cry, Gus added, “She’s a chubby little thing, but don’t worry. I got a niece who was like this when she was ten or eleven but then, when she was sixteen, she went all anorexic. So there’s hope.”
He noticed Delray looked over at him when he said this, like he’d said something wrong, but it didn’t matter: Gleason got the point. He admitted that he sold the truckload of fish to a couple guys in Manchester and used the money to buy his new truck and outboard motor. And what was left over, he gave to his daughter. Gus had told him to say that; he figured that way the guy wouldn’t look like such a greedy prick and, therefore, might get less of a beating.
And he was going to get a beating, or so he thought. Gus had told him on his first visit that he was going to have to smack him around just to make things look right, but promised it wouldn’t be too bad unless Gleason fucked up.
Fortunately, he didn’t. He stuck to Ted’s script like his first name was Jackie instead of Tom.
“Why’d you do it?” Delray asked. So far, that was the only thing he’d said since they’d entered Gleason’s house.
“I needed a new truck,” Gleason said. “My old one was falling apart and I couldn’t get a loan or anything. And I needed a new motor, too. I mean, fish is practically all I eat.”
To keep Delray from asking more questions, Gus hit Gleason in the face, knocking him right off his puke-green couch.
“Go get the keys and the title for the truck, you dumb shit,” Gus said.
After Gleason handed Gus the keys and the paperwork, Gus pulled out a .22 semi-auto. Gleason said, “Hey, wait a minute.” Gus didn’t wait. He shot him in the chest, then put one more in his forehead. If Delray was surprised he didn’t show it. But then Delray never showed anything.
Gus picked up the shells ejected from the automatic, looked around the room, and said, “I didn’t touch anything in here except his face. Did you touch anything?”
Delray ignored the question.
They left Gleason lying on the filthy shag rug in his living room, cockroaches in the blood before they even closed the door. Gus figured the local cops would think that Gleason, after a million years of bad luck, finally fell into some money, bought himself a new truck, and then some asshole came along and killed him and stole it. Which, when he thought about it, was pretty much what happened.
* * *
“What do you think?” McGruder asked.
“I don’t know,” Delray said. “The guy was so scared he could barely talk. But he didn’t deny anything.”
“What does Donatelli say?”
“He backs up Ted’s story.”
McGruder snorted. “Marco Donatelli’s a fuckin’ snake; he ain’t like his old man. He might back up Ted’s story if Ted comped him a couple nights at the casino.”
Delray, of course, didn’t answer because McGruder hadn’t asked a question.
“Where are you now?” McGruder said.
“Driving back from Portsmouth, we’re almost to Boston. Gus is behind me, driving the guy’s truck, towing the boat trailer.”
“You tell Gus to drop the truck off at my place. My nephew’s got a landscaping business, so he can use the truck, but I don’t give a shit what he does with the boat. And then after you get back, you and me are gonna go have a talk with Ted’s accountant.”
6
Molly Mahoney was about two twitches away from a nervous breakdown.
Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, her blue eyes red from crying, and it appeared as if she had lost weight since the last time DeMarco had seen her. He hoped she wasn’t sick on top of all her other problems.
Her curly, shoulder-length auburn hair was arranged in a sloppy ponytail and tendrils of hair had escaped the rubber band at the back of her head. She was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt that looked at least one size too big, and unflattering blue jeans that were too short and baggy in the seat. Her thin face was pale and devoid of makeup, and the freckles on her cheekbones stood out starkly.
She had spent one night in jail; her lawyers hadn’t been able to keep that from happening. At her arraignment, she pled not guilty and was released on a hundred-thousand-dollar bond. DeMarco had watched on television when Molly left the courthouse with her mother. Molly’s lawyers had walked ahead of Mary Pat and Molly, pushing through a mob of reporters, muttering “No comment” like a mantra, while Mary Pat held her daughter’s arm and talked to her, smiling occasionally, acting as if the reporters weren’t there at all. Mary Pat was made of steel.
DeMarco had met with Mary Pat before coming to see Molly. Mahoney’s wife had three things in common with her husband: she had snow-white hair and blue eyes, and was Boston Irish. But that was where the similarities ended. Mahoney was built like a bear; Mary Pat was slender. Mahoney was slowly committing suicide by overeating, overdrinking, and smoking three or four cigars a day; Mary Pat was a vegetarian who practiced yoga. Mahoney was devious, tricky, and dishonest; Mary Pat donated her time to charities and probably wouldn’t tell a lie if her life depended on it. How on earth they had ever gotten together in the first place, and then stayed together for forty years, was a matrimonial miracle.
“I’m really worried about her, Joe,” Mary Pat had said. “And I don’t mean the . . . the SEC thing. I’m worried about her health, her mental health. I don’t think she’s suicidal but she seems so . . . so fragile. You have to find out who’s behind this.”
DeMarco had promised that he would—and it was a promise he meant to keep because he’d made the promise to Mary Pat.
So DeMarco was now sitting at the kitchen/dining room table in Molly’s small, none-too-neat one-bedroom apartment in North Bethesda. He didn’t know how long she had lived in the place, but there were still unpacked boxes in her living room and she’d made no effort to decorate—no pictures on the walls, no throw pillows on the sofa, no cute knickknacks on shelves or end tables. The building she lived in surprised him, too: it wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods and it didn’t have a swimming pool or a fitness center or any of the other amenities you’d expect to find in a place where a well-paid young professional lived.
“Who do you think could have done this, Molly?” DeMarco asked. “I need someplace to start looking.”
Mahoney’s daughters knew that DeMarco occupied some shady niche in their father’s universe; they just didn’t know exactly what the niche was. When Molly had asked him if he was working with her lawyers, he’d said, “Well, not directly. Your dad just asked me to poke into this a little on my own.”
What DeMarco meant was: your dad expects me to do things your white-shoe lawyers might be disinclined to do, particularly if some of those things might get a real lawyer disbarred. But Molly did
n’t ask him to clarify his role in her defense. She just sat there staring down at the tabletop, seemingly shell-shocked by everything that had happened to her. She’d never been arrested before. She’d never been fingerprinted or strip-searched by a jailhouse matron. She’d never spent a night in a cage surrounded by crack-addicted prostitutes. That she was in shock was understandable, but DeMarco needed her help.
“Molly, I know you’re upset but you have to focus here. The lady from the SEC said that whoever did this used a computer at an Internet café. Have you ever gone to an Internet café?”
Molly nodded. “Yeah, a place called Milo’s. It’s just a couple blocks from here and whenever I need to go online for something, and if I’m not at work, I go there. It’s cheaper than paying for a monthly Internet connection.”
Now that surprised him—that a woman of Molly’s generation and income level wouldn’t have an Internet connection in her home. But maybe she was just frugal.
“Think, Molly,” DeMarco said. “Whoever did this knows your habits. He knows you use that café. He knows your address and date of birth and Social Security number. And half a million bucks was deposited into a checking account that supposedly belonged to you, which means this guy is rich or has access to piles of money. So come on, Molly. Who do you know that has money and access to your personal information? The list can’t be that long.”
Molly just shook her head.
Christ. “Well, do you have any enemies at work, someone who’s jealous of you or . . .”
“Jealous!” Molly said, and then she laughed—a short, unhappy bark of a laugh—as if the idea of anyone envying her was absurd.
“Then tell me about people you know who have the computer skills to do this.”
“Computer skills?”
“Yeah. Maybe somebody hacked into your computer to get information or installed one of them . . . them things that keep track of your keystrokes. And then he got onto this internet café’s computer and made it look like you bought the stock and set up the new bank account.”
Molly shrugged. “Most the people I work with are scientists or engineers,” she said, “and they all use computers. But none of them are hackers, at least not that I’m aware of.”
“What about your IT people? There must be some geeks where you work who service your machines.”
“We contract out the IT stuff, and I don’t even know any of the people who work for the contractor.”
“What’s the name of the IT company, Molly?”
She told him and DeMarco wrote it down. He was glad to have something to write down.
“What about the people that worked on this submarine battery project with you? Whoever did this had to know about the project and had to know when the battery company was going to announce the breakthrough. So how many people were involved in the project?”
“The main team had five engineers on it, including me, but lots of people in the company knew about it. We’d give the managers and the money guys biweekly updates on how we were doing.”
“Give me the names of these other engineers.”
Molly did, but added, “They’re just people like me. They wouldn’t do something like this. And none of them, as far as I know, has any of my personal information.”
“Molly, can you think of anything that will help? Anything. Someone snooping around your office, someone asking for your Social Security number, someone asking where you bank?”
Molly started to say something, but then gave a strangled sob and rose from the table and went over to stand by the kitchen sink with her back to DeMarco. She stood there, hunched over the sink as if she might throw up, then finally straightened but didn’t turn around.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Uh, twelve thirty,” DeMarco said, checking his watch. What difference did it make what time it was?
“Would you like a drink, Joe?” Molly said.
Ah. She didn’t want to start drinking before noon, like if you drank in the morning you were an alkie but if the sun was past its zenith, you were okay. And she didn’t want to drink alone.
“No, thanks,” DeMarco said. “Nothing for me.”
Molly opened a cupboard above her sink and pulled out a bottle of scotch. Cheap scotch, DeMarco noted. It probably tasted like paint thinner. While Molly was pouring a drink, DeMarco told her what Randy Sawyer had said about three previous insider trading cases at Reston Tech.
“Molly,” he said, “if you can’t think of anyone who would want to frame you, can you think of anyone at your company who might be involved in insider trading? If Sawyer’s right about these previous insider cases, it has to be someone who’s worked there a long time, long before you ever got there. So can you think of somebody who’s richer than you’d expect him to be? You know, spending more than you think he should be able to afford. Or how ’bout somebody who always seems especially curious about what you’re working on.” DeMarco was grasping at straws, and he knew it.
Molly didn’t respond; she was still at the sink, her back to DeMarco. She had slammed down her first drink while he was talking and then immediately poured another shot, this time adding ice to her glass.
“Molly,” he prompted her. “Do you have any ideas?”
She continued to ignore him while looking down at the drab courtyard outside her window. DeMarco had noticed the courtyard when he walked into the building: a small square of grass that was mostly weeds, a dry birdbath, and a couple of bushes with wilted brown leaves. The whole apartment building had the look of a place that ignored minor maintenance—or a place where the tenants couldn’t afford to complain if the maintenance wasn’t done.
Molly turned at last to face DeMarco. Her eyes seemed brighter—a by-product of the alcohol, he assumed.
“They said I might go to jail for three years. I’m going to have a criminal record and lose my job and my dad’s going to be humiliated by the press. I just feel like . . .”
She started sobbing. She cried so hard that she collapsed into a small heap on her kitchen floor. DeMarco walked over to her, pulled her to her feet, and took her into his arms. He patted her back clumsily, like he was burping a baby; she was so thin he could feel her shoulder blades through her shirt. “Molly, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to get you out of this, honey. Trust me.”
She didn’t know a damn thing that would help him and she was too distraught to think straight—but, sure, trust me.
7
Greg Porter walked out of the Public Safety Building on Atlantic Avenue, thinking the meeting with the cops hadn’t gone so well—but the cops were the least of his problems.
This thing that Ted was doing—lying to McGruder, hiding stuff from Al, juggling the numbers . . . He had a bad feeling about it, a really bad feeling. It looked as if Ted’s latest maneuver, however—convincing McGruder that that guy Gleason had ripped off a load of fish—had worked. Or so Ted thought—but Greg was still worried.
The casino kept two sets of books: one they showed to investors and the IRS and one that showed how much money they really made. The second set of books included Al’s cut from the casino, money laundered from some of Al’s other operations, bribes they paid to local cops and politicians. It was an intentionally complicated accounting system and hard to follow even if you were familiar with it. Greg was beginning to think, however, that McGruder hadn’t seen anything specific in the spreadsheets that had made him suspicious. For one thing, they weren’t trying to hide a big loss—only half a million—and Greg had spread the loss out over a lot of things. He couldn’t claim they lost the money because a couple of heavy hitters had lucky streaks at the tables; there were just too many people watching the gambling side of things. Instead, he cooked the books on the operations side. He expensed maintenance they didn’t do, added in losses for property damage that didn’t occur, inc
reased the amount spent to fix a crack in one of the swimming pools, bumped up the cost of consumables that were hard to track. There was no way McGruder could tell if they’d gone through a few dozen more cases of booze than normal.
So he didn’t think it was the numbers; it was McGruder’s goddamn nose. He just smelled that something was off, and probably, just like he’d said, it was because of the way he and Ted had been acting. Whatever the case, whether it was something in the spreadsheets or McGruder’s snout, he knew McGruder was going to catch them. He just knew it.
He reached the corner. His car was parked across the street in a thirty-minute loading zone because he hadn’t expected to be with the cops more than fifteen minutes. But then it took an hour to come to an agreement with the bastards, and he could see the ticket fluttering on his windshield. He shook his head. Everything in his life these days was turning to shit.
He started to cross the street but before he could step off the curb, a black Lincoln with tinted windows stopped in front of him, blocking the crosswalk. The passenger side window powered-down—and there was McGruder. Delray was driving.
Oh, Lord Jesus, help me.
“Get your ass in the car,” McGruder said.
Greg’s feet reacted faster than his brain: he ran. He ran right around the nose of the Lincoln, planning to dart across the street and get in his car and . . . And he didn’t know what, but no way was he getting in a car with Delray.
He didn’t see the city bus that killed him, the bus that dragged him fifty-seven yards, its brakes locked, skidding the whole way.
8
DeMarco was at Clyde’s in Georgetown, at the bar, having a vodka martini, admiring the legs of a tall blonde barmaid. He figured he deserved it—both the view and the drink—for toiling diligently on Molly Mahoney’s behalf.