House Revenge (13 page)

18

What DeMarco wanted to do was skedaddle back to Washington.

He didn't like the idea of remaining in Boston with the McNultys on the loose, but he didn't have a choice. He wanted—and Mahoney wanted—Callahan to pay for what had happened to Elinore Dobbs. Callahan was the person really responsible for her condition; the ­McNulty brothers were just the tools he'd used.

He did have one idea for how to deal with Callahan, but he didn't want to play that card just yet. What he could do was offer the McNultys a deal: in exchange for a reduced sentence, they would agree to testify that Callahan had ordered them to kill or injure Elinore, and then the cops might be able to get Callahan as an accessory to attempted murder. Mahoney, of course, would have to lean on the right federal and state prosecutors to make this happen.

DeMarco didn't like this idea, however, because that would mean that the McNultys would spend less time in prison and he wanted them to spend a
lot
of time in prison to make up for Elinore. So he preferred to come up with something else when it came to Callahan.

Callahan, however, was a whole different animal than the ­McNultys. He wasn't a petty criminal, and he was rich. This meant that if he was committing crimes, they would be complicated, well-camouflaged crimes, crimes involving things like tax evasion or whatever laws developers stretch to maximize their profits. Callahan was not going to be maneuvered into doing something as stupid as picking up a crate of machine guns, and DeMarco figured he had a snowball's chance in hell insofar as proving Callahan was doing anything illegal. And even if he did learn that Callahan was breaking the law, thanks to his wealth, he would have a flock of well-paid lawyers helping to make sure he didn't spend a day in jail.

As for continuing to disrupt the project on Delaney Street, what would be the point? Elinore was no longer there and, in the end, no matter what problems DeMarco caused him, Callahan was going to complete the project and make a fortune.

So what was he going to do about Callahan? Ultimately, whether he liked it or not, he and Mahoney might have to be satisfied that they'd used Callahan's money to put the McNultys in jail, and Callahan was not only going to get away with what he'd done to Elinore he was going to become even richer.

As the old saying went: life sucked, and then you died. That is, life sucked for folks like Elinore, and it sucked for guys like the McNultys, but not so much for people like Callahan who lived in a mansion on Beacon Hill with a gorgeous young wife.

It occurred to DeMarco that he really didn't know all that much about Callahan and that he should do some research. Or maybe doing research was just a way of pretending he was doing something productive since he didn't know what else to do.

He went to the hotel restaurant—after a while a hotel room made him feel claustrophobic—plugged the power cord for his laptop into a convenient outlet, and ordered a pot of coffee. Callahan had been featured in a couple of Boston publications showing pictures of developments he'd completed, his historic home on Beacon Hill, and his two most recent wives. Five years ago,
Forbes
included Callahan in an article about up-and-comers in the real estate world, and he even had his own Wikipedia page. DeMarco was fairly sure he'd never have his own Wikipedia page unless he assassinated Mahoney.

DeMarco learned that Callahan hadn't been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, which surprised him. He hadn't been poor as a kid, but he hadn't been rich, either. He went to a community college, got a business degree, then hooked up with a guy named Carl Rosenberg. Rosenberg flipped houses, owned and managed a midsized apartment building in Chelsea, and was the brains behind a couple small developments: a strip mall near Medford and renovating some public housing in Dorchester. DeMarco wondered how Rosenberg felt about his protégé becoming such a huge success.

About the only other thing DeMarco learned was that Callahan wasn't the until-death-do-us-part type. He married his first wife, a lady named Connie, when he was twenty-one and then divorced her just four years later. With a little effort, DeMarco found Connie's Facebook page. At the age of forty-six—a year younger than Callahan was now—Connie was a dark-haired, attractive woman, the mother of three children by her second husband, and she liked gardening. In other words, to judge by her photo and profile, she as a nice forty-six-year-old mom who liked to putter in the garden—but certainly not a bombshell.

Callahan's second and third wives were bombshells—tall, long-legged, blue-eyed, curvaceous blondes. When he saw a photo of Callahan's second wife, he noticed that she looked enough like his third wife to be her sister—or, considering their age difference, her mother. But so what? The man liked young blondes. That hardly made him unique.

After an hour, DeMarco decided he hadn't learned anything online that would help him nail Callahan, and he was tired of sitting and pecking on a keyboard. He needed someone who could give him a better idea of the way developments were structured and financed, someone who might have some insight into how developers like Callahan bent the law to be so successful. It occurred to him that Callahan's old business partner, Carl Rosenberg, might be a good guy to talk to.

DeMarco called Rosenberg's office and Rosenberg answered the phone himself. DeMarco said he'd like to meet with him, and naturally Rosenberg asked why. DeMarco thought about lying, saying that he was interested in purchasing the apartment building Rosenberg owned in Chelsea, then decided not to.

“It's about Sean Callahan and his development on Delaney Street,” DeMarco said. “I work for Congressman John Mahoney and he doesn't like the way Callahan has treated the tenants he's trying to force out of a building he wants to demolish.”

“Yeah, I saw Mahoney's press conference with that old lady,” Rosenberg said. “Sean can be a real . . . Let's just say he plays hardball.”

“Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Rosenberg, about the way Sean plays,” DeMarco said.

“Sure, why not. I'll be here until three this afternoon. I'm located at . . .”

DeMarco thought about walking to Rosenberg's office—it was a little over a mile from the Park Plaza—but decided to take a cab. It was too hot and humid for walking, and he didn't want to drive his rental car because finding a parking space in Boston was like trying to find the Holy Grail. As he was waiting for a taxi to pull up to the hotel entrance, he glanced across the street—and saw the McNulty brothers, illegally parked in a loading zone, driving a ten-year-old blue Toyota Corolla.

“There he is,” Ray said to Roy.

They were driving Doreen's car, which Doreen was not happy about—but they'd been forced to use her car since their van had been impounded by the ATF when they were arrested and they had to give the bondsman their Camaro.

The McNultys, like DeMarco, didn't have a plan. They weren't ­planners—they weren't strategic thinkers—they were opportunists, like vultures. In this case, they were hoping an opportunity to kill DeMarco would present itself as they considered him responsible for the many years they were about to spend in prison. And they wanted to kill him in such a fashion that they wouldn't be arrested for murder—but that's as far as their thinking had gone.

They'd found DeMarco by simply calling hotels in Boston, starting with five-star establishments and working their way down a list they found on the Internet. They figured a guy who wore a suit would stay at a nice hotel. They asked whoever answered the phone if they had a guest named Joe DeMarco registered, and an hour after they started calling, they struck gold at the Park Plaza. The clerk at the Park Plaza said, “Yes, we have a Mr. DeMarco staying here. Do you want me to ring his room?”

“Yeah,” Ray said, and then hung up while the phone was ringing.

“So now what?” Roy said, after his brother told him that DeMarco was at the Park Plaza.

“I dunno,” Ray said. “I guess we go over there and check the place out, see if we can spot him.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Roy said—even though it wasn't a plan at all.

And that's what the McNultys were doing when DeMarco stepped out of the Park Plaza to catch a cab.

Shit
, DeMarco thought, when he saw the McNultys parked across the street. What were those two thugs doing?

DeMarco thought briefly about walking over to confront them, but at that moment a cab stopped in front of him and the hotel doorman opened the rear door of the cab.

DeMarco gave the cabbie Rosenberg's address, and as they were driving, he looked back to see if the McNultys were following. They were. Son of a bitch.

The first thought that crossed his mind was that they were planning to get even with him for their arrest, either kill him or beat him so badly he ended up in the hospital again. He could think of no other reason why they'd be following him. It wasn't like he was a witness to the crime they'd committed so they couldn't be planning to intimidate him into not testifying against them. It was possible that they wanted to understand how he'd gotten the Providence mob to cooperate with him and wanted to question him. Naw, these guys didn't want to talk to him or question him or intimidate him. They wanted to kill him.

The cab stopped at Rosenberg's address and when DeMarco stepped out of the cab, his initial impulse was to point at the McNultys when they drove by to let them know that he knew they were following him. Then he decided not to. Right now he knew they were tailing him, and they didn't know that he knew. Maybe there was some way he could use that to his advantage—but until then, he needed to be careful.

He wished he had a gun.

“I wish we had a gun,” Ray said.

“Yeah, me too,” Roy said.

After they were arrested, the ATF not only searched their van and impounded it as so-called evidence, they also executed search warrants on their apartment and their bar looking for more weapons and any other evidence related to the assault weapons charge. At McNulty's, the ATF found a sawed-off shotgun they kept behind the bar in case some punk tried to rob them, and in their apartment they found an unregistered .45 automatic. The shotgun was illegal because it was sawed off, and the pistol was illegal because it was not only unregistered but the McNultys, being convicted felons, weren't allowed to possess firearms. These additional weapons charges were piled on top of the greater charge of being in possession of ten machine guns, but the bottom line was that they didn't have a gun.

“We could talk to Sheenan,” Roy said. “He could hook us up with a piece.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “But if we get caught with a gun on us, they'll revoke our bail and we'll end up sitting in a cell for six months before the trial.”

“You got a point there,” Roy said.

“Plus, shooting this fucker's too good for him,” Ray said. “It'll be over too quick. I want to break every bone in his body before we kill him.”

“We oughta get a couple of baseball bats,” Roy said. “They can't revoke our bail if we got a bat in the car. We'll just say we were going to a batting cage to, you know, relieve the stress.”

“Not baseball bats,” Ray said. “They're too long. I think we should get those little bats they use to smack fish with. What the hell do they call those things?”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” Roy said. “But I don't know what they call 'em. Little fish bats, I guess.”

“Yeah, those would be perfect,” Ray said. “We slip them inside our jackets and—”

“Our jackets! It's ninety-eight fuckin' degrees outside.”

“You know, you say the dumbest things sometimes.”

“I'm just saying . . .”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, Ray wishing they'd brought a cooler filled with beer and crushed ice.

“I wonder what he's doing inside that building,” Roy said. “I wonder who he's seeing.”

“I wonder what he's still doing in Boston,” Ray said. “He came here to help that old broad, but she's out of the picture now. Then he stuck around to fuck us up with the ATF and hung around for the arraignment, but why's he still here?”

“I don't know,” Roy said. “But you got a point. He could leave at any time and head back to D.C., although I suppose we could fly down there and get him if we have to.”

“The judge said if we left the state, he'd revoke our bail.”

“How would anyone know we left? It's not like we got those ankle monitors on.”

“Because if we flew, there'd be a record of us flying. And we could even get stopped by those TSA guys if our names are on some kind of watch list.”

“Why would our names be on a watch list? We're Americans, not fuckin' terrorists.”

“You know, those watch lists aren't just used for . . . Aw, never mind. We can't afford to fly there anyway, and it'll take us eleven hours to drive there. We just need to work fast and take care of him before he splits.”

19

Rosenberg's office was on Westland Avenue, about two blocks from Christian Science Plaza with its magnificent reflecting pool and a domed cathedral that looked like it belonged in Venice. The church was called the First Church of Christ, Scientist—making DeMarco think of Jesus holding up a test tube to see if He'd gotten the experiment right. If the experiment was the human race, He had some work to do.

Rosenberg's office was on the third floor of an older brick building, and as soon as DeMarco stepped inside, he could see that Rosenberg's office was also his home. He wondered if Rosenberg had fallen on hard times since he'd worked with Sean Callahan. In Rosenberg's living room, in addition to a small television set and a short sofa, were file cabinets and a desk with an ancient Dell computer on it. Behind the desk were black-and-white photos of historic Boston buildings: the Old North Church, Faneuil Hall, and the Old State House on Washington Street. DeMarco liked the photos.

Rosenberg was in his seventies, with wavy white hair that swept back over his ears and touched his collar and a neatly trimmed white goatee. He was dressed in a beige linen suit, a red bowtie, and brown-and-white saddle shoes. He looked spiffy, like a Jewish Colonel Sanders. His eyes crinkled into a smile when he saw DeMarco, and DeMarco got the impression that he was like Elinore Dobbs had been before she was injured: no matter what life tossed at him, he remained a perpetually cheerful, optimistic person.

Rosenberg pointed him to a chair and said, “So, Joe, what's on your mind?”

DeMarco again elected to tell Rosenberg the truth. He told him how Mahoney met Elinore, the sorts of things that Callahan had done to force the old woman to vacate the building, and how Callahan eventually won when Elinore took a convenient tumble down a flight of stairs.

“And you seriously think Sean was responsible for her getting hurt?”

“Yeah, I do,” DeMarco said. “I think he told the McNultys to do whatever was necessary to get her out of the building, and those two morons rigged a trip wire across the stairs hoping to kill her. Now that poor woman can barely remember her own name.”

“That's just terrible,” Rosenberg said. “But what do you want from me?”

“To tell you the truth, I don't know. I'm just trying to get a handle on Callahan. Elinore can't sue him thanks to her daughter, so I'm trying to come up with some other angle to pursue. I figured since he used to be your partner, you might be able to help. How'd you meet him in the first place?”

“I used to be a guest speaker at a class that prepared folks to get their real estate licenses,” Rosenberg said. “I'd tell the students about flipping houses and how you could get into serious trouble if you didn't do your homework and got too greedy. Anyway, Sean was in one of my classes, and after he got his license he asked me for a job.

“I've always worked alone, but at the time I had a lot going on and decided I could use his help. And it was a good decision. He was a go-getter, he learned fast, and he worked his
tuchus
off. The couple of years he worked for me, I made more money than I did in the previous decade.

“Anyway, one of the projects we worked on together was renovating some public housing in Dorchester, and Sean got smart on public housing, the federal and state agencies involved, the city council people who had some influence, and so on. Then he got wind of a plan to build some low-income housing in another part of Boston, and he pretty much went behind my back to get the contract. And he just took off from there.”

“So he screwed you,” DeMarco said.

“You could say that, but he didn't do anything illegal. We didn't have a formal partnership agreement—but a nicer guy would have included me in the deal since I'd been a mentor to him and gave him his first real job. Anyway, like I said, after that he took off like a rocket, using the money from that project to go after bigger things, and before he was thirty he was millionaire.”

“Huh,” DeMarco said. He didn't see how any of this could help, but then Rosenberg said something that did help.

“I'll tell you the person who really got screwed by him was Adele, his second wife. She was an only child and her family was worth ten, twenty million when she married Sean. Well, Adele's dad never liked Sean. Thought he wasn't good enough for his little girl and figured he'd never amount to anything. So her father forced Sean to sign a prenup to prevent him from getting his hands on the family money if they divorced.”

Rosenberg laughed. “What Adele's old man never considered was that the prenup could work to Sean's advantage if he divorced Adele. You see, prenups often protect what's called nonmarital assets, and Adele's inheritance would be considered such an asset. But Sean's company was also a nonmarital asset since he formed the company before the marriage. What this meant was that Adele could get at income Sean made off his company while they were married, but she couldn't get to all the assets he had tied up in the company, like cash reserves and properties he owned for future development. And, as you might expect, almost all of Sean's wealth was in his company at the time of the divorce. So I don't know all the legal ins and outs. But by the time the lawyers got through fighting, Adele got the short end of the stick and only ended up with a condo in Boston, a house on the Cape, and a settlement of twenty or thirty million.”

“I wouldn't call a house on Cape Cod, a city condo, and twenty million getting the short end of the stick,” DeMarco said.

“No, but twenty million isn't two
hundred
million, which is what she might have gotten if she hadn't signed the prenup. But you're right: Adele's never going to have to apply for welfare. And the thing that really pissed her off wasn't the money. She was very prominent in the Boston social scene and Sean humiliated her when he dumped her for a twenty-something Georgia peach. Adele is one very bitter woman.”

“Carl,” DeMarco said. “Let me buy you lunch. I want to ask you a couple more questions.”

“Sounds good to me,” Rosenberg said. “A man's gotta eat.”

They took the elevator to the lobby of Rosenberg's building and when they stepped outside, DeMarco looked around to see if the McNultys were parked nearby. They were. He still didn't want them to know that he'd spotted them tailing him, so he just glanced over at them once, then forced himself not to look again as he and Rosenberg walked to the restaurant. He needed to figure out some way to deal with those guys.

They ate at a place called Woody's Grill and Tap on Hemenway Street, half a block from Rosenberg's apartment/office. The waitress was a college-age kid with pink hair and a brilliant smile, and when she saw Rosenberg she said, “Carl! Where have you been? I thought you didn't love me anymore.”

“I'll never stop loving you, darling,” Rosenberg said, “but I'm just not ready to settle down with one woman yet.”

“You're breakin' my heart, Carl,” the waitress said.

Rosenberg ordered ice tea and a Reuben, and as that sounded good, DeMarco ordered the same. While waiting for their lunches to arrive, DeMarco said, “Tell me how a project like Delaney Square comes together.”

What DeMarco was really wondering was how precarious Sean Callahan's financial position might be. If he was teetering on the edge financially, maybe DeMarco could devise a way to give him a wee nudge and over the edge he goes.

“Well, as you might guess, it's complicated,” Rosenberg said. “A project, especially one as big as Delaney Square, starts five, six, seven years before they dig the first spadeful of dirt. The developer has to purchase the land or the properties he wants, and get some firm to design whatever he's building. He's got to do environmental impact studies and get a million permits from the city. And along the way there will be some neighborhood association or historical society fighting whatever he wants to do, and he's got to deal with them. Then, because he's going to have to tear up city streets and tie in to utilities like power, sewer, and water, he has to wrestle with the city to work all that out. So it isn't until after all the preliminary stuff is done and the design is complete and he's figured out a way to get around most of the roadblocks that he hires a construction firm and they start building. Then it takes however long it takes, depending on the problems he encounters during construction.”

And DeMarco thought:
Someone like Elinore Dobbs being one of those problems.

“But the first thing he has to do, before he completes the designs or buys all the land, is line up the money,” Rosenberg said. “With Delaney Square, according to what I've read, you're talking five hundred million bucks. So Sean can't just walk into his local neighborhood bank and get a loan like he's buying a house. For a project that size, he'll have to convince one or more of the major banks to loan him the money, but they'll only loan him eighty percent of what he needs. He'll have to line up the other twenty percent from other sources or use his own money, which I imagine isn't all that liquid. So now we're talking about a hundred million that he has to come up with from private investors.

“The other thing is the bank doesn't give him the entire eighty percent up front. They dole it out in increments based on the project reaching certain milestones. For example, they give him twenty percent to buy the land, then, when that's done, they'll give him another ten percent to demolish existing buildings. What this means is that if Sean isn't making the progress he's supposed to make, the bank might not give him the money he needs to complete the project. They're not going to give him all the money up front, then get left holding the bag if he blows it and has nothing to show for it except a large hole in the ground.”

“Why do they only give him eighty percent and not the entire amount he needs?” DeMarco asked.

“Because they want Sean and some other guys to have some skin in the game. More important, the bank wants to be able to force Sean to use his own assets or turn to these other investors when the project gets in trouble rather than running back to them with his hand out. Like I said it's complicated, but the bottom line is that Sean probably had to toss a lot of his own money into the pot and had to find some rich investors to cough up the twenty percent he needed.

“The thing you need to understand,” Rosenberg said, “is that guys like Sean Callahan are walking a tightrope the whole time they're trying to complete a development and it doesn't take much to make 'em fall off the rope. They unearth a skeleton, and the project grinds to a complete halt until they can figure out if it's from an Indian burial ground or some guy from Southie that Whitey Bulger planted. Or the workers making the big components he needs for heating and ventilation go on strike, and Sean's screwed until they go back to work. I mean, if you've ever remodeled the kitchen in your house, you know how it can go. The contractor discovers dry rot when he's replacing the windows, the cabinets don't fit, the city inspector makes you rip out the wiring because it's not up to code. So if you think remodeling your kitchen is tough, imagine what it would be like to construct office buildings and a hotel on fourteen acres in downtown Boston.

“I've seen lots of guys go bankrupt,” Rosenberg said. “They bite off more than they can chew, start having problems, and the next thing you know they're filing Chapter Eleven. I suspect Sean's leveraged up to his neck and if Delaney Square doesn't stay pretty much on schedule and close to budget, the bank will stop giving him money to complete the project. Then his investors will lose their money, and Sean goes under, loses his big house on Beacon Hill and maybe everything else he owns.”

DeMarco really liked what he was hearing—and then Rosenberg burst his bubble.

“But also keep in mind that big developers anticipate having problems, and they budget for them. Like Elinore Dobbs. If she hadn't slowed him down, something else would have, and Sean most likely has more than enough money in his contingency fund to deal with somebody like her, so he's probably not in big trouble yet.”

“Well, shit,” DeMarco said.

The pink-haired waitress came by at that moment, refilled their ice tea glasses, and asked if they wanted some dessert.

“Not me, darling,” Rosenberg said. “All my girlfriends like me slim and trim so I can dance the night away.”

“How come you never take me dancing?” the waitress said.

“Darling, you'd never be able to keep up.”

The waitress squealed and said, “Carl, you crack me up.”

“Let me ask you one more thing,” DeMarco said. “What kind of profit do you think Callahan will make on Delaney Square?”

“I have no idea,” Rosenberg said. “Like I told you, big developments are a house of cards and he could lose his shirt. But Callahan's been in the game over twenty years and he's sharp, so I doubt that'll happen.”

“But what's the normal profit margin on big developments?” ­DeMarco asked again.

“It depends,” Rosenberg said. “If a developer makes ten percent after he pays off the interest on all the loans, and what he owes the builders and architects and lawyers, he's probably feeling pretty good.”

“Ten percent on a five-hundred-million-dollar project would be fifty million,” DeMarco said. “That'd make me feel pretty good.”

“Yeah, but I'll bet Sean's going after a lot more than fifty. It depends on how he has things structured. He's probably getting a straight fee from the solar energy company for building their corporate headquarters, and he could be planning to sell the hotel to some chain like Hilton or Marriott for all I know. And the apartments he's building. Some of those are going to sell for more than a million, and I have no idea how much of a cut he'll get from them. When it's all said and done, Sean will lie about how much he made to keep the tax man from taking too big a bite, and he and the banks and his investors will probably all make a killing.”