13

DeMarco had decided that if he couldn’t use the law to get the McNultys, then he’d use outlaws.

Superintendent O’Rourke had given him the idea when he mentioned that the McNultys occasionally smuggled cigarettes for the Providence mob. But DeMarco wasn’t going to screw around with a crime as benign as depriving the state of Massachusetts of its exorbitant tax on cigarettes. He wanted the brothers in jail until they were old and toothless. Or if not old, he’d be satisfied with toothless, a condition they were likely to achieve when they annoyed the wrong people in prison.

A couple years ago, Mahoney’s middle daughter, Molly, had some trouble with an addiction to both booze and gambling. She was clean now, but as a result of the gambling she got into debt in a major way to a casino boss in Atlantic City, and to get out of debt, she conspired with the casino boss in an insider trading scheme. Then she was arrested. DeMarco was able to keep Molly from going to jail—even though she deserved to go to jail—by turning a mobster in Philly named Al Castiglia against the casino boss. As for the casino boss, well, he just disappeared.

The guy who did the disappearing was one of the scariest people DeMarco had ever met, a man named Delray. Delray—DeMarco didn’t know if that was his first or his last name—was Al Castiglia’s enforcer. He was built like a linebacker, he rarely spoke, and his most distinctive feature was one milk-colored, blind eye; the eye had met the pointy end of a shank while Delray was in prison.

What all this meant was that DeMarco knew a mobster in Philadelphia “that he’d once helped,” and the mobster might now be willing to help him. He checked flights departing Logan and four hours later found himself in the City of Brotherly Love, where he was hoping to launch a plan to destroy two brothers.

DeMarco used a pay phone to call Delray, preferring that there not be a record of him calling a man in Delray’s line of business. The first thing Delray said to him was: “How are your teeth doing?”

One of the odd things about his initial encounter with Delray was at the time he met the man, he was suffering from a cracked tooth, couldn’t get in to see his regular dentist, and Delray had recommended a nephew who was just starting his practice in D.C. So Delray’s nephew was now DeMarco’s dentist. Talk about six degrees of separation.

“My teeth are fine,” DeMarco said. “And I’ve recommended your nephew to all my friends.”

“Yeah, my sister tells me his practice is really growing. So why’d you call?”

“I need to meet with you and your boss.”

Delray picked DeMarco up at his hotel near the Philadelphia airport. Delray had a dark complexion—DeMarco wasn’t sure of his ethnicity—and, as always, was wearing sunglasses. He rarely took the glasses off because of his disfigured right eye. He was dressed casually in lightweight gray slacks and a blue polo shirt. He didn’t say a word to DeMarco during the thirty-minute drive to Al Castiglia’s house; he hadn’t become a chatterbox since DeMarco last saw him.

Castiglia’s house was a sprawling older home in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. The area had not yet been gentrified by greedy developers, and with Castiglia living there, it probably wouldn’t be until he either moved or died. Al Castiglia was no Elinore Dobbs. When Delray rang the doorbell, Castiglia answered the door himself.

Castiglia was a big man and getting bigger as he aged; he was six foot four and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He’d gained weight since the last time DeMarco saw him. He was close to seventy and mostly bald, just a few wispy strands of gray hair remaining on his big head. Because Philadelphia was experiencing the same heat wave as Boston, he was wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt, baggy shorts that reached below his knees, and sandals showing off hairy toes.

“Let’s go down to the basement,” Castiglia said. “It’s cooler down there. I’m starting to believe all that global warming bullshit might be real.”

There was a billiard table in the basement and a seating area with two comfortable old couches positioned for viewing a seventy-inch television screen.

“You want a beer?” Castiglia asked DeMarco.

“Sure,” DeMarco said.

“How ’bout you, Delray?”

Delray shook his head.

Castiglia took two bottles from a refrigerator near the billiard table, and used an opener attached to the refrigerator door to open the beers. He handed one to DeMarco, saying: “They make that right here in Philly.”

The label on the bottle said Kenzinger, a brand DeMarco had never heard of. He took a sip and said, “It’s good.”

“So how’s Mahoney doing?” Castiglia asked.

In order to keep his daughter from going to jail for insider trading, Mahoney had been forced to meet with Castiglia and, for whatever reason, the two men actually liked each other. Maybe that was because there wasn’t that much difference between gangsters and politicians; they just belonged to different gangs.

“He’s pissed that the Republicans still control the House,” DeMarco said, “but other than that, he’s doing fine. And he’s pretty much the reason I’m here. You see, Mahoney met this tough little old lady in Boston.”

DeMarco proceeded to tell Castiglia the tale of Elinore Dobbs, how Callahan and the McNulty brothers were trying to force her to move, and then, the last straw, had made her fall down the stairs.

“This old lady, who was sharper than a tack until this happened, can barely remember her own name now,” DeMarco concluded.

“Those sons of bitches,” Castiglia said. Delray didn’t speak, but he shook his head to convey his opinion of the low-handed thing the McNultys had done—and DeMarco had been counting on this. It had been his experience that almost all men loved their mothers, even the most despicable men. And, by extension, most men tended to care about old ladies because old ladies reminded them of Mom.

“So what do you need from me?” Castiglia asked. “You want me to send someone to Boston to kneecap these assholes.”

“No. I want them in jail, not a hospital or a morgue.”

“Okay,” Castiglia said. “But I’m not exactly in law enforcement.”

No shit, DeMarco almost said. “Do you know anyone in Providence? I mean, someone in your line of business?”

Castiglia shrugged. “I might know a couple guys there.”

“Here’s what I want,” DeMarco said, “and you can name your price as long as it’s not too outrageous. Somebody in Providence uses the McNultys to smuggle cigarettes from Virginia into Boston. They’re not part of the outfit in Providence. They’re just guys they use when they want something transported and don’t want to use their own people for whatever reason.”

Castiglia nodded. “There’s good money in cigarettes and the risk is fairly low. I mean, in terms of jail time.”

“Yeah,” DeMarco said. “But I’m not talking about cigarettes. I want you to buy a crate of automatic weapons. And I mean machine guns. M16s, AR-15s, something like that modified to fire on full automatic. I don’t care if the guns are pieces of shit, but they have to be machine guns. Then I need you to contact whoever it is in Providence that uses the McNultys and . . .”

DeMarco concluded by saying, “The risk to you is almost zero. You won’t have to go near the weapons. And I’ll compensate you and Providence.”

Castiglia finished his beer and said, “You want another one?”

“No, I’m fine,” DeMarco said.

Castiglia opened another Kenzinger and took a long swallow. “You know, it’d probably be cheaper for you to just have these guys whacked. By the time you pay for the guns and me and Providence . . . Well, I’m just saying.”

“I don’t want anyone killed,” DeMarco said. “What they did to that woman, I feel like killing them but . . . I’m just not going to go down that path, if for no other reason than I don’t want to end up as an accomplice to murder. If we do this the way I want, nobody goes to jail but the McNultys. I’ll be satisfied if they spend a long time inside, and when they get there, maybe you can reach out to someone and make their time in prison as uncomfortable as possible.”

“You okay with this, Delray?” Castiglia said.

Delray nodded. “I mean, shit, an old lady. Yeah, I’m okay with this.”

To DeMarco, Castiglia said, “Okay. I’ll call you. It’ll take a couple days to set all this up, and that’s assuming the guy in Providence will go along with it. And then you’re going to have to come up with the money.”

That could be a problem: coming up with the money.

The first thing DeMarco did when he arrived back in Boston was to go see Elinore again. He was hoping to see that she’d improved. When he arrived at her hospital room he found a woman sitting in a chair next to her bed, talking on a cell phone. She frowned when she saw DeMarco.

The woman was in her sixties, thin as a rail, and had dark hair tied back in a severe bun. In fact, severe pretty much described the woman. She was wearing a black dress—something appropriate for a funeral and not the July heat—and with her sharp nose, thin lips, and a face that looked as if it was frozen into a permanent frown, she reminded him of a discontented crow. She ended her call, saying, “I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be in this god-awful city. You’re just going to have to deal with that while I’m gone.”

“Who are you?” she said to DeMarco.

“My name’s Joe DeMarco. Congressman John Mahoney sent me here to help Elinore with the problems she’s having with a developer named Callahan. Who are you?”

“Alice Silverman. I’m Elinore’s daughter.”

DeMarco had given Elinore’s doctor the daughter’s name, and the hospital must have contacted her. He was thinking it was a good thing that Silverman was now in Boston to help her mother—that is, he thought it was a good thing for about two more minutes.

“My mother didn’t tell me anything about some congressman helping her,” Silverman said. “And right now she can’t even remember who I am half the time. I knew she was fighting to stay in her apartment but now . . . Well, she no longer has that problem.”

“What do you mean?” DeMarco said.

“Yesterday, Mr. Callahan offered my mother half a million dollars to vacate her apartment and I accepted his offer.”

“What! Do you have the authority to do that?” DeMarco asked.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes I do. My mother gave me power of attorney a long time ago in case she was incapacitated for any reason. So I’m accepting Mr. Callahan’s offer on her behalf. I’ve also agreed that neither my mother nor I will file a lawsuit against Mr. Callahan for her accident since he’s being so generous.”

“Son of a bitch,” DeMarco muttered.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. So what’s going to happen to her?”

“I’m taking her to live near me in Portsmouth. I’m placing her in an assisted-living facility there. Mr. Callahan said he’d help me relocate her, take care of her furniture and all that.”

“Callahan’s the reason she’s in the hospital,” DeMarco said. “She didn’t have an accident. These two shitheads—”

“I don’t like that sort of language.”

“Like I was saying, these shitheads working for Callahan rigged a trip wire across the stairs, and that’s why your mother fell. They were trying to kill her, and you should never have signed anything agreeing not to sue him. The last thing your mother would have wanted was you accepting his offer.”

Silverman did not take kindly to DeMarco chastising her. “I won’t tolerate you telling me what I should or shouldn’t have signed, and I don’t care who you work for. Now get out of here. My mother needs her rest.”

Ignoring Silverman, DeMarco walked over to stand next to Elinore’s bed. “Elinore, how are you doing?”

Elinore looked up at him, her eyes cloudy and unable to focus. “What did you do with Eli?” she said.

“What?” DeMarco said.

“Eli was her dog. He died fifteen years ago,” Silverman said. “Now leave. Immediately.”

DeMarco felt like punching his fist through a wall. While he’d been in Philadelphia, Callahan had somehow gotten to Elinore’s dour daughter. And although he didn’t know for sure, he figured that Silverman was going to dump her mother into the cheapest assisted-living facility she could find. By the time Elinore recovered enough to manage her own affairs—assuming she ever recovered—Callahan would have cleaned out her apartment and started knocking down the walls so there would be no way that she’d be able to move back in.

He hated to do it, but he called Mahoney. Mahoney went ballistic, screaming so loud DeMarco had to hold the phone a foot from his ear.

When Mahoney finally stopped yelling, DeMarco said, “I’m going to get these guys, boss.”

“How? How in the hell are you going to do that?”

“I’m not going to tell you how on a cell phone, but the McNultys are going to go to jail. Then I’ll deal with Callahan.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Mahoney said. He paused, then added, “Goddamnit, Joe, I sent you up there to help that woman and the next thing you know, she not only loses her apartment, she’s a fucking vegetable. How did you let this happen?”

DeMarco couldn’t believe it: now it was his fault that Elinore had been hurt. But then he thought: Maybe Mahoney is right. Maybe he should have considered the consequences of threatening the McNultys before he threatened them. Whatever the case, he was going to set things right.

DeMarco didn’t have anything useful he could think to do while he waited to hear back from Al Castiglia. He’d been planning to contact a lawyer to initiate a lawsuit against Callahan for Elinore’s injuries—but that option was no longer on the table thanks to Elinore’s daughter.

He called Emma, curious if she’d learned any more about Congressman Sims. She didn’t answer her phone—which was typical of Emma—and he didn’t bother to leave a message.

He called Fitzgerald, the BPD detective, to see if he’d had any luck in tracking down the bum Greg Canyon. He figured that if the cops could find Canyon, then maybe Canyon could be forced to testify that the McNultys had paid him to help injure Elinore or cover up the crime—which would be one more charge to file against the McNultys when the time came to file charges. Fitzgerald, however, said that Canyon was not to be found. DeMarco, who was not in the best of moods, said that Fitzgerald needed to get off his fat ass and find the man—which resulted in he and Fitzgerald getting into a screaming match. The call ended with Fitzgerald saying, “Hey, go fuck yourself.” Then he hung up before DeMarco could say, “No, you go fuck yourself.”

He called Boyer next to see how things were going insofar as stopping work on Callahan’s construction project. The last time he’d spoken to Boyer, he’d been in the process of ratting Callahan out to MassDEP for asbestos removal and soil contamination issues.

Boyer informed him that work on the three-deckers near where he found the steam pipe covered with asbestos residue had been stopped, at least temporarily. “And I haven’t reported the oil tank soil contamination yet,” Boyer said. “I thought I’d wait until Flannery is back to work after the asbestos thing, then I’ll report that one.

“This is actually turning out to be kind of fun. I called two of my buddies, old retired farts like me with nothing better to do, and in the morning we all get together for coffee, then mosey down to the construction site. It’s like a game now, seeing who can spot the most problems. Yesterday, we saw over a dozen fall protection violations and one of my buddies got a video of them on his cell phone. We’ll send that off to OSHA in a day or two. All of us know Flannery, and we want that prick to suffer.”

DeMarco almost told Boyer that Elinore Dobbs had lost her battle with Callahan. Thanks to the McNultys she could no longer live alone, and thanks to her daughter, she was vacating her apartment. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “Good. Keep the heat on him.”

“Uh, there’s one more thing,” Boyer said. “And this doesn’t have anything to do with safety or environmental stuff.”

“Oh, yeah. What’s that?” DeMarco said.

“I noticed yesterday, the guys doing the actual construction work— you know, pouring cement, carpentry, stringing wire— they were mostly white or black. But the guys doing the grunt work, digging with shovels, loading up rubble from the demolition, they were mostly Hispanic.”

“So what?” DeMarco said, then the penny dropped. “You think they might be illegals?”

“Maybe,” Boyer said. “Flannery is supposed to be using union labor, and I doubt these guys are union. But maybe Flannery cut some kind of deal with the unions, or maybe the unions can’t stop him. I don’t know. But the thing is, I could call INS and suggest they might want to have somebody check these guys’ papers.”

DeMarco pondered Boyer’s suggestion for a moment and said, “Leave this alone for now. We’ll keep it in our back pocket.” The truth was, he didn’t want to see a bunch of Hispanic guys hassled just because they were Hispanic and maybe lose their jobs, or worse. But like he’d told Boyer, that was a card they could play later.

That night, DeMarco walked to Fenway a couple hours before the Sox were scheduled to play the Yankees. He paid a scalper an exorbitant amount for a ticket—kings have been ransomed for less—then paid similarly exorbitant amounts for two hot dogs and three beers. But he had the pleasure of watching the Sox whip the Yankees. Any day the Yankees lost was a good day, and there were worse ways to spend a hot summer night in Boston.

Al Castiglia called the next morning as DeMarco was eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The bruise on his right cheek had faded somewhat—although it was still noticeable—but at least he wasn’t forced to sit at a table where he wouldn’t spoil the other diners’ appetites.

“Okay,” Castiglia said. “I got everything lined up if you still want to do this thing. I can get you ten of the items you wanted for eighteen hundred apiece. They’re pieces of shit, but you said that didn’t matter. So that would be eighteen grand, but why don’t we round it up to an even twenty.”

“Round it up?” DeMarco said.

“Yeah. I talked to Providence. The guy in charge doesn’t know your Boston knuckleheads. He’s never heard of them. He checked around and found out that one of his guys used them a couple of times just because they were handy and he had too much else going on. What I’m saying is, Providence doesn’t give a shit about the McNultys and for five, he’s willing to do what you want.”

“Five? For a phone call?”

“Yeah. This might come back on Providence in some way. You can never tell. So five seems reasonable to me.”

“Jesus.”

“And my end, I’m thinking ten.”

“You gotta be—”

“Hey, my guy has to get the money to the guy who has the merchandise. There’s risk in that.”

By “my guy” Castiglia meant Delray. He didn’t want to say his name on the phone.

“He doesn’t have to go anywhere near the merchandise,” DeMarco said. “I already told you that. He can FedEx the money.”

Ignoring DeMarco’s whining, Castiglia continued. “Then he’s gotta fly to Boston and talk with these maniacs. I mean, you told me yourself they were dangerous.”

“They’re dangerous to old ladies, not guys like him. He could handle them if he was on crutches.” And Delray probably could.

“Then there’s my fee for, you know, consultation and coordinating with Providence. None of this could happen if I didn’t have the right connections. Anyway, you add it all up, it comes to thirty-five, which sounds pretty reasonable to me.”

“This is about payback for an old lady,” DeMarco said. “I thought you cared about her?”

“I do care,” Castiglia said. “But business is business.”

DeMarco didn’t say anything for a moment, then said, “Okay. I need to talk to my boss. How soon can the items be where they’re supposed to be?”

“They’ll be there twenty-four hours after you tell me you got the money.”