Dead on Arrival

last shuttle would have left for the day, and he would have to catch another early A.M. flight back to Washington with a hangover so bad his hair would hurt.

But, he had to admit, he was looking forward to dinner with Father Mike.

DeMarco had called Orin Blunt’s home the night before, and when a man answered the phone he’d hung up. He wasn’t going to ask the air marshal if it was okay to come up and see him. He’d just knock on his door.

And knock he did. The man who answered the door was holding a magazine in his hand and wearing a faded blue denim shirt, khaki pants, and boat shoes. He was about DeMarco’s height but didn’t have DeMarco’s bulk. He had gray hair cut close to his scalp, small features, and the kind of eyes and face that poker players pray for; they gave away nothing.

When DeMarco showed Blunt his ID and said he wanted to talk to him about the shooting on the shuttle, Blunt stared impassively for a second and then invited him into his home. He didn’t offer DeMarco anything to drink; he just pointed him at a dining room table and took a seat across from him.

‘Why are you here?’ Blunt said. ‘The TSA review board has already given me a clean bill on the shooting.’

Blunt had placed the magazine he’d been holding on the table next to him. It looked to DeMarco like a catalog for power boats.

‘Thinking about buying a boat?’ DeMarco said.

Blunt just stared at DeMarco for a moment and then said again, ‘Why are you here?’

‘I want to know how you happened to be on the same plane as Youseff Khalid that morning.’

‘I wasn’t on the same plane as him,’ Blunt said. ‘He was on the same plane as me. That’s the flight I was assigned to that day, and if things had gone the way they normally do, I would have caught a flight out of Reagan to Chicago, and then from Chicago back to New York.’

‘I’ve got calls out to people who will tell me if you requested that flight or if you traded flights with someone,’ DeMarco said. And that wasn’t a lie. DeMarco had asked his new buddy Jerry Hansen, at Homeland Security, to see if Blunt had had himself assigned to Youseff’s flight but Hansen hadn’t gotten back to him. But what he really wanted was to see Blunt’s reaction to his threat — and there was none.

Blunt just said, ‘That’s good.’

DeMarco figured that maybe somebody had killed Rollie Patterson to keep him from talking because Rollie seemed like the type who would cave the minute a cop placed him in the hot seat. Orin Blunt, on the other hand, wouldn’t talk if you put his nuts in a vice.

‘I understand you’re on leave and thinking about retiring,’ DeMarco said.

Blunt nodded his head. ‘Shooting that guy really shook me up. I don’t want to ever have to do something like that again.’

‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said. ‘I can tell you’ve really been traumatized.’

There were many individuals, businesses, and organizations that contributed to Mahoney — and most of these contributors Mahoney was happy, even proud to name. But there were some who filled the speaker’s war chest that either Mahoney or the contributor wished to keep secret.

Bailey Flynn was one of these secret donors. Flynn represented several businessmen like himself who operated clubs where young girls danced barely clothed or not clothed at all. Mahoney, a true believer in the arts and the First Amendment, felt that these businessmen had a right to representation; he just preferred that places like Chucky’s All Nude Revue not be prominently listed among his supporters. And although its mission was certainly loftier than Bailey Flynn’s, the archdiocese of Boston also could not afford to be identified as a Mahoney booster. The Church’s tax-exempt status might come into jeopardy if it were seen to be emptying its collection plates directly into the speaker’s pockets.

And thus DeMarco’s reason for going to Boston: to meet those who directed the dancers and those who directed the choir — and take from them envelopes that he never, ever, looked into.

DeMarco dispatched Bailey Flynn in short order. He stopped at a club in Revere, took a seat, and ordered a Coke; he needed to keep his alcohol level on empty before meeting with Father Mike. A few minutes later Flynn joined him. Flynn was sixty, tall and perpetually morose, as if he spent his days embalming bodies. While Flynn told DeMarco that ‘those blue-nosed sons-a-bitches have ruined the Combat Zone in Boston, and Mahoney goddamn well better put a stop to that shit before the same thing happens everywhere else,’ DeMarco watched a girl with tassels on her nipples dance with as much enthusiasm as people display on their way to the dentist. Five minutes later he was on his way.

The thing about Jesuits, DeMarco knew from ex perience, was that they weren’t necessarily smarter than you but they were certainly better educated. Not only did these men go to college and spend several years in a seminary learning the priestly arts, they almost invariably had doctorates in more than one subject. And Father Michael Thomas Kelly was not only better educated than DeMarco, he was also smarter, but as he never made a point of this, there was no other man on the planet that DeMarco enjoyed dining with more.

DeMarco had never seen the priest in a Roman collar. Tonight he was dressed in a soft tan jacket made of something that looked like suede, a brown silk T-shirt that showed off his physique, and dark brown slacks that fit him perfectly. With the possible exception of Joe’s cousin Danny, Father Mike was probably the handsomest man that DeMarco knew. If he ever tired of being a cleric, he could make his fortune as a middle-aged model.

Although Father Mike never discussed his job, DeMarco had always suspected that the priest did for Cardinal Mackey what DeMarco did for Mahoney. If the Church had some sticky problem — and it had had more than its share of late — and if the problem couldn’t be handled through normal channels, Father Mike would be dispatched. DeMarco also suspected that beneath the thick layers of charm and wit and blarney there was a hard side to the priest that came out when called for.

Dinner began as it usually did with Father Mike: martinis, more than one. From there they proceeded to a bottle of white wine, followed by a bottle of red, followed by a snifter of cognac that was old and smooth and absurdly expensive. And between the martinis and the cognac they ate a meal that should have been added to the list of deadly sins.

During dinner, Father Mike talked. He talked about everything: sports, movies, books, and, of course, politics. His speech was filled with quotes from famous dead people and anecdotes about famous living ones, all of whom it seemed he’d met — the living ones, that is. And he was so skilled at the art of conversation that he made DeMarco feel as though he was actually contributing, though the reality was that DeMarco hardly spoke at all and didn’t mind that he didn’t.

At one point, DeMarco noticed a gorgeous woman in her thirties smile at Father Mike and he smiled back, a smile that almost certainly made the lady tingle all way down to her toes. DeMarco had no evidence whatsoever that Father Mike didn’t strictly adhere to his vow of celibacy; oddly enough, he believed sincerely that he did. But how he managed to do so the way women threw themselves at him, DeMarco couldn’t fathom.

Three hours after the dinner commenced, Father Mike drove DeMarco to a hotel near Logan Airport, stuffed an envelope into the breast pocket of his suit, and then mumbled something as he made a shoofly gesture in the air with his right hand. DeMarco suspected that he’d just been blessed — that a Jesuit had just asked God to keep a completely inebriated man from doing harm to himself as he staggered toward his bed.

34

They would have to alter the plan, but just slightly.

After two nights, he understood the pattern of the guards. One man, who appeared younger than the other two, left the guard shack at 11 P.M., 2 A.M., and 5 A.M. and patrolled for an hour. He patrolled erratically, never following a set pattern, but he tended to stay in areas that were well lit. The second guard began his patrols at midnight and 3 A.M. He would leave the guard shack and go to a small building fifty yards away, a building that looked like some sort of storage shed, and he would stay inside the shed for an hour and then return to the guard shack. The third guard, the one who had seen the boy, patroled at 1 A.M. and 4 A.M., and he either went to the spot at the southeastern corner of the refinery, where he sat and smoked and drank from a small flask, or he went inside the same maintenance shack where the second guard hid.

So the boy would enter the plant as soon as the first guard, the diligent one, returned to the guard shack.