House Reckoning (13 page)

DeMarco cut him off. “You used to go out with a teacher named Janet something. She was your mistress and she saw a cop kill an unarmed man in an alley. She told you, and you told Tony. I want to know Janet’s last name and where she lives.”

Anselmo didn’t say anything for a minute. “I don’t know. That was a long time ago and I’m not sure I feel like digging up the past.”

“Sal, let me explain something to you. The mood I’m in right now, I’m about two seconds away from dragging you out from behind that desk and beating the shit out of you.”

DeMarco knew what Anselmo was now thinking: he had no idea what Joe DeMarco did for a living, but he was probably figuring that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. All he knew for sure was that here was a guy who was a carbon copy of the deadliest killer he’d ever known.

“Just take it easy,” Anselmo said. “I’ll tell you, but I don’t want this coming back at me. I’m still married and I don’t want my wife hearing about Janet. I also don’t want to get involved in whatever you and Tony are into.”

DeMarco didn’t say that the only thing Tony was into was catching his next breath of air. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at Anselmo.

“Anyway,” Anselmo said, “her last name is Costello. I haven’t seen her in ten years but last I heard, she was still teaching at a grade school in Queens.”

Janet Costello might have been an attractive, sexy schoolteacher when Sal Anselmo was having an affair with her, but time had not been kind to her. One reason why, DeMarco suspected, was booze. He could smell the wine on her breath when she asked who he was and why he was knocking on her apartment door.

She was short and dumpy looking—broad hips and swollen ankles—and, like her ex-boyfriend, a few pounds overweight. Her hair was a mousy brown color and fixed in a frizzy, unruly perm. It appeared as if someone had painted two bright red spots on her cheeks the size of silver dollars, but the color was due to broken veins, not rouge.

DeMarco was willing to bet that she was the type of drunk who got through the school day by taking little nips from a bottle hidden in her purse and ingested breath mints continuously to disguise the odor. Once she got home at night, she probably went through a couple of bottles of cheap vino, whatever brand she could afford on a teacher’s salary. He also imagined she was still employed because she had tenure and because there were probably worse teachers in the New York City school system. God help those kids.

“Ms. Costello, my name’s Joe DeMarco and I need to talk to you. This has to do with something you saw when you were dating Sal Anselmo.”

“What?” she said. “Who’s Sal Anselmo?”

“You know who he is. He was your boyfriend and after you saw Brian Quinn shoot an unarmed man, you called him. I know this because I’ve talked to Sal.”

“That idiot,” she muttered. Then she asked, “Are you a cop?” Before DeMarco could answer, she said, “Look. I told you the last time Quinn sent people to lean on me, I wasn’t going to say anything.”

What the hell?

“No, I’m not a cop, Ms. Costello. I work for Congress and I’m investigating Quinn.”

“Congress?”

“Yeah.” DeMarco took out his ID and showed it her. “Can I come in and talk to you? Please.”

The apartment was a small, cluttered, one bedroom affair. The furniture was mismatched, yard sale quality. Her TV set was an older model, a big, boxy thing, not one of the new flat screens. A few paperbacks in a low-standing bookcase were covered with a layer of dust.

The jacket she’d worn that day was draped over a chair near a small table near her kitchen, and the kitchen was the size of a galley in a not-so-big boat. There was a dish on the table that had the smeared remains of her dinner and lying on the kitchen counter was the box the dinner came in: Salisbury Steak Lean Cuisine.

She pointed him to a small couch and she took a seat at one of the two chairs near the dining room table. “I don’t know what Sal told you but—”

“Ms. Costello, let me explain something to you. If you’re called to testify in court or in a congressional hearing and if you lie, you’ll be convicted of perjury and you’ll go to jail. Perjury’s a felony. I don’t know what the laws are in New York for teaching positions, but I imagine if you have a conviction you’ll lose your job. Now, will you tell me the truth? And maybe you’ll never be asked to testify and everything could end right here, but it won’t end here if you lie to me.”

“Goddamnit, what do you want to know?”

“I want you to confirm that what I’ve been told is true: that you saw Brian Quinn shoot an unarmed man, that Quinn stuck a gun in the man’s hand, and that the police brushed the whole thing under the rug.”

“Yeah, it’s true, but—”

“What did you mean when you said ‘the last time Quinn sent people to lean on’ you?”

“Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Uh, no thanks, but go ahead if you want one.” He didn’t think she was stalling; she just needed alcohol.

She walked over to the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of white wine, and filled a glass almost to the brim. After she’d taken a long swallow—like she was drinking water—she said, “I used to go to bars after Sal dumped me. You know, singles bars.”

DeMarco nodded.

“I’d go hoping to pick up some guy, and if the subject of New York cops came up, sometimes I’d tell people what I saw. I’d say, hey, let me tell you just how dirty the damn cops can be. I don’t think most people believed me when I told them what Quinn had done, or they would just pretend to believe me, depending on if they wanted to go to bed with me or not. But one night, this was right after Quinn became the commissioner, I was in this bar and I probably had too much to drink and I told some lawyer my story.

“Two days later these two cops show up at the school and the principal calls me out of class to talk with them. They didn’t tell the principal why they wanted to talk to me and later I told her some bullshit about having witnessed a robbery. I think they came to the school instead of my apartment just to show how much power they had and how they could fuck up my so-called life.

“Anyway, they took me into an empty classroom and told me they’d heard about me shooting my mouth off about Commissioner Quinn. I’d obviously talked to the wrong lawyer. I don’t know how they got my name, though. I mean, when I would meet men in bars, I didn’t tell them my last name until after we’d gone out on a regular date. But somehow these cops—they were big, hard-looking bastards and they scared the shit out of me—tracked me down. They told me that making unfounded accusations about the police commissioner, accusations that had no basis in fact, was a good way to get into a lot of trouble. I could be sued, for one thing. Or maybe the school would find out that I was a lush and hung out in bars and picked up married men, and some of those married men had mob connections. Or maybe, they said, the IRS would take a look at my tax returns. What they meant was, I worked as a part-time waitress in the summer sometimes, and naturally, like everybody else who worked at this place, I didn’t declare my tips.

“I mean, it was apparent these guys had researched the shit out of me. By the time they left I was crying and one of them said, ‘You got the picture now?’ Since then, no matter how much I’ve had to drink, I say nothing about Brian Quinn.”

“How well could you see Quinn that night?” DeMarco asked. “My source told me you were sitting on a balcony that overlooked the alley where Connors was shot.”

“The balcony was on the third floor and I used to sit on it because the landlord wouldn’t let me smoke in the apartment. And I didn’t actually see Quinn shoot Connors—I heard the shot—but when he came running down the alley to check if the guy was dead, then I could see him. I couldn’t see his face because it was pretty dark and he was wearing a cop’s hat and I was looking down at the top of his hat, but I could see what he did. I saw him pull a gun out of an ankle holster and put it in the guy’s hand and throw this can under a Dumpster. If he’d looked up, he would have seen me. But he didn’t. When another cop came down the alley—Quinn’s partner, I guess—I scooted back into my apartment.”

“Then how’d you know it was Quinn?”

“Because the papers said it was him.”

DeMarco didn’t have any other questions he could think of and he rose to leave. “Thank you, Ms. Costello. Someone will contact you if necessary.”

Costello started crying. “You goddamn people are going to ruin my life. All I’ve got is my shitty job and if I testify against Quinn I can guarantee you that he’ll come after me and I’ll get fired. I’m no lawyer, but I know damn good and well that you’ll never get Quinn if it’s just my word against the word of the entire police department.”

DeMarco hated to admit it, but he knew she was probably right.

18

DeMarco knew from talking to Tony Benedetto and Janet Costello that Quinn had a partner the night he shot the paint store guy, Connors. He wanted to find Quinn’s partner. He went to the New York Public Library and used one of their computers to search back issues of the
New York Times, New York Post,
and
New York Daily News.

It took him two hours to learn that Quinn’s partner was a man named Stanley Dombroski; Quinn got all the press coverage for shooting Connors, and his partner’s name was only mentioned in one sentence, in one article, and never mentioned again after that. He checked the white pages online and discovered there were five Stanley or S. Dombroskis in the greater New York area. He figured if he called the NYPD and asked the cops to give him the home address of the Dombroski he was trying to find, they’d tell him to go shit in his hat. Frustrated, he called a man in D.C. named Neil and said, “Find this fuckin’ guy for me.”

Twenty minutes later he learned that the Dombroski he wanted was now retired and lived on the Jersey shore in a town with the lovely name of Brick.

After spending his evening at the library, DeMarco got a room in a Manhattan hotel—he didn’t feel like staying with his mom again. His knew his mother was astute enough to realize that something was bothering him, and he didn’t want to spend the evening evading her questions or causing her to worry about him. He spent a couple of hours in the hotel bar, drinking slowly, munching on peanuts, stewing over what to do about Brian Quinn.

While he stewed, he occasionally looked up at the television over the bar. It was showing game seven of the National League Championship Series and the winner would play in the World Series. The only baseball teams DeMarco cared about were the New York Mets and the Washington Nationals, and since neither team was playing, he didn’t care who won. What he thought about instead were all the times he and his dad had gone to watch the Mets at the old Shea Stadium, and how that had always been a huge deal for him as a kid. He’d loved going to those games with his dad. Shea Stadium was gone now, replaced by a beautiful ballpark with the horrible name of Citi Field. DeMarco suspected his father wouldn’t like it any more than he did that ballparks were now being named after banks, businesses, and insurance companies.

The next morning, DeMarco rented a car and drove to Dombroski’s house in Brick, New Jersey, which was located in a neighborhood where about half the homeowners maintained their dwellings and the other half did not. Small, well-tended lawns were adjacent to weed-filled lots; houses with clean, freshly painted siding stood beside homes that hadn’t seen paint in two decades. Dombroski’s house was sort of in the middle in terms of appearance: no dandelions in the front lawn, but the paint on the door was peeling and DeMarco was surprised the roof had survived Hurricane Sandy.

DeMarco rang the doorbell but no one answered. He was thinking about leaving and coming back later when an old lady he hadn’t noticed called out, “He’s in the backyard.” He hadn’t seen Dombroski’s next-door neighbor because, sitting down, she was so short her head was barely taller than the railing around her porch.

He walked around the house and found Dombroski in a plastic lawn chair sipping a beer. Next to his chair were two empty beer bottles and a cooler probably containing full ones. A radio on top of the cooler was tuned to a sports talk show and some guy was going on and on about the Yankees failing to make it again to the World Series.

Dombroski was in his fifties, overweight, and red-faced from booze or sun or both. He was wearing an unbuttoned blue denim shirt over a white, V-necked T-shirt and khaki shorts with cargo pockets. His big feet were shod in flip-flops. DeMarco thought it was a bit cool for shorts and flip-flops but apparently not. Dombroski looked comfortable and content sitting there enjoying the ocean view.

DeMarco figured the view had to be the main reason why Dombroski had bought the house. The house itself was maybe twelve hundred square feet, and DeMarco had seen outhouses with more architectural appeal. It was essentially a small box with a roof and had windows so narrow they looked like gun ports. The backyard, however, was an unexpected jewel. It was only fifty feet wide and thirty feet deep, enclosed by a tilting cedar fence, but the grass was a lush green carpet and the view of the Atlantic, over the rooftops of the people who lived on the next block, was outstanding. DeMarco could see the beach from where he stood and the breakers hitting the shore.

“Mr. Dombroski?” DeMarco said. DeMarco wasn’t exactly sure how to approach Dombroski. He wanted him to divulge nasty information about a onetime partner and he knew that the thin blue line of the NYPD held together against outsiders. But he had to try.