House Revenge (3 page)

5

Ray and Roy McNulty were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. Sean Callahan met them when he was in the ninth grade.

The McNultys were raised by two violent, bigoted drunks, and their mother was just as bad as their father when it came to smacking them around. The smacking stopped when the boys entered their teens and were big enough to fight back. And you never fought one McNulty brother; you always fought them both simultaneously. Their parents got the picture one fine night when the boys sent their dad to the emergency room with a broken nose and dislocated shoulder.

Their mother, who was morbidly obese, died of a heart attack when they were seventeen and their father died of lung cancer compounded by liver problems a couple years later. Sean vividly remembered the McNultys weeping at their mother's funeral. It had been like watching hyenas cry.

Sean's parents were nothing like Ray and Roy's. They were decent people who doted on their only child. Sean's dad worked for the MBTA as a maintenance man and his mom was a substitute teacher. The problem with them was that they were weak people and Sean learned to manipulate them at an early age. They never approved of Sean being friends with the McNulty brothers, and could never understand why he was their friend. What Sean's parents didn't realize was that the McNultys made life interesting for a bored, discontented kid who didn't have anything better to do.

Sean wasn't a good enough athlete to make the first team and he had too much pride to ride the bench. He had no desire to hang around with the losers on the school marching band, the debate team, or the chess club. Nor was he—in those days—cool enough to hang with the A-list kids, most of whom were either athletes or had money coming out their ears.

So the McNultys filled the vacuum. They introduced young Sean to pool and pinball machines and bowling alleys thick with smoke. They initiated him in the urban sport of shoplifting. (Sean would be the diversion while the McNultys would go through a Kmart like a plague of two locusts.) The McNultys knew older guys who would sell them weed and booze. They also knew girls who would give it away for a six-pack of beer; these same girls would later understand that they were significantly undervaluing a moneymaking asset.

The amazing thing was that Sean was never arrested for the things he did with the McNulty brothers. He graduated from high school, and went off to college. Ray and Roy were not so fortunate. Ray spent most of his senior year in jail for stealing a car. Roy dropped out of school, as he didn't like to do anything without his brother.

Sean met the McNultys at their bar in Revere the day John Mahoney flew back to Washington.

At the ages of forty-seven and forty-eight respectively, Roy was maybe ten pounds heavier than Ray, and Ray's hair was disappearing faster than Roy's, but those differences were barely noticeable. They were both five foot eight, stocky, thick necked, and had the muscles one gets doing forty-pound curls while watching pro wrestling on TV. They had short, broad snouts; small, close-set eyes; lips as thin as knife blades. Their hair was cut within a quarter inch of their knobby skulls and they shaved dark, heavy beards a couple times a week. The easiest way to tell them apart was Ray's right ear: a piece was missing from the lobe, the piece swallowed by a drunk in a bar fight.

The brothers were proud of their bar in Revere; in fact, owning a bar was the pinnacle of their ambition. They did wish that their bar was in Charlestown where they'd been raised, and people they knew could say, “Hey, let's go to Ray and Roy's place for a beer.” But thanks to developers like their friend, Sean Callahan, they couldn't afford a bar in Charlestown.

Sean, however, did “loan” them the down payment to buy their bar for a favor they once did for him, knowing they'd never repay the loan. The bar was called the Shamrock. The brothers desperately wanted to change the name of the place to McNulty's
—
never mind where the apostrophe was supposed to go—but they never seemed to have enough cash on hand to afford a new neon sign.

The Shamrock was the sort of place you see all over America in small towns and in the not-so-classy neighborhoods of large cities: twelve stools in front of a scarred mahogany-stained bar, the stools padded with cracked and split red Naugahyde; four wobbly tables with three or four mismatched chairs per table; a much-abused pool table with cushions so soft you couldn't make a bank shot. Neon
BUDWEISER
and
MILLER HIGH LIFE
signs occupied the two small windows facing the street.

The previous owner of the Shamrock had been a Boston Celtics fan, and three-decade-old pennants were thumbtacked to the walls, the pennants moldy and curling from age. Prominently and proudly displayed behind the bar was an autographed photo of Larry Bird, arguably the most famous white guy who ever played the game. Had it been Bill Russell's picture, the McNultys would have removed it the day they bought the place.

The other thing about the Shamrock was that the McNultys now owned the bar, free and clear. They'd initially gotten a mortgage with a little help from Sean, and struggled every month to make the payment, then a
real
miracle happened. This was a miracle on par with Moses parting the Red Sea, comparable to Lazarus rising from the dead. An unmarried uncle—and maybe the only McNulty in generations born with a brain in his head—made a lot of money during his lifetime, then died unexpectedly and without a will. The McNultys inherited a hundred and fifty grand from a man they barely knew and thought might be queer, and that was enough to pay off the mortgage on the decrepit, narrow, two-story building in a bad neighborhood in Revere.

The Shamrock had a regular clientele of maybe twenty people, but most of the time there'd only be two or three customers in the place, old-timers with nothing better to do, alcoholics who went there because it was the closest place to home. The only time the Shamrock did a booming business was the day people got their Social Security checks and St. Paddy's Day. The main reason the place stayed financially afloat, if just barely, was the McNultys had a lady named Doreen who was, just possibly, tougher than the brothers and she managed the place. To compensate for her irregular salary, they let Doreen live in the small apartment above the bar.

But the McNultys were perfectly satisfied with the Shamrock the way it was—except for the sign over the door. It may not have been the grandest bar in Beantown, but it was
their
bar.

Sean took a seat with Ray and Roy at the back of the main room, near a dartboard that hardly anyone used. The people who patronized the Shamrock rarely had the hand-eye coordination to throw a dart and hit a target. Sean had a draft beer in front of him that he had no intention of drinking; he could see a lipstick smudge on the rim of the glass even as poor as the lighting was. There was only one customer in the place, a guy in his eighties who'd gotten there when the place opened at eleven a.m. and he'd been sipping beer for four hours since then.

Sean had dressed down for the meeting, wearing a wash-faded golf shirt, old jeans, and running shoes. The McNultys were wearing camo shorts with cargo pockets, white V-necked T-shirts that were tight on their bulging biceps and across their muscular chests, and high-top black tennis shoes without socks.

“About the old lady,” Sean said. “You gotta back off her for a while. Just leave her alone. Don't mess with the power or the air-conditioning or anything like that. Thanks to that fuckin' Mahoney . . .”

Sean had noticed—he couldn't help himself—that when he was alone with the McNultys his manner of speech changed: he swore more, tended to drop his
g
's, and his boyhood accent emerged, if only slightly.

“There'll be cops comin' around,” Sean continued. “A couple of building and fire inspectors will probably drop by, and even some TV and newspaper guys. But after a week or so, everything will go back to business as usual. But guys, I need that woman out of the building. She's killin' me.”

“What are you sayin', Sean?” Roy McNulty asked. “We've been doin' everything you told us to do.”

“I'm saying, do whatever you have to do to get her out of there.”

“Yeah, but what's that mean?” Ray asked, his small eyes glittering with amusement. He knew exactly what Sean meant.

The first time Sean used the McNulty brothers was ten years after he graduated from high school—and he hadn't seen them once in the intervening ten years. After Sean acquired a business degree and a real estate license, he had the good fortune to be taken under the wing of a man who was a much, much smaller version of what Sean Callahan would later become. Thanks to his mentor, Sean started flipping houses and buying properties that were later torn down to make way for more upscale residences. Then he took a major risk, and invested everything he had in a development where he made his first million. Sean Callahan
was
the American Dream: he came from a middle-class family, and thanks to brains, hard work, and ambition, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But nineteen years ago, at the time of his ten-year high school reunion, he'd had a problem.

He attended the reunion that year mainly to show off: At the age of twenty-eight, he was certain he was worth more than any other man in the room. He was accompanied by his second wife, Adele, who was only twenty-three at the time and as lovely as any starlet likely to grace the red carpet on Oscar night. Sean was surprised to see the McNultys at the reunion, as they hadn't graduated. He figured they hadn't been invited, but found out about it, and no one had the balls to tell them to leave. And as soon as he saw them, he decided they were the right guys to solve the problem he had.

The McNultys were standing alone by the punch bowl; everyone attending the function was doing their best to pretend they weren't even there. They were dressed in sport jackets that were too tight across the back and too short in the sleeves, polyester slacks, and black shoes so shiny they looked like they were made from plastic. Sean figured they came to the reunion just to see him; they'd had no other friends in high school, and there were at least half a dozen men at the reunion who the McNultys had kicked the crap out of when they were teenagers.

Sean and his new bride had been talking to another couple—a couple who'd been the homecoming queen and king his senior year; the woman had really packed on the pounds—when he saw the McNultys by the punch bowl. After thinking about it for a couple of moments, he told his wife and the other couple that he'd be right back, and walked over to greet Roy and Ray. On his way toward them, he made up his mind about how he was going to act, and when he reached them, he let out a whoop and clutched them in hugs. The McNultys were as startled as everyone else in the room.

They started to ask Sean how he'd been and what he'd been doing the last ten years—they couldn't keep their eyes off his wife—but he cut them off and said, “Look, we need to get out of this place and go somewhere and get a real drink. I never liked any of these people when I was in high school, and I don't like 'em now. I'm gonna hang around for another hour or so, then I'm going to drop my wife back home and I'll meet you guys over at McGill's so we can catch up.”

When he met with them at McGill's—a bar they used to go to in high school and where the owner tended to be flexible when it came to underage drinkers—Sean downplayed his success. He just said that he was in real estate and asked what they were doing these days—and got the answer he'd expected: “Aw, you know, just this and that.” Which made him wonder what sort of criminal records they'd managed to acquire in the last ten years.

After thirty minutes of bullshit, reminiscing about the good old days when they'd tormented the weaker sheep in Charlestown, Sean got to the point. He told them he was trying to renovate an apartment building in Chelsea, turn the small apartments into decent-sized units, and there was a building inspector who was fucking with him. And that was the only way Sean could describe it: “This guy, he's just fuckin' with me,” he told Roy and Ray.

For some reason the building inspector had taken an intense dislike to Sean, and the renovation had practically ground to a halt with the inspector identifying every small code violation he could find with wiring, plumbing, sprinkler systems, and so on. According to this inspector, not a single thing had been installed correctly, and Sean was constantly having to rip out work that had been completed; then, after he redid it, the inspector would find more problems. The guy was costing him thousands of dollars per day, and Sean couldn't find any way to get him out of his hair. He'd tried to bribe the guy—that almost got him arrested—and then he said he was going to sue him, maybe even file a discrimination complaint. The inspector was black and he was going to say that the inspector was picking on him because he was white. The inspector laughed in his face.

“I need to get this guy off my back,” Sean told the McNultys the night of the reunion.

“We can do that,” Ray said.

“Yeah, we can do that,” Roy said.

Sean was worried that they might actually kill the inspector, which he didn't want; that would be going too far. But the problem with the McNultys was the always-present
rage
. Imagine a teakettle, the water in the kettle simmering, almost to the point of boiling, the kettle spout barely whistling—and then, with a slight increase in temperature, steam comes billowing out of the kettle and it begins to
scream
. That was the way the rage simmered inside the McNultys: it was always there, and it took only the smallest provocation—an imagined slight, just a hint of disrespect—and all that barely contained fury would erupt like a volcano.

Sean remembered once when he and the McNultys were sitting on the stoop of a three-decker in Charlestown, drinking beer, and these two teenagers a little older than them walked by. The teenagers looked like kids who came from money—nice sweaters, expensive tennis shoes—so they weren't local guys. Well, one of the kids made the mistake of glancing over at the McNultys.