House Reckoning by Mike Lawson Page B

Carmine’s crew; he didn’t drink with them or go with them down to AC to play craps or on those fishing trips they used to take to the Bahamas. If you didn’t know he was Carmine’s button man, you’d think he was a civilian, like a guy punching the clock at a factory. But Tony had respected Gino, and if his kid could cause Quinn problems, that would be sweet. It was a shame that he probably wouldn’t be around to see what happened. The thing was, he didn’t think Joe DeMarco would be able to do anything about Quinn unless he whacked the guy and he doubted, like he’d said to Joe before he left, that he had the stones to do that. But then you never know.
    The phone rang but Tony didn’t reach for it immediately. Talking to DeMarco had just worn his ass out; it felt like he had gone ten rounds with fuckin’ Tyson. If the phone had been across the room he wouldn’t have bothered, but since it was right next to his chair and kept ringing, he reached out slowly and picked it up. He hoped it wasn’t DeMarco calling to ask more questions.
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “Pop, it’s me. It’s Anthony. I’m in a lot of trouble, Pop.”
    Aw, jeez. That’s the last thing he needed right now.
    Anthony Benedetto Jr. had always been a loser. Tony didn’t know what he and his wife had done wrong, but Junior just didn’t seem to have anything going for him. He wasn’t very bright, and he did awful in school. He didn’t have the size or the athletic ability to play sports. Tony had known teenage girls tougher than his son.
    He’d tried his best to steer the kid into a straight job, but Junior couldn’t to do anything right. For a while, Tony had let him manage an apartment building he had in Woodside—all Junior had to do was collect the rents and call the maintenance guy when something broke—but then Tony had to fire him after he stole all the rent money one month and spent it on dope.
    Junior was a junkie, and had been one since he was fourteen—and he was forty-two now. He was addicted to booze and pills and anything he could snort or smoke, but especially cocaine. Tony had stuck him in treatment places three times but they didn’t do any good, and after his wife died, Tony just gave up on him.
    “So what’s the goddamn problem this time?” Tony said.

16
    DeMarco’s head was spinning, his mind flooded with thoughts of his father, with things he hadn’t thought about in almost twenty years.
    As much as he’d loved his father, he had never made any attempt to track down his killer and avenge his death. Partly this was because at the time his father died, he was young and didn’t have either the skills or the connections to do something like that. But there was also another reason. Over time, he had come to accept what the newspapers had said: that Gino DeMarco had been Carmine Taliaferro’s enforcer.
    Joe had called Detective Lynch one time—the detective who had informed him and his mother about his father’s death—and asked Lynch who was feeding the papers this crap that his father was a hit man. Lynch, who he found out worked in Organized Crime, not Homicide, had said that even though he was never able to obtain the evidence needed for a conviction, he knew—he was positive — based on logic, circumstantial evidence, and hearsay testimony, that Gino DeMarco had been a killer. “The only good thing I can say about your old man,” Lynch had told Joe, “was that as near as we can tell, he only whacked other hoods. But he whacked ’em. There’s no doubt about that.” Joe had called Lynch a liar and slammed down the phone—but in his heart, he knew the man hadn’t been lying.
    Joe never forgot one night, when he was about twelve or thirteen. He couldn’t sleep and heard someone down in the basement and discovered it was his dad, wearing just a sleeveless T-shirt, washing his hands in the basement sink. It looked as if he’d cut himself and was washing away the blood from the cut, and lying on the