House Odds (22 page)

As she was saying all this, DeMarco was thinking that this was how even smart people, people like Molly Mahoney with an engineering degree, got into trouble. The odds always favored the house. Always. And sometimes the biggest losers were bright, educated people who thought they were brighter than the guys who the built the casinos. The other thing was that for some people gambling was addictive—it could be just as addictive as alcohol or cocaine—and a person’s IQ was often no defense when it came to addiction.

After she won that first time, she started going to Atlantic City almost every weekend and within ten months her savings account was bare and her credit cards were maxed out. It wasn’t long before she had to find a cheaper place to live and her salary—the part she didn’t gamble with—went for paying her rent and utilities and the minimum balance on her credit cards. Like any gambling junky, she always figured the next trip to the casino was going to be
the
trip, the one where she’d hit it big. It really didn’t take long at all before her standard of living had more in common with single moms on welfare than with professional women who make almost a hundred grand a year.

She always came to the Atlantic Palace because this was where she won the first time—and because Ted Allen was such a nice guy. Once, when she lost ten thousand dollars in less than four hours, he comped her dinner, a show, and a room. And then Ted said that if she needed money to play some more that weekend, he could give her an advance, and he took a little card out of his wallet and wrote something on the back of it. “Just take this to any cashier in the casino whenever you’re up here,” he had said, “and they’ll give you whatever you need.” Then he said, “But you do understand that these are loans, Molly. Right?” Before she could answer, he laughed and ordered her a glass of Dom Pérignon.

“I didn’t even know how much I’d borrowed until two months ago,” Molly said. “I went to the cashier’s cage one day with my magic card and the next thing I know a security guy is taking me up to Ted’s office. I knew I owed a lot but when Ted handed me a statement that I had borrowed a hundred and nine thousand . . . I threw up, right there in his office.”

Bet Ted had really liked that.

“They told me . . .”

“They?”

“Ted and this other guy, Greg, his accountant. I heard Greg got killed in a traffic accident. Anyway, they said I either had to pay back the money in a week or they were going to talk to my dad and maybe the press. That’s when I came up with the stock idea. I knew Doug Campbell was doing something like that—that phone call I told you about really happened—so I figured I could, too, and I knew that when the submarine battery design went public . . . Well, it was a sure thing.”

“So that’s when you went to Ted,” DeMarco said, “this guy who has a degree in business, and he pretends that he’s never heard of a little thing called insider trading. He says: Sure, Molly, here’s five hundred grand. Make us a little money, too, while you’re at it.”

“Yeah,” Molly said. “I didn’t think anybody would notice me buying such a small amount of stock. It’s not like I’m Martha Stewart; I’m not famous or anything. And I was careful. I did everything online and . . . Oh, God, what am I going to do, Joe?”

It was apparent that Molly hadn’t known that the SEC had been keeping an eye on Reston Tech for past problems. Maybe if she’d known, she wouldn’t have taken the risk. Or maybe not. Maybe she was so desperate she felt she had to take the risk.

He didn’t necessarily believe her about Douglas Campbell, though. DeMarco had unwittingly pointed her at Campbell when he asked: Who do you know that has access to your personal information and lives above his means? And that’s when she thought of Campbell. Maybe she really did hear the call she claimed to have heard—and maybe that’s what gave her the idea for the insider trading scheme—but Molly Mahoney, this person he thought was a victim, was clever enough to point DeMarco at a viable alternate suspect.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do,” DeMarco said, answering her question. “Right now there’s about a fifty-fifty chance of you going to jail. The odds of you being convicted would normally be higher, but your lawyer’s a shark and he’s going to throw up a smoke screen saying that Campbell and a couple of his buddies are the real insiders and not you. And it might work. And Kay Kiser still wants to know where you got the half a million you invested. So if it looks like you’re going to lose at trial, you could give her Ted, and maybe the people behind Ted—they’re bigger fish than you—and you might get a reduced sentence. But then you’d have a problem.”

“What problem?”

“For starters, Molly, and I’m sure Ted told you this, they have a guy who’s willing to testify that he gave you the money and that Ted didn’t have anything to do with it. But that’s not your biggest problem.”

“What is?” Molly said.

“Your biggest problem is that Ted might have you killed.”

* * *

DeMarco drove Molly back to D.C. It was a four-hour trip and almost nine p.m. when they arrived at the Capitol. Mahoney had said that he wanted to talk to his daughter before she spoke to her mother, and he was waiting in his office.

The rest of Mahoney’s staff had left for the day, except for Perry Wallace. When DeMarco arrived with Molly, Wallace was sitting in front of Mahoney’s desk with a six-inch stack of paper on his lap, briefing Mahoney on a dozen different political matters. The wheels of government hadn’t stopped spinning just because Molly Mahoney had been arrested.

Mahoney dismissed Wallace and said to Molly, “Sit your ass down. I’ll be with you in a minute.” Molly started crying again.

DeMarco told Mahoney about his meeting with Ted—leaving out the part where he beat Ted’s bodyguard unconscious. “Ted also told me he’s canceling Molly’s marker.”

“Why the hell would he do that?” Mahoney asked.

DeMarco shrugged. “I don’t know. He said it was a goodwill gesture. But he still wants the funds for his convention center and he still wants his half million back.”

“Something’s going on here,” Mahoney muttered. Then when he couldn’t figure out what it was, he added, “Anyway, you can take off. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

As DeMarco was leaving, he heard Mahoney scream at his middle daughter: “How in the fuck could you do something like this?”

He almost felt sorry for Molly again.

31

The same day DeMarco met with Ted Allen in Atlantic City, subpoenas, as Attorney Daniel Caine had promised, were delivered to five people.

The subpoenas asked Douglas Campbell, Richard Praeter, and Russell McGrath to provide tax returns and other financial records going back seven years.

Mrs. Martin of PNC Financial was directed to provide all documentation—including tape recordings, should there be any—associated with Mrs. Campbell’s trust.

And lastly, Kay Kiser of the Securities and Exchange Commission was ordered to produce all records generated in the last twenty years related to SEC investigations associated in any way with Reston Technologies. In addition, she was ordered to provide any files she had concerning Misters Campbell, Praeter, and McGrath.

All the people subpoenaed acted differently.

Pretty Mrs. Martin smiled, tossed the subpoena in her out box with a brief note attached, and then went back to the account she was working on.

Kay Kiser went to her gym and kickboxed a punching bag for an hour.

Richard Praeter threw a coffee mug at a wall in his office, putting a small dent in the plasterboard.

Douglas Campbell screamed at his wife and got very drunk—but then he did that almost every night.

Rusty McGrath sat on the bow of his yacht, enjoying the sunset, humming a Kenny Rogers song.

32

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stanley Brandon was eighty-four years old and dying of cancer. He’d been dying for two years. The last time Mahoney had seen the man, Brandon had looked like an anatomy-class skeleton covered with a thin layer of brittle parchment. He had to be wheeled into his office each day, couldn’t stand without someone helping him, and couldn’t sit at the bench for more than a couple of hours before he had to be taken back to his chambers for medications and a nap. And for two years, half of Brandon’s time had been spent getting chemo or radiation or just sitting in a hospital bed stubbornly battling death. But would he resign so a sprightly youngster of sixty-five could take his place? No way. He had a lifetime appointment and, by God, and he was going to stay for life.

Today, however, word had come that Brandon was finally on his way to meet that Big Judge in the sky. The head doc at Walter Reed had personally assured the president that the old bastard wouldn’t make it through the night. Thank God, the president had most likely said, and since he’d had plenty of time to prepare for this moment, he was ready to begin the painful process of selecting Brandon’s replacement.

The president invited a dozen members of the House and Senate to the White House to talk about a number of things. Mahoney and Big Bob Fairchild were among those present. The president was in one of his optimistic, I-know-we-can-all-work-together moods, so he served a mixed group of Republicans and Democrats lukewarm coffee—a group that couldn’t agree on what day of the week it was—and chatted about a number of things: a tax reform proposal that Mahoney knew didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing in the House; a half-baked idea for slowing down the exodus of American jobs to places where people still used oxen to pull their plows; and lastly, that a certain distinguished jurist wasn’t going to be alive tomorrow morning and he wanted to acquaint the politicians with his short list.

The president realized that his nominee could have the wisdom of Solomon and it wouldn’t make any difference. No matter who he nominated, half the people on the Senate Judiciary Committee would find reasons why his candidate was unacceptable. The folks on his short list turned out to be three middle-of-the-road federal judges who’d never been accused of judicial activism; in fact, none of them had ever been accused of having had an original thought. The president extolled each person’s virtues basically by saying:
How could you possibly have any objection to these guys?
Three of the senators present said they thought the president’s potential nominees sounded like fine choices; three others murmured that they’d give whomever the president selected their serious consideration—which was code for:
You’ve got to be kidding.
The president could see that he was in for the usual dogfight, and on that happy note, the meeting ended.

Following the meeting, Fairchild and Mahoney stood silently outside the White House, waiting for their cars to return them to the Capitol. God forbid they should have come together in the same car. Fairchild’s car arrived first, which annoyed Mahoney. Fairchild’s driver opened the rear door for him, but Fairchild didn’t move toward the car. Instead he turned to Mahoney and said, “John, I was thinking about stopping by your office later today to explain a few things to you, but I might as well talk to you here.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mahoney said. He and Big Bob Fairchild rarely spoke face-to-face; they preferred to snipe at each other via the media.

“Yes,” Fairchild said. “I’d like the president to tell Terrance Wheeler that his so-called investigation has gone on long enough. I also want you to tell your people to quit opposing my water bill.”

Terrance Wheeler was the independent prosecutor appointed to investigate congressmen who may have been bribed by the lobbyist Lucas Mayfield, the Jack Abramoff clone. The “water bill” was a bill that Fairchild had introduced to help the state of Arizona with one of its biggest resource issues: Arizona was a state that didn’t have a whole lot of water. The bill not only threw some federal money to Fairchild’s home state, it also helped out some of his cronies there. Mahoney was against the bill only because Big Bob was for it, and consequently every other Democrat in the House was against it, too.

Mahoney smiled in response to Fairchild’s comment. He was having a rotten week, all the shit going on with his daughter, and tormenting Big Bob would be a small ray of sunshine beaming down onto an otherwise dismal day.

“You’d like all that, would you?” Mahoney said. “Well, Bob, I’d like to screw all the Redskin cheerleaders, the point being that we don’t always get what we’d like.” Before Fairchild could say anything else, Mahoney said, “At any rate, Wheeler doesn’t work for me. I can’t call him off. And as for the water bill . . .”

“The hell you can’t get Wheeler to stop,” Fairchild said. “You’re the one who got him appointed in the first place. And the only reason you did is you were hoping he’d get something on my nephew.”

“Not true, Bob,” Mahoney lied. “I had no idea that Little Bob—”

“His name’s not Little Bob, goddamnit!”

“—that Little Bob was involved with that lobbyist.”

“Bullshit!” Fairchild said. “Wheeler hasn’t investigated anybody but Republicans and he’s spent more time looking at my nephew than anyone else.”

“Not true again, Bob,” Mahoney said. “I heard that Wheeler’s also investigating Randy Collier.”

Collier was a Democratic congressman from Illinois—and a complete idiot.

Fairchild laughed. “He’s only investigating Collier because the
Washington Post
mailed him pictures of Collier sitting with Mayfield and two bimbos on Mayfield’s boat.”