Chapter Thirteen

 

Ivan was determined to put last night—or rather the last few minutes of last night—behind them when he showed up to start going over the O’Gill records. He got to the bar, talked to the bartender Sal for a bit about the family, what people were like, and so on.

He learned that the five lieutenants were: O’Malley, Flannery, Higgins, Doyle, and Bates. Higgins had no luck with women, and O’Malley had a drinking problem that was causing Sean to give him fewer responsibilities and rumor had it that O’Malley was going to be retired soon or put on the back burner.

Ivan made note of that. Nobody liked to admit when they had a problem, and nobody liked being taken away from the action, stripped of their hard-won position in the family.

Doyle, Higgins, and Bates were the three remaining from when Sean had taken over from his cousin Shane. All three of them had been miffed at the time, Doyle especially—and the man had a temper.

Maybe too much of a temper, though. Sal told Ivan that Bates was the patient type and could wait months before getting back at someone. That sounded more like the kind of person that they were dealing with now, someone who was willing to wait until the time was right to strike. Doyle sounded like the kind of person who’d have come at Sean fists flying way back when the whole thing had first happened. But maybe he’d managed to hold onto his rage and wait it out.

Flannery and O’Malley were brought in by Sean after the power transition. Flannery was the most loyal, or at least in appearance. But an excess of loyalty could hide the most treachery. Ivan knew plenty of stories of supposed brown-nosers who’d secretly been planning the demise of their boss the entire time.

In short, all five of them were suspects. Any one of them could be holding a grudge. When he asked Sal if any of them had any reason to bear Sean a grudge, if there’d ever been any bad blood, Sal had just laughed.

“Boy, if you want the list of that, we’ll be here all day,” the bartender had said, slapping the bar top as he chuckled in amusement.

“Right, but anything really big,” Ivan had pressed. “A raid where one of them lost a family member, a disagreement that resulted in heavy losses, a public embarrassment, even stealing one of their women?”

Sal shook his head. “Sean’s one of the rare ones that married for love. Stayed loyal to his missus until her death—and after that he wasn’t in much condition to be chasing tail.”

A mobster who actually loved his wife. Hilarious, almost, in its rarity. Lower down on the ladder, the grunts, they married for love. But higher up? The dons and their heirs? Marriage was still a game of politics. European royalty tended to have more freedom in who they married than mob bosses.

But Sean had been married before he was summoned to the United States by his cousin. And if he had cheated on his wife, Sal didn’t know it and he didn’t know of anyone else who might know. Nobody’d made accusations.

“I guess my far-fetched theory of an illegitimate child wanting to claim the title of heir is a bust, then,” Ivan joked.

“If that was your theory, you have fewer brain cells than I thought,” came Kelly’s voice from behind him.

Like Ivan had said to himself this morning, he wanted to put last night behind them.

Kelly did not seem so inclined.

She dumped the paperwork in front of him. “Have at it. I’ve already translated it for you.”

He supposed that was a bonus—he wouldn’t have to put up with her and she wouldn’t have to put up with him—but the way she said it made it sound like she’d just done this Herculean task or something.

“Thanks.” He took the paperwork. He wasn’t in the mood for another fight, especially not now that all he could think about was what she felt like pressed up against him.

Pavel was wrong—having a girl in his life would clearly only be a distraction when he needed to focus on pulling his family up out of the mud.

Kelly hovered for just a moment, like she might say something more. For the first time, Ivan saw a look of uncertainty cross her face. Then she shook herself, her look growing stern as though silently chastising herself, or him.

“See you around, Sal,” she said to the bartender, and then she was out the door.

Ivan moved all of the paperwork over to the corner booth where he could spread it out. At least now he could research—in other words investigate—Kelly without her being there to see it.

The paperwork, other than having to translate some of it into English, was methodical and straightforward. The O’Gills kept good records. Better records than the Sokolovs had kept, actually. Things had been a mess when Ivan had taken over. Pavel had assigned a couple of the potential lieutenants to work through it as a sort of test and also because they couldn’t really move forward until it was all taken care of.

He started with Kelly. It seemed she had her finger in just about every pie. When he asked Sal about it, the guy nodded.

“Practically runs the thing, or as much as she can. Her brother relies on her a hell of a lot more than her old man does. I think when Shane takes over that he’ll make her a lieutenant.”

Ivan could see that in the notes—Shane routinely signed off on Kelly doing things. Tax papers, records, money counting, all done by Kelly with a post-it note or something stuck to it with Shane’s signature authorizing her. It could’ve been faked, of course. Kelly could have been doing it all on her own and then faked Shane’s signature—and then he found out and so she had to kill him. But why fake her brother’s signature when it would be easier to fake her father’s? And if Shane had been her target, then he’d be dead by now instead of still stuck up on life support. Kelly was the one watching his bedside, she could’ve done it at any time.

He didn’t see any signs of Kelly doing anything underhanded. She wasn’t pre-cooking the books before they got to the accountant, something that was often done when a lieutenant was skimming off the top and was hoping to fix things so that the accountant wouldn’t notice when the time came.

After about two hours, he had to admit defeat. If Kelly was planning something against her father and brothers, she’d done a good enough job covering it up that Ivan couldn’t find it. Normally there would be signs, like men being bought off, moved around or missing money, something in the paper trail that suggested that she wasn’t doing what she claimed she was. But everything matched what Kelly had told him.

However…

All phones that were owned by members of the family had to be given out by the family, and all phone conversations and text messages could be recorded that way. Paranoia was the name of the game in the mob, not that anyone could be blamed for it.

It looked like O’Malley had made a suspicious number of calls and texts to some unknown numbers, asking about prices and asking for discretion. It could’ve been just an order for a stripper or something, but Ivan’s curiosity was piqued.

He looked up the number. Turned out it was for a cleaning company.

‘Cleaning’ having a completely different meaning than someone coming in to scrub your bathtub.

There was only one reason that O’Malley could want to order a hitman company and that was to take someone out.

Someone like the two heirs that stood, in his mind, between him and ruling the family. Or, conversely, to bring pain to the man who had benched him, was threatening to take away the lieutenant post that O’Malley had put years into getting.

That was a solid lead. Nothing too incriminating was said over the phone, the details, including the name of the victim, would’ve been done face to face. But this was enough to start out with.

But then, Ivan read Shane’s monthly reports.

As the heir, it seemed that Shane had been checking up on this on Sean’s behalf and making reports for his father to read. He’d gotten into an altercation, at least according to the report, with Doyle over something. Connor seemed to be involved as well, Shane’s report mentioned him a few times. Shane’s report was vague as to what the altercation was about, exactly, but he mentioned going to see their accountant so it had to be about money or budgeting.

Could Doyle have been skimming off the top and it was discovered by the brothers? Shane mentioned in the report that he’d tell his father in more detail in person, but the report was dated only a day or two before the shooting had taken place on the way to the club. Shane might not have had time to talk to his father in more detail before he’d been hit.

A drive-by shooting seemed a lot more like Doyle’s style as well, brazen and bold, risky.

Perhaps the two lieutenants were in it together? Doyle could’ve gone to O’Malley, knowing O’Malley was pissed and suggesting a team-up. One of them would hire the hitmen and the other could play the distraction for the brothers.

But there was something throughout all of this that didn’t sit right with Ivan.

He sat back, staring idly into the middle distance.

Every mobster knew that their phone was being tapped by the boss. So who would be stupid enough to hire a hitman over one of those phones? Surely it would be easier to create a Gmail account or something like that using a computer at the local library and use that for correspondence, or buy a burner phone, or even just conduct everything in person. That’s what Ivan would do it he was planning to, say, put a hit on Pavel and didn’t want Pavel to have any suspicions about it.

And killing someone after they were accusing you of skimming off the top, that only made you the prime suspect. The smart thing to do—and Doyle for all of his temper had to be smart or Sean wouldn’t have kept him as lieutenant even through the transition—would be to then find someone else and make them the scapegoat, make it seem like they were the ones skimming.

Two trails of clues, both of them convenient—too convenient, found only after a few hours of searching.

Ivan considered this whole case. The two heirs of a mob boss are attacked. One dies, one survives but in critical condition. The whole thing is hushed up by the father so that the organization doesn’t become unstable—but the father immediately starts looking into his lieutenants. And what does he find? Two of them with convenient clues, suggesting they were cheating him or had hired hitmen.

It was the perfect recipe for a schism within the O’Gill family.

But who had put the idea of it being an inside job to Sean in the first place? If Ivan was attacked his first thought wouldn’t be that he’d been betrayed, it would be that another family was moving in on his territory and wanted him gone.

He checked the records of the assets that the O’Gill family had. They were most powerful in the docks area, where their main rival was the Murphy family, another Irish mob. The two of them had been circling one another like wolves for years, from what Ivan had heard.

He had been looking at this all wrong, thinking of it as an inside job because Sean had been convinced that it was. But what was the reason for eighty percent of hits against a high-ranking member of the mob? An outside enemy wanted the territory. Oh, sure, that outside enemy might be calling itself the government on certain occasions but really the principle was the same: get rid of the competition.

It looked like the Murphy family was the biggest competition that the O’Gills had, and vice versa. The docks were an important asset. If the Murphys could get a hold of the entire docks, they could squeeze other families and make them pay huge fees for using them because they’d have a monopoly.

Right now, with two families controlling the docks, they had to keep their prices relatively low. If they jacked them up too much higher than the other family, people would switch to the competition and use their side of the docks instead. It was a whole racket, the docks. You provided bribes to dock workers, helped people move shipments, provided protection, informed about police raids… it was crazy powerful. It was probably what had kept the O’Gill family’s head above water all of these years.

Ivan wouldn’t be surprised if the Murphys thought it was the perfect time to take over. Especially if, their men working side by side like this, some bad blood hadn’t developed—some real personal shit that turned this from just a business venture into a chance for revenge against year of petty little digs.

What could be more convenient for them than to arrange to take out the heirs and blame it on various lieutenants? The entire leadership of the O’Gill family would be at one another’s throats. After all, just taking out the heirs was pretty bad but there was always a lieutenant or two to step up and take their place if necessary. But if all the lieutenants were also being implicated… the entire family would fall apart from the inside and all the Murphys would have to do would be to sit and watch.

Ivan gathered up the papers.

Time to do some first-hand investigating.