House Secrets (10 page)

A woman he assumed was Janet Tyler was holding a little girl in one arm, the girl about two years old. Clutching the woman’s knees was another little girl with big brown eyes and curly dark hair, and she was cuter than Shirley Temple. Tyler herself was slim and short, five-two or five-three, but unlike her dark-haired, brown-eyed daughters, she had blue eyes and blond hair. Her hair was tied back in a careless ponytail and there were food stains on her pink T-shirt. She had the frazzled appearance of a mother with two high-energy children born close to a year apart.

“Ms. Tyler?” DeMarco said.

“Yes.”

DeMarco held up his identification and introduced himself.

“Congress?” Tyler said.

“Yes, ma’am. May I come in? I need to ask you a few questions about Senator Paul Morelli.”

Tyler inhaled sharply, and DeMarco recalled that he’d gotten an almost identical reaction from Marcia Davenport. These women were afraid of Morelli.

“I . . . I don’t have anything to say about the senator,” Tyler said. “I only met him once.”

“You worked for him when he was the mayor. I’d just like to know—”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t talk right now. I have to get my daughter to the doctor’s office.”

The woman was a terrible liar. DeMarco was a good one.

“Ms. Tyler,” he said, “if you don’t talk to me today, you’re going to be subpoenaed to testify before a congressional committee. You’re going to have to fly to Washington and you may be there for several days, at your own expense, until the committee gets around to hearing your testimony. If you want to avoid all that, I’d suggest you talk to me.”

Tyler struck him as a timid person, not all that sure of herself, and he felt like a heel bullying her. But he needed answers.

She closed her eyes briefly then said, “I have to get a neighbor to watch my girls. There’s a café across the street. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

“These guys are connected somehow to the CIA,” Mary Tollier told Emma.

When the U.S. Capitol police officer had taken the driver’s licenses from the two men in the Buick she had photographed the licenses, then dusted them with fingerprint powder and photographed them again. Emma then took the memory chip from the cop’s camera to a woman named Mary Tollier who worked at the DIA. Tollier had once worked for Emma, and thanks to Emma’s influence, she had ascended the bureaucratic ladder, coming ever closer to that shatter-proof glass ceiling. Mary Tollier owed Emma.

“What!” Emma said. “Who are they and what do they do?”

“The answer to both questions,” Mary said, “is I don’t know. The names on the licenses are phony. I ran their fingerprints, got nothing from any of the databases, but half an hour later I got a call from
a very rude man at Langley asking why I was running those particular fingerprints. We traded insults and hung up.”

“Thanks, Mary. Oh, Mary, I just thought of something. You’re a music lover. I have a friend in a quartet, and tomorrow they’re playing some stuff by this marvelous new Swedish composer. I can’t make it, and I was wondering if you’d like to have my ticket.”

Emma would tell Christine that she had to use the ticket to bribe Mary to get information.

Emma knew she deserved to go to hell for what she’d just done.

Janet Tyler entered the café twenty minutes later as promised, and saw DeMarco sitting in a corner booth. She had changed out of the Gerber-stained T-shirt and combed her hair and put on some lipstick. She was a pretty, young mom—and a very nervous one.

She took a seat across from DeMarco. “What’s this all about?” she said.

“Would you like some coffee?” DeMarco said.

“No.”

“Okay. I know you worked for Paul Morelli in 1999. You were involved in some kind of zoning study, but you quit after only two months. I want to know why you quit.”

“I didn’t like the job,” Tyler said.

Terrible liar
.

“I don’t believe you,” DeMarco said.

“I’m telling you the truth. I just didn’t—”

“Did Paul Morelli attack you, Janet? Did he rape you?”

Tyler’s eyes widened in shock but DeMarco couldn’t tell if she was shocked because he’d made an outrageous, untrue accusation against Morelli or if it was because he knew what Morelli had done to her.

“No,” she said. “He never did anything to me. I just didn’t like the job and I quit. Why are you asking these questions?”

Lydia Morelli had said something about Tyler’s fiancé, something to the effect that her fiancé had been used to silence her. That had
been eight years ago and Tyler had kids, so DeMarco assumed that by now she had married the guy.

“Who’s your husband, Janet?” DeMarco asked.

“I’m not married.”

“Then who’s the father of your children?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Janet, I work for the federal government. How long do you think it’s going to take me to find out what I want to know?”

“You bastards,” she said. “Why can’t you just leave us alone? What are you going to do? Take my children from me? Deport their father?”

“Jesus, no,” DeMarco said. And what was she talking about?

Tyler put her head in her hands and started sobbing, which made DeMarco feel even worse than he already felt.

“Janet,” he said, “I’m not going to do anything to you or your kids. I just want to know—”

“My fiancé’s name is Hussein Halas. He’s a Jordanian national and we’re not married because he hasn’t been able to get a divorce from his wife. Now is there anything else you want to know?”

“I told you. I want to know if Paul Morelli did anything to you. And if he’s blackmailing you in some way to ensure your silence.”

“No,” she said, but she didn’t look at him when she said the word. “Can I go now?”

DeMarco couldn’t think of anything else to say to make her talk. “Yeah, you can go.”

Tyler immediately rose to leave, wanting only to get away from DeMarco as fast as she could. He felt like a thug leaning on her the way he had and because of this, he said, “And don’t worry, Janet. I promise I’m not going to do anything to harm your family.”

DeMarco had no idea if he could keep the promise he’d just made.

“Did you check the fingerprints I sent you, Marv?”

“Yeah. Why are you asking about these men, Emma?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“Well, shit, Emma. I can’t just—”

“You know, Marv, maybe the media won’t care. I mean, how long has it been? Ten years? Twelve? Yeah, maybe after all this time they won’t care that you guys stole a suitcase of heroin from a DEA evidence locker and then traded it for Russian surface-to-air missiles. Now that wouldn’t have been so bad, except maybe the part about stealing the dope, but then you gave the missiles to a terrorist and he used one to shoot down a helicopter carrying a Philippine politician. And the real bummer was, the politician was on our side. Oops.”

“We didn’t know he was a terrorist,” Marv whined.

“I know. You went
way
beyond stupid on that one, Marv.”

“You’re bluffing, Emma. That op was classified then and it’s still classified, and if you leaked that story, you’d go to jail.”

Emma laughed. “Like you could ever prove I leaked it.”

The phone was silent for a moment. “Okay, fine,” Marvin said. “Their real names are Carl van Horn and James Suttel.”

“Are they agents?”

“God, no. They’re just a couple of mutts we used a few times.”

“Used for what?” Emma said.

“You know, stuff. Stuff we didn’t wanna be tied to. The last time it was a banker down in Haiti. He was funneling money to the wrong people and we tried to get the Haitian government to put a stop to it, but the banker was bribing too many people. So we sent van Horn and Suttel down there. All they were supposed to do was scare the banker a little, but van Horn, he bricked the guy’s kneecaps. He said he needed the brick to get his attention.”

“Good Lord,” Emma said, shaking her head. The CIA just amazed her—and terrified her.

“Are they working for you now?”

“No, we haven’t used them since Haiti. Look, these guys are basically hoods, Emma. They could be working for anybody. Now are you going to tell me why you’re asking?”

“Of course not,” Emma said.

“Hussein Halas is trapped in the nine rings of immigration hell,” Neil said.

DeMarco had called Neil after he spoke to Janet Tyler. He wanted to know more about her fiancé and Neil had worked his magic.

“He’s been trying to get his citizenship papers for almost ten years but he can’t because he has a wife back in Jordan. And the fact that he’s a Muslim doesn’t help. But the catch-22 is, he has to go back to Jordan to divorce his wife, but if he does that, they won’t let him back into the U.S.”

“But Immigration could probably deport this guy in a heartbeat if they wanted to,” DeMarco said.

“Oh, you betcha,” Neil said.

Harry Foster claimed to be a political consultant—it said so right on his office door.

But what Harry really was, was a guy who always knew a guy who knew a guy. If you needed a politician on your side, Harry knew who was for sale. If you wanted a building permit to slide through the system, Harry knew where to apply the grease. Your no-load brother-in-law needs a job? No problem. Harry knew a guy at the union hall. To get things done in New York you could play by the rules, but if you wanted to win you hired an old-time, backroom boy like Harry Foster.

Harry had helped Paul Morelli get elected mayor of New York City.

Harry was sixty-five now and was one of those people who looked better at sixty-five than he had at twenty-five. He was a bit shorter than DeMarco, slim and in good condition. His once black hair was now a handsome shade of silver, receding at the temples, giving him an attractive widow’s peak. His skin was pockmarked from old acne scars, but a good tan maintained in a sun worshiper’s coffin minimized this small blemish. His hands were manicured, his hair perfectly trimmed, and his face was scented with something rich and subtle.

You could still hear traces of Flatbush in Harry’s speech but he had come a long way from Brooklyn. He and DeMarco were seated twelve
stories above Fifth Avenue in an office fit for an urban prince, drinking coffee from bone china cups. Below them was Central Park in all its autumn glory, and from their height the view was unmarred by muggers, winos, and the great unwashed.

As DeMarco had told Paul Morelli the night they met, Harry was DeMarco’s godfather. DeMarco’s dad and Harry had known each other as boys—an Italian kid with iron fists and his Irish friend with a silver tongue. DeMarco’s father made a wrong turn somewhere along the twisted road of life and became an enforcer for a mobster in Queens named Carmine Taliaferro. Harry took a different route, going to work for a crooked Bronx borough president, and ending up where he was today, rich and covered in a thin mantle of respectability.

Whatever bond Harry and DeMarco’s father had formed as boys held them together in their later years. Harry would occasionally visit DeMarco’s boyhood home in Queens, and he and his dad would sit there in his mother’s kitchen, drinking coffee, while Harry made jokes about the old days when the nuns used to twist their ears. And while they talked, DeMarco’s mom would glower at Harry, as if it was his fault that her husband worked for the mob. And maybe it was.