The Revenge of Liam McGrew: A Dermot Sparhawk Mystery

by Tom MacDonald

  I sat on a weight bench. “Can we coerce a judge?”

  “What?”

  “Halloran must have enemies,” I said. “You don’t get to where he got without burning a few people along the way.”

  “Let’s suppose he has enemies,” Kenny said. “What does that have to do with coercing a judge?”

  “The heist is a federal case,” I said. “The Treasury Department is involved.”

  “It is a federal case.” Kenny agreed. “Treasury is my client.”

  “Who would prosecute this type of case?” I asked.

  “The US Attorney’s Office in Boston,” Kenny answered.

  “You must know people in the US Attorney’s Office.”

  “I do.” Kenny sat next to me on the bench. “I’m familiar with Maddy Savitz.”

  “The US Attorney in Boston?” I said.

  “The US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.” Kenny got off the bench and squatted low, leaning his back against the wall. “I don’t know Maddy personally, but I can reach out to her through a connection.”

  “Can you set up a meeting with her?” I asked.

  “Why?” Kenny looked up from where he sat.

  “So we can ask her if there’s a federal judge who will say he’s issuing a search warrant. The judge doesn’t have to actually issue one, just start the process.”

  Kenny got up from his haunches and walked around the room with his hands on his hips, probably wondering why he ever asked to partner with me that day in police headquarters. He stopped in front of me. “Let me see if I have this straight. You want me to set up a meeting with the US Attorney so we can ask her to file papers for a bogus search warrant against Halloran?”

  “The worst she can say is no,” I said.

  “You don’t get it, Dermot. You don’t know how it works.”

  “I know exactly how it works.” I got off the bench and stood next to him. “If Maddy Savitz and Halloran are enemies, she will go after him. Whether for a federal crime or simple revenge, she’ll go after him.”

  “To use your logic,” Kenny countered, “if Maddy Savitz is aligned with Halloran, he gets warned and we get nothing.”

  He had a point.

  “Do some checking around,” I said. “Find out if Maddy and Halloran are friends.”

  “It won’t be easy to find out,” he said. “Nothing ever is in politics.”

  “Find out what you can and we’ll go from there,” I said.

  “I don’t know.” Kenny rolled his neck, except he wasn’t rolling his neck, he was shaking his head. “We’ll never get a search warrant, not a chance.”

  Was he listening to what I said?

  “I don’t care about getting a search warrant,” I said. “I just want Halloran to think we’re getting one.”

  §

  I sat on a bench in Peter Looney Park and watched the kids shooting baskets as their coaches offered pointers. Dip the knees, keep the head up, follow through. They were the same pointers I heard growing up. One of the kids got the hang of it and sank five jumpers in a row. My cell phone rang. It was Kenny Bowen.

  “You are not going to believe this, Dermot. Maddy Savitz wants to meet with you tonight at six o’clock.”

  “Will you be there?” I asked.

  “She wants to meet with you alone at her office,” he said.

  “You have some serious pull, Kenny.”

  “It’s all about Halloran,” Kenny said. “Just the mention of his name got you the meeting. Now it’s up to you. In the meantime I’ll be at the O’Neill Building talking to my clients in Treasury. Maybe we can team up with Maddy on this one.”

  I had two hours to prepare for a meeting with US Attorney Maddy Savitz. I knew nothing about her, not what she looked like, not why she agreed to see me. It was time to get to work.

  I drove to Glooscap’s house and found Buck Louis studying in the three-season porch that faced the tracks. A commuter train tore south, highballing for Quincy, Braintree, and beyond. The conductor blew the whistle at the Victory Road overpass and Sleddog answered with a howl. I knocked on the door and Buck looked up, his brown eyes focused, his dark brow crunched in concentration.

  “Dermot,” he said, laying down his pen.

  “I need your help, Buck.”

  §

  The US Attorney’s Office is located on the ninth floor of the Moakley Courthouse, a newer building that sits on a choice lot facing Boston Harbor. I got through security without a snag and saw Maddy Savitz waiting on the other side of the lobby. She wasn’t hard to spot, with her long chestnut hair reaching halfway down her back. Her enormous brown eyes followed me across the foyer as I moved toward her. She wore a dove gray skirt and a French blue blouse that was open at the neck, all topped off with a string of white pearls. And then I saw the saddest sight I had seen all week, a wedding ring on her finger. Oh, well.

  “Mister Sparhawk?” she said.

  “Call me Dermot.”

  “And you can call me Maddy. Let’s take the elevator to my office.” She led the way. “I usually walk the nine flights, but I heard you’d been shot in the leg.”

  “Both legs,” I said, in a play for sympathy. I regretted it as soon as I said it.

  “I also heard about your college football injury.” Maddy pressed the up button and looked at her watch. “Is it true that you are still hobbled by it, the football knee?”

  “My playing days are long over, brief as they were.”

  She had looks, smarts, charm, and the ability to win over a person inside of a second. She’d be unstoppable if she ran for public office, a shoo-in as the pundits say. And it was evident that the research Maddy had done on me dwarfed the research Buck and I had done on her. That’s why she’s a US Attorney, she leaves nothing to chance. The elevator doors opened with a ping.

  We went into her office, a commodious space with direct water views. On one wall was a framed picture of Maddy at the Holocaust Memorial in Boston. She was pointing to an etched number on one of the glass towers, a somber look on her face. On a different wall hung a happier photo, Maddy smiling with Boston Bruins star Patrice Bergeron. They were holding the Stanley Cup and slapping a high five. Maddy closed the door and invited me to have a seat. She rolled a chair out from behind her desk and sat next to me, no barriers between us.

  “I know the basics of the heist at the Hynes,” she said. “Make your case and I’ll make my decision.”

  “Just like that?”

  “We work fast in this office,” she replied.

  “I guess you do.” So I got right to it. “A man named Halloran orchestrated the Hynes robbery. He hired a team to pull it off, but he masterminded it. I can’t prove any of this, of course, but I know he did it.”

  “You sound confident.”

  “I’ve dealt with Halloran in the past,” I said. “His modus operandi at the Hynes was the same as another big crime he arranged years ago.”

  “You also sound obsessive,” she noted. “Are you motivated by revenge, perhaps? Does payback play a role in your fervor to bring down Halloran?”

  “Yes, it does,” I said. “I hate him.”

  “You hate him?” She laughed. “Well, at least you’re honest. Back to the robbery, the person who engineered the job had ample resources. We know this because a private security firm named Ironclad left the door open for the thieves to walk in. They were bought off to look the other way. The owner of Ironclad is nowhere to be found.”

  “Privatization at its finest,” I said, “the highest bidder wins, in this case Halloran.”

  “The price for the fix had to be exorbitant,” she said.

  “Thus the man behind the curtain had to be chock-full of money,” I said. “Halloran robbed the place and I want to get him.”

  “I have gleaned that much already.” She half smiled.
“I don’t think I’d want you after me.”

  “I can take Halloran down with your help.”

  Maddy got out of her chair and walked to a small refrigerator in the corner of the office, grabbed two bottles of water, and handed me one.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said. “I can’t act on a hunch.”

  I got up and walked to the windows and watched a tugboat chugging through the inner harbor, riding low with a tank full of diesel.

  “I need a bird dog, Maddy, someone who will scare Halloran from his roost. Once he’s in the open, I can take him down.”

  “How do you propose to scare him from his roost?” she asked.

  “With a search warrant,” I said.

  “You need evidence to get a search warrant.” She joined me at the window and looked out. “A gut feeling doesn’t cut it.”

  “I’m talking about a bogus warrant.” I looked at her against the harbor backdrop. She was even more beautiful up close. “As I understand it, law enforcement agencies will sometimes execute a bogus warrant to check for internal leaks.”

  “Leaks are always a concern,” Maddy agreed.

  “Think of me as a plumber.”

  “What you’re suggesting happens on occasion, staging bogus warrants to safeguard against leaks.”

  “Can you make it happen on this occasion?” I asked, not quite begging. “Can you put a sting into play to nail Halloran?”

  “It’s possible,” she said. “Nothing you discover can be used in court, so I’m not sure why I should go along with it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying ‘What’s in it for me?’”

  “It’s politics, Dermot.”

  “For one thing, you’ll find out if you have any leaky pipes.” I thought about something Kenny said earlier, that as soon as Maddy heard Halloran’s name she agreed to see me. “For another thing, you get a free shot at Halloran with my fist.”

  She smiled when I said that.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  At least she didn’t say no.

  IV.

  The next morning I drove to Halloran’s estate in Weston, the toniest of Boston’s tony suburbs. As I cruised along Boston Post Road, passing some of the most desirable properties in the Commonwealth, I plotted my approach to bring down Halloran. For the plan to work I had to jolt him out of his comfort zone, shake him like a soda can and hope he popped. And then there was Karl Kloosmann, his bodyguard, who could kill a man as easily as stepping on an ant. I had to get Kloosmann on the defensive, too, but that wouldn’t be hard, since he was an imbecile.

  I pulled into a semicircular driveway that looked like the Indianapolis Speedway cut in half and parked under a carport at the front entryway. I rang the bell and waited. To my surprise, Karl Kloosmann answered the door. His massive trapezius muscles bunched on his neck and crept up to his ears, the Incredible Hulk of Weston. I wondered if the dense tissue slowed the blood flow to his brain.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” he said.

  “Promoted to houseboy, Karl?”

  He wore banana yellow pants and a lime green polo shirt. The getup contrasted with his stevedore forearms and tree-trunk torso.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Tell Halloran I need to talk to him.”

  “You don’t give orders.”

  “Tell him it’s about the $100,000 bills.” I stepped past Kloosmann into the shady foyer. “Move your ass, Karl. I don’t have all day.”

  “We’ll settle this later.”

  Kloosmann went deep into the house. Five minutes later he returned and told me to follow him. We walked down a corridor that could be described as a marble airstrip and entered a room with floor-to-ceiling windows. Halloran sat in an oversized leather chair with his legs crossed, a member of the landed gentry in all his glory.

  “Thanks for seeing me, Halloran.” I sat on a couch without being asked. “I’m here to do you a favor.”

  “And what, pray tell, is that, Mr. Sparhawk?” He ran a delicate hand through his styled white hair.

  “I came to collect the $100,000 bills you stole from the World’s Fair of Money.”

  “You are off base as usual, but I suppose I should expect that from a project boy.” He sighed. “I didn’t steal anything. Why don’t you run along home before something untoward happens to you.”

  “You yourself didn’t steal anything, because you don’t have the balls for that, but you set up the heist.” I stretched my arms overhead and made myself at home. “You hired Liam McGrew’s crew to do the job for you, the same crew you hired to rob the museum twenty years ago.”

  “You’re full of shit, Sparhawk,” Kloosmann butted in. “Totally full of it.”

  “You convinced me, Karl. I’m full of it.” I turned to Halloran. “I killed Alroy McGrew, Liam’s grandson. Alroy had a $5,000 bill on him from the heist. I killed a second IRA man named Mac, full name to be determined. Mac was in on the heist, too.”

  “Humor me, Mr. Sparhawk,” Halloran said. “How do you plan to prove that I had anything to do with this alleged heist?”

  “I don’t plan to prove anything,” I said. “I plan to lie. I’m going to the US Attorney’s Office after I’m finished with you, and I’m going to tell her that I saw the sheets of money in your house. I’ll swear to it on an affidavit.”

  “No one’ll believe you,” Kloosmann said. “You’re nobody.”

  “And you’re a gofer, Karl, a trained seal,” I said. “The only reason you eat is you lick Halloran’s ass.”

  “Gofer?” Kloosmann’s face exploded red. He leaped in the air and snapped a karate kick to within an eyelash of my nose. He chopped at imaginary things in the air, shrieking and grunting as his hands flailed away, and then he landed in front of me like a ninja warrior and said, “When this is over, I’m gonna break your back.”

  “Can you hear my teeth chattering?”

  Kloosmann was stupider than I thought. He wasn’t quite retarded, but someday he could be if he smartened up. I said to his boss, “What do you say, Halloran? Save yourself a headache. Hand over the money and keep your freedom.”

  He pursed his lips as if pondering my offer and stared at me.

  “Get out,” he said.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I said. “The federal marshals will be ringing your bell in the morning, search warrant in hand.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. “Karl, please show Mr. Sparhawk to the door. We are finished here.”

  V.

  I called Kenny Bowen and told him to set the plan in motion at the Treasury Department. I called Maddy Savitz and told her that Halloran was ripe to be rousted from his roost. I called Harraseeket Kid and asked him if the wrecker was ready. Kid assured me it was all set, and we agreed to meet at his garage in an hour.

  When I got there, Kid had the wrecker up on the lift, studying the chassis with the aid of a droplight. He adjusted something and said, “She’s ready to go. All I have to do is attach the plow.”

  “Nice work, Kid.”

  “The camera is set, too. Let me show you.” We went to the parking lot. “My buddy welded a short length of rebar to the top of the plow.”

  “You painted the plow black?”

  “Matte black, so you can’t see it at night. We’re going tonight, right?” Kid went back to the camera talk. “He welded a piece of flatiron to the rebar. Then he attached the camera with steel clamps, nice and secure, ready to film the whole thing.”

  “Will the camera take the thump if we collide?” I asked.

  “If we collide? What’s this ‘if’ stuff? I’m gonna whack the shit out of Halloran, knock him out of his Gucci shoes. And don’t worry about the camera. The camera will take a thump.” Kid grabbed the rebar and shook it. “She’s rock solid, strong as gra
nite ledge. Another thing, Vic Lennox is the cameraman. He knows how to work the remote.”

  A third man?

  “The front seat will be crowded.” I could see that Kid wanted Vic with us. “It’s not a bad idea to have another man along, just in case.”

  “What time do we ambush Halloran?”

  “I’ll meet you here at nine o’clock,” I said.

  “I’ll hitch the plow.”

  VI.

  At noontime Kenny Bowen called me while I was eating a hotdog at Castle Island. I wiped the mustard from my mouth and answered the phone. Kenny vacillated as he spoke.

  “I don’t know, Dermot. I can’t be sure, but I think our little ploy could work.”

  “You’re not exactly brimming with confidence.”

  “Too many moving parts to be confident,” he said. “The success of the trap comes down to the Treasury Department and the US Attorney’s Office. If there’s a leak in either agency, it could work.”

  “What if one of the department heads is on the take? He or she could warn Halloran about the phony search warrant.”

  “See what I mean about moving parts?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is the most interesting case of my career,” Kenny said. “We need a combination of honesty and dishonesty within multiple departments for it to work.”

  “And if there is no leak the plan flops.”

  “That’s right.” Kenny laughed. “Can you believe it? I’m actually hoping the departments are corrupt.”

  Of course Kenny was hoping for that. He wanted to get the reward.

  “If you had to give odds, would you go fifty-fifty?” I asked.

  “More like sixty-forty,” he said, “against.”

  I repeated what Kenny told me to make sure I had it straight.

  “For the plan to work there has to be a leak in either the Treasury Department or the US Attorney’s Office, and the leak has to be at a lower level, because a lower-level worker won’t know the warrant is a trap.”