House Justice (18 page)

Two hours later, Rudy was still snoring and DeMarco was giving serious consideration to smothering him. Rudy was spared by the arrival of the toothpick-gnawing detective.

“You feel like talking yet?” the detective asked.

“No,” DeMarco said, “and you assholes can’t hold me unless you’re going to charge me with something.”

“I’d suggest you watch your language,” the detective said. “And we
are
charging you.”

“With what?” DeMarco screamed. “Calling 911?”

“Vandalism.”

“What!”

“Yeah, there were a lot of broken windows in that parking lot and we think maybe you’re the one who broke ’em.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. Those windows were
shot
out and you know I didn’t have a gun on me.”

“Maybe you threw it away.”

“This is bullshit!”

“Language,” the detective said.

“And if you’re charging me, you have to arraign me so I can get bail and you have to let me see a lawyer and you have to let me make a phone call.”

“Now that’s all true,” the detective said. “The problem is, we’re pretty busy today and the court’s got quite a back log and we got guys like Rudy over there who are in line ahead of you. Might be a while before the judge gets around to hearin’ your case.”

“You …” No, no, calling the guy a cocksucker would not be smart. Instead DeMarco said, “Look, all I’m asking is for you to let me call my boss and tell him what’s going on. After I’ve talked to him, I might be able to tell you why I was going to see Acosta. I’ve already told you everything else I know.”

“Who’s your boss?” the detective asked.

“A guy you really don’t wanna piss off,” DeMarco said.

“Is that a fact?” the detective said, a little smile tugging at his lips. Then he looked at his watch. “Damn, it’s way past my lunch time. You hungry?” he asked DeMarco.

DeMarco realized that he was. “Yeah,” he said.

“Well, that’s too bad,” the detective said and walked away.

Ten minutes later, Rudy woke up. He sat on the edge of his bunk for a while, head in his hands, and DeMarco figured the guy was hungover so badly it felt like his skull was going to explode. Finally, Rudy trained his bloodshot eyes on DeMarco.

“My name’s Rudy,” he said.

DeMarco assumed Rudy had no recollection that he’d already introduced himself. This was good. “I’m Joe,” DeMarco said. Then he waited for Rudy to tell him a second time that he didn’t like the way DeMarco was looking at him.

But he didn’t. Instead, Rudy said, “I sure hope I didn’t do nothin’ mean to you.”

“Uh, no,” DeMarco answered.

“That’s good.” Rudy shook his head sadly and said, “Sometimes when things ain’t goin’ so good down at the mill, I go over to Seth’s and get drunk. And then I get mean. I don’t know why, but I do. At first I feel good, and I like everybody, but the next thing I know people start pissin’ me off. And then ol’ Seth, he calls the cops and I wake up here. Man, I hope I didn’t go whuppin’ on nobody.”

“Yeah, me, too,” DeMarco said.

“Well, I suppose I better call my wife and tell her where I am. She’s gonna give me the dickens.”

Then Rudy took a cell phone out of his back pocket.

“They let you in here with a phone?” DeMarco said.

“Huh?” Rudy said. “Oh, yeah. They know me. I do this a couple times a year, so they just chuck me in here until I sober up, then I plead guilty and Judge Sims makes me go pick trash on the highway.”

The wheels of justice.

“Uh, Rudy, do you think I could use your phone after you’re finished? I’ll pay for the call.”

DeMarco told Mahoney he was incarcerated in South Carolina and that the police were being mean to him, then told him what had happened.

“Someone killed Acosta?” Mahoney said.

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” Mahoney said, like he was thinking about Acosta’s death but he didn’t seem particularly concerned that his faithful employee had almost been killed.

“So, can I tell ’em why I was visiting Acosta?”

“Hell, no! Don’t tell ’em shit. I gotta figure out how I want to play this.”

“But these rednecks aren’t going to let me out of here if I don’t tell them something!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mahoney said. “I know a guy down there.”

DeMarco was willing to bet that if he’d told Mahoney he was in jail in Bangladesh, Mahoney would have said “he knew a guy down there.” He just hoped that whoever the guy was he could get him out of jail.

Mahoney called a man named Scott Hayden, whose ancestors had ruled South Carolina when it was still a colony. Hayden had never held a political office but he had so much money that he had more influence than any elected official in the state. He had served with John Mahoney in Vietnam.

They didn’t talk about the shared experience of combat, though. Instead, they reminisced about a weekend they had spent in Las Vegas prior to being sent overseas. Thinking they both might return home in government-issued coffins, Hayden took a few thousand out of his bank account—even at the age of eighteen he was obscenely rich— and treated his friend Mahoney to a smorgasbord of gambling, booze, food, and girls. Neither man had a clear recollection of their long weekend in Vegas because 90 percent of it had been spent in an alcoholic haze, but they figured they must have had a good time—a belief reinforced by the fact that they both came down with a case of the clap a week later.

After the past had been recalled and thoroughly embellished, Mahoney asked Hayden to get DeMarco sprung from jail. He then sat sipping bourbon and looking out the window at the National Mall while he swirled the whole Whitmore mess around inside his head. He finally decided since Whitmore could now get out of jail and wasn’t likely to tell stories about his sex life, he might as well be up
front with LaFountaine. He wasn’t sure that was a smart thing to do because he didn’t trust LaFountaine, but the thing with this dead spy was just too big a deal not to play it straight.

He called LaFountaine and told him what DeMarco had learned: that an ex–White House operator named Dale Acosta had leaked the story to Sandra Whitmore posing as a CIA agent, and Acosta had been killed. He said he figured Acosta was working for somebody but he didn’t know who, and he said he didn’t know who had leaked the story to Acosta’s boss.

Which was sorta true. Mahoney was pretty sure Ray Rudman had leaked the information to Rulon Tully and that Tully had hired Acosta, but he wasn’t positive, so he didn’t
exactly
lie to LaFountaine.

LaFoutaine’s response to Mahoney being so open and honest was, of course, to get pissed. He was pissed that Mahoney had been doing his own investigation and had been withholding information from him. He was also pissed that one of his employees had been attacked and tortured in his own home, and he figured Mahoney was somehow responsible for that, too.

At that point, and as was usually the case whenever Mahoney and LaFountaine talked to each other, both men started screaming into their respective phones, swearing, and not listening to a word the other man was saying. They were just too much alike.

Finally, they calmed down, or maybe they just ran out of things to say. LaFountaine broke the silence, saying they needed to get together and talk face-to-face, and Mahoney agreed. Then they both said they were sorry for losing their tempers, though neither man was.

Benny changed out of his sweat-soaked clothes, packed his suitcase, and left his motel room. He stood outside the door for a moment, looked down into the parking lot, and didn’t see anyone. Good. The .32 was tucked into the waistband of his pants, concealed by his shirt, and he kept his hand near the gun as he walked down the stairs.
Moving quickly toward his car, he opened the trunk with the remote and tossed his bag inside. As he closed the trunk lid, an object that felt like a gun barrel was pressed against his back.

He held up his hands and turned his head slowly. It was the guy from the parking lot, the big guy with the mustache, and he was holding a shotgun. Benny thought about pulling out the .32 and spinning around and shooting the guy—and quickly concluded that would be just about the dumbest thing he could do.

“Give me your gun.”

Benny pulled out the little .32 and the man took it from him.

“Now get in the car. You’re going to drive.”

Benny noticed the guy had some sort of accent. He didn’t think he was a cop—if he had been, he would have said so—but he didn’t look or sound like a wop, either, so Benny didn’t think he was the goombah’s partner. But if he wasn’t the goombah’s partner then who the hell was he?

Benny got into the car. The gunman opened the rear passenger-side door, tossed the shotgun onto the backseat, then pointed the .32 at Benny’s face while he opened the passenger-side door and entered the car.

“What’s your name?”

“Benny.”

“Okay, Benny. Buckle your seat belt and start the car. I’ll tell you where to go.”

What kind of fuckin’ mess had Jimmy gotten him into
?

An hour after DeMarco talked to Mahoney, a uniformed cop came to the cell and opened the door.

“You can both go now,” the cop said.

“Did I hurt anybody, Kenny?” Rudy asked the cop.

“No, but you kicked over some guy’s Harley and really fucked up the chrome. That’s gonna cost you.”

“Dang,” Rudy said.

DeMarco was given back his belt, wallet, watch, and cell phone, and then taken to an office occupied by a big, gray-haired guy in a suit. Also present in the office was the detective who had originally questioned DeMarco.

“Mr. DeMarco,” the man in the suit said, “my name’s Frank McDaniel. I’m the chief of police. I want to, uh, apologize. It seems that maybe things got a little out of hand, that maybe we were a little, uh, overzealous, but a murder like this, well… Anyway, I’m sorry you were detained. We’ve got your statement and your description of the suspect but I hope it’ll be okay for us to call you if we need anything else. And I hope there’re no hard feelings.”

“Yeah,” the detective said, “I screwed up, and I hope there’s no hard feelings.”

DeMarco could tell that neither McDaniel nor his detective were the sort who apologized for much of anything, so he figured whoever Mahoney had called had landed on the chief like a ton of bricks.

“Sure,” DeMarco said. “And when I file a lawsuit against you clowns for unlawful arrest and mental anguish and violating my civil rights and any other fuckin’ thing I can think of, I hope you won’t have any hard feelings, either.”

“Now look,” McDaniel started to say, but DeMarco interrupted him.

“I’m kidding. Can somebody, please, just give me a ride back to my car?”

They drove west out of Myrtle Beach until they came to a two-lane dirt road that looked promising, and the florist told Benny to turn onto the road. Twenty minutes later, he told Benny to stop when he saw a grove of trees on the right-hand side of the road that would shield them from passing cars.

“Get out of the car,” he said.

Benny hesitated; he didn’t want to go into the trees.

“Benny, if I wanted you dead I would have killed you back at the motel. Now get out.”

He nudged Benny into the trees, prodding him in the back with the .32. To his credit, Benny didn’t start blubbering or beg the florist not to kill him. Benny, it seemed, was a fatalist, and a tough one, too.

“Okay, stop,” the florist said when they were no longer visible from the road. “Now listen to me, Benny. I’m not a policeman. I’m not bound by any rules. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to hurt you. Badly. Do you understand?”

Benny nodded.

“Now tell me why you tried to kill DeMarco.”

“Who?” Benny said. He must have seen the impatience flare in the florist’s eyes because he added rapidly, “No. Wait, wait. I’m telling the truth. I don’t know anyone named DeMarco.”

“DeMarco was the man you tried to kill in the parking lot at the golf course. Why did you shoot at him?”

“Oh, the goombah,” Benny said. “He saw me.”

“I still don’t understand. What did he see you doing?”

Benny hesitated. “How do I know you’re not a cop?”

“Benny, would a cop have brought you out here? Would a cop have come to your motel by himself, without a bunch of other cops? No, a cop would have brought a SWAT team with him and arrested you. I’m not a cop, Benny, but I’ll say it again: I will hurt you if you don’t start talking.”

“Okay,” Benny said. “I don’t know what’s going on. I was hired to kill this guy Acosta and I killed him, and DeMarco saw my face after I did the job. I figured he was going to call the cops, so I tried to kill him, too. But I’m just hired help. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Who’s Acosta and why were you hired to kill him?”

“I don’t know. He was just the mark. That’s all I was told.”

“So who hired you?”

“I don’t know. I never know. I get a call, I’m given a name, and I do the job.”

“Then who called you?”

Benny hesitated. “Look, I can’t tell you that, I mean if I did…”

The florist shot Benny in the left foot.

Benny fell to the ground, clutched his bleeding foot, and began to whimper—and the florist could understand why. There are many delicate bones in the foot and the bullet had probably broken several of them.

“Benny,” the florist prompted.

“Jimmy called me,” Benny said through clenched teeth. “He’s the middleman, the one the customers call.”

“Tell me Jimmy’s last name and where he lives.”

“Man, if I do that…”

“Benny, do you want me to shoot you in the same foot or the other foot? I’ll let you choose.”

“Jimmy Franco. Not James. He lives in LA. He owns a pawnshop there.”

The florist thought Benny was telling the truth.

“What are you going to do now?” Benny asked.

“Don’t talk, Benny. That’s what I’m trying to decide.” After a moment he said, “Give me your wallet.”

“Hell, yeah. Take the money,” Benny said, and with some effort he extracted his wallet from his back pocket and tossed it to the florist.