The Iceman Page 21

  “That’s all you can do, I guess. Listen, I had that stuff you wanted. You know what I’m talking about?”

  Kuklinski’s eyebrows rose. “The powder?”

  “The special order you put in. I had it in my trunk, a little vial of the stuff. I called you a couple of times, but there was no answer. I didn’t want to be carrying that shit around with me, so I brought it back and told the guy to hold it for me until I found you.”

  “Jeez, that’s just what I could use right now.”

  “How come no one answers that phone, Rich?”

  “When I’m not there, I unplug that line. That’s my special line. If there’s no answer or you get an answering machine, you know I’m not around.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Dominick brought up Tim then and renewed his interest in buying ten hit kits for his wiseguy customer in New York as well as completing the big arms deal for the Irish Republican Army. That morning Bob Carroll had coached him on what he should get Kuklinski to talk about, and they’d discussed how Dominick might draw him out. But Kuklinski didn’t need any drawing out today. He was running on at the mouth, more talkative than he’d ever been, acknowledging his criminal career, stressing his need to get rid of Percy House, referring to the murders of Gary Smith and Danny Deppner. After a while Dominick had to keep himself from looking at his watch to see how long they’d been there. He couldn’t believe this. Why was Kuklinski telling him so much? Why was he sharing all this incriminating information?

  The answer was obvious, and it came as no surprise to Dominick. Kuklinski intended to kill him. Why else would he be talking so much? Dominick only hoped that the task force’s assumption about the Iceman was correct, that he killed only when there was a profit to be made. As long as Dominick didn’t have any large quantities of cash with him, he was safe. Nevertheless, he kept his hand on the gun in his pocket. And even with that, he paid close attention to which way the wind was blowing, so that he’d know where to move if Kuklinski tried to spray him in the face.

  “So, Rich, you still interested in doing the kid with me?” Dominick said, steering the conversation toward the matter of killing the “rich Jewish kid.”

  “That’s your game, Dom. You tell me when. I’m ready to do whatever you want to do with him.”

  “We do him with cyanide, no? The way you told me, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “So how do we do it?”

  Kuklinski frowned and shrugged. “You bring him back here. I’ll have a van. You tell the kid to get in the back of the van so you can do the deal, and we’ll do it there.”

  “And you’re sure the cyanide won’t show up when they find him?”

  “If they do a regular zip-zap job and throw him out, it don’t matter, they won’t find it. If they do certain tests on him, it might show up. But like I’m saying, it all depends on how thorough the coroner is. If he’s not thorough, he’s in a hurry to get the fuck home and he just slaps it together, you got it made.”

  “How about just making him disappear completely?”

  “There’s some old abandoned mine shafts in Philadelphia. Drop something down there, you don’t even hear the fucking thing bounce.”

  “All right. That’s possible. And how about the car? You think we should leave it or get rid of it?”

  “Either way. We could sell it for parts. I know a place—bang, bang, bang—they cut it up and get rid of the parts the same day. They don’t keep anything around to get ’em in trouble.”

  Dominick wrinkled his face and looked doubtful. He wanted Kuklinski to talk some more about murder. “You sure about all that stuff about fooling the coroner? They got all kinds of ways to find out things, don’t they?”

  “Hey, you think those people are smart? Listen to me. They found this one guy, and when the autopsy was done, they said he was only dead two and a half weeks. But see, he wasn’t. He’d been dead two and a half years. Those guys got their little nuts twisted on that one.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Dominick knew exactly who he was talking about.

  A sly grin stretched across the Iceman’s face. “In a freezer nothing changes, my friend.”

  “You mean, the freezer maintains—”

  “Everything. It’s like pulling a steak out of the fridge.”

  Dominick shook his head in amazement. The Iceman had just admitted to the freezing of Louis Masgay. Unbelievable.

  “Cyanide?” Dominick asked.

  “In that case, no.”

  Dominick knew that was true. Masgay had been shot. Dominick almost wanted to thank Kuklinski for his unusual cooperation. He suddenly became very aware of his Nagra. The goddamn tape recorder better be working, he thought. Kuklinski was giving him gold here.

  The conversation then moved on to how they would administer the cyanide to the rich kid, and Kuklinski weighed the pros and cons of each method. Putting it in a spray was possible, but as he’d already explained, you always had to be sure you were downwind of the mist or else you could end up spraying yourself.

  Putting it in cocaine could work very well, too, but when someone is sampling from a big bag of coke, slipping cyanide into his line without detection could be awkward, if not impossible.

  Putting it on food was a much better bet. As long as you could get the guy to eat something thick and wet, like a sauce or a gravy, where the poison could be mixed in and disguised. If it’s simply sprinkled on a piece of meat, say, it’ll cake and make the food unappealing. “Don’t put just a fucking sprinkle, put enough to spread it over,” Kuklinski advised. “I mean as long as it’s something gooky, spread it over, let it blend in, let him have enough to have a bon appétit.”

  Ketchup was a great thing to mix cyanide with, Kuklinski said. Mix it in with the ketchup on a guy’s hamburger and he’ll never know it’s in there. Kuklinski recounted the time he gave a guy a poisoned hamburger and he practically ate the whole thing before it affected him. “The fucker must have had the constitution of a fucking bull.” He was talking about Gary Smith.

  Out of the corner of his eye Dominick looked for those two gulls fighting over the ketchup-stained hamburger bun, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  Kuklinski then expressed his desire to “retire into the woodwork” soon. He was ready to get out of all this dirty business, he said, and he confided that he had some money “set aside out of the country.”

  Dominick nodded and listened. He knew that Kuklinski had taken several trips to Switzerland in the past.

  “I’ve got it all set up,” Kuklinski said. “I’m ready. I just have some unfinished problems here I’d like to take care of. I’d like to find this one guy, and that’s the end of my problems as far as that goes. It’s personal, you know. I allowed it to happen, so it’s my own mistake. And I hate to leave a mistake undone.”

  “I agree.”

  “I mean this guy Percy, he trapped a guy in his own crew. Wore a wire on the kid, and now the kid’s in jail with a life sentence. The kid used to work for him. That’s what kind of rat this guy Percy is.”

  From the way Kuklinski spoke of him, Percy House wasn’t just a thorn in his side; he was a public menace who had to be obliterated from the face of the earth for everyone’s protection.

  Before they said good-bye, Kuklinski asked one more time if Dominick was sure that the rich Jewish kid wasn’t connected to the Mafia in some way. Dominick told him not to worry. “I’m the only one who’s connected,” he said. They agreed to stay in touch about this.

  Kuklinski got back into his Cadillac, as respectable as a banker in his suit and tie, and drove out of the parking lot. Dominick got into the Shark and watched the big white car sail past the gas pumps. His head was spinning with all that he’d just heard. He started his engine and drove out of the parking lot, then got on the turnpike. He was halfway to the next exit when he finally noticed that someone was right on his tail, blowing his horn and blinking his headlights like some kind of nut.

  Dominick glanced in the rearview mi
rror and saw Paul Smith’s silver sedan. He pulled into the next rest stop, found a parking space, and shut off his engine.

  Smith pulled his car in next to the Shark. His eyes were bugging out of his head as he rolled down his window and motioned for Dominick to do the same.

  “Dominick, what the hell happened? You were out there an hour, the two of you yakking like a couple of old ladies. What’d he say?”

  Dominick just shook his head. His face was drained. “I’m full up, Smith. I’m full. Can’t hold no more.” The Nagra tape recorder was in his hand. He took the lid off and checked to see if the tape had progressed from one reel to the other. It had. It was all down on tape. Dominick let out a long sigh of relief.

  “But, Dominick, what the fuck did he tell you?”

  Dominick kept shaking his head. “I’m full, Smith.” He put the lid back on the Nagra and handed it to the investigator.

  “But, Dom—”

  Dominick made him take the Nagra. “Here. Bon appétit.”

  He started up the Shark.

  “Where the hell you going, Dom?” Paul Smith was having a conniption fit. “They’re waiting for us back at the office to go over—”

  “Later.” Dominick hit the power button and closed the window in Paul Smith’s face. He backed the Lincoln out of the space and got back on the turnpike. He had to take a ride and unwind.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1986—EARLY EVENING

  In the conference room at the Organized Crime Bureau offices in Fairfield, the guys from the Attorney General’s Office—Deputy AG Bob Carroll, Deputy Chief Bobby Buccino, Investigators Ron Donahue and Paul Smith—all sat forward, leaning on their elbows, staring intently at the tape deck as the cassette turned around and around. The reel-to-reel Nagra recording of Dominick’s latest meeting with Kuklinski at one-fifteen that afternoon at the Vince Lombardi Service Area had been transferred to a cassette.

  Dominick leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He was afraid they were going to wear the damn tape out the way they were playing it.

  “Listen to this,” Dominick was saying on the tape. “The Jewish kid asked me if I can get him three kilos. I said yeah, I got it. Eighty-five thousand, cash. Wednesday morning he’s coming. He’ll be here around nine, nine-thirty. Now here’s the thing. I’ll pick up the cyanide that morning from my guy. How long—”

  “Doesn’t give me enough time,” Kuklinski interrupted. “Doesn’t give me enough time. I need a couple of days to get it ready.…”

  Dominick got up, went to the cabinet behind Bob Carroll, and pulled out the new bottle of Johnnie Walker Black that had the picture of Kuklinski from the old bottle taped over the label. He needed a drink. He’d heard this goddamn tape a hundred times already. He knew the goddamn thing by heart.

  “Too bad you can’t pick the stuff up earlier, Dom, ’cause I gotta have it done up, see? I don’t do it myself. I don’t have the, ah, you know, the facilities to do it. I bring it to a guy who does it for me. I pay to have it done. That’s something you don’t want to fuck around with, ya know. A mistake on that, and you got a problem. If I fuck with it and I do something wrong, it could be my fuckin’ problem. I don’t want to fuck with something like that. I have a guy that makes it up.”

  “Let me ask you something, Rich. Can you just have the components, then I can just bring the stuff and your guy can tell you how much to put in?”

  “I don’t have the stuff to mix it with. He has it. He mixes the stuff together perfectly. He has to see the strength of the stuff, some stuff isn’t as strong as others, ya know? He has to see how strong it is. He tests it. Then he puts in these things, and he’s gotta have a seal on it. You gotta make it airtight. You can’t fuck around with this stuff. If it’s not airtight, it could be a problem for you … and me.”

  “Bullshit.” Bob Carroll was frowning.

  They’d found out from the state chemist that cyanide is water-soluble. Mixing the deadly spray should be as simple as making Kool-Aid.

  Dominick was talking on the tape. “What about the other way, Rich?”

  “What’s that? Putting it in the guy’s food? You sure the guy’s gonna eat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then we’ll need a couple of hamburgers, something like that. But will the kid eat?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Then that’s great.”

  “Guaranteed. It’ll be an egg sandwich. Every time I meet this kid, he orders an egg sandwich. We’ll get him an egg sandwich.”

  “We can do that. Do they sell egg sandwiches here? I don’t even know if they do.”

  As Dominick set out five plastic cups, he remembered Kuklinski blowing into his hands at the Lombardi Service Area and looking back over his shoulder at Roy Rogers. It had been cold and wet that day, and the ground was covered with dirty slush. Dominick’s feet were still cold from standing outside by the phone booths with him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dominick said on the tape, assuring Kuklinski that he’d get the sandwiches. “Anything with eggs this kid’ll eat. Is that okay for you?”

  “Don’t matter to me,” Kuklinski said. “Once we get him in the van, he’s ours—”

  Bob Carroll reached over and shut off the tape deck. He didn’t look happy. None of them did.

  “He’s hinky,” Paul Smith said. “He’s getting ready to give you the runaround? Why does he sound so hesitant to commit himself all of a sudden? Why does he need a couple of days to mix the spray? He’s hinky. He’s gonna disappear. You watch.”

  Dominick poured out the scotch. There was barely enough left in the bottle to give everyone a taste. He emptied the last drops, then set down the bottle next to the small brown glass vial on the table. The vial contained fine white granules of quinine, specially prepared by a state chemist to resemble cyanide. Dominick was going to give it to Kuklinski and tell him it was the poison.

  “Hey, Smith, I forgot to ask you,” Dominick said as he passed the plastic cups around, “you do like eggs, don’t you?”

  “Too late now if I don’t.”

  An egg sandwich was the first thing that had popped into Dominick’s head when Kuklinski started to give him trouble about needing time to mix the spray. If he was going to meet the rich kid at nine o’clock in the morning, it was more logical that someone would eat an egg sandwich than a hamburger. But Dominick could tell that the guys from the state weren’t exactly thrilled with his improvisational talents. Well, all he could say was he was out there and they weren’t. When Kuklinski had started to hem and haw, he had to act fast to keep him from making any more excuses.

  Dominick hoisted his drink. “Gentlemen, a toast.” He swiveled his chair to face the larger picture of Kuklinski that was taped to the wall. “This is for you, Richie. I hope you’re enjoying yourself now because your days are numbered, my friend. You are mine, my friend. You are fucking mine.” He threw back the scotch and drained the cup.

  Paul Smith lifted his cup. “Bon appétit, Richie.”

  They all laughed and downed their drinks. They had to laugh because they knew that if they didn’t, they’d be climbing the walls. It wasn’t a matter of cockiness or false bravado or machismo. Kidding around was a survival mechanism. If you let the tension get to you, you’d lose your edge and you’d start questioning yourself. And once you started to doubt your abilities, you started making mistakes. And you do not want to make mistakes with a mass murderer. That’s why Dominick was laughing the loudest.

  The deputy attorney general set down his cup and pressed his lips together. “I’m still thinking we should move the meeting indoors.”

  “Why?” Ron Donahue asked.

  Deputy Chief Bobby Buccino shrugged and showed his palms. “Kuklinski has never wanted to meet anywhere but Lombardi. If you try to change the place, he may not go for it. Why run the risk of turning him off?”

  Bob Carroll tapped his fingers on the table to make his point. “Yes, but if we can get him inside, we ca
n videotape the whole thing.”

  Buccino looked confused. “We can videotape outside. We’ve got the equipment.”

  Carroll shook his head. “No, that’s not what I mean. What I’m thinking is we get a three-room apartment somewhere. We set it up so that Dominick and Paul are in the living room doing the coke deal. Richie will have to go out of the room to put the cyanide in the sandwich and we’ll get it all on video. Can you imagine how that would look to a jury if they could see a film of Kuklinski actually putting poison on a sandwich, getting ready to kill someone?” The deputy attorney general was almost bouncing in his seat he was so excited by his brainstorm.

  Dominick shook his head. “Where’d you get that one? America’s Most Wanted?”

  “No, no, think about it. How can a jury fail to convict? How could the defense say his actions weren’t premeditated?”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Paul Smith said. “What if Kuklinski changes his mind? What if he just pulls out a gun and shoots me?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “We know he doesn’t just kill with cyanide. If he thinks he’s alone in there with Dominick and the rich kid, why mess around with cyanide? May as well just shoot the kid and get it over with, right?”

  “I don’t think he’d shoot you,” Ron Donahue said. “He might use a knife, though.”

  “Or he might try to strangle you,” Bobby Buccino offered. “He’s done that before.” Buccino was grinning at the young investigator.

  “This isn’t funny, Bobby. What if he really does shoot me?”

  “So you’ll wear a vest.”

  “What if he shoots me in the head?”

  Dominick waved him off. “Smith, you worry too much. Look at it this way. If he kills you indoors, we’ll just carry you out in a rug. But if we do it at Lombardi, he’s gonna stick you in a barrel, and face it, who wants to be stuck in a barrel? Remember what happened with that guy he did in Jersey City.”