The Inside Ring

by Mike Lawson

  “No, and I still don’t.”

  Taliaferro barked his harsh laugh. “Just like your old man. Won’t give a fuckin’ inch, even when you’re the guy who wants the favor.”

  “I may be doing you the favor,” DeMarco said, hoping he was wrong.

  “That’ll be the day. So whadda you want?”

  “I want to know about John Palmeri.”

  “Palmeri! That rat fuck! Why you wanna know about him?”

  Taliaferro’s vehemence surprised DeMarco. Palmeri had obviously fallen out of favor. That was good.

  “I want to know who he’s working for these days,” DeMarco said.

  “If I knew that he wouldn’t be workin’,” Taliaferro said. “Palmeri turned state’s evidence, oh, six, seven years ago. He put three of my people in jail. You remember Schmidt, that skinny kraut who used to keep the books for me?”

  DeMarco nodded.

  “Him and two others. Schmidt died in the slam. I would have gone with them but Palmeri didn’t know enough to get to me. That fuck! They made the shithead disappear.”

  “Who did?”

  “You know, the feds. Put him in witness protection and a good thing for him they did. If they hadn’t, well . . .”

  Taliaferro didn’t complete the sentence. Even on death’s doorstep he wasn’t going to say anything to incriminate himself.

  “Palmeri’s been using the name David Robinson,” DeMarco said, “and he’s been living in Waycross, Georgia.”

  “Georgia? He was down there all this time?”

  “I don’t know how long he was down there. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Georgia. No wonder we couldn’t find him. That’s like livin’ on the fuckin’ moon,” Taliaferro said. “So why you wanna know about Palmeri?”

  DeMarco hesitated. That Palmeri had killed Billy Mattis could mean many things, but one of the things it could mean was that the Mob was somehow involved in the assassination attempt. If that was the case, and they found out DeMarco was poking into it, he could soon be as dead as Billy Mattis.

  But DeMarco knew something Oliver Stone didn’t. Guys like Carmine Taliaferro didn’t even kill cops much less presidents. Crime families were under so much heat these days they’d never do something that stupid—or that big. The Mob didn’t think big. They were about loan sharking and prostitution and stealing crates off the backs of trucks. And drugs, of course. But all their operations were petty, nothing on a grand scale; it was just when added together that they amounted to something. But assassinating a president, no matter what problem the White House was causing them, was not something they would do. At least DeMarco didn’t think so; God help him if he was wrong.

  “Palmeri killed a Secret Service agent in Washington, a man I knew,” DeMarco said. “I’m trying to find out why.”

  “Secret Service? What an idiot. And you’re tryin’ to find Palmeri because this agent was a friend or something?”

  “No, I’m not trying to find him, Mr. Taliaferro. Palmeri’s dead.” DeMarco paused. “I killed him,” he said. He hadn’t wanted to tell Taliaferro that but knew he’d find out anyway.

  “You! Mr. Fuckin’ Civil Service! You killed Johnny Palmeri? If it wasn’t so early I’d pour us a drink.”

  DeMarco said nothing.

  “So why’d ya kill him?” Taliaferro asked, the laughter fading from his dead-man’s eyes.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” DeMarco said. DeMarco knew Taliaferro would get a copy of the police report, maybe even have someone talk to the cops who had interrogated DeMarco, but he wouldn’t find out any more than DeMarco had told the police.

  “No choice,” he said. “You don’t say.”

  DeMarco ignored the disbelief in Taliaferro’s tone. “So are you going to help me or not?” he asked.

  “How can I help you? I told you, he ratted us.”

  DeMarco didn’t say anything; he just stared back at the old man.

  “And anyway, why should I help you? Because of all the favors you’ve done for me over the years? Because you think I owe you something for your old man?”

  “No, not because you owe me anything,” DeMarco said. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Taliaferro laughed. Right thing to do. What bullshit. He sat there a moment studying DeMarco’s face, waiting for him to beg, knowing he wouldn’t. “All right, I’ll make some calls. Leave a number where I can reach you.”

  As DeMarco was leaving, the old man laughed and said to his back, “So Gino’s kid finally made his bones.”

  27

  On the flight back to D.C., DeMarco scanned a copy of The Washington Post to see if Billy’s death had made the papers. He had expected it to be front-page news and was surprised that it wasn’t. He flipped through the paper and finally found the story on page two of the Metro section. The paper only said that a man had been killed by an armed robber while getting cash from a bank machine and that a bystander had intervened and shot the robber. The victim’s name was being withheld, pending notification of his next of kin.

  DeMarco understood what had happened. Billy had been killed about ten last night and the detectives were questioning DeMarco and the two teenagers until almost two a.m. By the time Billy’s wife had been notified and had identified the body, it would have been early morning, maybe later.

  Sometime today, however, Billy’s name would be released and enterprising journalists would connect the name of the dead man with the Secret Service agent guarding the President at Chattooga River. It had been eleven days since Harold Edwards’s body had been found and in that time the press had pretty much accepted the FBI’s position that Edwards had acted alone. But now that Billy Mattis had been killed, DeMarco was guessing that a herd of journalists would stampede over to the Hoover Building and ask if Billy’s death was related to the assassination attempt. The FBI would probably say no—but the conspiracy theories would begin to bloom.

  The good news was that DeMarco was fairly certain by the tone of the article that he wouldn’t likely be hearing from the police again. By now six other murders had already occurred in southeast D.C. and the weary detectives manning that bloody sector had no time to waste on an innocent, if mysterious, bystander.

  THE LIGHT ON his answering machine was blinking when DeMarco entered his home. Four of the five messages were from General Banks, all conveying the same sentiment: get your ass over to my office and tell me what happened to Mattis. DeMarco thought of calling Banks back but decided not to. He’d let Banks stew for a while; it was his fault DeMarco was in this mess.

  The fifth message was from Carmine Taliaferro. DeMarco checked his watch: it was just four hours since he had talked to the dying mobster. Taliaferro’s message was short: “I got what you wanted, you fuckin’ ingrate.”

  “PALMERI WAS WORKING for this jamoke down there in Waycross,” Taliaferro said. “Guy by the name of Junior Custis. Custis controls a percentage of the rackets there—the usual stuff, gambling, hookers, that sorta thing. Small-timer. Anyway, my guy tells me that this Custis used Palmeri for heavy lifting.”

  “Like what?” DeMarco asked.

  “What I gotta do, spell it out for you?”

  “You mean to tell me the Justice Department put a mob killer into the witness protection program, and then lets him keep on killing?”

  Taliaferro laughed. “Hell, it was the only trade the man knew. And maybe Justice didn’t know what he was up to. Palmeri married a gal down there who owns a motel. He was always livin’ off some broad, even when he worked for us. Anyway, he helped her out around the place, so he had a visible source of income.”

  “But the local cops must have known about Palmeri’s connection to Custis.”

  “Maybe, but if they tried to do a records check on him they’d of run up against a wall. Justice don’t tell the FBI who’s in their program—FBI’s got too many leaks—and they sure as hell don’t tell the local cops. As long as Palmeri wasn’t arrested for anything, which he wasn’t, and if
he was careful, which my guy says he was, then Uncle’s right hand, as usual, don’t know what the left hand’s doin’.”

  “Your guy have any idea why Palmeri would have killed a Secret Service agent?”

  “No. Didn’t make any sense to him. Did this agent work down there, maybe trying to bust up Custis’s operation?”

  “No,” DeMarco said, “he wasn’t that kind of agent.”

  “Well my guy also says Palmeri didn’t work exclusively for Custis. He freelanced.”

  “So when he killed this Secret Service agent, he may or may not have been working for Custis?”

  “My guy says no way he was working for Custis. Somebody else hired him to pop your boy.”

  My guy, your boy. Jesus, DeMarco thought. “Can you find out who?”

  “I tried. My guy says Palmeri was always careful when he set something up. The funny thing is he hardly ever left the area and when he did, he never went north, not to any big cities. Probably afraid of being recognized. Whenever he did a job outta Waycross, it was always someplace else in the South—Mississippi, Texas, shit-kicker places like that. Nobody can figure out what that prick was doing in D.C.”

  That meant somebody had paid him a lot, DeMarco thought. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Taliaferro,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Maybe you can return the favor someday.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  Taliaferro laughed. “I wished I was gonna be around awhile longer to see how you turn out. You can’t run from your own blood, Gino’s kid.”

  A PLUMP GRAY-HAIRED woman, concern etched into her normally pleasant features, answered the doorbell. DeMarco displayed his congressional get-him-in-anywhere security pass, pompously stated he was “from the government,” and said he needed to speak with Mrs. Mattis.

  There was a chance Billy might have confided in his wife. Darcy Mattis would be alone now, with no one to protect her. There would be a hole in the place where her heart used to be. Her mind would be numb, thinking if she didn’t think at all, if she simply didn’t acknowledge the news she had been given, it would all go away and her handsome Billy would come home again. And DeMarco, prick that he was, was going to question her in this vulnerable condition.

  The woman looked briefly at DeMarco’s ID, then up at his hard face. “Oh, couldn’t you come back? Please. She’s in a terrible state.”

  “And who are you, ma’am?” DeMarco asked. He needed to make sure the woman wasn’t a Secret Service nursemaid.

  “I’m her next-door neighbor. Dottie Parker. When the police came this morning—five o’clock it was—they came to my house first. They asked if I was a good friend and would I mind staying with her after they told her the news. I said sure, but . . .”

  Now that DeMarco knew she was just a decent citizen, and therefore someone he could run roughshod over, he said, “Ma’am, I need to talk to her right away. It’s important. A government matter.”

  Flustered, Dottie Parker—decent, compassionate Dottie Parker—said, “Oh, sure. Oh, sure. I’m sorry. She’s out back, sitting on the patio. I tried to get her to come in and have some tea but she won’t budge.”

  DeMarco found Darcy Mattis sitting in a folding aluminum chair, wearing jeans and a brown cardigan sweater over a white T-shirt. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. The sweater was two sizes too large for her. The weather was overcast and a bit cool for the season, but not chilly enough to warrant a sweater. DeMarco assumed the sweater was her husband’s, something that would have retained the warmth and smell of him, something to wrap too big about her the way his arms used to do.

  He couldn’t help but think of how she and Billy had looked the last time he had seen them together. They had reminded him then of Hansel and Gretel, hugging in the dank fen of Foggy Bottom, searching for bread crumbs the monsters had swallowed. And now the monsters had swallowed Billy.

  Without waiting to be asked DeMarco pulled a chair close to her and sat down. She didn’t turn her head in his direction until his chair scraped the patio concrete. Her eyes were red-rimmed and ravaged.

  “Mrs. Mattis,” DeMarco said softly, “do you remember me?”

  She nodded her head slowly. “You were here the other night. You made Billy mad.”

  “I’m very sorry about what happened to your husband, Mrs. Mattis. He was a fine man. I wouldn’t be here, intruding at such a time, if it wasn’t important.”

  Seeming not to hear him, she said, “Did you know that bastard killed him for a hundred dollars?”

  “No,” DeMarco said. He had no intention of telling her he had watched her husband die.

  “He never used that bank-machine card. Never. He only had one in case of emergencies, like when he was traveling and needed to get something I forgot to pack, but he never used it around here. Why in God’s name did he stop at that machine last night?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Mattis,” DeMarco said.

  “He fought in wars and he didn’t die. He dies getting money out of a cash machine. God’s a joker.”

  Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and spilled down the contours of her pretty face.

  “Mrs. Mattis, I need to ask you a couple of questions. It concerns—”

  “You thought Billy knew something about what happened at Chattooga River, the day the President was shot.”

  “That’s right,” DeMarco said. “I don’t think Billy did anything wrong,” he lied, “but I think he knew something and was afraid to talk about it.”

  “Billy wasn’t afraid of anything!” Darcy Mattis said. A spark of anger flared in her tear-bleached blue eyes, but the spark died quickly and she went back to staring, dull-eyed, at memories only she could see.

  “Do you know a man named Dale Estep?” DeMarco asked.

  “No.”

  “What about a Maxwell Taylor from Folkston, Georgia?”

  “No. Billy never talked about anyone from down home except his mother. Billy didn’t like his hometown. He only took me there once the whole time we were married.”

  She withdrew inside herself momentarily, perhaps thinking of all the other things she would never do again with her husband.

  “Did Billy’s habits or patterns change at all during the last two months?” DeMarco asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Had he been doing anything recently you thought was unusual or abnormal for him? Did his routine change in any way?” How many different ways could he say it?

  She nodded her head. “He came home late a lot back in June. He hardly ever stayed past his shift when he was in town.”

  “Did he tell you what he was doing?”

  “All he’d say was that he was usin’ the computers at work. Evenings were the best time to use ’em, he said. Less people on the system.”

  “Did he tell you what he was using the computers for?”

  “No. That’s all he ever told me—that he was using the computers—and he only told me that because I was gettin’ mad at him for staying late so much. I couldn’t understand it. Billy and I told each other everything. He never kept anything from me but the last couple months he was so . . . inside himself.” Stifling a sob, she added, “God forgive me, I thought he was having an affair.”

  “But he wouldn’t tell you what was bothering him?”

  “No.”

  “When did this moodiness start?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Was it about the time he was assigned to the President’s security detail?”

  She looked at DeMarco in surprise. “Yeah, I guess it was. I thought he’d be real happy about the assignment, and at first he was, then he acted like he’d been cursed. I figured it was just the responsibility of the job.”

  “But he wouldn’t tell you what was bothering him?”

  “No, I just told you. Why are you askin’ all these questions, anyway? What do you bastards think Billy did?”

  DeMarco ignored her question and said, “Mrs. Mattis,
if he wouldn’t confide in you, is there anyone else he might have talked to if something was troubling him?”

  “No,” she said. She hesitated. “Well, maybe his mom. Billy and his mom were real close.”

  DeMarco remembered Mattis’s phone bill and the large number of calls he had made to his mother in June.

  “Would Billy have confided in Mr. Donnelly?” DeMarco said.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Patrick Donnelly, head of the Secret Service.”

  “No. I doubt he even knew who Billy was.”

  “I was told Mr. Donnelly personally arranged to have Billy assigned to the President’s security team.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe he did. Billy was real surprised he got the assignment. He figured it was because of his record, but he said there were a lot of men senior to him who could have been picked. I don’t know why he was picked but I know he wasn’t friends with Mr. Donnelly.”

  DeMarco was trying to think of something else to ask when she said, “We were thinking about adopting a baby, you know. I couldn’t have children and Billy wanted a little boy. Wanted a boy to go fishin’ with.”

  She hugged herself and the tears came again, rolling slowly down her cheeks and falling like unanswered prayers into her lap. DeMarco couldn’t do this anymore. He stood up and gave her shoulder a clumsy pat, and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mattis. I’m so very sorry.”

  He left her sitting there, huddled in her husband’s sweater, knowing nothing would ever make her warm again.

  28

  DeMarco stepped into Banks’s office and before he even closed the door, Banks screamed, “What the fuck happened to Mattis? What’d you do?”

  DeMarco told him, he told him everything. He discussed the odd connection between Dale Estep and Billy Mattis, Estep’s military record and his skill with a rifle, and the tenuous link to a rich man in Georgia. He spoke of how Mattis had been set up by Estep and killed by John Palmeri.