Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

‘She’ll be fine. They’ll question her for a while, but she won’t be arrested. And we’ll send her money, and with you gone she’ll be able to live off what she gets from the government. And, of course, she’ll have God’s blessing for eternity because she will be the mother of a martyr.’

To get Jubal Pugh arrested, DeMarco needed the cooperation of four people. The first was Patsy Hall of the DEA. Since Hall wanted Pugh more than anything else on the planet, she’d been easy to convince. The second and third persons whose help he needed lived in Queens, New York. One was the district attorney of the county; the other was a gangster. He decided to visit the gangster first.

Tony Benedetto’s home was a medium-sized two-story brick structure in Ozone Park. Most of his neighbors were working stiffs, but more than a few were mobsters. One of Tony’s goons met DeMarco at the front door and frisked him. He told the guy to watch his side and leg because he’d just been shot but this information, instead of impressing the man, only caused the sadistic bastard to pat him down harder. When he felt the bandage on DeMarco’s thigh, he made DeMarco drop his pants to make sure he didn’t have a transmitter taped to his leg. The bodyguard finally finished and DeMarco pulled up his pants and limped toward the kitchen, the wound in his leg throbbing from the guy whacking it.

Tony was seated at his kitchen table, wearing a jogging outfit: a maroon sweatshirt that zipped up the front and maroon pants with white piping on the sides. He was sixty-eight years old and had big ears, a big nose, and dyed-black hair that didn’t make him look younger, just silly. When a man is almost seventy, his hair shouldn’t be the same color it was when he was twenty.

He was reading The Wall Street Journal and drinking Slim-Fast from the can. He saw DeMarco glance down at the diet drink and said, ‘Hey, it works. I tried Atkins, but who can live without bread and pasta? So I have one of these for breakfast, one for lunch, and for dinner I eat like a normal person.’ He studied DeMarco for a moment. ‘You know, you look just like your old man,’ he said.

DeMarco’s father had worked for another gangster in Queens, a man named Carmine Taliaferro. Taliaferro and DeMarco’s father were now both dead, Taliaferro of natural causes, Gino DeMarco from three bullets in the chest. Benedetto had worked with DeMarco’s father and had replaced Taliaferro as the head hood in Queens after Taliaferro died.

‘I’m also Danny DeMarco’s cousin,’ DeMarco said.

Now Benedetto smirked, making DeMarco want to smack the reading glasses right off his big nose. Benedetto obviously knew about the connection between DeMarco’s ex-wife and his currently incarcerated cousin.

‘Is that why you’re here, because of Danny? Whatta you gonna do, bug me like Marie to get him outta jail?’

‘I don’t give a shit if he rots in jail,’ DeMarco said, ‘but I need him for something. And I need your help too.’

DeMarco told him his plan.

Benedetto finished his diet milkshake and rubbed his chin as he thought over DeMarco’s proposition. ‘I can’t see that it has a downside for me,’ he said, ‘but why would the Queens DA go along?’

Good fuckin’ question, DeMarco thought.

‘Are you out of your damn mind?’ Thomas Farley said.

Thomas Farley, district attorney of Queens, was five-nine and a little on the pudgy side, but a well-tailored suit disguised this flaw fairly well. His best features were his eyes and his hair. He had a lush mane of gray hair brushed straight back from a broad forehead and intense dark eyes that were perfect for a man whose job was prosecuting heinous criminals. His eyes transmitted his outrage at whatever he was pretending to be outraged about, and right now all that righteous fury was directed at DeMarco.

With DeMarco was Patsy Hall. She had flown up from D.C. to join DeMarco for the meeting.

‘Look,’ DeMarco said, ‘you know as well as I do that Danny DeMarco is a goddamn weasel of a fence, but he’s never killed anyone in his life.’

‘I don’t know that,’ Farley said. ‘And if he didn’t commit the murder, he was an accomplice to it.’

‘He was standing there when Vince Merlino shot Charlie Logan, and Merlino shot him because Logan was strangling him.’

‘I don’t know anything about Vince Merlino, but-’

‘Bullshit,’ DeMarco said.

‘But if this Merlino guy shot Logan as you say, all Danny has to do is tell us that. Merlino will go to jail for murder two and Danny will plead out to a couple of years. He just has to do his civic duty and testify against Merlino.’

‘You know if he gives up Merlino, Tony Benedetto will have him killed.’

Farley shrugged. ‘Not my problem,’ he said. ‘Either Danny boy does the time for Logan’s death or he gives up Merlino. Personally, I don’t care who does the time, but somebody’s going to.’

‘Charlie Logan was an abuser with a violent temper. He knocked his wife and kids around before she divorced him. He beat up a guy at work; you guys arrested him for that. He was nobody’s idea of a model citizen, and nobody gives a shit that he’s dead.’

‘I don’t care if he was Satan incarnate,’ Farley said, ‘he was killed in my district. So unless you have something to say that I care about, I think we’re through here.’

DeMarco looked over at Patsy Hall. He’d been hoping to convince Farley of the merits of his plan without having to use Hall to close the deal. In other words, he’d been hoping to get a politician to put aside his own self-interest and do something for the greater good of the country. He should have known better.

‘Mr Farley,’ Hall said, ‘right now there’s a Jamaican drug ring here in Queens. We’re fairly close to wrapping this group up, but we’re willing to give you total credit for the bust. This group, which your narcotics guys know very well, is a major distributor of crack cocaine, and they’ve killed more people than Vince Merlino and the entire Benedetto family combined. I think that’s a pretty fair trade for Danny DeMarco.’

Farley studied Patsy Hall for a moment.

‘And I — we — get the credit? I don’t have to stand in front of the cameras with some fed next to me going on about how it was his guys who did all the work?’

‘That’s right,’ Patsy said.

‘And how many of these Jamaicans are we talking about?’

‘Six for sure, maybe ten total.’

‘How soon would this happen?’

‘In a month, no longer than two. Right before you start running for reelection.’

Farley smiled at Patsy Hall; she smiled back.

DeMarco didn’t smile. Patsy Hall didn’t know it yet, but if his plan worked out she was gonna get screwed.

Danny DeMarco, the fourth and final person whose cooperation DeMarco needed, was on the other side of the glass in the visitor’s area, talking into a phone. The son of a bitch hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and was dressed in a jail jumpsuit, and he still looked like a million bucks.

Joe and Danny DeMarco looked alike; no one would be surprised to hear they were cousins. Both had full heads of dark hair, strong noses, good chins, and blue eyes. And Joe DeMarco was a good-looking man, handsome according to most. But next to Danny …? Well, it was all about millimeters. The millimeters of space between the eyes, the millimeters of difference in the length of the nose or the shape of the chin. Perfect symmetry versus near-perfect symmetry — that’s all that separates the truly beautiful from the merely handsome. For example, if you placed a photo of Kirk Douglas next to one of his son Michael, taken when they were both thirty years old, there would be no doubt that the millimeters had favored Kirk. That was Danny and Joe DeMarco — and Joe was Michael, not Kirk.