House Reckoning by Mike Lawson

said. He wasn’t in the mood for a stroll down memory lane, nor was he in the mood for commiserating with Tony about his illness.
    Mahoney had been pissed yesterday when DeMarco had told him he was flying to New York the following morning. Mahoney wanted him to pursue the veterans’ scam not only because he genuinely cared about the issue but because it would generate favorable headlines, something that could matter in terms of him continuing to get reelected from his district. As a congressman with a two-year term, Mahoney was always running for reelection. So when DeMarco said it was a family thing and he had to go, Mahoney had said, “Well, can’t it wait a couple of days?” A normal person would have asked: What’s the problem? Can I do anything to help? Not Mahoney. He was too self-centered to care about any problems other than his own.
    “No,” DeMarco had said. As he was closing the door to Mahoney’s office, he heard Mahoney yell, “Hey!” Whatever he had said after that was muffled by the door, and DeMarco knew he was going to get a severe ass chewing the next time he saw his boss.
    “The man who killed your father is a guy named Brian Quinn,” Tony said, pausing every couple of words to get air into his lungs. It was painful watching him talk. “Carmine was the guy who ordered the hit.”
    “What?” DeMarco said.
    “Yeah. And Quinn was a cop at the time. In fact, I guess you could say he still is.”
    While DeMarco was still trying to get his head around the fact that his father’s boss was the one who had him killed, Tony proceeded to tell DeMarco the whole story. He told him about Jerry Kennedy and why Kennedy had to be killed and how Carmine forced Quinn to kill him. He also told DeMarco how Carmine got his hooks into Quinn in the first place—about a woman seeing Quinn shoot an unarmed man and how the NYPD had covered up the shooting. Lastly, he told him how Carmine had set up Gino DeMarco so Quinn could ambush him.
    It took Tony almost an hour to tell the story because DeMarco kept interrupting to make sure he understood all the details. By the time Tony finished, the old man could barely keep his eyes open, exhausted by the effort of speaking for so long.
    As Tony sat there with his eyes shut, struggling to get air into his ravaged lungs, DeMarco was remembering his father’s funeral and how Carmine Taliaferro had lied to him. “I swear on the heads of my wife and daughter,” Carmine had said when DeMarco asked him if he knew who’d killed his father. He also remembered that Tony had been standing right next to Carmine that day.
    “How long have you known about this?” DeMarco asked.
    Benedetto opened his eyes. “I don’t know, exactly. All the stuff about Quinn sort of came out, bit by bit, over the years. Some I learned from Enzo, some from Carmine. But I didn’t learn about Carmine setting up your dad to be killed until just before Carmine died. At the end, when Carmine was in worse shape than I’m in now, he was taking lots of drugs for the pain, and I’m not even sure he knew what he was saying half the time.”
    Carmine Taliaferro had died eight years ago at the age of eighty-two—which meant that Tony had known about Gino DeMarco’s killer all that time. DeMarco felt like ripping the oxygen tubes out of Tony’s big nose and watching him slowly suffocate.
    “So why’d you decide to tell me now?” DeMarco asked.
    “Aw, you know. It’s time to make things right before I—”
    “Do you know anything else Quinn did for Taliaferro?” DeMarco asked, interrupting Tony. It didn’t really matter why Tony had suddenly grown a conscience, but DeMarco was wondering if there was any way to prove that Quinn had been in collusion with Carmine on other matters. He knew it was pretty unlikely that he’d be able to prove that Quinn had killed his dad.
    “No, nothing for sure,” Tony said. “All I know is, after Jerry Kennedy and your dad were killed, Carmine never had a major