House Revenge Read online

  As he was talking to Dooley, the McNulty brothers came out of the building and Roy McNulty pointed his finger at DeMarco, a gesture DeMarco interpreted as some sort of juvenile, I’ll-be seeing-you-later threat. DeMarco ignored the gesture and turned his back to them, and just as they were walking past him, he said into the phone, “Got it. The Warren Tavern at eight.”

  9

  The Warren Tavern is in a white clapboard three-story building on Pleasant Street in Charlestown. It was established in 1780 and is supposedly the oldest tavern in Massachusetts; Paul Revere and George Washington had patronized the place. The wooden floor near the front door was made of twelve-inch-wide planks that were painted black—or maybe they were black from people walking on them for the last two centuries. The floor certainly looked old and worn enough that it was possible that George Washington’s boots had trod upon it.

  There was a painting of Old Ironsides—the USS Constitution—on one wall, and one of Paul Revere on another. In the Revere painting, the famous silversmith was holding a metal teapot, presumably one made by his own hands. Behind the bar—which was constructed of ancient-looking four-inch-wide planks polished to a high gloss—was a wide-screen television set showing a soccer game. DeMarco could never understand the appeal of soccer, a bunch of guys running around for an hour and a half and hardly ever scoring. He’d always thought that soccer would be a lot more entertaining if they reduced the number of players to six on a side so someone might score more than one or two goals a game. But, hey, more people on the planet liked the game than baseball and basketball combined, so what did he know?

  DeMarco was dressed in shorts, a Nationals T-shirt, and topsiders without socks; it was too damn hot to wear anything more formal. Dooley and his wife were also wearing shorts, but instead of T-shirts they had on polo shirts with animals on the breast, a little alligator on hers, a little pony on his. Dooley’s wife looked particularly good in shorts. She was tall and slender, and possibly possessed the best thighs in Boston. DeMarco had no idea how Dooley—who was short and tending toward pudginess—had managed to snag such a good-looking woman. DeMarco also had the impression—although maybe it was just his imagination—that Anna Dooley was coming on to him the way she looked into his eyes and patted him on his bare thigh every so often to emphasize whatever she was saying. They spent three hours drinking beer, munching on appetizers, and talking—but devoted no more than thirty minutes to Elinore’s plight.

  Dooley explained that the law was on Elinore’s side—and damn near useless in aiding her. He said under Massachusetts’s law, all landlords owe tenants something called a Warranty of Habitability.

  “This means,” Dooley said, “that a landlord is obligated to keep an apartment in good condition from the time you move in and until you leave.” Furthermore, according to Lawyer Dooley, Sean Callahan was guilty of a “Breach of Quiet Enjoyment.”

  “What the hell’s that?” DeMarco said. “Breach of quiet enjoyment” sounded like you were blocking someone’s view of a sunset.

  “It’s a law,” Dooley said, “that says a landlord can’t interfere with your enjoyment of your apartment and requires him to furnish, among other things, utilities. In other words, the landlord has to provide electrical power and heat and hot water. And when the landlord fails to provide these things, the tenant can sue and ask that his lease be terminated or that the landlord pay back the rent the tenant’s paid.”

  “Elinore doesn’t want to terminate her lease,” DeMarco said.

  “I know,” Dooley said. “So all the court can do is make Callahan pay restitution. That is, he can be forced to pay restitution if Elinore is able to place a value on Callahan’s breach of her quiet enjoyment, which is tough to do. But the biggest problem Elinore has is that time is on Callahan’s side.

  “First, and as I’m sure Elinore has already done, she has to notify her landlord in writing of the ways he’s failed to meet his obligations, then Callahan is allowed a reasonable amount of time to resolve Elinore’s complaints, reasonable being weeks. Then when he fails to resolve her written complaints, Elinore can sue and the court sets a date to hear the case that’s maybe six months later. Meanwhile, Elinore has to live without heat and power. Then the case finally goes to court after Callahan’s lawyers have delayed as long as possible, and the court finds in favor of Elinore and orders Callahan to make restitution and fix the problems. Maybe the court orders him to give Elinore back whatever rent she’s paid—which Callahan, of course, doesn’t give a shit about—then he temporarily restores power and a few weeks later he shuts it off, and Elinore has to go back to court again. Usually what happens is the landlord wears the tenants down and they vacate, happy to accept any kind of settlement they can get.

  “The real problem is that the judge is unlikely to do anything truly onerous to Callahan, such as throw his rich ass in jail. He’ll be given citations that he ignores and fines imposed by the court that don’t bother him one damn bit because once he forces Elinore out, he’s going to make more than enough money to pay whatever fines he gets.”

  “But there must be something that—” DeMarco started to say but Dooley cut in.

  “Let me tell you a story reported in the Globe a couple years ago. There’s a landlord here in Boston who owns a bunch of run-down apartment buildings in Dorchester and Roxbury and he rents mostly to minorities who can’t afford to live anywhere else. This guy—this ­slumlord—is a multimillionaire and he lives in a mansion in an exclusive area in Wellesley. Anyway, in the last ten years, he’s been the defendant in over twenty lawsuits, has been taken to the Boston Housing Court almost a hundred times, and has been cited for over five hundred safety and health code violations.”

  “What kind of violations?” DeMarco asked.

  “Every kind you can think of,” Dooley said. “There are rats and roaches in the apartments. The appliances don’t work. The roofs leak. The wiring isn’t up to code and it’s lucky that none of his places have burned to the ground. And if you did have a fire, you can’t open windows to get to the fire escapes. Anyway, like I said, he’s been cited hundreds of times in a ten-year period and has been to Housing Court so often he should have a courtroom named after him. And do you want to know what the city has done to make this scumbag change his ways?”

  “Yeah,” DeMarco said.

  “He’s been given a grand total of forty thousand bucks in fines, of which he’s paid less than ten percent because his lawyers have managed to get the fines dismissed. He hasn’t spent a single day in jail. So if you think Elinore Dobbs can really cause Callahan a problem, you’re dreaming.”

  “Well, shit,” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah, it’s a shame,” Dooley said. “On the other hand, those old buildings like hers don’t have enough closet space and there often isn’t room for washers and driers inside the units. They usually don’t have more than a couple of electrical outlets in each room so you can’t plug in all your electronics, and the kitchens are so small you can’t even put in a dishwasher. Anna and I certainly don’t want to live in a place like that, so if a landlord wants to attract renters with money, he needs to renovate.”

  “My God,” Anna Dooley said. “Can you even imagine having to wash dishes by hand?”

  The Dooleys were clearly grateful that some developer had remodeled their condo in Charlestown—and they weren’t losing any sleep wondering where the people who used to live there had gone. As for those like Elinore not being able to afford to live in a place like theirs . . .

  “Hey, what can you do?” Dooley said.

  After that they just BS’d, Dooley and DeMarco recounting drunken escapades from law school that sounded better in the retelling than they’d actually been. DeMarco described life in D.C. surrounded by useless politicians, while avoiding talking exactly about what he did for Mahoney. Dooley, without being an ass about it, made it clear that he was a roaring success in his law firm.


  As for Anna Dooley, she worked for a PR firm and it sounded as if she was a roaring success, too. She talked about a couple of her firm’s celebrity clients who sounded like total goofballs. Anna was bright and witty and had a musical laugh—and DeMarco again wondered what could have possessed her to marry Dooley, other than the fact that Dooley was rich and getting richer. No, that wasn’t fair. Dooley was a good guy; DeMarco was just jealous.

  At eleven they parted company, and DeMarco, a bit high from all the Sam Adams Boston Ale he’d consumed, decided to walk around a bit rather than driving immediately back to his hotel. He wanted to get closer to the Breathalyzer legal limit before tackling the congested, confusing streets of Boston, which were hard even for the natives to navigate much less an outsider who was barely sober. He should have taken a taxi to meet the Dooleys, but since he’d paid for a rental car, he figured he’d use it. That was just one more mistake he made that night.

  The temperature had dropped to a bearable number—maybe eighty—and it was pleasant on the streets of Charlestown, where it seemed all the women were young and good-looking. After half an hour of strolling and girl watching, he decided to head back to the garage where he’d parked.

  The garage was on the waterfront, on Constitution Road, three blocks southeast of the Warren Tavern. Vehicles entered the garage via a ramp but there was a gray door to one side of the vehicle ramp with a blue sign that said PEDESTRIAN ENTRANCE. He opened the pedestrian door to find another concrete ramp, one that would accommodate wheelchairs, and started down it. Once he passed through the door he was no longer visible to people on the street or to anyone in the garage on the floor below who might be getting into or out of a car. At any rate, he’d just passed through the door and taken a couple of steps when he heard a sound behind him, like maybe a shoe scraping the concrete. Before he could turn to see who was there, the lights went out.

  10

  DeMarco woke up in the emergency room of a hospital, lying on a gurney, in a space closed off by a curtain. The back of his head had a large, tender knot on it; it felt like someone had hit him with a brick. In fact, his entire face hurt like it had been bricked, and when he tried to move, his ribs on the right side screamed that he should stay still. He thought about trying to stand, but decided not to, and a few minutes later the curtain was pulled back by a dark-complexioned woman wearing black-framed glasses and blue hospital scrubs.

  “Ah, you’re awake again,” she said.

  Again? He didn’t remember being awake the first time. She stepped over to him, took his pulse and blood pressure, then said, “Follow my finger with your eyes.” She moved a slim brown finger back and forth in front of his face to see if the muscles controlling his eyeballs still worked. “Good,” she said. “But we need to get an MRI.”

  “Where am I?” DeMarco asked.

  “Mass General. I’m Dr. Bhaduri. Do you know your name?”

  “What?” DeMarco said.

  “I asked if you know your name.”

  “Yeah, it’s Joe DeMarco.”

  “And can you remember what happened to you?”

  “No. I had drinks with a couple of friends at a place called the Warren Tavern, but I can’t remember anything after that.”

  “It appears you were mugged. Some college kids found you unconscious and were nice enough to call nine-one-one. You have a concussion, which is always a concern. You were also hit or kicked in the face several times, though none of those injuries are significant.”

  “My ribs hurt, too.”

  “We’ll take X-rays,” Dr. Bhaduri said.

  The MRI showed that he had a short hairline crack in his skull that Dr. Bhaduri said would mend in time and wasn’t anything for him to worry about. Easy for her to say since it wasn’t her skull. The X-rays showed that two of his ribs were also cracked, but like the skull fracture, the ribs would mend. When he looked into a mirror, he saw that somebody had used his face for a punching bag. There was a large blue-black bruise on his right cheek and his nose was encrusted with dried blood. He touched his nose and it hurt, but it didn’t appear to be broken. Thankfully, all his teeth were still in his mouth.

  His wallet was missing but he still had his cell phone and his car keys—and it was the car keys that helped him remember: he’d walked into a garage to get his rental car and . . . He didn’t remember what happened after that. It was apparent, however, that someone had hit him on the back of the head with something hard, and then kicked the shit out of him. Because it was a public garage and the streets of Charlestown were full of people at even eleven at night, whoever did it only had time to get in half a dozen kicks or punches before they took his wallet and fled.

  So what happened? Had some opportunistic thief decided to relieve him of his wallet when he stepped into the parking garage? Or was it the McNulty brothers? He remembered the McNultys coming down the steps in front of Elinore’s building as he was telling Dooley that he’d meet him at the Warren Tavern at eight. Did the McNultys go to the tavern, wait for him to come out, follow him to the garage, and beat him senseless? And if so, why?

  He could come up with two answers to that question. A: it was a strategic move on the part of the McNultys. They didn’t want him hanging around, protecting Elinore Dobbs, as his presence made it harder for them to drive her out of her apartment. Or B, the answer he liked better: beating the hell out of him wasn’t at all strategic. The McNultys had just decided to tune him up because he’d threatened them and pissed them off, and because they were a couple of violent morons.

  He called Dooley since he couldn’t think of anyone else to call, and told him what had happened. “Oh, my God!” was Dooley’s reaction. Dooley and his wife came to the emergency room, gave him a ride back to his hotel, and loaned him five hundred bucks since DeMarco didn’t have any money or credit cards. In fact, he needed Dooley’s help to convince the hotel clerk that the battered man standing before him in a bloodstained T-shirt was indeed a registered guest at the Park Plaza even though he didn’t have any ID and had lost the key card to his room, which had been in his wallet. The first thing DeMarco did once inside his room was to cancel his Visa card and tell the Visa folks to express a new one to the hotel. Then he took a long, hot shower and collapsed into bed.

  The next morning—his head throbbing and his ribs aching—he called Mahoney and told him what had happened. Mahoney’s reaction was about what he’d expected.

  “That son of a bitch Callahan,” Mahoney said.

  “I’m not sure Callahan had anything to do with this,” DeMarco said.

  “Sure he did. Those guys work for him. He’s responsible.”

  Mahoney was angry that DeMarco had been attacked, and he was concerned for the health of his faithful employee—but there was something else. DeMarco had seen the movie Gladiator, the one with Russell Crowe, where the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius sent an emissary to negotiate a peace treaty with some barbarian tribe—and the barbarians sent the emissary back to the emperor, tied to his horse, minus his head. And that was Mahoney’s attitude: Mahoney, the emperor, had sent his emissary to Boston and Callahan had tried to send him back without a head. What Callahan had done was an insult to the emperor; DeMarco’s head was a secondary issue.

  After he spoke to Mahoney, DeMarco called Emma. She thought he was calling about Congressmen Sims’s Purple Heart and immediately said, “I got call from a friend at the Pentagon yesterday and—”

  “I almost got my head caved in last night,” DeMarco said.

  “What!”

  “I’m okay,” DeMarco said, and proceeded to tell her what was happening to Elinore Dobbs and what had happened to him.

  “I’ll catch the next plane up there,” Emma said.

  “No, no, that’s not why I called,” DeMarco hastily said. “I just want you to go to my place and get my passport and FedEx it to me so I’ll have some ID to get on a plane when I’m ready to go
home. Also my checkbook so I can get cash.” Emma knew where he hid the spare key to his front door and the code to his security system. “Okay,” she said. “But if you need some help . . . People like this Callahan character make me sick and I like that old lady even though I’ve never met her.”

  DeMarco figured that Callahan and the McNulty brothers should thank their lucky stars that he didn’t ask Emma to come to Boston to help him.

  “By the way, what did you find out about Sims?” DeMarco asked, although Sims was hardly a priority now, and the way he was feeling he really didn’t care.

  “There’s no record of him receiving a Purple Heart,” Emma said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t get one, but the marines keep better records than the other services. I could ask my friend to dig some more, to see if there’s a citation letter in some file or a recommendation written by whoever his CO was at the time, but if she does that she’s going to have to talk to a bunch of people.”

  “Mahoney wouldn’t want that,” DeMarco said.

  “I know. So I’m looking into another way to get more information.”

  “Great,” DeMarco said. He didn’t want to spend any more time talking about Sims. And the way his head was throbbing, he wondered if he qualified for a Purple Heart.

  “Joe, you let me know if you need help up there.”

  “I don’t. I’ve got everything under control.” He didn’t have anything under control but all he wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep some more.

  An hour later, a phone call from Anna Dooley woke him. She wanted to see how he was feeling.

  “I’m okay,” he said, not wanting to sound like a wimp.

  “Well, if you need any succor, let me know.”

  Succor? DeMarco thought he knew what the word meant—support, assistance, help—but there was something sexual about the way she’d said it. At any rate, he was in no condition to be succored in the way she seemed to be offering, so he went back to sleep.