"It was during my Johnnie Walker Black period. All I cared about was the next glass in my hand."
The view from the small conference room on the twenty-eighth floor of 26 Federal Plaza was spectacular. The confluence of the Hudson and East rivers at the tip of the narrow island gave a clear perspective on the amount of water surrounding and bisecting the boroughs. But like most natives, Eddie Dunne was more interested in the brick and mortar than the coastline. He looked for roofs he'd made love on, roofs he'd caught homicides on. He had to amuse himself somehow; thus far, they'd excluded him from the meeting.
Eddie had finished his coffee and bagel and read all he wanted of the
New York Post
. He started looking around the room, trying to figure out where they'd hidden the camera and mike. The FBI tech men were much better than in the days when they wired a mike into a TV set, then sat it dead center in the middle of the room. The only thing in the center of this room was an odd-shaped chunk of polished brown granite in the center of a small table. On it was a brass plaque that read Alfred p. murrah federal
BUILDING, APRIL 19, I995.
No goddamn reason for making me wait this long, he thought. Arrogant bastards couldn't find a junkie in Harlem without guys like me. Eddie walked over to a large mirror and placed his fingernail against it. There was no gap between his fingernail and the image of it in the mirror. It was a two-way mirror. If it had been a real mirror, there would have been a space between his nail and its image.
After ninety minutes, he heard the sound of heels clicking on the tile floor. Special Agent Stacey Powers, a young woman with a Southern accent, led him two turns down the hallway, then into a conference room that faced uptown. She pointed out a seat at the end of a long, polished table, next to a grim-faced Matty Boland. Yellow pads and pencils were stacked in the center of the table. Powers introduced seven nonsmiling males, agents or attorneys, all crisp and buttoned-down. Then she went straight to the first question: When was the last time he'd seen Paul Caruso?
"Fourteen years ago at a party in Queens," Eddie said. "I never saw him again after that."
"Any correspondence between you since he moved to Sicily?"
"None."
"Do you know if Detective Caruso ever returned home to the United States again after that?"
"If he did, he didn't call me," Eddie said. "Ask his brother."
"We spoke to Mr. Caruso," Powers said.
Agent Powers gave Eddie a quick, annoyed glance, then said there was no record of him ever returning, not even this time. Friends and neighbors thought he was traveling in Europe again. Local police considered Paul Caruso an international playboy, jetting off to Amsterdam or the French Riviera on a whim. No one had any idea how his skull had arrived in New York, or where the rest of his body might be hiding.
Agent Powers said, "According to your department's records, you had a fistfight with Detective Paul Caruso at a graduation party in June of 1984, in the backyard of Angelo Caruso's house."
"It wasn't a real fight."
"He needed extensive dental work following the encounter."
"Paulie liked to do Robert De Niro imitations," Eddie said. "He was doing De Niro playing Jake La Motta in
Raging Bull
. I was supposed to be Sugar Ray Robinson. He'd had a little too much to drink and stepped into a punch."
"I understand that was the last time he spoke to you."
"That's true."
"Tell us about Marvin Rosenfeld," a new questioner said from behind them.
All heads turned to a man sitting in one of the four leather chairs that surrounded a glass coffee table. French cuffs, blue shirt with a white collar. He'd come in after the introductions, carrying a teacup, complete with saucer.
"Marvin Rosenfeld started out as a tax attorney," Eddie said, addressing his answer across the table to Agent Powers. "He had an office on Remsen Street in the seventies. Then he started working as a financial adviser for a scumbag Russian crime boss named Evesi Volshin."
"Rosenfeld lived in Manhattan Beach," French Cuffs said.
"And he died there," Eddie added.
Eddie figured French Cuffs was the assistant special agent in charge. The one who claimed to know the musical roots of the subway
bing-bong
. He had no yellow pad of his own. Eddie figured the conversation was being recorded. Agent Powers took notes for effect.
"Rosenfeld was murdered at home in March of 1984," French Cuffs said. "Tell me about that homicide and the Marine Park shooting that followed it."
"Nineteen eighty-four was a long time ago. Agent Powers has the files in front of her."
"Humor me," French Cuffs said. 'Tell me about that day."
Eddie told him that he and Detective Paul Caruso were working off the detective chart, investigating a rash of burglaries in upscale Manhattan Beach. They spotted a souped-up Dodge Charger parked in the driveway of the expensive home of local attorney Marvin Rosenfeld. They figured Rosenfeld wasn't the muscle-car type. Detective Caruso drove around the block once more. On the second pass, they saw two men they knew to be Brooklyn thugs tossing black plastic trash bags into the Charger. It didn't look like trash removal or anything legitimate. It looked purely wrong. Caruso parked half a block away. A few minutes later, the Charger backed out of the driveway. They followed it a short distance east on the Belt Parkway to a deserted employee parking area in Marine Park. The Charger pulled behind a park storage building, where the two men had apparently hidden a second vehicle. When they began transferring the bags to the second vehicle, the two detectives moved in. They came up on them quickly, guns drawn, loudly identifying themselves: "Police! Freeze!" The two thugs began firing. The detectives returned fire, killing both men. Eddie pointed out that both he and the Priest won the Medal of Honor for this incident, the highest decoration awarded by the NYPD.
"You just happened to be there," French Cuffs said.
"It's called police work."
"You didn't call for backup?" he asked.
"No radio. Not all detective cars had radios in those days. We always signed out the cars that didn't."
"Why was that?"
"If you had a radio, they always called you back into the house for annoying errands: Pick up lunch, coffee, booze, drive the boss to a meeting. Things like that."
"The guys who did the robbery, Santo Vestri and Ray Nunez, who were they?"
"Two half-assed wanna-be gangsters," Eddie said. "Consignment guys, mostly. They'd get rid of hijacked loads for a percentage: TVs, fur coats, drugstore supplies, anything."
"Two small-time punks who died in a police shoot-out," French Cuffs said. "Who the hell cared, right?"
"Not even their mothers," Eddie said, turning to look at him. "These guys murdered both Marvin Rosenfeld and his wife, Svetlana, while their little girl sat right there. They shot the parents to death right in front of her."
"But you didn't know this at the time of your encounter in Marine Park."
"If we had, we wouldn't have gone so easy on them."
"Were you outraged enough to follow up on the shooting, Mr. Dunne? What happened to the child?"
"The wife's parents moved back to Russia, took the little girl. She drowned a year or two later. Fell into an icy lake."
"My report says hypothermia," Agent Powers said.
'The record indicates you recovered a lot of money from the trunk of that Dodge Charger."
"Front page of the
Daily News
said four point two million," Eddie said.
"Four point two million," French Cuffs said. "How did a small-time lawyer like Rosenfeld come to have so much cash?"
"I'm sure that's also in that file Agent Powers is holding."
"I read it," French Cuffs said. "It says that in the early 1980s, Marvin Rosenfeld was a money launderer who worked for the man you mentioned. Evesi Volshin was
the
major Russian crime boss in Brighton Beach up until that week. The four point two million was Volshin's money, believed to be from the lucrative gasoline-tax scam, waiting to be laundered. The money was coming in so fast, they had a hard time getting it all out. Hundreds of millions, if you believe the rumors."
"I'm sure all the rumors are in the FBI report," Eddie said.
"The report also mentions that Anatoly Lukin, your former employer, was the real mastermind of the gas-tax scam. Or was that only a rumor?"
"Evesi Volshin was an idiot; I'm sure someone else was the brains. Lukin would be my guess, too."
"Volshin himself was murdered a few days after Rosenfeld," French Cuffs said. "Anatoly Lukin then took over the Russian mob. Isn't that correct?"
"And your next question," Eddie said, "is about my relationship with Anatoly Lukin."
"No sense in me asking, then, is there?"
Eddie said, "First, let me tell you that Evesi Volshin was a vicious bastard who preyed on his own people. Russian people in Brooklyn started celebrating in the street the minute they heard he was dead. He was shot and beaten to death in a crowded restaurant. No witnesses. A hundred people have taken credit for his murder."
"So you agree that Anatoly Lukin took over his operation on that day?"
"Common knowledge," Eddie said. "But what you're leading up to is the fact that shortly after those murders, Anatoly Lukin hired me. And that makes you think I had something to do with the murders."
"It doesn't matter what I think," French Cuffs said. "It's an investigative dead end. You're the only witness left alive."
"Mr. Dunne," Agent Powers said. "Last Tuesday, you told Detective Boland about several black binders that Anatoly Lukin kept in his office. You said they contained dummy corporations. Where did they come from?"
"From Marvin Rosenfeld. The guy was an expert in dummy corporations before it was fashionable. He made them up in advance. Dozens of phony corporations at a time. He kept them in black binders and sold them to any interested party."
"How did the binders move from Rosenfeld's possession into Lukin's?" she asked. "The Brooklyn DA never took those binders into evidence on the day of the murders."
Eddie stood and nodded to the silent group around the table. For all he knew, they'd had their tongues clipped in Quantico.
"Mr. Dunne," Agent Powers said. "The binders are missing. Apparently, someone stole them from Lukin's apartment shortly after he was shoved under the train."
"I don't have them."
"You disappeared for almost an hour after Lukin's death," French Cuffs said.
Eddie glared across the table at Matty Boland. He'd chased Lukin's killer to a construction site and come back with the coat. But that didn't prove anything to them. Witnesses identified the coat as the killer's, but the feds always saw Machiavellian plots when city cops were involved.
Eddie stood up and walked to the door.
Agent Powers said, "We have a duty to protect the reputation of the United States government, Mr. Dunne. This doesn't mean we'll stop looking for your daughter. We want you to understand that."
"If I were you, I wouldn't do anything foolish," French Cuffs said.
"Actually," Eddie said, "this is the smartest thing I've done in a long time."
Chapter 20
Friday
11:00 a.m.
Eddie's pulse slowed in the cool darkness of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The more he thought about it, the more he understood what had happened. He'd been around bosses like French Cuffs before. Public service was invented for them. One of the many ways they avoided taking action was by suggesting the possibility of some serpentine scheme that would undermine the plan's success. Take no chances. This ensured the longevity of the mediocre. Eddie couldn't prove he'd chased the woman in the wool coat, so French Cuffs hinted at his possible duplicity. God forbid they embarrass the Bureau. Careerwise, it was always safer to do nothing. Paulie the Priest had called it "empty-suit disease."
All Eddie had learned in 26 Federal Plaza was from Boland as he chased him across the plaza. Boland said that Sergei Zhukov lived in Rego Park. They had agents sitting on his house, as well as the Eurobar and a restaurant he frequented in Queens named the Registan. Other agents were interviewing friends of Misha. Boland told him he needed to calm down. Eddie said he'd calm down when someone besides Babsie Panko came up with a decent lead. He told him to concentrate on Sergei. Find him and all would be forgiven.
Out of the tunnel, in the sunlight again, Eddie squinted to find the sign for the Belt Parkway. He could think like French Cuffs, too. His own natural paranoia had already created a dozen scenarios, some involving the FBI in the kidnapping. But they were all too complicated. Answers are always simpler than that. Keep it simple, he reminded himself, or you'll wind up with your head up your ass, like Special Agent French Cuffs.
The Howard Beach Boccie Club sat on a quiet street of one- and two-family homes, surrounded and shaded by old trees. There were no signs outside. Those inside knew who they were and why they belonged. Behind the trees, the club was protected by an eight-foot chain-link fence and the reputation of its members.
Eddie pushed the gate open. A quartet of old men in flowered shirts and dark pants had congregated under a gazebo near the far corner. Eddie waited as they spoke softly in a lyrical Italian. Sotto voce. They spoke softly in English, as well. In fact, these men had spent their lives in hushed conversations. Eddie waited for Angelo Caruso to acknowledge him. It was Angelo's move. After a minute, three men stood up and walked away.
"How ya doin', champ?" one of them said as he bobbed and weaved in a fighter's stance, feinting short slow-motion jabs at Eddie. Eddie still got this every now and then, despite the fact that his fight career had ended over thirty years ago. Guys like Ali and Frazier must get it all the time, he thought. People dancing around them, throwing punches. He wondered if they were tempted to reach out and smack them down. He bet nobody tried this with Mike Tyson.