House Secrets (44 page)

“What are you doing here, Joe?” Harry said.

DeMarco placed his knuckles on Harry’s desk and leaned down and said, “Paul Morelli’s connected to Dominic Calvetti, Harry. And Calvetti is in some way related to Lydia Morelli. And you, goddamnit, are connected to both Morelli
and
Calvetti.” DeMarco paused for a beat and added, “You’re going to tell me everything you know, Harry.”

“Calvetti? Jesus, Joe, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“No, Harry, don’t lie to me. People are getting killed, and Calvetti and Morelli are the ones doing the killing. So don’t you
dare
lie to me!”

“Getting killed? Who’s getting killed?”

DeMarco took a deep breath, struggling to get his emotions under control, struggling to keep from grabbing Harry by the throat and shaking the shit out of him. Then he told Harry how he had set up
Paul Morelli and why, and how everybody involved but he and Sam Murphy was either in a hospital or dead. He never mentioned Emma.

Harry didn’t interrupt while DeMarco was speaking but he seemed to shrink into his chair, as if he was trying to disappear inside himself. He closed his eyes as DeMarco spoke of Lydia’s murder and her allegations against her husband.

When DeMarco was finished, Harry said, “His stepdaughter, Joe? Are you positive, son? Are you absolutely positive?”

“Yeah,” DeMarco said. “I’m positive.”

Harry rose from his chair and walked slowly over to the wet bar in his office. He moved like he’d aged ten years in the last five minutes. “I need a drink. You want one?” Before DeMarco could answer, Harry said, “Ah, Jesus, Joe. What have you done?”

“Harry, I don’t want a drink. What I want is for you to stop beating around the bush and tell me what I need to know.”

As Harry filled a glass with crushed ice and bourbon, DeMarco, too agitated to sit, walked to a window and looked down at Central Park. He could see ice skaters on a pond, and from twenty stories above, they looked like mechanical figures on the top of a music box.

“Kid, you’ve put me a bad place,” Harry said. “You can’t believe the place you’ve put me in. If it wasn’t for your dad—”

“Harry, I don’t have time . . .”

“Joe, what you’re asking me to talk about . . . It could get me killed, son.”

“Harry, I’m gonna get killed if you don’t talk—and there’s no ‘could’ about it.”

Harry didn’t answer.

“Harry. Please.”

Harry stood there staring at his godson, trying to make up his mind, trying to sort out where his real allegiance was. Finally he said, “Dominic Calvetti is Lydia Morelli’s father.”

Dominic Calvetti was a mobster of mythical proportions.

His criminal domain extended into all the five boroughs of New York and to points far up and down the eastern seaboard. In the forties and fifties he’d been deeply involved with the teamsters—and their pension fund—and as time went on he managed to penetrate virtually every major labor organization that operated in the Northeast. He controlled judges and politicians, and possibly even a few of Mahoney’s cronies in Congress. In some places his people managed his criminal operations directly, and in other areas he made alliances with local crime lords whenever he considered an alliance more beneficial than outright warfare.

Unlike the John Gottis of the world, Calvetti avoided publicity and displays of ostentatious wealth. Even as a young man, he was never seen strutting with bottle-blond showgirls or rolling the dice in Vegas. He lived in a modest home on Long Island, rarely left it, and when he did, he never traveled with an entourage, only one or two bodyguards. Most significantly, other than one brief prison term when he was still in his twenties, he had never been indicted for his activities. In part this was due to his intelligence, in part because he had penetrated every law enforcement agency that might want to indict him, and in part because he was known to be completely ruthless to anyone who might betray him.

Dominic Calvetti was now seventy-nine years old.

According to Harry, Lydia’s mother had an affair with Calvetti in the fifties when they were both young and both married. Dominic had been a handsome young man and Lydia’s mother a beautiful woman with a bit of a wild streak. How Lydia’s mother and Calvetti became involved Harry didn’t know, but he imagined that Dominic found it amusing to be screwing the wife of a big-shot lawyer who later became a federal judge. Or maybe they were just two young people who fell in love.

“And Lydia’s father, the judge,” DeMarco said. “He never knew that Lydia wasn’t his child?”

“I don’t think so,” Harry said. “Why would she tell him?”

“And how would Lydia’s mother have known the child was Calvetti’s and not her husband’s?”

“I don’t know that either. Maybe she didn’t have sex with her husband all that often or maybe he’d been shootin’ blanks for years. All I know is that Lydia’s mother knew the child was Calvetti’s and she told him, and later Calvetti told Lydia he was her old man.”

DeMarco was getting hit with so much new information that he was having a hard time sorting it all out. “So is this why Calvetti’s been helping Paul Morelli,” he said, “because Lydia’s his daughter?”

“No. Dominic never had anything to do with Lydia when she was a child. He didn’t have, as far as I know, any emotional attachment to her. When Lydia’s mother got pregnant, they stopped the affair, and Lydia’s mother went back to her husband and Dominic back to his wife. So, no, Dominic didn’t help Paul because of Lydia. He helped Paul because Paul could help him. He helped Paul because he could see Paul’s potential. Lydia, she was . . . she was leverage.”

Harry said that a few months after Lydia married Paul Morelli, Calvetti set up a meeting with the couple and told them that he was Lydia’s real father. He said if they didn’t believe him, he’d submit to testing to prove it.

“Okay, so he’s Lydia’s father,” DeMarco said. “So what? Why would Morelli go along with him?”

“Now we get to Paul. Paul’s about thirty at this point; he’s ambitious but he’s going nowhere. He’s just another assistant DA. A smart one, a good-looking one, but he’s just one of the herd. And his father-in-law, the big judge, a guy who could have helped him, had just retired from the bench in disgrace and if anything, Paul’s now tainted by his association with the guy.

“So along comes Dominic. He says he can help Paul, and he says he wants to help his daughter and the granddaughter he’s never met. We’ll get to Kate later. But the main thing is he says he can help Paul’s career. And then he makes a threat. Dominic says that if Paul doesn’t agree to work with him, then maybe the word gets out that Paul’s related to Dominic through his wife. That would have killed Paul’s political career.”

DeMarco remembered what Lydia had said the day they walked along the canal:
Then the devil danced in.

“And it worked for Paul. He and Calvetti made it work. They didn’t do dumb things, they didn’t try to make barrels of money or get Calvetti’s minor hoods out of jail. They focused mostly on advancing Paul’s career.” Harry laughed. “When Paul was mayor of New York, everybody thought he was a genius the way he kept the unions in line. But it was Dominic who controlled the unions. He’d been controlling unions ever since the days Hoffa ran the teamsters.”

“And the other reason Morelli did so well,” DeMarco said, “was because Calvetti would destroy his political rivals if they became a problem.”

Harry shook his head. “Rarely, Joe. Rarely did Dominic have to intervene. Paul was a good politician. He did most of it on his own.”

“So that’s it, Harry? That’s how Paul Morelli became Calvetti’s pet politician?”

“No, Joe, you still don’t get it. Paul wasn’t anyone’s pet. He and Dominic worked together. They were equal partners, as near as I could tell. Paul concentrated on being a good politician and he did good things. Those stories I told you the day we had lunch, they were all true. If anything, Paul turned the mob into a positive force.”

“Come on, Harry. Calvetti helped Morelli for the good of the people? Who the hell are you trying to kid?”

“I’m not saying that. Sure, Dominic got some things out of the arrangement. But they didn’t do things just to make money. Calvetti was already a multimillionaire when he hooked up with Paul. And if you look at Paul’s finances, you’ll see that he’s not real rich, not Kennedy-rich.”

Harry paused. “I’ll tell you something I’ve suspected for a long time,” he said. “I think for Dominic this wasn’t about money at all. It was a game to him.”

“A
game
?”

“When Dominic hooked up with Paul, he already had everything. And I don’t just mean money. He had power, respect. He was at the pinnacle of his career. But the idea of making a man mayor of New York, then a senator, then president . . . I think that’s what appealed to him. I mean can you even imagine the feeling?
His
guy in the White House. I think for Dominic that’s what it was all about: he just wanted to see if he could do it, see how far he could help Paul rise. It would be Dominic’s way of giving the finger to the whole system. But for Paul, of course, it wasn’t a game at all. The White House was what he had wanted from day one.”

A game, DeMarco thought, played with people’s lives and reputations.

“And someplace along the way,” Harry said, “something else became important to Dominic and that was Kate. He never knew Lydia when she was young, but Kate, he saw her the first time when she was about two and he just fell in love with her. Kate may have been the only person in the world Dominic Calvetti ever really loved. I know he didn’t love his own wife or Lydia’s mother or even Lydia. And he never had children of his own. But Kate, she was different. Dominic actually cried when she died; I saw him. So I think part of the reason he helped Paul was so he could have some contact with his granddaughter, not that Kate ever knew who he really was.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous for Calvetti to meet with Paul or his family?”

“Damn straight it was dangerous. If anyone ever tied them to each other, Paul would have been finished. So Dominic and Paul, they’ve only met face to face maybe two dozen times in the years they’ve been working together. But when Kate was little, before she was really old enough to know who Calvetti was, she’d be taken to see him sometimes. And these visits, they were set up like . . . like I don’t know what. They’d switch cars, meet in remote spots, use helicopters for surveillance. It was like a military operation, every time he saw the girl.”

“But at some point when Kate was older she must have been curious about old Uncle Dominic,” DeMarco said. “She must have realized he wasn’t your average, smiley relative.”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I don’t know what they told Kate when she got older. And when Paul moved to D.C. the meetings had to stop. The logistics were just too hard and the stakes too high.”

DeMarco walked over to the window and looked down at Central Park. He could see a squad car down there now, near the skating rink, its light bar flashing red and blue. The lights of the patrol car blended in with the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree near the pond.

Now everything made sense to DeMarco, including why Paul Morelli had not solicited Dominic Calvetti’s help to kill Lydia. Morelli would have been asking Calvetti to kill his own daughter. And there was another thing: if Morelli had asked Calvetti to kill Lydia he’d have to tell him why, and he couldn’t tell him that it was because he had molested Calvetti’s cherished granddaughter.

There was something else that now made sense as well: now he understood why Lydia had been unwilling to name Calvetti. Lydia had wanted to destroy her husband because of what he’d done to her daughter, but her motives hadn’t been entirely pure. She didn’t want the world to know that Calvetti was her father and that she’d gone along with all the things that he’d done for her husband.

“Harry,” DeMarco said, “what was your role in all this?” DeMarco was pretty sure he already knew the answer to that question.

“I was the go-between for some things Paul did with Dominic. Dominic’s known me a long time, since the early days with your dad, and he trusts me. And I knew Paul from before he ran for mayor, and he trusted me too. There were a lot of things that had to be done—people to talk to, deals to make—things that neither Paul nor Dominic could be involved in. And for those kinda deals, Paul couldn’t send some snot-nosed kid from his staff and Dominic, he sure as hell couldn’t send one of the bent-noses that works for him. So they used me.”

And they paid you, DeMarco thought, and they paid you well. Harry’s high-rent office made a lot more sense now.

Although Harry looked as he had the last time DeMarco had seen him—carefully trimmed silver hair, manicured hands, well-tailored suit and silk tie—he seemed somehow a bit seedier, a bit closer to the mean streets he had escaped years before. And DeMarco, as much as he loved Harry, knew he’d probably never see him again. Assuming he lived to see anyone again.

DeMarco already knew the answer to the next question too, but he still asked it.

“Harry, what do you think would happen if Paul Morelli told Dominic Calvetti the names of the people who had cost him the White House? Do you think Calvetti would help him get even?”

“In a New York minute,” Harry said. “Dominic’s big on payback. He might do something even if Paul didn’t ask for his help. Like most people, Dominic likes Paul.” Harry made the last statement sound like an accusation.

DeMarco stood at the window with his back to Harry. The cops were now putting someone in the squad car and it looked like a guy in a Santa suit. Only in New York.

Now he knew who was helping Paul Morelli and why, and the answer was even worse than he had expected. If Dominic Calvetti wanted him dead, he had the life expectancy of a snowflake.

DeMarco said, “And what do you think Calvetti would do if he found out that Paul Morelli killed his daughter and molested his granddaughter?”

Harry set up the meeting with Dominic Calvetti in the same small restaurant where DeMarco and Harry had eaten lunch the last time DeMarco was in New York. It had taken DeMarco an hour to convince Harry that he needed to see Calvetti. He had told Harry that he had to do something, because if he didn’t, Paul Morelli was going to have Calvetti kill him. It was either meet with Calvetti and make him see reason, DeMarco argued, or leave the country and have his face rebuilt. Harry had said that a meeting with Calvetti was suicide; they had anesthetics for plastic surgery.