House Reckoning: A Joe DeMarco Thriller Read online

  “Are they protecting him?” Carmine asked.

  “No,” Quinn said. “I mean they don’t have agents or federal marshals guarding him. They figure as long as only a couple people in the U.S. attorney’s office know where he is, he’s safe.”

  “Aren’t they afraid he might split?”

  “No. He doesn’t have any money and he doesn’t have a car and he’s got too many people looking for him. He’s safer in that motel than he would be on the street.”

  “How did you track him down?”

  “I took a couple days off work and started following the most likely attorneys.”

  Carmine nodded. Smart guy.

  Carmine didn’t say anything for a long time. He just stared at Quinn while Quinn glared back at him. The young cop really hated him.

  “I want you to kill him,” Carmine said.

  “Forget it,” Quinn said.

  “Quinn, if you take care of Kennedy, you’ll be all paid up with me. I’ll never contact you again.”

  “And I’m supposed to just take your word for that?”

  “No. I’ll give you the name of the witness who saw you shoot Connors. I’ll also give you the beer can with your fingerprints on it. But the main thing is, you’ll have the name of the witness. You can whack her for all I care. She don’t mean shit to me. But the easiest thing to do is just scare her if she becomes a problem. You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure something out once you have her name.”

  Carmine could now see the gears spinning inside Quinn’s handsome head, analyzing the pros and cons of killing Jerry Kennedy. He was most likely thinking that once he knew the name of the witness, he could do just like Carmine had said and find a way to neutralize her. He was probably also thinking—or maybe rationalizing was a better word—that Jerry Kennedy was scum, not an honest citizen, and he could justify Kennedy’s death at least to himself if not to a judge.

  “Okay,” Quinn said, “I’ll do it. But I don’t ever want to hear from you again.”

  “You won’t,” Carmine said, but he was wondering if it was a bigger sin if you lied inside a church.

  Brian Quinn not only got a law degree from St. John’s University; he also received an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He spent time on high-profile assignments, including a couple of task forces where the NYPD partnered with the feds. He rose through the ranks even faster than Carmine had thought he would. But that was all in the future.

  When the lives of Brian Quinn, Jerry Kennedy, Gino DeMarco, and Carmine Taliaferro crossed, Quinn was only a couple of years older than Gino’s son, Joe.

  5

  Gino didn’t understand why Jerry wanted to see him, but he couldn’t refuse. All Jerry had told him was that he was in big trouble and needed to talk and couldn’t talk on the phone. He told Gino he was staying in a run-down shithole near Poughkeepsie. He also said he was a dead man if Gino told anyone where he was.

  “Oh, and one other thing. Can you bring me a bottle of bourbon? I don’t have a car and there’s no place near here to buy booze. I’m about to crawl out of my skin, I need a drink so bad.”

  The first thing Jerry did as soon as DeMarco stepped into the motel room was take the booze out of his hand and pour himself a drink. After he’d swallowed the first drink, he poured another and said, “You want one?”

  Gino shook his head; he could tell Jerry didn’t want to share the booze, not sure when he’d be able to get more.

  Jerry looked like hell. He was the same age as Gino but looked ten years older because of all the alcohol and cigarettes, and because the only exercise he got was shuffling cards. But now he didn’t just look older than he was, he looked like he might be sick, his face that pasty gray color you see in guys who’ve just had heart attacks.

  “Why did you want to see me, Jerry?” Gino asked. “And what are you doing in this place?”

  He told Gino the story, about the bookie he was into for twenty grand and the gangster in Trenton whose heroin he’d lost when he was arrested. The feds were now offering him Witness Protection if he’d tell them everything he knew about Carmine’s operation, and he was going to take the deal.

  “I’ll never be able to pay back the guys I owe money to. And the guy in Trenton . . . He’ll kill me.”

  “Carmine will kill you if you rat him out,” Gino said.

  “Yeah, if I was in a prison he would. Or if I hung around New York. But if the feds set me up in fuckin’ Idaho, Montana, someplace like that, he’ll never find me.”

  Gino wasn’t too sure about that. “What about your family?” he asked.

  Jerry shrugged. “Me and Arlene, we’ve been through for years and my son’s an asshole. I won’t miss him at all. But my daughter, she’s a different story. That’s one of the reasons I called you, Gino. I want you to look out for Julie after I’m gone.”

  “I don’t have the money to take care of your family,” Gino said.

  “I’m not asking you to take care of them. I’m just asking you to keep tabs on Julie, and if she needs something and if you can do it, I’d like you to help her out.”

  “Sure,” Gino said. He was the girl’s godfather, after all.

  “The other thing I wanted you to know, and it’s the main reason I called you, is I swear I’m not going to tell the feds anything about you.”

  “What are you saying, Jerry? Are you worried I might kill you?”

  “Yeah, I am. I mean, I know you wouldn’t want to but if you thought I was going to give them something that would land you in jail, then I think you probably would. You wouldn’t have a choice. So I’m telling you, right now, I’m not going to say a word about you. You’re safe.”

  “But Carmine isn’t,” Gino said.

  Jerry shrugged again, that New York shrug that said: Hey, what can you do?

  Before Jerry could say anything else, there was a knock on the door and Jerry jumped like a firecracker had gone off in the room. He hissed at Gino, “Did anyone follow you here?”

  “No.”

  Jerry went to the door and yelled, “Who is it?” The motel room door didn’t have a peephole.

  “John Tallman. Clerk for Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Mayhew.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just want to give you some papers from Mr. Mayhew. It’s about your relocation, Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Mayhew wanted you to have them tonight so he could talk to you about them tomorrow. Now please open the door.”

  Jerry waved Gino toward the bathroom, and Gino went inside and closed the door. A moment later he heard a shot.

  Without thinking, Gino pulled his .38 and jerked open the bathroom door. Jerry was on the floor and a man was standing in the doorway holding a revolver, also a .38. As soon as the man saw Gino, he fired at him and Gino fired back. They both missed.

  The man who’d shot Jerry took off running. Gino went to his friend and knelt down and checked for a pulse. Jerry was dead. He stepped over the body and went after the shooter, but the shooter had already reached his car. Gino fired again and blew out the back window of the shooter’s Dodge but missed the driver. He did get the last four digits of the license plate.

  Gino looked around to see if any of the motel’s other lodgers had come out of their rooms to investigate, but none of them had. The crummy motel only had six units and he didn’t see a light on in any of them. He wondered if the feds had rented all the rooms to protect Jerry. Whatever the case, he didn’t see anybody who might have seen him. He went back to Jerry’s room, wiped his prints off the bathroom doorknob, and picked up the bourbon bottle, which was the only other thing in the room he’d touched.

  On his way back to Queens, he stopped at a pay phone and called Carmine. “I need to talk to you. Tonight.”

  “Why?”

  Carmine had to know that whatever Gino wanted to talk about had to be damn important because protocol demanded that he go through Enzo Marciano if he had something to pass on to the boss.

  “Not over the phone,” Gino said.


  “Okay. I’ll meet you at the place with Sinatra’s picture.”

  There were a million places in New York with Sinatra’s picture, but Gino knew where he meant.

  Gino was sitting at a table with a beer in front of him but it didn’t look as if he’d taken a drink. He’d probably just ordered the beer to keep the waitress from bugging him. Carmine ordered a sambuca, and after it arrived, he said, “So what is it?”

  “Somebody killed Jerry Kennedy tonight and I want to know if you ordered the hit.”

  “What!” Carmine said. He wasn’t pretending to be shocked—he was shocked. First that Quinn had dealt with Kennedy so quickly, but even more shocked that Gino knew Kennedy was dead. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “Who killed him? I haven’t seen the damn guy for a while, but I figured he was on a bender. And how the hell do you know he’s dead?”

  So Gino told Carmine what Carmine already knew: that Kennedy owed money to a bookie, lost two kilos of heroin belonging to a gangster in Trenton, and the feds had stashed him in a motel outside Poughkeepsie, where they’d been trying to sweat information out of him. The part that was a surprise to Carmine was that Kennedy had called Gino and asked Gino to come see him.

  “Why did he want to see you?” Carmine asked.

  “Because he wanted me to look out for his daughter after he went into Witness Protection. And because he was afraid I might kill him if I thought he was going to testify against me, and he wanted me to know that he wouldn’t.”

  “Then some guy just knocks on the door and shoots him?” Carmine said.

  “Yeah, a young guy, a kid in his twenties. And I want to know if you sent him.”

  Carmine pretended to get pissed. “Hey! If I had decided to kill him—and I would have if I’d known he was gonna rat me out—then that would be my business. I’ve put up with a lot of your shit over the years, but don’t you go forgetting who I am.”

  DeMarco, the bastard, just stared at him.

  “Anyway, I didn’t order the hit. I already told you I had no idea Kennedy had been arrested. Maybe the guy who killed him worked for the guy whose dope Kennedy lost. You know, the guy from Trenton.”

  He watched Gino absorb the lie—and he thought Gino believed him.

  “Okay,” Gino said, “and I apologize for . . . for insulting you.”

  Bullshit, he was apologizing.

  “But I’m gonna find out who it was,” Gino said. “I saw him clear as a bell and I got most of his license plate. I’ll find him.”

  Goddamnit, Carmine had thought at the time. He probably will find him. Gino didn’t own a bunch of cops and bureaucrats the way Carmine did, but he was smart, stubborn, and resourceful. Yeah, he’d probably find him.

  Carmine drove back home thinking that Brian Quinn might be the unluckiest fucking Irishman on the planet.

  When Carmine got back home after meeting with Gino, his wife told him a man had called, said it was urgent, and to call him back. He called the number, which turned out to be a phone in a restaurant. He didn’t identify himself. All he said was “A guy told me to call this number.”

  “Yeah, I know who you want.” A moment later, Quinn was on the line.

  “I need to talk to you. Right away,” Quinn said.

  Shit. He told his wife he had to leave the house again and she said, “What’s going on? How many girlfriends you got?”

  It was kind of a running joke with them, his wife acting like he had girlfriends all over town, him pretending he did. The truth was, he’d stopped caring about sex years ago.

  He met Quinn at an Indian restaurant near the Queensboro Bridge, a place Carmine was confident nobody he knew would ever visit. Quinn was sitting there drinking some kind of stinky tea, pretending to be calm. He liked that about Quinn, the way he could control his emotions. Quinn got right to the point and told Carmine he’d killed Kennedy, but another man had been with Kennedy.

  “I recognized him,” Quinn said. “I’ve looked at the files our organized crime people have on you . . .”

  Carmine almost smiled at that, picturing Quinn poring over the files, studying him the way he’d studied Quinn.

  “. . . and I know I saw his face in the file. I have a good memory for faces. Tomorrow, I’ll get his name and call you. I need you to make sure he doesn’t talk.”

  Carmine didn’t say anything for a moment. For one thing, Quinn was starting to piss him off, telling him what he needed, like Carmine should give a shit what he needed.

  “I already know who he is,” Carmine said. “I met with him half an hour ago. He came to tell me Kennedy had been killed and that he was going after the guy who killed him.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I did my best to convince him that whoever shot Kennedy probably worked for the guy in Trenton whose dope Kennedy lost.”

  “Good.”

  “No, it’s not good. He saw your face, too, and he got part of your license plate, and Jerry Kennedy was his best friend. I figure in a few days, less than a week, he’ll know who you are. Then he’ll kill you.”

  Quinn didn’t say anything immediately but Carmine saw him squeezing the teacup so hard he was surprised it didn’t crack.

  “What’s his name?” Quinn finally asked.

  When Carmine didn’t answer the question right away, Quinn said, “I’ll get his name from the files tomorrow, so you might as well tell me.”

  “It’s DeMarco,” Carmine said. “Gino DeMarco.”

  And five days later, Enzo came to Carmine’s house while he was feeding his fish and told him that Gino had identified the man who had killed Jerry Kennedy: a young cop named Quinn.

  6

  Joe DeMarco walked into the house and the odor of whatever was cooking in the kitchen made him smile. His mother, an Irish girl who barely knew how to scramble an egg when she first got married, was one of the best Italian cooks in Queens. She was so good that Joe rarely went to Italian restaurants because he knew the food wouldn’t be as good as his mom’s.

  He dropped his bag on the floor by the front door and walked into the kitchen. His mother hadn’t heard him come in, and she was standing at the counter, whacking an onion into small chunks with a big knife, like she was mad at the onion. He could also see her lips moving, talking to somebody who wasn’t there, which would have made him smile if she hadn’t looked so angry. Which meant the imaginary person she was talking to was most likely his father.

  “Hey, Ma,” he said.

  She jumped. “Oh, my God! You’re gonna give me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that.”

  She put down the knife and rushed over and hugged him. “Are you hungry?”

  It seemed like that was the first question she asked every time she saw him, like he’d walked from D.C. to New York, foraging for food on the way.

  “You want me to make you a sandwich?”

  He held her for a moment and looked at her. She was slim but not frail, and there wasn’t that much gray in her hair. But she was starting to look old, older than his dad looked, and they were both the same age. He figured it was fear etching the lines into her face: fear that her husband was going to be arrested one day, fear that he would be killed one day, fear that she wouldn’t be able to support herself when he was gone. And maybe the biggest fear: fear that her only son might be sucked into his father’s world.

  He had seen pictures of her when she was young, before he was born, and she looked like . . . well, like somebody who would be fun. Now there was nothing fun about her, nothing joyful, nothing playful. Now she looked like who she was, a person always knotted up inside, perpetually angry at the man she married, maybe angry at the whole damn world.

  But Joe knew she would never leave his father. Being Catholic was one reason why; the other reason was that she came from a class and generation that equated divorce with failure. More than anything else, however, he knew she still loved his father; he knew this even if she didn’t. No, she’d never leave Gino DeMarco—s
he just wouldn’t ever forgive him for being who he was.

  Joe didn’t feel the way she did about his dad. He loved the man unconditionally.

  When he was young, like when he was eight or nine, he’d ask his mom what his dad did at work and why he didn’t come home some nights, and she’d put him off saying things like “Oh, you know, he just works for a man. He fixes things for him, like the way he fixes things here around the house. And sometimes things have to be fixed at night. Now go clean up your room like I told you.”

  He was ten when he found out his dad worked for Carmine Taliaferro and who Taliaferro was. A kid named Jimmy Moskovey had asked him if his dad was a gangster and if he had gun. “What?” Joe had said. “What are you talking about?” “Well, he works for old man Taliaferro and everyone knows Taliaferro’s a big gangster.” The only thing Joe knew about Mr. Taliaferro at that time was that he was rich and he donated the uniforms for his Little League team. “My dad’s no gangster,” Joe told Jimmy, “and if you ever say that again, I’m gonna punch you.”

  But when he got home from school that afternoon, he asked his mom, “Does dad work for Mr. Taliaferro? Jimmy Moskovey said he’s a gangster.” His mom closed her eyes, like she’d been dreading this moment all her life. Finally she said, “Yes, he works for him but nobody knows for sure what Mr. Taliaferro does. People make up stories about him. And your father isn’t a gangster.” “But what does Dad do for him?” Joe persisted. “He just does stuff, but he doesn’t do anything bad. Now quit pestering me. I’ve got work to do.” His mother had never been much of a liar—she was too blunt and almost always said what was on her mind without caring what the consequences might be—but Joe, even at the age of ten, could tell she was lying. And that night, after his parents thought he was asleep, he could hear his mom yelling at his dad in the kitchen.

  By the time Joe was in his teens, he knew from the neighbors, the newspapers, and the kids in school exactly what Taliaferro did. He was involved in loansharking, prostitution, and drugs. His guys shook down store owners for protection money, hijacked trucks, and fenced stolen goods. He bribed politicians and cops to stay out of the can. He also had his hooks deep into the garbage haulers’ union, meaning everyone in Queens was basically paying him to take away their trash.