House Reckoning: A Joe DeMarco Thriller

by Mike Lawson

  He sat down and drank a toast to Jake’s corpse. He’d grown to like the guy.

  He called the medics, told them there was no rush, then walked up to Mahoney’s office to inform him of Jake’s departure. He was surprised when tears welled up in Mahoney’s eyes. That would not be the last time John Mahoney surprised him.

  Part II

  13

  DeMarco was thinking that this wasn’t a bad way to spend a lovely October afternoon. The guy he was supposed to meet was half an hour late and if he didn’t show up at all, that would be fine with him. The temperature was in the upper sixties, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the turning leaves across the river looked like God’s palette. The beer he was drinking was fresh and cold.

  DeMarco was sitting at an outdoor table at the Washington Harbour. He didn’t know what pretentious snob had stuck the u in harbor. The Harbour was in Georgetown, on the banks of the Potomac River, and consisted of a elliptical-shaped plaza surround by high-end condos and restaurants. It also offered spectacular views of the Kennedy Center, Roosevelt Island, and the Key Bridge. Included with the other spectacular views was a woman sitting at the bar, wearing a skirt that showed off long, shapely legs. She had big-framed sunglasses stuck on top of her head, nested in a mass of red hair. She saw DeMarco looking at her and she smiled at him and he smiled back. Yeah, he’d be perfectly content to spend the entire afternoon sitting right where he was, sipping beer.

  Unfortunately, at that moment he spotted a guy coming toward him and he was guessing this was the guy he was supposed to meet. He was young, in his twenties, with short dark hair. He was carrying a slim briefcase and wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt. On his feet were shiny black lace-up shoes that looked as if they might be part of an army uniform—and they were. The man was a sergeant currently assigned to the Pentagon.

  “Are you Mr. DeMarco?” the young guy asked. He was so nervous he looked like he was about to come out of his skin.

  “Yeah,” DeMarco said. “Sit down. And relax.”

  DeMarco had worked for John Mahoney for a long time and he knew his boss was as corrupt as any politician on Capitol Hill. And Mahoney’s corruption sometimes went beyond the typical shenanigans related to campaign financing and preferential treatment given to wealthy constituents. Only the year before, Mahoney, with DeMarco’s help, had undermined three government agencies to get his daughter out from under an insider trading charge—and his daughter had been guilty.

  There were, however, lines that Mahoney would not cross. The problem was that these lines were arbitrarily and inconsistently drawn, and it wasn’t always easy for DeMarco to know where they were placed. One of those lines had to do with veterans. Mahoney was a Vietnam vet and when it came to the proper treatment of veterans, Mahoney would do almost anything—and the national debt be damned.

  The young man sitting with DeMarco—Sergeant Gary McCormack—hailed from Boston, Mahoney’s hometown, and he had sent Mahoney a letter saying that a colonel at the Pentagon was siphoning off money intended for veterans suffering from mental health issues. In terms of Defense Department spending, the amount being pilfered was meager—meaning only a few million—but Mahoney had ordered DeMarco to meet with McCormack and get the evidence he claimed to have. Mahoney wanted some facts before he started firing political artillery shells at the Pentagon.

  McCormack looked around the plaza nervously before he put his briefcase on the table and took out a manila file folder. Before he could open the folder, DeMarco said, “Order a beer. And stop looking like we’re two spies meeting in Red Square. Nobody has a clue you’re here unless you told somebody.”

  It took McCormack twenty minutes to explain the contents of the manila folder as it had to do with the army’s accounting system—a system that appeared to have been designed for the sole purpose of hiding from Congress where the army spent its money. After McCormack left, it took DeMarco about five seconds to decide he should treat himself to another beer. The redhead was still sitting at the bar by herself. The next time she looked over at him—she’d glanced his way half a dozen times—he was going to raise his beer glass and make a why-don’t-you-join-me gesture—and that’s when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID at saw it was a New York area code.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “It’s Tony Benedetto,” the caller said. Tony sounded odd; his voice was scratchy and he was breathing like he’d just run up the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building.

  Tony Benedetto was an old-time mafia guy, now mostly retired, as far as DeMarco knew. He lived in Queens and had worked for Carmine Taliaferro; he’d been there at the funeral mass the day his father was buried. DeMarco had seen Tony less than a year ago to get some information he needed on another mobster in Philadelphia.

  “I need to see you,” Tony said.

  “Why?” DeMarco asked.

  “I know who killed your father.”

  14

  The last time DeMarco had seen Tony Benedetto, they’d been sitting in Tony’s kitchen and Tony had been checking his blood pressure, bragging about what great shape he was in for a seventy-four-year-old. He wasn’t in such great shape now. He was dying.

  He was wearing house slippers and a dark blue jogging suit, the clothing loose on his long frame. He had a big nose and a thin-lipped mouth and was now completely bald —a by-product, DeMarco assumed, of chemo or radiation or whatever medical procedure was being used to keep him alive. DeMarco knew the hair loss had to bother Tony: he’d always been vain about his thick head of hair. He used to have a small paunch, too. Like his hair, the paunch was gone and his face was beginning to take the shape of the skull beneath the skin.

  “Lung cancer,” he told DeMarco. They were sitting in Tony’s living room, Tony in a brown La-Z-Boy that faced a television set too big for the room. There was a green oxygen tank next to the recliner and clear plastic tubing fed the gas to his nose. A sour smell permeated the room, a smell DeMarco couldn’t identify; maybe it was the smell of a man decaying right before his eyes.

  “It seems like everybody I know died from cancer,” Tony said. “My wife, Carmine, Enzo Marciano. Carmine, it was his lungs, too. Enzo got skin cancer, which seems weird for a guy who lived like a vampire.”

  “Tell me what you know about my father,” DeMarco said. He wasn’t in the mood for a stroll down memory lane, nor was he in the mood for commiserating with Tony about his illness.

  Mahoney had been pissed yesterday when DeMarco had told him he was flying to New York the following morning. Mahoney wanted him to pursue the veterans’ scam not only because he genuinely cared about the issue but because it would generate favorable headlines, something that could matter in terms of him continuing to get reelected from his district. As a congressman with a two-year term, Mahoney was always running for reelection. So when DeMarco said it was a family thing and he had to go, Mahoney had said, “Well, can’t it wait a couple of days?” A normal person would have asked: What’s the problem? Can I do anything to help? Not Mahoney. He was too self-centered to care about any problems other than his own.

  “No,” DeMarco had said. As he was closing the door to Mahoney’s office, he heard Mahoney yell, “Hey!” Whatever he had said after that was muffled by the door, and DeMarco knew he was going to get a severe ass chewing the next time he saw his boss.

  “The man who killed your father is a guy named Brian Quinn,” Tony said, pausing every couple of words to get air into his lungs. It was painful watching him talk. “Carmine was the guy who ordered the hit.”

  “What?” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah. And Quinn was a cop at the time. In fact, I guess you could say he still is.”

  While DeMarco was still trying to get his head around the fact that his father’s boss was the one who had him killed, Tony proceeded to tell DeMarco the whole story. He told him about Jerry Kennedy and why Kennedy had to be killed and how Carmine forced Quinn to kill him. He also told DeMarco how Carmine got his hooks into Quinn
in the first place—about a woman seeing Quinn shoot an unarmed man and how the NYPD had covered up the shooting. Lastly, he told him how Carmine had set up Gino DeMarco so Quinn could ambush him.

  It took Tony almost an hour to tell the story because DeMarco kept interrupting to make sure he understood all the details. By the time Tony finished, the old man could barely keep his eyes open, exhausted by the effort of speaking for so long.

  As Tony sat there with his eyes shut, struggling to get air into his ravaged lungs, DeMarco was remembering his father’s funeral and how Carmine Taliaferro had lied to him. “I swear on the heads of my wife and daughter,” Carmine had said when DeMarco asked him if he knew who’d killed his father. He also remembered that Tony had been standing right next to Carmine that day.

  “How long have you known about this?” DeMarco asked.

  Benedetto opened his eyes. “I don’t know, exactly. All the stuff about Quinn sort of came out, bit by bit, over the years. Some I learned from Enzo, some from Carmine. But I didn’t learn about Carmine setting up your dad to be killed until just before Carmine died. At the end, when Carmine was in worse shape than I’m in now, he was taking lots of drugs for the pain, and I’m not even sure he knew what he was saying half the time.”

  Carmine Taliaferro had died eight years ago at the age of eighty-two—which meant that Tony had known about Gino DeMarco’s killer all that time. DeMarco felt like ripping the oxygen tubes out of Tony’s big nose and watching him slowly suffocate.

  “So why’d you decide to tell me now?” DeMarco asked.

  “Aw, you know. It’s time to make things right before I—”

  “Do you know anything else Quinn did for Taliaferro?” DeMarco asked, interrupting Tony. It didn’t really matter why Tony had suddenly grown a conscience, but DeMarco was wondering if there was any way to prove that Quinn had been in collusion with Carmine on other matters. He knew it was pretty unlikely that he’d be able to prove that Quinn had killed his dad.

  “No, nothing for sure,” Tony said. “All I know is, after Jerry Kennedy and your dad were killed, Carmine never had a major problem with the law and he made millions, mostly off dope, and he didn’t share much with anybody else. I just remember we were sitting in a bar one day and Quinn was on the TV, and Carmine laughed and said, ‘I own that mick prick.’”

  “What did he mean?” DeMarco asked.

  “I don’t know what he meant. I just know what he said.”

  “And why was Quinn on television?”

  “He’s on all the time. I thought you’d know who he was as soon as I said his name. Brian Quinn is the commissioner of the NYPD.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me!” DeMarco said. It had never occurred to him that Tony meant that Brian Quinn. It was bad enough to learn that his father’s killer was a cop but now he knew he wasn’t just any cop: he was the most powerful cop in New York.

  “Do you have any idea if Carmine was bribing Quinn?” DeMarco asked. He was thinking that maybe some of Carmine’s money could be traced to Quinn.

  “Maybe, but I doubt it,” Tony said. “Based on what he said about how he owned the guy, it sounded like he was probably blackmailing him or something. But I don’t know for sure. I do know that Carmine didn’t pay people unless he had to.” Before DeMarco could respond, Tony laughed and said, “All the money Carmine had, he still lived in that same little house in Queens just a couple blocks from your mom’s place and I don’t think he bought a new piece of furniture after his wife died. He had a nice place down in Florida, a condo he went to in the winter, but the house in Queens . . . I guess he just didn’t see the point in moving. His daughter ended up with all his money. She and her husband own a bunch a businesses—legit ones, as far as I know—and she’s a big-shot politician now.”

  DeMarco didn’t care about Taliaferro’s daughter, but if she was big in politics it must be something local because he’d never heard of her.

  DeMarco sat for a moment just listening to the sound of Tony breathing, and wondered what he should do next. Only one thing occurred to him. “The woman who saw Quinn shoot that guy in the alley, the paint store guy, is she still alive?” DeMarco asked.

  “As far as I know,” Tony said. “But if you’re thinking you can get her to testify against Quinn, you’re dreaming. I mean, that happened almost twenty years ago. Who’s going to believe her coming forward now and especially when you look at all the things Quinn’s done since then?”

  “What’s the woman’s name?” DeMarco asked.

  “All I remember is Janet something. You’d have to ask Sal Anselmo. I know he’s still alive. He’s just a little older than you. He’s straight now, sells cars out on the island.”

  DeMarco rose to leave. He started to tell Tony that if he wasn’t a frail old man, he’d beat the shit out of him, then figured: Why bother? He turned and headed for the door, but before he reached it, Tony said, “Kid, the only way you’re going to be able to make things right is if you become who your dad was. What I mean is, you’re not going to get Quinn by going after him with some bullshit legal thing. You’re going to have to kill him. You think you got the stones for that?”

  DeMarco didn’t answer. He didn’t know the answer.

  15

  After DeMarco left, Tony wondered if he’d done the right thing telling DeMarco that Quinn had killed his father. Maybe he shouldn’t have, but if somebody had killed his old man, he’d want to know.

  He could tell DeMarco was pissed because he hadn’t told him years ago, right after Carmine died, but at that time there was no way he was going to put himself in a position where some lawyer could subpoena him to testify against Quinn. Now he didn’t care about a subpoena; he’d be dead before they could drag him into a courtroom.

  The other thing was, he’d never liked Quinn—Quinn was a prick—and he had liked Gino DeMarco, although he hadn’t really known him all that well. Gino never had much to do with the rest of the guys on Carmine’s crew; he didn’t drink with them or go with them down to AC to play craps or on those fishing trips they used to take to the Bahamas. If you didn’t know he was Carmine’s button man, you’d think he was a civilian, like a guy punching the clock at a factory. But Tony had respected Gino, and if his kid could cause Quinn problems, that would be sweet. It was a shame that he probably wouldn’t be around to see what happened. The thing was, he didn’t think Joe DeMarco would be able to do anything about Quinn unless he whacked the guy and he doubted, like he’d said to Joe before he left, that he had the stones to do that. But then you never know.

  The phone rang but Tony didn’t reach for it immediately. Talking to DeMarco had just worn his ass out; it felt like he had gone ten rounds with fuckin’ Tyson. If the phone had been across the room he wouldn’t have bothered, but since it was right next to his chair and kept ringing, he reached out slowly and picked it up. He hoped it wasn’t DeMarco calling to ask more questions.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Pop, it’s me. It’s Anthony. I’m in a lot of trouble, Pop.”

  Aw, jeez. That’s the last thing he needed right now.

  Anthony Benedetto Jr. had always been a loser. Tony didn’t know what he and his wife had done wrong, but Junior just didn’t seem to have anything going for him. He wasn’t very bright, and he did awful in school. He didn’t have the size or the athletic ability to play sports. Tony had known teenage girls tougher than his son.

  He’d tried his best to steer the kid into a straight job, but Junior couldn’t to do anything right. For a while, Tony had let him manage an apartment building he had in Woodside—all Junior had to do was collect the rents and call the maintenance guy when something broke—but then Tony had to fire him after he stole all the rent money one month and spent it on dope.

  Junior was a junkie, and had been one since he was fourteen—and he was forty-two now. He was addicted to booze and pills and anything he could snort or smoke, but especially cocaine. Tony had stuck him in treatment places three times but they didn
’t do any good, and after his wife died, Tony just gave up on him.

  “So what’s the goddamn problem this time?” Tony said.

  16

  DeMarco’s head was spinning, his mind flooded with thoughts of his father, with things he hadn’t thought about in almost twenty years.

  As much as he’d loved his father, he had never made any attempt to track down his killer and avenge his death. Partly this was because at the time his father died, he was young and didn’t have either the skills or the connections to do something like that. But there was also another reason. Over time, he had come to accept what the newspapers had said: that Gino DeMarco had been Carmine Taliaferro’s enforcer.

  Joe had called Detective Lynch one time—the detective who had informed him and his mother about his father’s death—and asked Lynch who was feeding the papers this crap that his father was a hit man. Lynch, who he found out worked in Organized Crime, not Homicide, had said that even though he was never able to obtain the evidence needed for a conviction, he knew—he was positive—based on logic, circumstantial evidence, and hearsay testimony, that Gino DeMarco had been a killer. “The only good thing I can say about your old man,” Lynch had told Joe, “was that as near as we can tell, he only whacked other hoods. But he whacked ’em. There’s no doubt about that.” Joe had called Lynch a liar and slammed down the phone—but in his heart, he knew the man hadn’t been lying.

  Joe never forgot one night, when he was about twelve or thirteen. He couldn’t sleep and heard someone down in the basement and discovered it was his dad, wearing just a sleeveless T-shirt, washing his hands in the basement sink. It looked as if he’d cut himself and was washing away the blood from the cut, and lying on the floor was a shirt Joe had given him for Father’s Day splattered with more blood. But Gino didn’t have a cut on his hand.