House Odds (3 page)

Now, that made Ted smile. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. He has a granddaughter and Gleason takes the little girl fishing with him when he’s not drunk and she’s not in school.”

“Perfect,” Ted said.

As Ted had told Greg, he needed something to distract McGruder momentarily, and he needed something to convince him that the casino’s books hadn’t been doctored the way McGruder thought they had. Ted didn’t need a lot of time, just a few days, maybe a week at the outside.

And the good Lord, it seemed, had chosen to drop this poor slob, Gleason, right into his lap.

* * *

Mahoney sat, his chair tilted back, his big feet up on his desk. His tie was undone, his suit jacket off, and he held a tumbler of bourbon in his thick right paw. As he talked to DeMarco he looked out at the National Mall, at the protest in progress.

The protesters were as close to the Capitol as the U.S. Capitol Police would allow them to get, but too far away for DeMarco to read the signs they were holding aloft. It seemed to him that there was always someone on the Mall protesting, that hardly a day went by when some group didn’t exercise its constitutional right to assemble and complain.

“If it was Maggie, I might believe it,” Mahoney was saying. “Even Mitzy, but if Mitzy did something like this, she’d be doing it to save the redwoods or the whales or some fuckin’ thing. But not Molly. Molly . . . She’s my
mouse,
Joe. She’d never do anything like this.”

Mahoney had three daughters: Maggie, Meredith—who went by the nickname Mitzy—and Molly. Maggie, the oldest, was a gorgeous redhead. She was tough, smart, and ambitious—and as tricky as her father if the occasion required it. She was currently an assistant district attorney in Boston, and Mahoney hoped that she’d run for his seat if he ever decided to retire. He and Maggie fought like cats and dogs whenever they were together, but she was clearly Mahoney’s favorite.

Mitzy, the youngest, was a free spirit who refused to be shackled by convention or tradition. She dropped out of college her sophomore year, and since then had hopped from one risky, adventurous job to another. She’d been an avalanche maker on the ski slopes of Colorado; a diver on the Barrier Reef filming white sharks in feeding frenzies; and was the only female member of a team that climbed Annapurna II at a record-setting pace. The last DeMarco had heard she was in the Amazon jungle trying to prevent the extinction of some bird whose sole purpose for living was to shit the seeds of some exotic tree.

Molly was the middle daughter. She was pretty, but not head-spinning, knockout pretty like her sister Maggie. And unlike Mitzy and Maggie, she was quiet. When all three girls were in the same room with Mahoney and his wife, Molly would sit there, a small smile on her face, just listening as her parents and her sisters talked and argued. She couldn’t compete with Maggie’s stories of crime and politics, and no one could match Mitzy’s tales of nearly being killed by sea creatures and hostile climates. It was easy to see why Mahoney called Molly his mouse.

“Why’d she go to work for Reston Tech?” DeMarco asked. He knew Molly had some kind of engineering degree, chemical engineering he thought, but that’s all he knew about her profession.

“She likes that they do cutting-edge design work,” Mahoney said. “That sorta stuff turns her crank. And the outfit she works for is close to D.C., which she also likes, and they pay pretty well.”

“Well enough for her to have half a million dollars to invest?”

Mahoney shook his head. “She makes about a ninety grand a year, and her mother told me that she was saving up to make a down payment on a house, but no way has she saved up half a million. She’s only twenty-six and she’s only been with Reston four years.” Mahoney sighed. “This thing’s making Mary Pat nuts. She wants to blow up the whole fuckin’ government, starting with the SEC. I’m not gonna get a minute’s peace until this is settled. Oh, and she wants to see you.”

“Sure,” DeMarco said. Mary Pat was Mahoney’s faithful, long-suffering wife. She had endured her husband’s countless affairs, his drinking, his selfish nature. She had raised his children, managed his household, and stayed by his side through political thick and thin. DeMarco would walk barefoot on broken glass carrying a Hummer on his back for Mary Pat Mahoney.

“She probably wants to give you a kick in the ass, make sure you’re doing everything you can,” Mahoney said.

DeMarco doubted that. Mary Pat wasn’t the ass-kicking type. On second thought, maybe she was when it came to her children.

“I need to talk to somebody over at the SEC,” DeMarco said. “Somebody other than Kay Kiser.”

“Yeah, ain’t she a pip,” Mahoney muttered.

“And I need to talk to Molly.”

“She’s a basket case right now, but I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming over.”

“Is she staying at your place?”

“No. Her mother told her she should, but she doesn’t want to. Maybe when the press starts camping out on her doorstep she’ll move in with us.”

“What are her other lawyers doing?”

Mahoney’s lips twitched at the word “other.” DeMarco had a law degree, had even passed the Virginia bar, but he’d never practiced law. Instead he’d gone to work for John Mahoney—and then did things for the man that he couldn’t put down on a résumé. Nonetheless, DeMarco thought of himself as a lawyer and it always pissed him off that Mahoney didn’t.

“What they’re doing right now,” Mahoney said, “aside from charging me six hundred bucks an hour, is chucking big paper rocks at the SEC to slow this whole thing down. And if the case goes to trial, they’ll tie Kiser into knots. But it shouldn’t ever get to trial, because Molly didn’t do it.”

He didn’t bother to add:
and it’s your damn job to prove it.

Mahoney brooded for a moment, finished his drink, and set the glass down hard on his desk. “Someone’s framed my daughter, goddamnit. And when I find the son of a bitch . . .”

“I don’t think she was framed,” DeMarco said.

“What! Are you saying . . .”

“Boss, you don’t frame someone with half a million bucks.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m saying that if somebody wanted to frame Molly, I don’t think they would have thrown away half a million to set the hook. Maybe a few grand, but not half a million. I think there’s one of two things going on here. One, somebody’s using Molly for cover or . . .”

“For cover?”

“Yeah. Somebody—maybe somebody in her company—was trying to make a killing in the market just like Kiser thinks, but they did it using Molly’s identity so if anything went wrong she’d get the blame.”

Mahoney nodded. “And two?”

“Two is somebody’s out to get you. To get you, somebody might be willing to write off five hundred grand.”

Mahoney was silent for a moment; it hadn’t occurred to him that he might be the target. “Maybe you’re right,” he finally said. “So you need to get your ass out there and find out what’s going on. You pull out all the stops on this one, Joe. You do whatever you gotta do. You understand?”

What Mahoney meant was that if DeMarco had to break a few laws, Mahoney wouldn’t care. DeMarco also knew that if he got caught breaking those laws that Mahoney wouldn’t care about that either.

DeMarco looked out at the protesters again. Their signs were waving back and forth in unison like they were singing
Michael Row the Boat Ashore
or some similar Kumbaya-ish chant. Maybe, DeMarco thought, he’d stop working for Mahoney and set himself up as a protest facilitator. All these folks would have to do was step off the bus and there he’d be with permits and face paint and signs emblazoned with clever, rhyming slogans. For a little extra, he’d provide straw-stuffed dummies to hang in effigy—and all the dummies would resemble Mahoney.

* * *

Gus Amato drove from Atlantic City to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Gleason lived. He didn’t like to fly—crammed into a seat built for pencil necks and twelve-year-olds, surrounded by people always coughing and sneezing—and he really didn’t like to travel unarmed.

Gleason’s place was even worse than he’d expected: a seven-hundred-square-foot shack that hadn’t seen paint in twenty years, the front lawn a tangled field of dandelions and weeds, and crap just strewn everywhere: beer bottles, an old toilet, a kid’s bike missing a wheel, a rust-covered barbecue tipped over on its side. The only thing that wasn’t broken or rusting was a four-door Ford 250 parked in front of the house. On a trailer attached to the Ford was an old fourteen-foot Boston Whaler, and locked to the transom of the boat was a big, shiny Mercury outboard.

The man who came to the door was in his sixties. The little hair he had was thin and gray, and he had an enormous, bloated belly and the bloodshot eyes of a major boozehound. He was wearing a white wife-beater undershirt that showed off flabby arms and blue jeans stained in several places with rust-colored spots that Gus suspected were dried fish blood. He was six-two, which made him five inches taller than Gus, but the last thing Gus was worried about was this guy’s size.

“What do you want?” he said when he saw Gus. He didn’t say this rudely; more like he was just surprised that anyone would be visiting him.

“You Tom Gleason?” Gus said.

“Yeah. But if you’re selling something . . .”

Gus hit him in the gut and felt his fist sink into four inches of fat. Gleason collapsed in the doorway, retching. “Just wanted to be sure,” Gus said.

Gus dragged Gleason with one hand across the floor and propped him up against a sofa that was a weird green color, like the color of pea soup. As Gleason sat there trying to catch his breath, Gus looked around the house.
Jesus, how could anyone live like this?
He could practically hear the roaches scuttling over the food-encrusted dishes in the sink.

“You able to hear me okay?” Gus asked. He said this because he’d just noticed that Gleason was wearing a hearing aid in each ear; maybe he really did deserve that settlement money he got from the government.

Gleason nodded, still not able to talk.

“Okay. A couple weeks ago, you were supposed to deliver a truckload of fish to Atlantic City that Marco Donatelli’s guys ripped off from Legal Seafoods.”

“I did,” Gleason said.

Gus wagged a finger. “No, no, listen to me. You gotta get your story straight. Like I was saying, you were supposed to deliver this fish but it never made it. You told the casino buyer that the refrigeration system on the truck crapped out and he was dumb enough to believe you. But then, shit, next thing we know, you got a new Ford sittin’ outside your house and new motor for your boat.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gleason said. “I delivered the fish.”

Gus put a hand gently on Gleason’s shoulder. “Tom, I don’t want to have to hit you again. Now, you got a fat little granddaughter. She takes the bus home from school every day, and it drops her off two blocks from your daughter’s place. So what I’m sayin’ is, that if you don’t get this story straight, a couple of Colombian guys—and these guys are fuckin’ animals, Tom—they’re gonna pick her up and . . . Well, I don’t have to tell you, do I? You’ve heard what those people do, sell little girls to perverts, put ’em in porno flicks. I mean, it just makes me sick. So I’m gonna start over, to make sure you understand.”

* * *

DeMarco rapped on the doorframe of an office containing a scarred wooden desk, a high-backed black leather chair behind the desk, four gray metal file cabinets, and two wooden visitors’ chairs. Paper was stacked on every flat surface in the room, including the tops of the file cabinets, the floor, and both visitors’ chairs. Next to the phone was a pile of pink telephone message slips, and there were at least thirty slips in the pile.

Sitting behind the desk was Perry Wallace—a triple-chinned fat man with small, cunning eyes. His hair was shaved close on the sides but left thick on top, making it appear as if someone had glued a muskrat’s hide to his big, round skull. He was as attractive as roadkill. But he was probably the smartest person DeMarco knew and he was definitely the hardest working.

Perry Wallace was John Mahoney’s chief of staff.

Making laws requires work, lots of work, and Mahoney was not a hardworking man. Perry Wallace was the one who did the work. While Mahoney gave speeches and posed with Cub Scouts and veterans, Perry managed Mahoney’s staff and his reelection campaigns. He read every word in the Bible-size bills making their way through the House, did the research to sniff out the bullshit buried in the bills, and did the math to see how much everything would cost. And not only did he toil until the wee hours on Mahoney’s behalf, he knew
everything
. He knew the law and how the federal budget was tallied; he knew the operating rules for Congress, which are harder to interpret than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most important, he knew every Democratic politician in America and how he or she could be used to advance Mahoney’s agenda, whatever that agenda might be.

Wallace’s reaction to DeMarco’s theory—that somebody was using Molly’s legal problems to harm Mahoney—was: “I don’t see it. So she’s convicted of a crime. Big deal. Everybody has kids, and sometimes their kids do stupid things. Mahoney’s numbers wouldn’t dip two points if she went to jail. And if they showed Mary Pat crying while they carted Molly off to jail, his numbers would probably rise two points.”