House Revenge Read online

  John Mahoney had always had the ability to give a rousing speech and he usually did it off the cuff because he was too lazy to prepare a speech and practice it. And the next morning he stood next to Elinore and ripped Sean Callahan a new asshole. He said people like Elinore had rights, and developers like Callahan couldn’t be allowed to violate those rights just so they could get richer. He described Callahan’s harassment campaign against Elinore, cutting off her power and water, trying to force her to move. He said he’d be talking to city officials, like the mayor, to find out why he was allowing Callahan to treat people this way. And the speech worked—at least in the sense that Mahoney came across as a man who cared about the plight of all those like Elinore Dobbs.

  The following day, a spokesman for Callahan read a statement to the media saying that Mahoney was grossly exaggerating Elinore’s situation, and Mr. Callahan deeply resented the implication that he’d done anything illegal. If any vandalism had occurred in Elinore’s building, it had been perpetrated by the criminal element who currently lived in the neighborhood—the sort of people who would migrate elsewhere when Mr. Callahan’s project was complete.

  The spokesman said that, sure, there’d been a few maintenance problems in Elinore’s building. It was an old building, and since most of the tenants had moved out, there was less rent money coming in to pay for maintenance. But there wasn’t any sort of ongoing harassment campaign against an old woman. That was ludicrous. Things just break and it takes time to fix them.

  The spokesman also said that Mr. Callahan had done everything humanly possible to relocate Elinore and her fellow tenants. He’d made very generous offers to buy out their leases and relocate them to apartments much nicer than the ones on Delaney Street. In fact, Ms. Dobbs had been offered two hundred thousand dollars to relocate. For Christ’s sake, how much more generous could Mr. Callahan be?

  Speaking of generosity, the PR flack said, just look at Mr. Callahan’s record, how he and his wife contributed more than two million dollars last year to organizations like Big Brothers, the Boys and Girls Clubs, the YMCA, and Habitat for Humanity. Yeah, the spokesman concluded, Sean Callahan was a good guy and he resented a powerful congressman, for purely political purposes, saying he was otherwise. And by the way, the spokesman said, Mr. Callahan’s project was providing jobs for a whole lot of working folks and, if anything, Elinore Dobbs was taking a paycheck out of those workers’ pockets.

  In short, Callahan’s spokesman sent a message to John Mahoney. The message was: Go fuck yourself.

  And Mahoney responded accordingly. He called the police commissioner and told him if he wanted any more of those federal antiterrorism funds, he’d better get off his fat ass and protect Elinore Dobbs. Mahoney wanted big guys with nightsticks patrolling the neighborhood. He wanted these McNulty clowns who were intimidating the old folks leaned on and leaned on hard.

  He called the secretary of the Treasury and said he wanted Sean Callahan’s crooked development company audited. The secretary informed him that the last director of the IRS had been forced to resign for auditing Republicans to make the Democrats happy. Mahoney’s response was that this wasn’t about partisan politics; in fact, the guy he wanted audited was a registered Democrat. The secretary said, “Man, I don’t know,” to which Mahoney said that maybe it was time to review the secretary’s last trip to Jamaica, the one where he’d flown in a government plane, accompanied by a secretary that everyone knew was his mistress, and then spent the whole time playing golf and hide-the-pickle in his hotel room. “You’re right, Congressman,” the secretary said. “A man like Callahan who would push an old lady around is very likely to be defrauding the government out of its rightful share.”

  Mahoney’s called the chairman of the SEC, saying he wanted Callahan investigated for insider trading. He didn’t know if Callahan was guilty of this particular crime but suspected a man with his money and connections might be. Mahoney, in fact, had been guilty of insider trading many times but as a member of Congress, and despite recent changes to a vaguely worded law called the STOCK Act, he could get away with it. But Callahan couldn’t. So unless the chairman of the SEC wanted to be dragged in front of a House committee to explain why his commission was so damn useless . . .

  He contacted the director of the FBI next, and told him that he wanted the bureau to investigate Elinore’s claim that Callahan’s people had stolen her mail. Stealing mail was, after all, a federal crime. The head of the bureau languidly said, “Not my job, Congressman. You need to talk to the Postal Inspection Service.” Mahoney had never dealt with the Postal Inspection Service in his life. He looked them up on the Internet and found that, yep, they were the guys who investigated if your mail got stolen. They also investigated mailbox destruction, letter bombs, identity theft, lottery fraud, and a whole bunch of other stuff. They had over a thousand inspectors, seventeen field offices, and even had their own forensic laboratory. No wonder the price of stamps kept going up. But when Mahoney learned that the postal service’s top cop had started off his career as a mail carrier in Mississippi, he “imaged” a guy with a wandering eye, in those shorts mailmen wear, one of those white safari hats on his head—and decided not to bother.

  Lastly, Mahoney called the mayor of Boston and the city councilman representing Elinore’s neighborhood. He told them one thing he wanted done immediately was to have the right people inspect Callahan’s project looking for building and safety code violations. He wanted inspectors crawling over Callahan’s development like red-hot ants. He also wanted to know why the civil suits Elinore and other tenants had filed to stop Callahan’s terrorist tactics hadn’t prevailed. He screamed at the mayor, “You tell the useless son of a bitch who’s supposed to keep Callahan from breaking the housing laws to do his goddamn job!”

  The mayor and the councilman said they’d do what they could but their response was noticeably lukewarm. It was apparent to Mahoney that those two jackals were in Callahan’s pocket, either getting a kickback from him or a promise to contribute to their next campaign—and Mahoney couldn’t help but wonder if the mayor might actually be thinking about running against him.

  Two days after meeting with Elinore Dobbs, a disgruntled Mahoney sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair at Logan Airport waiting for his plane to D.C. to board. On one hand, he felt good that he’d done the right thing by siding with Elinore against Callahan. Maybe his reason for siding with her had more to do with pride than anything else—but he’d done the right thing. On the other hand, he had this queasy feeling in his stomach that his next run for the seat he’d held for more than three decades might not be so easy.

  The other thing was, in spite of all the bureaucrats he’d leaned on, Mahoney knew that eventually Callahan was going to win and Elinore was going to lose. There was no way she could hold out for three more years against Callahan. He also knew that after a couple of weeks the media would become bored with the story, if they weren’t bored already. So he needed to do more. He needed to find some way to keep the heat on Callahan, and what he really needed was to find some legal way to stop him from harassing Elinore. Then he thought: Who says it has to be legal?

  He called Mavis, his secretary in D.C. “Track down that lazy bastard DeMarco. He’s probably playing golf. Tell him I want him in my office tomorrow, and to pack a bag. He’s going to Boston.”

  5

  Ray and Roy McNulty were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. Sean Callahan met them when he was in the ninth grade.

  The McNultys were raised by two violent, bigoted drunks, and their mother was just as bad as their father when it came to smacking them around. The smacking stopped when the boys entered their teens and were big enough to fight back. And you never fought one McNulty brother; you always fought them both simultaneously. Their parents got the picture one fine night when the boys sent their dad to the emergency room with a broken nose and dislocated shoulder.

  Their mother, who was morb
idly obese, died of a heart attack when they were seventeen and their father died of lung cancer compounded by liver problems a couple years later. Sean vividly remembered the McNultys weeping at their mother’s funeral. It had been like watching hyenas cry.

  Sean’s parents were nothing like Ray and Roy’s. They were decent people who doted on their only child. Sean’s dad worked for the MBTA as a maintenance man and his mom was a substitute teacher. The problem with them was that they were weak people and Sean learned to manipulate them at an early age. They never approved of Sean being friends with the McNulty brothers, and could never understand why he was their friend. What Sean’s parents didn’t realize was that the McNultys made life interesting for a bored, discontented kid who didn’t have anything better to do.

  Sean wasn’t a good enough athlete to make the first team and he had too much pride to ride the bench. He had no desire to hang around with the losers on the school marching band, the debate team, or the chess club. Nor was he—in those days—cool enough to hang with the A-list kids, most of whom were either athletes or had money coming out their ears.

  So the McNultys filled the vacuum. They introduced young Sean to pool and pinball machines and bowling alleys thick with smoke. They initiated him in the urban sport of shoplifting. (Sean would be the diversion while the McNultys would go through a Kmart like a plague of two locusts.) The McNultys knew older guys who would sell them weed and booze. They also knew girls who would give it away for a six-pack of beer; these same girls would later understand that they were significantly undervaluing a moneymaking asset.

  The amazing thing was that Sean was never arrested for the things he did with the McNulty brothers. He graduated from high school, and went off to college. Ray and Roy were not so fortunate. Ray spent most of his senior year in jail for stealing a car. Roy dropped out of school, as he didn’t like to do anything without his brother.

  Sean met the McNultys at their bar in Revere the day John Mahoney flew back to Washington.

  At the ages of forty-seven and forty-eight respectively, Roy was maybe ten pounds heavier than Ray, and Ray’s hair was disappearing faster than Roy’s, but those differences were barely noticeable. They were both five foot eight, stocky, thick necked, and had the muscles one gets doing forty-pound curls while watching pro wrestling on TV. They had short, broad snouts; small, close-set eyes; lips as thin as knife blades. Their hair was cut within a quarter inch of their knobby skulls and they shaved dark, heavy beards a couple times a week. The easiest way to tell them apart was Ray’s right ear: a piece was missing from the lobe, the piece swallowed by a drunk in a bar fight.

  The brothers were proud of their bar in Revere; in fact, owning a bar was the pinnacle of their ambition. They did wish that their bar was in Charlestown where they’d been raised, and people they knew could say, “Hey, let’s go to Ray and Roy’s place for a beer.” But thanks to developers like their friend, Sean Callahan, they couldn’t afford a bar in Charlestown.

  Sean, however, did “loan” them the down payment to buy their bar for a favor they once did for him, knowing they’d never repay the loan. The bar was called the Shamrock. The brothers desperately wanted to change the name of the place to McNulty’s—never mind where the apostrophe was supposed to go—but they never seemed to have enough cash on hand to afford a new neon sign.

  The Shamrock was the sort of place you see all over America in small towns and in the not-so-classy neighborhoods of large cities: twelve stools in front of a scarred mahogany-stained bar, the stools padded with cracked and split red Naugahyde; four wobbly tables with three or four mismatched chairs per table; a much-abused pool table with cushions so soft you couldn’t make a bank shot. Neon BUDWEISER and MILLER HIGH LIFE signs occupied the two small windows facing the street.

  The previous owner of the Shamrock had been a Boston Celtics fan, and three-decade-old pennants were thumbtacked to the walls, the pennants moldy and curling from age. Prominently and proudly displayed behind the bar was an autographed photo of Larry Bird, arguably the most famous white guy who ever played the game. Had it been Bill Russell’s picture, the McNultys would have removed it the day they bought the place.

  The other thing about the Shamrock was that the McNultys now owned the bar, free and clear. They’d initially gotten a mortgage with a little help from Sean, and struggled every month to make the payment, then a real miracle happened. This was a miracle on par with Moses parting the Red Sea, comparable to Lazarus rising from the dead. An unmarried uncle—and maybe the only McNulty in generations born with a brain in his head—made a lot of money during his lifetime, then died unexpectedly and without a will. The McNultys inherited a hundred and fifty grand from a man they barely knew and thought might be queer, and that was enough to pay off the mortgage on the decrepit, narrow, two-story building in a bad neighborhood in Revere.

  The Shamrock had a regular clientele of maybe twenty people, but most of the time there’d only be two or three customers in the place, old-timers with nothing better to do, alcoholics who went there because it was the closest place to home. The only time the Shamrock did a booming business was the day people got their Social Security checks and St. Paddy’s Day. The main reason the place stayed financially afloat, if just barely, was the McNultys had a lady named Doreen who was, just possibly, tougher than the brothers and she managed the place. To compensate for her irregular salary, they let Doreen live in the small apartment above the bar.

  But the McNultys were perfectly satisfied with the Shamrock the way it was—except for the sign over the door. It may not have been the grandest bar in Beantown, but it was their bar.

  Sean took a seat with Ray and Roy at the back of the main room, near a dartboard that hardly anyone used. The people who patronized the Shamrock rarely had the hand-eye coordination to throw a dart and hit a target. Sean had a draft beer in front of him that he had no intention of drinking; he could see a lipstick smudge on the rim of the glass even as poor as the lighting was. There was only one customer in the place, a guy in his eighties who’d gotten there when the place opened at eleven a.m. and he’d been sipping beer for four hours since then.

  Sean had dressed down for the meeting, wearing a wash-faded golf shirt, old jeans, and running shoes. The McNultys were wearing camo shorts with cargo pockets, white V-necked T-shirts that were tight on their bulging biceps and across their muscular chests, and high-top black tennis shoes without socks.

  “About the old lady,” Sean said. “You gotta back off her for a while. Just leave her alone. Don’t mess with the power or the air-conditioning or anything like that. Thanks to that fuckin’ Mahoney . . .”

  Sean had noticed—he couldn’t help himself—that when he was alone with the McNultys his manner of speech changed: he swore more, tended to drop his g’s, and his boyhood accent emerged, if only slightly.

  “There’ll be cops comin’ around,” Sean continued. “A couple of building and fire inspectors will probably drop by, and even some TV and newspaper guys. But after a week or so, everything will go back to business as usual. But guys, I need that woman out of the building. She’s killin’ me.”

  “What are you sayin’, Sean?” Roy McNulty asked. “We’ve been doin’ everything you told us to do.”

  “I’m saying, do whatever you have to do to get her out of there.”

  “Yeah, but what’s that mean?” Ray asked, his small eyes glittering with amusement. He knew exactly what Sean meant.

  The first time Sean used the McNulty brothers was ten years after he graduated from high school—and he hadn’t seen them once in the intervening ten years. After Sean acquired a business degree and a real estate license, he had the good fortune to be taken under the wing of a man who was a much, much smaller version of what Sean Callahan would later become. Thanks to his mentor, Sean started flipping houses and buying properties that were later torn down to make way for more upscale residences. Then he took a major risk, and inv
ested everything he had in a development where he made his first million. Sean Callahan was the American Dream: he came from a middle-class family, and thanks to brains, hard work, and ambition, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But nineteen years ago, at the time of his ten-year high school reunion, he’d had a problem.

  He attended the reunion that year mainly to show off: At the age of twenty-eight, he was certain he was worth more than any other man in the room. He was accompanied by his second wife, Adele, who was only twenty-three at the time and as lovely as any starlet likely to grace the red carpet on Oscar night. Sean was surprised to see the McNultys at the reunion, as they hadn’t graduated. He figured they hadn’t been invited, but found out about it, and no one had the balls to tell them to leave. And as soon as he saw them, he decided they were the right guys to solve the problem he had.

  The McNultys were standing alone by the punch bowl; everyone attending the function was doing their best to pretend they weren’t even there. They were dressed in sport jackets that were too tight across the back and too short in the sleeves, polyester slacks, and black shoes so shiny they looked like they were made from plastic. Sean figured they came to the reunion just to see him; they’d had no other friends in high school, and there were at least half a dozen men at the reunion who the McNultys had kicked the crap out of when they were teenagers.

  Sean and his new bride had been talking to another couple—a couple who’d been the homecoming queen and king his senior year; the woman had really packed on the pounds—when he saw the McNultys by the punch bowl. After thinking about it for a couple of moments, he told his wife and the other couple that he’d be right back, and walked over to greet Roy and Ray. On his way toward them, he made up his mind about how he was going to act, and when he reached them, he let out a whoop and clutched them in hugs. The McNultys were as startled as everyone else in the room.