The Iceman (21 page)

On Christmas Eve, in Room 55 at the Skyview Motel in Fort Lee, Danny was jittery. He was stuck there, afraid to move, afraid to leave the room. Richard Kuklinski had paid for the room but again left him with no money. Danny kept the TV on to keep him company, but there was only a lot of dopey Christmas stuff on, cartoons and crap. He left it on, though, because the silence of the night made him nervous. He dozed off on the bed with
his clothes on and the television going. That’s when he had the nightmare for the first time.

Gary hadn’t died. He was under that bed, but he wasn’t dead. He was reaching out, trying to get out from under the mattress and box spring. He was struggling and moaning. Danny was lying on that bed, sleeping, tossing and turning, having the nightmare. Beneath him, Gary was on his back, reaching up. Danny wanted to escape, but he couldn’t move. Suddenly Gary’s rotting hands emerged from the mattress on either side of Danny’s face—

Danny Deppner’s eyes shot open, and he bolted off the bed. He stared at the mattress, looking for Gary’s hands. He was drenched in sweat.

On Christmas Day, not knowing who to turn to, Danny called his ex-wife, Barbara, and asked her to come down for a while. Terrified herself, knowing what she knew about Gary Smith’s murder, she told him she didn’t think that was such a good idea. He begged her, but she refused. He was getting low on cigarettes, he told her, he had no money, and he needed a drink bad. An alcoholic who’d been trying to reform, Danny had started drinking again. His ex-wife kept saying no, she couldn’t come down and be with him. She was too scared.

Danny Deppner spent the day alone in Room 55, fighting the urge for a drink and a cigarette, flipping channels on the TV, avoiding that bed.

That night he dozed off on the armchair and had the nightmare again. He didn’t get much sleep.

The next day Barbara Deppner changed her mind and went to the motel to be with Danny, but he wasn’t there. Afraid that he might be dead, too, she called the only other place she thought he could be, “the store.” She asked if Danny or Big Rich had been around, but no one had seen either of them lately.

Later that day she returned to the motel and found Danny in his room. He said he’d gone out for a long walk, anything not to be cooped up in that room. She could see that he was a mess. He
couldn’t stop talking about how he and Kuklinski had killed her cousin Gary, begging her to listen to all the gory details. But she didn’t want to hear about it. She had her own problems. Percy House was still in jail, and she had all those kids to take care of by herself. Anyway, the whole thing about what they’d done to Gary made her sick. But Danny had to tell somebody. If he didn’t let it out, he’d go crazy, he said. She tried to get him to change the subject, but he wouldn’t. He wanted her to go to Gary’s house that night and ask Veronica Smith if her husband had returned home. Barbara thought her ex-husband had finally snapped, but Danny insisted that she do it. He had to know if Gary was really dead.

As she tried to reason with him, the phone suddenly rang, and they both froze. Danny picked it up. It was Kuklinski. He wanted them to meet him right now at the Fort Lee Diner, a five-minute drive from the motel. They were both too scared to disobey.

Kuklinski wasn’t there when they arrived, so they waited in the parking lot. It wasn’t long before the white Cadillac with the blue top pulled into the lot. Kuklinski motioned for them to get into his car, but Barbara shook her head. She was terrified of him.

Richard Kuklinski didn’t like people saying no to him. He jumped out of the car, enraged, and snatched Barbara Deppner by the wrist. Where the hell did she get off calling “the store” and asking about him? he wanted to know.

Danny tried to defend her, but he knew better than to challenge Big Rich.

But then, as suddenly as he had erupted, Kuklinski calmed down and suggested they go into the diner and have something to eat so they could talk. Danny was suspicious. Why was he being so nice all of a sudden?

Inside, over coffee, Kuklinski explained his problem with this whole situation. He couldn’t go on carrying Danny indefinitely, paying for motel rooms and bringing him food every day. Danny had to start pulling his own weight because he just couldn’t afford
it. He suggested that Barbara take Danny to a liquor store so he could hold it up.

After they left the dinner and Kuklinski departed, Danny told his ex-wife that he knew of a convenience store up in Sussex County that would be easy to knock off, the Ding Dong Dairy Store in Hardystown. Forget it, she told him. Her uncle worked there now. She didn’t want him getting hurt. Danny pleaded with her, promising that he wouldn’t hurt anyone, but she stuck to her guns. She dropped him off back at the motel and headed home. She wasn’t going to help him rob stores. She already had more trouble than she needed.

On December 31, 1982, Richard Kuklinski moved Danny Deppner to the Turnpike Motel on Route 46 in Ridgefield, where Danny registered under the name Bill Bradly. His room was paid for each day just before checkout time. One of the maids at the motel remembered “Mr. Bradly,” a tall man with dark, woolly hair and a thick mustache. He had tired eyes and drawn face. “Mr. Bradly” would never let her clean his room, just took the clean sheets and towels at the door and said he’d take care of it himself. She also remembered the white Cadillac with the blue top that came every day just before checkout time and parked in front of “Mr. Bradly’s” room.

Danny was sleeping a little better now, but every once in a while he’d wake up in the middle of the night with that nightmare, Gary trying to grab him through the bed.

On Saturday, February 5, 1983, forty-four days after Gary Smith’s death, Richard Kuklinski moved Danny Deppner once again, this time to an apartment in a residential section of suburban Bergenfield, New Jersey. The studio apartment belonged to a young man named Rich Patterson who was dating one of Kuklinski’s daughters at the time. Patterson was away for the weekend, and Kuklinski had his own set of keys. Apartment 1 at 51 Fairview Avenue, Bergenfield, was the last place Danny Deppner ever had that nightmare.

* * *

On Sunday, May 14, 1983, a man was riding his bicycle along Clinton Road in Milford Township, New Jersey. It was a warm spring day, and the early-morning sun was sparkling off the waters of the Clinton Reservoir. The air was fresh, and the woods were alive with new growth. There was seldom very much traffic on this road, especially on Sunday mornings, and there wasn’t a house for miles. It was beautiful.

As the man rode along the reservoir, something caught his attention to his left. An unusually large black bird was perched high in a tree. The man pulled his bike to the side of the road and stared up at the bird. It was a turkey buzzard, the biggest one he’d ever seen. He figured it must be looming over a carcass, probably a dead deer left behind by hunters. He got off his bike and went into the woods to investigate. Under the buzzard’s tree he found something wrapped in green plastic garbage bags. One end of the large bundle was ripped, most likely by the scavenger bird. As he stepped closer, his stomach lurched. Part of a human head was peeking through the tear in the bag.

The bicyclist ran back to the road and marked the spot where he’d entered the woods with a fallen branch. He intended to ride down to the nearest house and call the police, but a car happened to come by, and he flagged it down. He told the driver to call the police, there was a body in the woods.

The police arrived within the hour and summoned Dr. Geetha Natarajan, the acting chief medical examiner of Passaic County. She examined the body at the scene but left it in the garbage bags. After photographs were taken, the body was carefully lifted off the ground and put in a body bag. Samples of the dead leaves underneath the body were taken. They would help Dr. Natarajan determine when the body had been left there. The body was then taken to the State Medical Examiner’s Office in Newark, where she would perform the autopsy.

At the ME’s office, Dr. Natarajan’s first task was to remove the
plastic bags, taking note of how many were used and how expertly the victim’s limbs had been bound with paper tape. Then came the one job she detested most: dealing with the bugs. She took samples of all the insects and larvae she found present on the body, mainly carrion beetles and blowflies. The number of insect generations on the body would help determine how long it had been left in the woods. Identifying the types of insect would also be helpful since different species thrive at different times of the year. When Dr. Natarajan was certain that she had samples of all the species present, she hosed the rest of the swarm down the drain and ground them in the garbage disposal, glad to be rid of them.

Laying the body on a stainless steel worktable, Dr. Natarajan then began the autopsy. The victim was a male, six feet one and a half inches, 173 pounds. The man’s face was almost totally skeletonized, and there was only partial flesh on the limbs, but the torso was very well preserved. Spring had come late that year, so the cold had kept him relatively fresh, and fortunately the buzzard had not had that many meals off this carcass.

She removed the clothing—a white V-neck T-shirt with extensive brown-red staining, a pair of blue jeans, a black leather belt, blue socks—and took note of the absence of shoes or a coat. There were no gunshot or stab wounds, but she did find hemorrhaging on the neck just above the Adam’s apple and on the whites of the eyes. A pinkish flush was apparent on the skin around the shoulder and chest on one side. This kind of discoloration, called pink lividity, can indicate several things, most commonly carbon monoxide poisoning.

When Dr. Natarajan got to the stomach contents, she found more than two pounds of undigested food: beef, beans, potatoes, carrots, and beer. It was a large meal but not unusually so for a man this size. There was no sign of gastric emptying—the food hadn’t moved on from the stomach through the digestive tract—which meant that the man was killed soon after he had finished his meal,
perhaps during the meal. She examined the food itself and noticed that the beans had been burned. The meal was probably home-cooked, she believed, because a restaurant couldn’t get away with serving burned food. The man must have been very hungry to eat it.

In the pocket of the man’s jeans she found a black wallet that contained no money or identification. She did find five wet slips of paper in the wallet, which turned out to be motel receipts. There were also three photographs that had stuck together. She soaked them and carefully separated them, laying them on paper towels to dry. They were pictures of children, two boys and a girl. Dr. Natarajan bagged them and sent them up to the Passaic County prosecutor.

When he received the photos, the prosecutor laid them on his desk and stared at them. There was something familiar about those kids, but he couldn’t place them. The pictures sat there for two days, haunting him, the little faces staring out at him, like three pathetic little orphans. Then it dawned on him. He did know those kids. They’d been in the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office with their mother and her lowlife boyfriend/common-law husband, whatever the hell he was, Percy House. Those were Barbara Deppner’s kids. He picked up the phone and called the ME’s office to tell Dr. Natarajan he had a good hunch who her body was. It was the father of those three kids, Daniel Everett Deppner.

Barbara Kuklinski didn’t know what to think as her husband held the door for her and she walked into the carpeted lobby of the restaurant. Richard was wearing his dark glasses, even though it was evening, and he’d been wearing them all day around the house, which always made her uneasy, but now he was dressed to the nines in his dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a maroon tie. This was their favorite French restaurant, the place they always went to when they had something to celebrate. He’d specifically asked her to wear the dove gray Christian Dior suit he’d bought her a few months ago. As they went up to the maître d’s station together, out of the corner of her eye Barbara saw him take off the glasses and put them in his pocket. He smiled at the maître d’ as he gave him their name. She couldn’t figure it out. Richard seemed to be in a good mood, but the dark glasses made her suspicious. Was this really the good Richard, or was it a new incarnation of the bad Richard?

The maître d’ nodded to Richard and raised his finger as if to say “just one moment.” He turned and stepped into the dining room, waving his hand at the pianist until he caught the woman’s eye. He nodded once to her, and
she stopped what she was playing and started a new song. Barbara recognized it immediately, Kenny Rogers’s “Lady.” When the record had first become popular, Richard declared it “her song,” and whenever he was in a very good mood, he’d call ahead to the restaurant and make sure it was played for their arrival.

“Thank you, Richard,” she said as the maître d’ led them to their table.

He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “I haven’t done that in a while.”

“It’s very sweet of you.”

“Who else have I got to be sweet to?”

She smiled and squeezed his hand. But she was still suspicious.

As soon as they were seated, a waiter came and asked if they’d care for drinks. Richard wasn’t much of a drinker, but he did like wine with his meals. The waiter fetched the wine list for him, but Barbara already knew what he’d order, a good Montrachet, their favorite red wine. The ones Richard ordered were never less than a hundred dollars a bottle.

The waiter returned with the bottle of Montrachet and showed Richard the label. He nodded his approval, and the waiter uncorked the wine, placing the cork in front of Richard, then poured a little into his glass. Richard took a sip, looked down, and considered it for a moment, then told the waiter it was very good. The waiter filled Barbara’s glass first, then Richard’s, then left to let them study the menu.

Barbara forced herself not to look at Richard over the top of her menu. She wasn’t convinced that this was really the good Richard, and she knew from experience that anything could set the bad one off, though she was usually safe in public. Most times he saved his temper for behind closed doors. But not always.