The Iceman (27 page)

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 mirror 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.

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 can 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.”

“You mean Malliband?”

“Yeah, Malliband.”

Paul Smith looked disgusted with the bunch of them. “At least I’ll fit,” he grumbled.

George W. Malliband, Jr., made a big mistake, and at the time he probably didn’t even realize it. He showed up at Richard Kuklinski’s house unannounced.

It was a hot summer Sunday afternoon in the late seventies, and the Kuklinskis were having a barbecue in their backyard in Dumont. The kids had some of their friends over, and Barbara’s mother was there, presiding over the plenty at the picnic table, urging everyone to eat. Barbara kept going in and out of the house to fetch things while Richard tended to the grill, flipping hamburgers and turning the hot dogs.

Richard Kuklinski was relaxed that day, enjoying himself. He liked it when his family was all together, doing something together as a family. Moving back from the rising smoke, he watched the flames lick the sizzling burgers as fat dripped onto the burning coals. Another couple of minutes and the burgers would be done. He opened up a package of buns to toast on the grill just before he took the meat off.

But just as he started to separate the buns, his mother-in-law came over and grabbed him by the sleeve. She looked upset. There was a big man standing on the grass
at the side of the house, staring at them, she said. She’d asked the man what he wanted, but he said he had to talk to “Richie.”

Kuklinski looked up and squinted against the smoke. George Malliband was at the edge of the yard, waving him over. The three-hundred-pound, six-foot-three man wore metal-rim glasses and a bushy mustache. From the look of horror on Kuklinski’s mother-in-law’s face, it was as if the Blob had suddenly arrived for lunch.

Kuklinski’s mood turned black. He shoved the bag of hamburger buns into his mother-in-law’s hands and ordered her to watch the grill while he took care of the intruder. He strode toward Malliband, slow but purposeful. Malliband had a hell of a lot of nerve coming to his house.

But before he said a word to Malliband, he managed to put a clamp on his rage. He was furious that Malliband, a wheeler-dealer from central Pennsylvania whose main source of income was pornography, had shown up without an invitation and barged in on a family cookout. He regretted that he’d ever brought Malliband home that one time. He was just trying to be social, but that was a big mistake. He swore he’d never do that again with anybody.