by Lawson, Mike
“Was the third kid a football player, too?”
“No, he was just some little geek, and that’s the other reason I didn’t spend much time on him. He wasn’t big enough to toss Jimmy Sweet out a window. And if he’d been on the team, I’d probably be able to remember his name, which I can’t right now. But it was his room Sweet fell from, which also surprised me. I mean this kid—what the fuck was his name?—wasn’t the kind of guy these ball players would have hung around with.”
“Then why were they in his room?”
“According to McGrath—he’s the one who did all the talking—it was just your typical college dorm thing. You know, the kids are all drinking, going from room to room, bullshitting with each other, and somehow they just ended up in . . . Praeter! That was his name. Richard Praeter.”
* * *
DeMarco’s shoebox-size office—no windows, inadequate ventilation, and an air-conditioning system that hadn’t worked for years—was a place where he spent as little time as possible. A couple of years before, an earthquake had struck D.C.—one that measured 5.9 on the Richter scale and damaged the Washington Monument—and DeMarco had been in his office at the time. He was sure he was going to die that day. He knew the statue of Freedom on the Capitol’s dome—a statue that weighed fifteen thousand pounds—was going to plummet through the Rotunda’s painted ceiling, then through two floors, and land right on his head.
Since the quake he’d discovered that he couldn’t spend more than a couple of hours in his claustrophobic work space before he had to go out and gulp fresh air. He actually wondered if he had a minor case of PTSD, but he was too embarrassed to tell anyone for fear of sounding like a wimp. He walked outside and stood on the side of the Capitol facing the Library of Congress, and while standing there, began bullshitting with one of the guards, an old-timer named Leary. DeMarco dreaded to think that Leary and his brethren were the last line of defense protecting him from terrorists.
For some reason, he and Leary started talking about the Redskins. They didn’t agree on much but they did agree on one thing: Billy Kilmer may have been the best quarterback the Skins ever had. Kilmer had stumpy legs, a potbelly—in fact, he looked a bit like Leary—and he couldn’t run or throw for shit, but man, could he win games.
DeMarco returned to his office—like a reluctant mole descending into its burrow—and googled Richard Praeter. He was starting to think that he was like Billy Kilmer when it came to googling: slow, but he got the job done.
Richard Praeter lived in Manhattan.
Richard Praeter was a financial consultant.
DeMarco didn’t know exactly what a financial consultant did but he’d finally found somebody connected to Douglas Campbell who might know how to use inside information to make a lot of money. Which made him feel like saying something silly like “hidey-ho.”
So he did.
* * *
DeMarco spent another hour searching for more information on Praeter, trying to see if the magic Internet could link him directly to Reston Tech or past insider trading cases. The Internet failed. He needed Neil. He decided to call it a day and go someplace where there was air and sunlight, humans and alcohol—and maybe when he got there he’d call Alice’s good-looking friend—and that’s when Kay Kiser’s comment about Molly Mahoney popped into his head.
When he’d asked Kiser what motive Molly could possibly have for committing a crime, Kiser had said: You need to get know your client a lot better, DeMarco. What had she meant by that?
And then he thought about the way Molly lived.
And then he thought, Aw, shit.
DeMarco called Mahoney’s office, obtained Molly’s Social Security number and date of birth from Mahoney’s secretary, then called the company that had performed the credit check on Douglas Campbell. He asked them to do a credit check on young Molly Mahoney.
Thirty minutes later he learned that Molly was in debt up to her pretty chin. She had four credit cards and every one of them was maxed out, and all she was doing was paying the minimum balance on the cards. She was frequently late paying her rent, her utilities, and her phone bill. And DeMarco now realized why she lived in a dump: a dump was all she could afford. Molly Mahoney’s motive for committing a crime wasn’t greed—it was necessity. If she didn’t get a large infusion of cash pretty soon, she was going to be living out of her car.
But what the hell had she spent the money on? He needed to get Molly’s credit card statements—or maybe just do the simple thing and ask the woman what the hell was going on.
He called Molly’s number and got her voice mail. “Molly, it’s Joe DeMarco. Call me as soon as you get this message.” He paused before he added, “Molly, you should have told someone.”
17
“Okay, okay. I’m coming, for Christ’s sake!”
Denny Reed was fifty-two. He was wearing sandals, black socks, blue Bermuda shorts, and a red sleeveless T-shirt that exposed two skinny arms. His ex-wife had told him one time that he shouldn’t wear sleeveless shirts because his arms looked like those tube-balloons street artists twisted into the shape of dachshunds. His ex was a vicious, sharp-tongued bitch.
Denny flung open the door, intending to say: “What the hell’s wrong with you, leaning on the fuckin’ buzzer like that,” but then he saw who was standing on his porch. “Oh, hey, Gus,” he said. “How you doin’? Good to see you. You wanna come in?”
Gus Amato stared at Denny for a long moment then snapped his gum, the sound like a twig being broken in two. “Sure, Denny, I’ll come in,” he said.
Gus strolled past Denny and then stood in the middle of his living room, looking around the house. The house was a two-story Cape Cod that faced the waters off Ocean City, New Jersey, and it contained hardly any furniture. The only items in the living room were a recliner, a cheap television set, and a TV tray that Denny used for a table. The dining room was completely empty, not even a picture on the walls. Denny had sold almost all his possessions at an impromptu yard sale one day so they wouldn’t repossess his car.
“You want something to drink?” Denny asked, speaking to Gus’s back. “I don’t have any booze but I got some Pepsi.”
Gus turned to face him. “I saw the sign on the lawn, Denny. I guess that means you still haven’t sold the house.”
“Yeah, but I will. I just need a little more time. I been thinking about switching real estate agents, getting somebody who really knows what the hell he’s doing.”
“This place has a mortgage on it, right?” Gus said.
“Yeah. It didn’t have one when I first moved in, but, well, you know.”
“So that means you gotta make a pretty good profit to get straight with us.”
“I will,” Denny said. “The market’s a little cool right now, but it’ll pick up. You just gotta give me . . .”
“How’d you get this house in the first place? I think you told me once but I can’t remember.”
“My brother,” Denny said. “It was his summer place. He was always such a prick to me, I couldn’t believe it when he left it to me in his will.”
Gus laughed. “He was probably a prick because you were always trying to borrow money from him.”
There wasn’t anything Denny could say to that.
Gus walked toward the kitchen, speaking as he went, Denny trailing along behind him. “How long were you in, the last time you were inside?”
“What?” Denny said. “You talking about prison?”
“Yeah. How long were you in last time?”
Denny’s kitchen cabinets, the ones above the counter, had glass doors, and the only items in them were two plates, three glasses, and a single coffee cup. Another glass and a coffee cup were in the sink. That was all the dishes Denny owned, and he wished the cabinets had regular doors so Gus couldn’t see his stuff.
�
��Eighteen months,” Denny said. “I mean, I never shoulda been there at all. This goddamn lawyer I had . . .”
“And why were you there? Something about credit cards, right? Getting credit card numbers off the Internet, something like that?”
“Yeah. I . . . I needed the money at the time.”
Gus laughed. “You fuckin’ guys. You just never learn.”
There wasn’t anything Denny could say to that either.
Gus opened Denny’s refrigerator. A half-empty jar of jelly, two cans of Pepsi, and a greasy bucket from KFC. He shook his head as if what he saw was pathetic, and closed the door.
“And you did your time in the joint okay?” Gus asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you didn’t go nuts, try to slash your wrists, nothin’ like that?”
“No.”
Gus smiled. “Which means you were probably someone’s bitch from the day you got there.”
“Hey! I wasn’t no one’s . . .”
“Denny, I don’t care. Inside, a guy does what he has to do. I’ve been there. I understand.”
“Why are you asking about . . .”
Gus took a step toward Denny, backing him up so his skinny butt was touching the stove. “Denny, Ted Allen has decided he’s gonna let you keep your house and . . .”
“What?”
“Mr. Allen’s gonna let you keep your house, Denny. He’s gonna write off what you owe him, including the vig, so you won’t have to sell the place.”
The vig was the interest Denny paid on the money he owed Ted Allen. The vig was murder, and about the same as the interest rate the bastards at Visa charged.
“Why would he do that?” Denny asked.
“Because you’re gonna do him a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
Gus told him.
“No way!” Denny said. “No fuckin’ way. Tell Mr. Allen I’ll sell the house next week. I swear to Christ, I will. And then I’ll be able to pay back everything.”
Gus nodded as if agreeing with Denny—then hit him in the throat, a short little jab, his right fist traveling only six inches.
Denny fell to the kitchen floor. He lay there, clutching his throat, kicking his feet, flopping like a trout out of water, saying “Gaa, gaa, gaa.” He couldn’t breathe and he was trying to get air into his lungs but was too panicked to relax and take short breaths.
Gus bent over so he was closer to Denny’s face.
“Denny,” Gus said, “when I said you were gonna do Mr. Allen a favor, I wasn’t asking if you wanted to do it.”
18
Mahoney walked slowly down the Atlantic City boardwalk.
He walked past Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and the place where the old Steel Pier used to be, and past souvenir stores that sold T-shirts and rubber dice and vendors hawking funnel cakes cooked in vats of grease. As he walked, garbage-eating seagulls scuttled out of his way. He passed one guy pulling a rickshaw that contained a couple too overweight to walk to the next all-you-can-eat casino buffet.
Mahoney hated Atlantic City.
He was wearing a red windbreaker over an old Patriots sweatshirt, navy-blue chinos, and tennis shoes. On his big head was a Red Sox baseball cap, the bill pulled down, partially obscuring his face. It was the sort of outfit he wore when Congress wasn’t in session and he was home in Boston, walking around the Back Bay, stopping in neighborhood places for a beer or two. He liked the Back Bay, particularly in the fall, when the weather was crisp and the trees had some color and you could see Harvard’s crew team sculling on the Charles.
He missed Boston, especially today.
The Atlantic Palace Casino was bigger than the pyramid at Giza and flashier than a New York pimp. As Mahoney walked through it, he glanced at the players hunched over their cards at the blackjack tables. Whenever they showed casinos in television commercials, all the players were young and beautiful, laughing and grinning like they were having the time of their lives. Some of the folks he could see were young, but gray-haired pensioners bused in from New York and Philly far outnumbered the youngsters, and none of them, old or young, were particularly beautiful. More to the point, none of them looked happy; they sat there—grim, tense, humorless expressions on their faces—just hoping—just praying—that they wouldn’t bust on the next card they were dealt. Yeah, gambling was a lot of fun.
Mahoney presented himself at the security desk and said he had an appointment with Ted Allen. Mahoney could tell the guard thought it pretty unlikely that someone dressed like Mahoney would have an appointment with the man who ran the casino, but he politely asked Mahoney’s name.
“Just say it’s Molly’s dad,” Mahoney said.
Mahoney wasn’t surprised that the security guard didn’t recognize him, and that had little to do with his half-assed disguise. Although he’d been on the political stage for decades—posing with presidents at news conferences, making guest appearances on TV shows, not to mention having been the Speaker of the House for more years than he could remember—he knew that half the people in the country didn’t pay enough attention to national politics to recognize him. Hell, half the people in the country didn’t even bother to vote.
Five minutes later Mahoney was ushered into a penthouse office. Through the windows he could see the ocean to the east, but not the ugly low-rent district to the west. He figured he might be high enough to see England on a clear day.
Ted Allen turned out to be a pretty-boy with reddish blond hair and chiseled features, and he introduced himself as the CEO of Indigo Gaming, Inc. Mahoney had a hard time believing that anyone would make this arrogant young squirt the chief of anything.
“Would you like a drink, sir?” Ted asked.
“No,” Mahoney said. He wanted a drink—actually he needed a drink—but he wasn’t going to drink with this guy. “What I want is to hear what you have to say about my daughter, and I wanna hear it quick.”
“Okay,” Ted said. He paused a beat, then said, “Molly owes me—the casino, that is—one hundred and nine thousand dollars for gambling losses.”
Mahoney didn’t say anything; Preston Whitman had already told him this.
“She likes to play craps,” Ted said. “Not usually a woman’s game, but . . .” Ted made a gesture indicating to-each-her-own-poison. “She’s been a regular here for about a year, a good customer, so when she came to me one day and asked me to extend her some credit, and considering who her father was, I decided to accommodate her. In retrospect, not one of my wiser decisions.”
Bullshit, Mahoney thought. She didn’t come to him; he went to her. He saw she was losing and running out of money, and he offered Eve the apple. And he did it because of who Mahoney was. Like most people, Ted Allen figured Mahoney was wealthy—which, at the moment, he wasn’t. Ted had thought that Mahoney would pay off his daughter’s debt to avoid the embarrassment, which he probably would have, scraping up the money somehow, if he had known about her problem.
“A hundred thousand’s a fairly large number,” Ted said, “but not an insurmountable one. Unfortunately, Molly has significantly compounded her problem.”
“And how did she do that?” Mahoney said. He just wanted to smack this guy.
“When she said she couldn’t pay the hundred she owed, I said I was going to have to discuss the situation with you, and that’s when she came to me with a proposal.”
“A proposal?”
“Yes. She told me she had information on a particular stock—a stock for some company that makes batteries—and that if I would loan her just a bit more, I’d get back all she owed.”
Oh, Jesus.
“Molly’s an intelligent, educated woman,” Ted said, “and she made a very effective presentation. She had charts, historical performance data. That sort of thing.” He glanced over at
the university diplomas on his wall, letting Mahoney know that he was a man who could appreciate a well-reasoned business proposition. “She was very persuasive and I was quite impressed.
“Molly figured the stock’s price would rise anywhere from twenty to thirty percent. That’s quite a bump. So I loaned her two hundred and fifty thousand so she could invest it and pay down her debt, and gave her another two fifty to invest for the casino. Twenty percent on two hundred and fifty grand would not be a bad day’s work.”
“You’re saying that you knowingly abetted my daughter in an illegal insider trading scheme.”
Ted gave a little shrug. “I’m not a lawyer, Mr. Mahoney. I didn’t know that your daughter was doing anything illegal.”
“Bullshit,” Mahoney said. He was also thinking that if Molly’s scheme had worked, Ted would have used her over and over again in the future to do the same thing. He would have had his hooks into her for life.
“Be that as it may,” Ted said. “Right now I have a problem: my half million dollars has been frozen by the government—and I want it back.”
“Tough shit,” Mahoney said. He also noticed that Ted hadn’t said anything about consolidating Molly’s debts and giving her a low interest loan, as Preston Whitman had said he would.
“The other problem I have,” Ted said as if Mahoney had spoken, “is that someplace down the line Molly may think it’s a good idea to implicate me in this crime for which she’s been arrested. And that’s why I thought we should have this little chat. To make sure that Molly—and you—understand that if she was to do such a thing it could have some very grave consequences. For one thing, Molly’s gambling problem would become public knowledge, but that would be the least of her problems.”
“Are you threatening my . . .”
“You see, Mr. Mahoney, there’s no way to prove that I gave her the money. The money was direct-deposited to her account by a late associate of mine and there’s no banking trail leading to him, much less to me. But . . . well, I think my next point would be best illustrated by a small demonstration.”