House Odds

by Lawson, Mike

  He’d go see the lobbyist tomorrow. He’d called the damn guy two days ago but he’d been out of town, plus, after thinking about it, Ted had decided this wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to talk about on the phone. So tomorrow he’d go see him in person, and if the guy didn’t come through for him, maybe he’d have Gus give him a beat down. Not that beating the lobbyist would solve his problems; it would just feel good to make someone else feel some pain.

  10

  “Come on, Emma. Help me out here.”

  Emma was pulling weeds, her butt pointed rudely at DeMarco, as she uprooted offending flora. She was wearing shorts, an old T-shirt from the New York marathon, and a long-billed baseball cap that had a piece of cloth attached to the back to protect her neck from the sun. On her knees were padded knee protectors, the type carpet-layers wear. She pulled the weeds rapidly, and DeMarco would swear that each time she yanked one she muttered a little curse as if she was condemning the unwanted plant to a hot green hell.

  Emma had a large yard surrounding her spacious home in McLean and by early summer her place would look like the grounds at Versailles. But to reach this state of horticultural perfection, each spring Emma went berserk, planting and reseeding and pruning—and doing whatever else it was that fanatic gardeners did. And during this period she reminded DeMarco of the Star Trek episode about Spock’s sex life.

  Vulcans, according to Gene Roddenberry, had sex about every seven years and just before they mated, they went mad—not an unexpected outcome considering the period of abstinence. At the peak of their mating cycle your typical pointy-eared, unemotional Vulcan became this crazed loony who would decapitate his friends if they frustrated his need to procreate. And this was Emma in the spring—except it wasn’t celibacy that made her insane; it was the need to revitalize her yard, and she wouldn’t return to normal until the job was complete.

  “I just told you,” Emma said, still not looking at him. “Neil’s on vacation and I don’t know where he is.”

  “Yeah, but there must be some way to track him down.”

  Emma didn’t answer. She was frowning at something she’d just pulled from the earth, as if the plant in her hand was some particularly malevolent species, maybe the Ebola virus of weeds.

  “Emma!” DeMarco said. “How do I find him?”

  Neil called himself an “information broker.” The truth behind this ambiguous job description was that Neil, for a substantial fee, could find out anything you wanted to know about your fellow citizens. Most often Neil performed his magic by bribing folks who work in places that stockpile privileged data: the IRS, Google, Social Security, banks, credit card and cell phone companies. But if Neil couldn’t find what you needed to know with a simple bribe, he and his small staff were capable of hacking through firewalls and bugging phones and offices. The only reason Neil wasn’t the corpulent prison bride of a tattooed man named Bubba was because he was often employed by agents of the federal government, agents who didn’t have the patience or the inclination to get the necessary warrants.

  “Neil and his wife are on an island somewhere,” Emma said, “taking a second honeymoon. He doesn’t want to be found. He wants to make love on the sand at sunset.”

  “Oh, please!” DeMarco said. The thought of Neil naked and having sex was beyond revolting.

  “He had to cancel his first honeymoon,” Emma said, still examining the wicked weed, “when they arrested him for . . . well, for something. He was never convicted, of course, but he had to postpone his honeymoon to deal with the problem.”

  He was never convicted, DeMarco thought, because he was probably working for you and Uncle Sugar.

  “Well how ’bout that little dweeb he works with?” DeMarco said. “What’s-his-name, Bobby something, with the dreadlocks.”

  Emma stopped pulling weeds and turned to look at him. “Bobby Prentiss is not a dweeb,” she said. “He’s brilliant.”

  Everyone was brilliant but DeMarco. “Good,” he said. “So since he’s so brilliant, maybe he can help me.”

  “Have you ever tried to communicate with Bobby, Joe?”

  “Yeah, once.” Bobby was a man who could go for days without uttering a word. It seemed as if it was almost painful for him to talk to other members of his species.

  “And?” Emma said.

  “And it’s easier to gossip with God,” DeMarco admitted.

  Emma stood up and emptied her small box of dead weeds into a larger container full of dead weeds. A genocide, of sorts, was in progress.

  Emma was tall and slim and regal—even wearing a goofy hat. She had short hair that DeMarco thought was gray until the light struck it from a certain angle and then he thought it was blonde. She was several years older than him, but she could run him ragged on a racquetball court, which she did every couple of months when she couldn’t find anyone else to beat. The marathon T-shirt she wore was from a race she ran in three years ago.

  DeMarco wasn’t sure he could even walk twenty-six miles.

  “I don’t understand all this insider trading stock crap,” DeMarco said. “You’re rich. Help me out here.”

  “What makes you think I’m rich?” Emma said. “I’m a retired civil servant living on a pension.”

  “Yeah, right. A pensioner that drives a new Mercedes and has a home in McLean that I’m guessing would sell for about two mil.”

  “Maybe I inherited my home,” Emma said.

  “Well did you?” DeMarco asked.

  “Maybe,” Emma said.

  Emma delighted in being enigmatic. She was a retired civil servant: retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency. She’d been a spy—and maybe she was still a spy. She’d kept so many secrets during her career that she continued to keep secrets even when they didn’t matter; it was habit she could not break.

  “So are you going to help me or not?” DeMarco said.

  “No. I have to get bulbs into the ground, I have bushes to prune, and this lawn . . . My God, look at it!”

  DeMarco thought her lawn looked like one of the putting greens at Augusta National, but then he had fairly low standards when it came to yards and gardens. He wanted to replace the grass in front of his Georgetown home with Astroturf.

  Before DeMarco could say that keeping Molly Mahoney out of jail was more important than tulip bulbs, Emma said, “But let me see if I’ve got all this straight. The SEC says that they have a trail of stock purchases originating from an Internet café. The stocks were purchased using half a million dollars that was mysteriously placed in Molly’s new bank account. Molly claims she doesn’t know where the money came from, claims she didn’t buy any stock, says she never set up a new bank account, and then points the finger at this man Campbell because she heard him make a funny-sounding phone call a few years ago. Is that right?”

  “Yeah, but you make it sound like . . .”

  “Just for the sake of argument, what makes you so sure that Molly didn’t do it?”

  “Well, other than the fact that she’s not the type of person who’d do something like this . . .”

  “Unlike her father,” Emma said.

  “. . . she doesn’t have half a million bucks.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, I don’t for sure. But she lives in this shitty little one-­bedroom apartment and her father said she was saving up money to make a down payment on a house.”

  “Or maybe she lives in a cheap apartment because she was saving her money to invest in the market on inside information.”

  “Come on, Emma! Whose side are you on?”

  “Doesn’t the half million bother you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s say someone was trying to frame Molly. Would you blow five hundred grand on a frame? Don’t you think that’s excessive? Wouldn’t five thousand have worked
just as well?”

  This was the same conclusion DeMarco had come to earlier.

  “I don’t think it was a frame, Emma. I think they may have been using Molly for cover. They—somebody—set up a new bank account in her name, deposited the half mil in the account, bought the stock, and planned to close the account after they’d transferred the profits back to themselves. If everything had gone right, they would have made a quarter million bucks and nobody would have been the wiser. But if things went bad, which they did, then Molly’s the one who ends up with her head on the block.”

  DeMarco was about to tell Emma his other theory, that somebody was using Molly to get to her father, but before he could, she said, “What happens when Molly gets her monthly bank statement and suddenly discovers she’s half a million dollars richer?”

  “With a lot of banks, you don’t get paper statements these days. You have to go online to look at account activity, and she wouldn’t go online to look at an account she didn’t know she had. And if they sent her e-mails, she wouldn’t see them because whoever did this set up an e-mail address she never used.”

  “Do you know all this for a fact?”

  “No, but it sounds logical—if you believe Molly’s innocent.”

  “Humpf,” Emma said—and DeMarco didn’t know what that meant.

  “How ’bout for now,” he said, “you assume she’s not a crook. What would you do next?”

  Emma shrugged. “See if the SEC has anything on this guy Campbell, I guess. See if he’s really living large the way Molly says. And see if someone close to Campbell sold off a bunch of stock in this bottle company right after Molly heard him talking about it.”

  “How the hell would I do that?” DeMarco whined. “I don’t have any way to find out if a guy dumped a bunch of stock. But if Neil was here . . .”

  “Then let’s just assume that Campbell’s richer than he should be. Go accuse him of insider trading and see how he acts. Better yet, tell him Molly has given him up to the SEC, that she knows he’s guilty, and she’s going to trade his butt for a reduced sentence. Do that, and see if he runs to his partner.”

  “What partner?”

  “You said that the SEC has been watching Reston Tech for years. If Campbell was making money illegally off stock tips related to Reston’s research, I imagine the SEC would have nailed him by now, just the way they nailed Molly. So if he’s involved with some kind of insider trading scheme, he has to have an accomplice not connected with the company. All you have to do is find the accomplice. Now, where did I put my pruning shears?”

  Emma found the shears. They had blades sharp enough to decapitate gophers. Emma opened and closed the jaws of the tool a couple of times as if she were warming up for an athletic event: full-contact gardening.

  11

  Preston Whitman was a lobbyist, a very good one, and his job was to convince politicians to vote the way his clients wanted. And Whitman’s clients paid his outrageous fees primarily for one thing: his ability to gain access to those in power. Access was everything. Once Whitman had slithered through a legislator’s door, he had a small arsenal with which to persuade: a pledge to contribute generously to the lawmaker’s next campaign; a position on a board after the pol retired; a special deal on an Aspen condo. He also had at his disposal think tanks staffed with experts—generals and geniuses and ex–cabinet members—and they could develop a viable, well-reasoned argument for any position. They could demonstrate why it was acceptable—hell, even patriotic—to sell flammable pajamas for toddlers if that’s what Whitman’s clients sold.

  And that’s why Ted Allen had hired Preston Whitman. He’d paid the man a hundred thousand dollars to get something done in Congress, but so far the lobbyist had failed to deliver. Whitman had warned him in advance that he couldn’t promise to accomplish what Ted wanted, but Ted didn’t care. In Ted’s world, if you give a guy a hundred Gs, you expect to see results. And Al wasn’t happy either. Al thought Ted had used the money to bribe a congressman; Al approved of a bribe because he could understand a bribe. What he couldn’t understand was paying a lobbyist to influence several congressmen in a legal—or mostly legal—manner. Al was a dinosaur, but one with a heavy tail and very big teeth.

  Ted had been working on the project for over three years and had spent over a million dollars of Al’s money on it, including Whitman’s fee. If he pulled it off, Al would think that the sun rose and set with him—and fuck McGruder. But if he didn’t pull it off . . . well, he didn’t know what the consequences would be, but he knew they wouldn’t be good. Maybe fatally not good. You could just never tell with Al.

  The project. Atlantic City currently had a convention center that was less than fifteen years old, but the place was already falling apart. And separate from the existing convention center were bus and railroad terminals that brought the suckers in from New York and Philly and D.C. Ted had managed to convince the right people that AC needed a new convention center, and it should include terminals for trains and buses and the terminals should be connected to a retail mall like Union Station in D.C. To get support for the project, he’d bribed a few folks and blackmailed others, but mostly he’d just sold the idea—just the way any legitimate businessman would do. He’d convinced the city council guys and the mayor and state representatives that a new convention center was good for AC, good for the people, good for jobs and taxes.

  The hardest guy to convince had been Al—convincing him that he’d have to invest a little money to make a lot of money. McGruder, of course, had been against him every step of the way, telling Al that he’d just be pouring money down the drain. But in the end Ted won. Yep, he lined up all the ducks, and it hadn’t been easy.

  The project benefited Al’s operation in multiple ways. The site for the new structure would require two lots that Ted had acquired, and they’d pay Al ten times what he’d paid for the lots. The work itself would go to a certain construction company—they had an absolute lock on that—and Al would get a big kickback from the company. The construction company would also be forced to use union labor, and Al had his fingers in two of the biggest unions—carpenters and electricians—and he’d get a percentage of the money collected for dues and pensions. And it didn’t end there. Al was a legitimate partner in a cement factory located outside Trenton, and Ted made sure that the ground rules specified using products made in Jersey if they were available—and it was going to take a lot of cement to build the convention center. The Jersey politicians, of course, had backed him on this. The icing on the cake was the project included a moving walkway to get the suckers from the new bus and train terminal to the boardwalk, and the first place it would stop would be the Atlantic Palace.

  Yes, it was a terrific plan, and it was Ted’s plan, and they wre going to make millions off the deal—and then six months ago, it had all fallen apart.

  The governor of New Jersey, a guy they’d been paying off for years, went and had himself a stroke. The bastard now had as much brain activity as a radish, and the lieutenant governor, who’d be in the job the next two years, was a rich, righteous son of a bitch and Ted didn’t have anything he could use to force the man to play ball.

  The lieutenant governor wasn’t opposed to the project—he could see how it would benefit Atlantic City and the good people of New Jersey—but he got it into his thick head that the federal government should kick in a little money. His logic was that the convention center should be part of all those other federal stimulus programs designed to get the economy moving, and he decided—arbitrarily—that the Fed’s portion should be a hundred million. Why a hundred million, nobody knew, but the guy was adamant the Feds had to share in the cost.

  The problem, of course, was that other than the New Jersey dele­gation, very few people in Washington were inclined to give the state a hundred million bucks, so now the project wasn’t moving forward. And that had been Preston Whitman’s job: to
get a rider attached to some bill—any fuckin’ bill—that would send a measly hundred million to Jersey, but Whitman hadn’t been able to make it happen.

  Which was why Ted had decided to pay Whitman a visit. He needed to get the damn guy moving, and he needed to get things back under control before McGruder sniffed something out.

  * * *

  To make sure Whitman understood the possible consequences of failure, he brought Gus Amato with him. Ted had told Gus to wear a suit—and to leave the suit jacket unbuttoned so Whitman could see the gun in the shoulder holster. He’d also told Gus to take the damn earring out of his ear, but the idiot was still wearing his alligator skin cowboy boots. In spite of the boots, Gus had the intended impact: The entire time Ted was talking to Whitman, Gus stood behind Ted, staring dead-eyed at Whitman, and Whitman’s eyes kept straying over to look at the gun.

  As Gus stared and Whitman fidgeted, Ted explained the situation with Molly Mahoney. Molly was his ace in the hole; she was the pry bar he needed to get things unstuck. He didn’t tell Whitman everything, but he told him enough.

  “Wow,” Whitman said when Ted was finished.

  Wow? And this guy depended on his tongue to make a living. No wonder he hadn’t made any progress.

  “So do you think this will work?” Ted said.

  “Maybe,” Whitman said. “If we could get Mahoney behind the project, he’d be a huge help. But I have to warn you, Ted, John Mahoney can be very unpredictable.”

  “Just set up the meeting,” Ted said. “And do it quick. You gotta be good for something.”

  * * *

  Preston Whitman sat at his desk for several minutes after Ted Allen left his office, thinking about Ted—and what Ted had told him.

  Taking on Ted as a client had been a mistake—a huge mistake. The man just didn’t understand how things worked in D.C. He particularly didn’t understand the pace at which things worked. Ted dressed well, he spoke like an educated man, but underneath all that Whitman sensed that Ted had been raised rough and poor. He was a thug with a diploma. And that ape that he’d brought with him to the meeting . . . What the hell was that all about? What was Ted going to do? Break his legs if he didn’t do what Ted wanted?