House Odds (33 page)

“The hell I won’t,” Castiglia growled, apparently deciding to drop the pretense that he was unconnected to Ted’s affairs. Turning to Delray again, Castiglia said, “Can you believe that fuckin’ guy would do something like this?”

Delray didn’t respond.

To DeMarco, he said, “All right. So what do you want, money for telling me this shit? Your dad would have been ashamed of you.”

DeMarco shook his head. “I don’t want your money. I just came here to tell you that John Mahoney wants to talk to you. Privately.”

“Why? Why does he wanna meet with me?” Castiglia said.

“He has a proposition for you, a way for you to get your money back and get his daughter off the hook at the same time.”

48

Neil was sitting at his desk, eating a twenty-four-inch pizza—all by himself—and laughing as he watched something on one of the three computer monitors on his desk. When he saw DeMarco, he said, “Come here. You gotta see this.”

DeMarco helped himself to a slice of pizza and went to stand behind Neil. On the monitor he could see a woman in her fifties dressed in a black bra, black panties, and a black garter belt with black stockings. She did a strange little dance move—like a mamba move without a partner—then took a seat at a makeup table and snorted a line of cocaine. When the drug hit her, she tipped back her head and screamed, “Yo Mama!”—and Neil started laughing again.

“Who is that?” DeMarco asked.

“That is Madame Marie de Villiers. She represents France on the Board of Governors of the World Bank. She’s getting ready to meet her lover, a thirty-nine-year-old ex–soccer player turned embezzler, from Nigeria. Madame de Villiers doesn’t realize it but in addition to getting her hooked on cocaine and cuckolding Madame’s husband—a member of the French parliament, by the way—he’s using her to siphon off approximately fifteen million euros from the bank.”

“You stuck a camera in her bedroom in France?”

“No, on both counts,” Neil said. “She’s in New York and I didn’t sneak a camera into her room. The picture is coming from the camera in her laptop. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not trying to blackmail her. I’m helping some guys from Interpol.”

Neil scared the shit out of DeMarco. George Orwell’s Big Brother was not a bunch of government agents wearing gray suits and fedoras—it was a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt stuffing his face with pizza.

Neil turned off the monitor and said, “Where’s Emma?”

“She’s mad at me.”

“Ooh. You don’t want Emma mad at you.”

“Tell me about it. So what did you find out about Fairchild?”

“I found out,” Neil said, “that he’s a model citizen, a pillar of society, a veritable paragon of virtue.”

“I don’t want to hear that, Neil. I wanna hear that he spent a weekend in Reno screwing a goat.”

“Sorry, Joe.”

“Well, shit.” DeMarco sat there for a moment, sulking, trying to figure what to do next. Finally he said, “So how much do I owe . . .”

“I said the man’s a paragon of virtue, but he has a family.”

DeMarco stared at Neil’s smiling face for a moment. “Why do you do that, Neil? Did you pull the wings off flies when you were a kid?”

Neil’s only response was to increase the width of his smile.

“So what about Fairchild’s family?” DeMarco said.

“He has a daughter, Patricia. She’s now twenty-five years old, happily married, and the mother of two. She sings in the choir at her church. When the girl was sixteen, however, I think she had an abortion.”

“Big Bob’s daughter had an abortion?”

Fairchild was, supposedly, a pro-life champion—a very outspoken champion who placed abortionists in the same category with serial killers.

“Correct,” Neil said.

“How did you find this out?”

“I looked at the family’s medical records, of course. You know, patients had a lot better chance of keeping their medical problems private before doctors started putting every little thing into a computer. Anyway, I was actually looking to see if Fairchild or his spouse had ever had a recurring case of the clap or some other nasty STD, which might mean that Bob had been doing a little fishing off the wrong pier. Unfortunately—for you, that is—Bob’s sexual plumbing appears to be in pristine condition. I did learn that Fairchild’s wife has had more cosmetic surgery than Joan Rivers.”

“Get to the abortion. How do you know his daughter had one?”

“In her medical records, the ones with her regular doctor in Tucson, I noted she had a problem with her uterus.”

“What kind of problem?”

“DeMarco, did you become an OB-GYN when I wasn’t looking? It doesn’t matter what kind, but since I saw the word
uterus,
and since I’m not a doctor either, I called a doctor I know and he said it looked like the girl’s problem might have been related to complications following an abortion.”

“
Might
have been?”

“Right. I also noted that the girl’s regular doctor consulted by phone with a Dr. Aarini Kumur in San Francisco. The records don’t indicate why she consulted with Dr. Kumur, but the good doctor works for Family Planning Associates—an abortion clinic.

“Furthermore, credit card records show that Fairchild’s daughter and his wife were in San Francisco about a week before the two docs talked to each other. So it appears that the girl got knocked up, told her mom, and she and her mother went to San Francisco where the girl had an abortion. A few days later there were complications and the girl went to see her own doctor.”

This was why people tolerated Neil and paid his outrageous fees.

“I couldn’t find any record of payments to the clinic in San Francisco, so I’m guessing they paid with cash instead of using their insurance or a credit card.”

“Does Fairchild know about the abortion?”

“I don’t know. But while his wife and daughter were in California, Fairchild, per the Congressional Record, was in D.C.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t know about it,” DeMarco said. “I don’t think he’d be so vocal on the subject of abortion if he did.”

Neil shrugged. There was no reason to comment on the hypocrisy of politicians.

“Well, this is good, Neil,” DeMarco said. “Anything else.”

“Maybe. Do you remember, it must have been seventeen, eighteen years ago, right before Fairchild’s first term in the House, that he shot a man? He was the Tucson city prosecutor at the time and a mugger attacked him and a woman who worked for him.”

“Yeah, I do remember that. In fact, I think one of the main reasons he was elected was because he’d taken the expression “tough on crime” to a whole new level. So what’s the problem?”

“Well, the woman who was with him . . .”

“You think Fairchild had an affair with her?”

“No, no. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“So what about the woman?”

“A week after the incident, she stopped working for the prosecutor’s office, and other than retail sales jobs during the Christmas season, it appears that she hasn’t worked since. Every month, however, she gets a check for twenty-five hundred dollars. Actually, the check is for two thousand, five hundred and twenty dollars and eighty-three cents—a weird amount—and it’s made out to the Saguaro Cactus Preservation Society.”

“You think she’s being paid off by Fairchild for something?”

“I can’t tell. The check is actually written by the Sinclair Evans Foundation.”

“Sinclair Evans?”

“Fairchild’s wife’s late father. He was a developer, and he didn’t hold environmental organizations in high esteem. He sued the Sierra Club twice in one year. What’s even more ironic is that a group in San Xavier, Arizona, once forced Sinclair Evans to redesign a portion of a hotel he was building because two saguaro cacti would have been destroyed. The saguaro cactus, in case you didn’t know, grows at a rate of about one inch per year, and so when you see one of them big saguaros in some Western movie, them things are a couple hundred years old and folks get all upset if you knock one down.”

“This is fascinating, Neil, but what does this have to do with Bob Fairchild?”

“I don’t know. The Evans Foundation donates buckets of money to all the usual places: Red Cross, United Way, hospitals, research centers for various diseases, but the Saguaro Cactus Preservation Society is the only environmental group. So I just found it odd that this woman gets a monthly check from an organization founded by a guy who would have fed every cactus he ever saw into a wood chipper.”

* * *

Mahoney was exhausted. In the last thirty-six hours he’d been to Pakistan and back. While in Pakistan, he met with the American ambassador and the CIA’s head of station in Islamabad to get an update on the latest developments, then had dinner with the Pakistani prime minister and several of his cabinet members. During dinner, the only drinks served were water and fruit juice. After the dinner, he and the prime minister retired to the prime minister’s home where they smoked Cuban cigars and drank a bottle of Maker’s Mark that Mahoney had brought with him. The prime minister was a strict Muslim until behind closed doors. After the United States’ relationship with Pakistan had been temporarily restored, Mahoney flew back to Washington and when DeMarco rang the doorbell, he answered it.

* * *

DeMarco was surprised that Mahoney had wanted to meet at his condo, because he knew Mary Pat would be there. DeMarco had no idea how much Mahoney had told his wife about Molly’s problems, but he knew for sure that Mahoney had not talked to her about what he was planning with Al Castiglia.

Mary Pat was a person who was almost always cheerful, and more than that, she always seemed serene to DeMarco, content with her place in the universe and confident she could handle whatever cards she was dealt. And having lived with John Mahoney for over forty years, she’d been dealt more than a few bad hands. Tonight, however, she didn’t seem the least bit serene. She sat twisting a Kleenex in her hands and it was apparent that she’d been crying earlier. Mary Pat wasn’t usually a crier, either.

Mahoney began by saying, “You can talk in front of Mary Pat, Joe. I’ve told her everything.” Mahoney was standing behind his wife when he said this, adding vodka to a glass of orange juice, and as he made the statement he looked at DeMarco and shook his head violently.

“I told her all about Molly’s gambling and how she owed Ted Allen a hundred grand until that shithead Fairchild bought her marker. She also knows how Fairchild is twisting my nuts.”

What Mahoney was saying was that Mary Pat did
not
know that Molly was guilty of insider trading and in hock to the Mob for another half million.

Now clear on what he could say in Mary Pat’s presence, DeMarco briefed Mahoney on what he’d learned from Neil, the principal finding being that Fairchild’s daughter had had an abortion. When he finished, Mahoney said, “This is good. What I want you to do . . .

“No!” Mary Pat said. “You will not use this information, John. Do you hear me? That girl is married now and a mother and I won’t allow you to drag her past through the mud.”

“I didn’t say I was going to tell the press,” Mahoney said, “I’ll just threaten Fairchild with that.”

“No,” Mary Pat said.

“Honey, I gotta do something,” Mahoney said. “I can’t let that son of a bitch . . .”

“John, you will leave his daughter out of this. Do you understand? If Fairchild doesn’t know the girl had an abortion when she was sixteen, he doesn’t need to know now. And the press had better not ever hear a word about this. What about this other lead you got, Joe?” Mary Pat said. “This cactus woman?”

“I haven’t followed up on that yet,” DeMarco said. “And it might not pan out, Mary Pat. The woman could be legitimate and the abortion’s a known quantity.”

“Damnit, Joe!” Mary Pat said, slapping her hands on her thighs. “Didn’t you hear what I just told John? I am not going to allow you two to hurt some other woman’s child just because my child’s in trouble. You find some other way to deal with Fairchild.”

It would be a different world, DeMarco thought, if everyone were like Mary Pat.

* * *

Mahoney walked DeMarco to the elevator so he could speak without his wife hearing.

“Delay the meeting with Castiglia,” Mahoney said, “and head on down to Arizona and look into this cactus thing some more.”

“You sure that’s smart?”

“Yeah. Molly’s case doesn’t go to trial for months, and I’ve hired a couple of ex-Capitol cops to watch her in case Ted tries something. More money goin’ down the fuckin’ drain. So go to Arizona and when you get back, I’ll meet with Castiglia.”

The elevator arrived and DeMarco stepped inside. Before the door closed, Mahoney said, “And don’t you dare come back empty-handed, Joe.”

And thank you, sir, for your encouragement and support.

49

Melinda Stowe lived in a trailer park in a suburb of Tucson called Flowing Wells. She had a double-wide; the siding was white and clean, and there were spiky plants near the concrete block steps leading up to her door. Behind her trailer, in an open desert area that didn’t appear to be part of the trailer park, was a single, small saguaro cactus, one no more than three feet high.