The Iceman (12 page)

“You still there, Rich?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Listen, don’t worry about Dom. He’s okay. And listen.”

“What?”

“If you find Buck, you let me know. I know a lotta people around here who’d love to pay him a visit. You know what I mean?”

“I know. Take it easy, Lenny.”

“Yeah, you, too, Rich.”

He hung up the phone and swiveled his chair toward the window. Looking out through the Venetian blinds, he could see the two small concrete lions on the patio. He was thinking about Gary Smith. Percy House and Barbara Deppner had to go to sleep the same way Gary had gone to sleep. Maybe not as messy as Gary had been, but he wanted them to go the same way. He ran the edge of his hand over the crumpled napkin on the desktop. That’s why he needed the goddamn cyanide.

Thanksgiving 1982 had started out fine for Gary Smith. That morning while his wife, Veronica, prepared the turkey dinner in their kitchen in Highland Lakes, New Jersey, he and his six-year-old daughter, Melissa, cuddled on the couch in front of the TV to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Gary got a big kick out of his daughter’s excitement every time a new giant balloon creature filled the screen and she recognized the cartoon character.

Melissa was growing up, and Gary’s feelings for her had changed. When she was younger, he’d pretty much taken her for granted. Veronica took care of the baby, and he worked—it was as simple as that. But Melissa wasn’t a baby anymore. She was a kid, someone he could talk to and share things with. He was really beginning to enjoy being a father.

The house was warm with the smell of the roasting turkey by the time Percy House’s wife, Connie, and her children arrived early in the afternoon. While Connie helped Veronica in the kitchen, the kids ran around the house, giggling and screaming, having a great time. Gary
beamed as he watched little Melissa mixing in and playing with the bigger kids. She was having a ball.

Watching Melissa set Gary to thinking about his responsibilities again. For the past few months he’d been giving a lot of thought to this, and he’d pretty much made up his mind to quit Percy House’s gang and go straight. He’d been with Percy a long time, but it wasn’t like he was committed to being a crook for the rest of his life. He’d just sort of drifted into it about five years ago, when he couldn’t find a job and he really needed money. Working for Percy, stealing cars and robbing stores, just scraping by—that was okay when Melissa was a baby and all she needed to keep her happy was a bag of cookies and Bugs Bunny on the TV set. But things had changed. Being a two-bit thief just didn’t seem right anymore. It wouldn’t be fair to Melissa if he kept on doing what he was doing. She needed a more stable life. That’s why he wanted to go straight, and he intended to tell Percy that very day.

But when Percy showed up later that afternoon with Danny Deppner, the other worker in the gang, Gary’s announcement did not get a warm reception. Percy scowled at him and just kept shaking his head. You don’t understand, he kept saying. It’s not that simple. You
can’t
quit, Gary.

Danny sat on the couch, nodding like Howdy Doody, agreeing with everything Percy said. Danny didn’t dare disagree with Percy. He was scared shitless of Percy. Percy beat him up regularly. At one point he’d made Danny live in his basement and would throw pizza crusts down to him as if he were a dog. Percy had said that Danny needed an “attitude adjustment.” That was one way of putting it. Danny seemed to get a lot of “attitude adjustments” from Percy. Christ, Percy had even stolen Danny’s wife. Just started shacking up with Barbara and took her for himself, and Danny didn’t say boo. He didn’t dare. Well, Gary wasn’t Danny, and he didn’t want to have to put up with any of that shit anymore. All he wanted was to go straight, period.

As the children ran around them, chasing each other through the
living room, Gary tried to plead his case without begging. All he wanted to do was quit. Whatever they’d done together in the past was in the past. He’d never talk about it to anyone, never. He promised.

But Percy kept shaking his big ugly head, telling Gary he didn’t understand, his face getting flushed, his growl getting louder. “You don’t get it, Gary. You don’t fucking get it, do you?”

“Whattaya mean, I don’t get it?”

“You can’t quit, Gary, and that’s all there is to it. I’m not gonna let you out, and Richie sure as hell ain’t gonna let you out either.”

Gary’s stomach sank. Richie Kuklinski. He’d been trying not to think about Richie. He’d hoped that maybe he’d only have to deal with Percy, the foreman of the gang, not Richie, the boss. Richie didn’t come around all that much. He liked to keep his hands clean. That’s why Gary thought he might be able to avoid a confrontation with him. Percy he could deal with. Percy was a bully, and he liked to use his fists, but Gary wasn’t like Danny. He was a pretty big guy—six-two, 190 pounds—and he could stand up to Percy. Richie, on the other hand, was a real big son of a bitch, but that wasn’t what made him scary. When Percy got mad at you, he stayed mad until he blew up and burned himself out. When Richie got mad, his temper might explode, but then all of a sudden it would pass and he’d be real calm as if nothing had ever happened. But Gary knew that Richie never forgot; he just waited.

By the time the women called everybody to the table, Gary didn’t have much of an appetite, though Percy and Danny ate like there was no tomorrow. Gary felt like he’d spent the last two hours talking to a brick wall. Later, after pumpkin pie and coffee, Percy took Gary out onto the porch and picked up the discussion where they’d left it, trying to make Gary understand in his blunt way why he couldn’t quit.

Richie was already upset with him, Percy explained. All this talk about going legit for his daughter’s sake was getting on everybody’s nerves. What was he, getting soft? What would he do if the
cops leaned on him? Was he gonna be a real upstanding citizen and tell them about everything he’d done with the gang? Is that what going straight was all about? He had to get his head right about this. They weren’t all gonna take a fall because Gary had decided he wanted to play
Father Knows Best
all of a sudden.

Gary tried to make Percy understand that he wasn’t going to do that. He would never rat on anyone in a million years.

But Percy kept shaking his head, saying that the best thing he could do would be to just be a good boy and do what he was told because Richie already had it in for him and you never get to strike three with Richie.

Gary didn’t even have to ask what Richie had against him. He knew. Billy Cudnyg’s goddamn black Corvette.

Richie had a thing for new Corvettes. They’d stolen a bunch of them that year for him. Usually they got them right off the lot from car dealerships. Percy would go in during the day and make like he wanted to buy one. He’d ask the salesman to see the bill of sale to see what the dealer was paying for the car so that they could negotiate. Usually salesmen had no problem with that. Except that Percy wasn’t interested in the price. He was interested in the eight-digit key number. Percy would stare at the sheet and memorize the number, then afterward he’d go to a locksmith and have a duplicate key made from that number. A couple of nights later either Danny or Gary would take the key, unlock the car, and drive it right off the lot, easy as that.

But Cudnyg’s car was different. They didn’t steal that one. Billy Cudnyg, one of the guys who hung out at “the store,” owned it for real. Richie had figured he could make a profit on both ends with that one. He and Cudnyg would split the insurance money when Cudnyg reported the car stolen, then Richie would sell the car to a guy he dealt with up in Connecticut and get about a quarter of the book price for it. When Cudnyg started having second thoughts about doing this, Richie convinced him it would all work out fine. Besides, as he pointed out to Cudnyg, he already had duplicate
keys to the car because he’d rented it from the man a couple of times, so he could go ahead and steal it anyway and cut Cudnyg out completely. Billy Cudnyg had no choice but to go along with the scam.

On December 21, 1981, the theft was staged at the Willowbrook Mall in Fairfield, New Jersey. The car ended up with Gary Smith, who was supposed to keep it hidden until Richie was ready to bring it up to Connecticut. Gary kept the car at his house for two weeks, but it was making him nervous, so he moved it around from place to place, wondering when the hell Richie would take it off his hands. By February he was running out of hiding places he could trust, so he left it with a woman he used to work for when he was a teenager. Unfortunately the police happened to spot the stolen car in her driveway. After checking the Vehicle Identification Number plate on the dashboard to confirm that it was indeed the stolen Corvette, they had it towed away.

The car was returned to Billy Cudnyg. Kuklinski was furious when he found out about it. That was strike one against Gary. Three weeks later the car had to be stolen a second time. This time Kuklinski traded it to a man from Bloomfield, New Jersey, for a vintage 1964 Corvette coupe.

Afterward everybody kept throwing it up to Gary, needling him about the black Corvette that had to be stolen twice, Richie warning him not to lose any more cars or else he’d be very sorry. Gary was getting sick of hearing this shit. It wasn’t his fault. If he had thought the cops would’ve spotted the car in that lady’s driveway, he would never have left it there, for chrissake. But they kept on his back about it, and that was when he started thinking that maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a thief. Maybe he ought to start thinking about getting into another line of work where the bosses weren’t like Percy and Richie.

For weeks after that Thanksgiving dinner, Gary mulled over his position in the gang. He really wanted out, but it looked like he was going to have to ease himself out gradually, maybe stay with
them through the winter, then slack off, get a real job, start avoiding Percy, and maybe by spring they’d leave him alone.

But then on December 17, 1982, the shit hit the fan and everything got crazy.

Gary Smith, Danny Deppner, Percy House, Barbara Deppner, and several of her children were driving to her mother’s house in West Milford. They were going there to drop the kids off for the day. As they approached the house, they noticed a police car parked off the road, backed up into the woods. Percy was immediately suspicious. It wasn’t the kind of road where the police would post a speed trap. When they got to Barbara’s mother’s house, they saw that her car wasn’t in the driveway. Percy ordered Gary and Danny to get out and go hide in the woods behind the house. He figured that if the cops were up to something, having the gang all together would give them a reason to haul them in.

Percy’s instincts were right. When he and Barbara backed out of the driveway and drove up to a stop sign at the top of the hill, police cars came out of nowhere and surrounded their station wagon. As the police emerged from their vehicles with guns drawn, shouting for Percy and Barbara to show their hands and not move, the frightened children wailed in the backseat. Percy snapped at them and told them to shut up. This was all a lot of bullshit. He’d been through this before. These sons of bitches were just out to hassle him, he figured.

But Percy was wrong about that. Passaic County had a seventy-nine-count indictment against him for an assortment of offenses, including theft and forgery of motor vehicle registrations. The cops weren’t just out to hassle him this time. Their intention was to put him and his gang away. They had arrest warrants for Gary and Danny, too.

As the police leaned Percy House over the hood of the station wagon to handcuff him while they read him his rights, he looked over at pregnant Barbara Deppner clutching her screaming baby.
He didn’t have to say a word. His sad, baggy eyes said it all. She knew right away what he wanted her to do. Call Richie. She looked around at the faces of all the policemen. They were all focused on Percy. She nodded to him that she understood.

Later that day she caught up with her cousin Gary and her ex-husband, Danny, at Gary’s house. Veronica, Gary’s wife, was hysterical. Detective Pat Kane of the state police had been there earlier with a search warrant. He was looking for Gary. Danny and Gary were frantic. They were on foot, they didn’t have much money, and they didn’t want to get caught hanging around there, so Barbara drove them to the Sussex Motel in Vernon, where she rented a room and they all spent the night. She had already gotten in touch with Richie, right after Percy was arrested.

Barbara didn’t have that much money herself, but Danny had just put down a security deposit on a house in Lake Hopatcong, so the next morning they drove there in the hope that Danny could get the deposit back. But the landlord wasn’t around when they got there, and they didn’t want to stick around. They all piled back into the station wagon and headed east on Route 80. Richard Kuklinski had instructed Barbara to take Gary and Danny to some place called Paul’s Diner on Route 3 somewhere in Hudson County.

Forty-five minutes later they pulled into the parking lot of Paul’s Diner. A white Cadillac with a blue top was parked at the far end of the lot all by itself. Richard Kuklinski was sitting behind the wheel. Barbara pulled the station wagon up alongside the Cadillac and rolled down her window. The Cadillac’s power window glided down, and Kuklinski looked right through her, glaring at Danny and Gary.

“Follow me,” he said.

“Where we going?” she asked.

He narrowed his eyes, and his stare bore into her. Her fingers were suddenly freezing. “Just follow me,” he repeated. His window glided up, and the Cadillac’s engine roared to life.

Barbara Deppner followed him to the Liberty Motel in North Bergen, where Kuklinski gave Danny some money and he rented a room under the name Jack Bush. Relieved to have the fugitives out of her car, Barbara headed straight back to her sister’s place, where she’d left her children.

Percy, in the meantime, was stuck in the Passaic County jail, being pressed for the whereabouts of his associates Gary Smith and Danny Deppner. He repeatedly told the police that he didn’t know where they were, but the cops kept hounding him. Actually Percy wanted to know where they were and what they were doing himself, particularly Gary. He didn’t trust Gary anymore, hadn’t trusted him since Thanksgiving. Gary still had it in his head that he could reform himself, and Percy feared that if the cops got to him, he’d want to cooperate just to show them what a real good citizen he was now. Gary would turn on them, sure as shit. He was a time bomb waiting to go off. Sitting in his cell, Percy got the sweats just thinking about it. He’d done time before, but he’d never gotten used to the feeling of being locked up. The thought of doing another long stretch was making him short of breath. He couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t. He’d go crazy. He needed to know where the hell Gary was, but the goddamn cops weren’t letting him make any calls. For three days he waited, barely containing his panic until finally they let him have a visitor, Barbara Deppner.