House Odds (41 page)

Campbell, of course, got completely screwed. He had signed a confession admitting not only to the crimes that he, Praeter, and McGrath had committed but he also took responsibility for Molly’s crimes. But Campbell’s deal was contingent upon him giving testimony leading to the conviction of Rusty McGrath—and so when McGrath disappeared, the only guy left to take the fall was Campbell. If Campbell tried to tell folks a different story—that he really hadn’t had anything to do with Molly and that DeMarco had coerced him into taking the fall for her . . . Well, who was going to believe a man who had already signed a confession? And after Campbell got out of jail—or maybe while he was still in jail—Al Castiglia would most likely get his money, too.

Mahoney’s plan had been brutal. And his only moral justification had been—not that Mahoney felt the need to justify anything—that Molly was his daughter.

It wasn’t that DeMarco felt bad about what happened to Ted Allen and Rusty McGrath, and what was going to happen to Campbell. He didn’t. He didn’t feel badly about that at all. He knew Campbell was a killer, that McGrath had tried to kill both Campbell and his wife, and, although he couldn’t prove it, he knew that Ted Allen had most likely killed as well. So he wasn’t sorry for the misery that these people had brought down upon their heads. What he felt bad about was that he had undermined a decent person like Kay Kiser and corrupted the legal system to save a guilty a person: Molly Mahoney, the lesser evil.

And then Mahoney surprised him. Mahoney was normally too self-centered to be attuned to the feelings of others, but it was as if he knew what DeMarco was thinking.

“By the way,” Mahoney said, “Molly’s going to do the time for what she did, she’s just not gonna do it in a jail cell.”

“What do you mean?” DeMarco said.

“I talked this over with Mary Pat this morning. I . . .”

“You told her Molly was guilty.”

“Yeah. Basically. I mean, I didn’t tell her what happened to Ted or McGrath or any of that stuff. She’d never stand for that; she’d turn
me
in. But I told her that Molly had helped with the insider stuff and the only reason she didn’t go to jail was because I pulled some strings. The funny part was, Mary Pat didn’t act surprised. It was like she’d known for some time that Molly was guilty but was afraid to say it out loud or admit it even to herself. So me and Mary Pat, we sat down with Molly, and Mary Pat told her what she was going to do to make things right. She didn’t give her a choice.”

“What did you decide?” DeMarco asked, and Mahoney told him.

And DeMarco thought:
Yeah, I can live with that.

“But there is one other problem,” DeMarco said.

“Aw, Christ!” Mahoney said. “Now what? Won’t this fuckin’ thing ever end?”

“Kay Kiser resigned from the SEC when Molly got the deal. She might talk to the press.”

“She can talk to them, but that won’t change anything. Not with Campbell’s confession. And Sawyer and the guys at Justice, they aren’t going to admit to anything. But what really bothers me is her resigning. We need people like her, Joe. She’s smart and she’s tough and she’s incorruptible. The government needs her. The country needs her. What does she want? What can we do to make her stay?”

The strange thing was that DeMarco knew that John Mahoney, a man who was corrupt in so many ways himself, actually meant what he’d just said: that the country needed Kay Kiser.

63

Barbara Jane watched the lawyer as he walked away from the pool. He was a few years younger than her, maybe ten, and he was a cutie. She’d told him to come to the house for the meeting, and then told the maid to send him out to the pool when he arrived. She wanted to meet him at the pool because that way she’d be able to wear a bikini and flash her tits at him when she put her top back on.

She was
proud
of those puppies, and every once in a while she liked to take them out for a walk.

She’d told her cute young lawyer that she was divorcing Bob right away, and explained to him that Bob wouldn’t be contesting the divorce in any way. Her lawyer had probably been surprised that she was moving so quickly—Bob had been arrested less than a week ago—but not as surprised as Bob had been. Yep, she’d done nothing but surprise lawyers lately, including dumb ol’ Bob who was a lawyer, too.

What an idiot. He hires a man in his seventies who’d had a stroke to kill Melinda Stowe, and told the man to kill DeMarco as well, because DeMarco had talked to Stowe and made a tape recording. Apparently the killer was supposed to find out where the recording was and destroy it. When DeMarco captured the geezer, it wasn’t long before the cops found out that his gun had been used to kill Stowe and he made a deal and gave up Bob.

She met with Bob briefly after his arrest. She didn’t ask him why he did the dumb thing he did, but he started blubbering about how he wanted the VP job and how he had to get rid of Melinda Stowe because if he didn’t Mahoney would have eventually used the information against him and undermined all his plans. “I figured Orville Rate, being an ex-cop, would have been able to pull it off,” Bob had said.

Then he said: “But we can still get Mahoney. You know, leak the information about the casino canceling his daughter’s marker like we talked about.”

And that’s when she explained to Bob that there wasn’t going to be any
we.
She wasn’t about to have him hanging around her neck like a stinking, dead albatross. She said that as long as he didn’t contest the divorce, she’d pay for his legal costs, which were going to be staggering. But if he did contest the divorce, and since he had barely any money of his own, some snot-nosed public defender might be the one representing him against an accomplice-to-murder charge.

As for Mahoney, she said, just forget about him. The charges against his daughter had been dropped, but more important, she’d read that the man who ran the Atlantic Palace Casino had disappeared—and without him, it would probably be impossible to prove that Molly Mahoney ever had a marker with the casino. She concluded by saying, “So you’re just going to have to take your medicine, Bob. But I’ll get you the best lawyer I can and maybe he’ll keep you from getting the needle for killing Melinda Stowe.” She wondered if tough-on-crime Bob was happy that Arizona still had the death penalty.

My God, what a scandal! The media went berserk: you couldn’t turn on a television set without seeing pictures of her and Bob, and the phone had been ringing off the hook with reporters requesting interviews. All Bob’s colleagues in Congress were saying how shocked and dismayed they all were. She saw one clip of Mahoney, shaking his head gravely, saying how the stress of politics could often drive people to do unimaginable things.

One of these days, but not right away, she might run for Bob’s seat. And whether she was in Congress or not, she just might go after John Mahoney—and she was a whole bunch smarter than dumb ol’ Bob.

64

It was ten p.m. and DeMarco was sitting on a stone bench on the terrace on the west side of the Capitol. As he sat, he sipped cognac from a Styrofoam cup. At his feet was the bottle of Hennessy that he normally kept in the file cabinet in his office. The cognac was for medicinal purposes—for moments like this, when he felt the need to heal his soul.

It was a clear, cloudless night, and the weather was balmy, and DeMarco had an unobstructed view of the National Mall, from Washington’s obelisk, across the Reflecting Pool, all the way to Lincoln’s bright, white, shining cube.

He loved Washington at night.

He took a sip of cognac, relieved he didn’t have to tilt his head to the right. Delray’s cousin—and now DeMarco’s new dentist—had put a crown on his cracked tooth and charged him only six hundred bucks as opposed to the thousand his previous dentist would have charged. One thing for sure: he was going to pay the bill on time. He didn’t need Delray showing up to collect; he didn’t ever want to see Delray again.

Then there was Tina Burke, sexy mother of two. Did he want to see her again? Maybe Alice was right—maybe he’d reached an age when he should be thinking beyond the end of his dick. He thought about that a moment longer, took another sip of brandy, and pulled out his cell phone—but still couldn’t decide if he should make the call.

“I want to talk to you,” a voice said.

He turned his head toward the person who had spoken. It was Kay Kiser. He had no idea how she’d found him, but he suspected Kiser could track down just about anybody she wanted to find.

“Hi,” he said. But he was thinking:
Aw, shit.

“Are you proud of what you’ve done?”

“Do you want some cognac?” he said.

She started to say something, to spit out some stinging retort, but then she didn’t. “Yeah,” she said, and sat down next to him.

He filled up the Styrofoam cup he’d been drinking from and passed it to her. She took a sip, then another, and passed the cup back to DeMarco.

“So thanks to you Molly Mahoney gets a free pass,” Kiser said. “And basically Campbell does, too. Well, are you proud of yourself?” she asked again.

“No,” he said—and he wasn’t. And his answer probably surprised her. “But Molly’s not getting a pass, Kay. She’s not going to jail but she’ll be doing something a whole lot harder than a couple years in some country-club prison.”

“What’s she going to do?” Kiser said.

DeMarco told her.

Kiser nodded, just like DeMarco had done, probably saying to herself the same thing that DeMarco had said:
I can live with that
.

“But Campbell, he goes into witness protection. You call that justice?”

“He’s not going into witness protection. He just thinks he is.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t tell you. All I can tell you is that Campbell’s going to prison and he’s never going to spend a dime of what he stole.” He paused then he added, “And McGrath’s dead.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“I can’t tell you that either. All you need to know is that Richard Praeter and Doug Campbell and Rusty McGrath won’t be committing any more crimes, and Doug Campbell’s going to jail and losing all the money he stole.”

She just looked at him. He could tell she believed him—and she was smart enough to know that it wasn’t in her best interest to know any more than she’d just been told.

“So it’s all over, Kay. You won.”

Kiser took the cup back from DeMarco and sipped again.

“I hate these people,” she said after a while.

“What people? Campbell and McGrath?”

“All the people who game the financial system. All the Wall Street crooks. They steal billions more than some ghetto kid who knocks off a liquor store, and they destroy people’s lives. And when they do get caught, half the time they don’t get convicted because the cases are so goddamn complicated that the average juror can’t understand them.”

“Is that why . . .”

“My dad worked for a company called Clemson Fasteners. They made stupid screws and bolts and rivets, things like that. He went to work for them when he was eighteen, and along the way he got some education and rose through the ranks. He was the first person in his family to hold a job where he didn’t work with his hands. But when he was sixty-two, just a couple years away from retirement, it comes out that the CEO had been understating expenses, hiding debt, overstating the profits. All the usual crap companies pull when they’re trying to keep their stock price up and the company afloat. I mean, this wasn’t Enron big. Only a couple thousand people were affected. But my dad lost his job and he lost his pension, and because he was sixty-two years old, he couldn’t find another job. He went through his savings in less than two years. After he declared bankruptcy, he sealed off the garage with towels and started the car and killed himself, and my mother was the one who found him. She died of heart failure a year later. So I hate these people and I’m going to spend my life putting them in jail.”

“I thought you resigned.”

“You don’t know what Mahoney did?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been at the SEC for a long time, but I never really wanted to be there. The SEC investigates and regulates, but when we find somebody who’s committed a serious crime, the guys at Justice are the ones who prosecute. After I’d been at the SEC only a couple of years, I realized I needed to be over at Justice if I really wanted to make a difference, but I’ve pissed off so many people at Justice, I knew they would never give me a job. At least not the one I wanted.

“But today, I got a call from the attorney general. That wimp. He’s going to put me in charge of their criminal division. The job just miraculously opened up. The guy who had the job—the guy who agreed to the deal that Molly got—he’s going off to teach at Harvard. So I get his job, and it’s the job I’ve always wanted.”

“Congratulations,” DeMarco said, and he was being serious. He also wondered how Mahoney had been able to make the attorney general do what he wanted, but he didn’t really care and he wasn’t going to ask.

Kay Kiser stood up, all six feet two inches of her, and looked out at the National Mall, her head moving slowly as she took in all the government buildings surrounding the Mall. She was probably imagining the corruption occurring daily inside those buildings.