The Con Man's Daughter (17 page)

"We have to talk about your old partner, Eddie. Even you have to agree now that all this has something to do with an old case, or something you guys did together. Throwing his head on your lawn is a message even Irish guys should be able to understand."

Grace, skipping rope inside the ring, was far enough away that they could talk. The ring was only a foot off the ground. Kieran had bought the canvas and ring ropes at a CYO auction. The Dunnes drove spikes in the dirt and hammered out a wooden frame made from sections of two-by-fours Kieran had salvaged from the old P. Ballantine and Sons Brewery. The basement, like much of the bar, was salvage. Kieran liked to brag he'd never bought a new piece of wood in his life.

"They have a cause of death?" Eddie asked.

"The ME might not be able to determine an exact cause of death as it is now, but timewise, she thinks five to ten days, minimum. She says he was brutally beaten before he died; that much is sure."

"I didn't even know he was in New York."

"He wasn't," Babsie said. "At least customs can't find how or where he entered the country."

Babsie asked Eddie to tell her about Paulie Caruso. Talking in short bursts of air, punctuated by grunts and the thump of his fists against canvas, he started with his nickname. Paulie first started being known as "the Priest" when he was working undercover on prostitution. The undercover cop's job was to allow a street hooker to make an offer of sex for money, then signal the wagon to pick her up. Eventually, the street girls would begin to recognize the same undercover cops and run. Disguises were called for. Paul Caruso had one brother in the priesthood and one in the mob. The good died young, and Paulie inherited a clos-etful of black suits and white collars, plus a collection of vestments in colors to match the many moods of the Catholic church. Paulie began wearing the black suit and backward collar on Eighth Avenue. It was a surefire act. Girls propositioned him every step of the way. The van would drive along behind him and scoop up the hot-pants crowd nice they were lost souls at a tent revival. The archdiocese finally heard about it and stopped it. But Paulie still became a man of the cloth whenever the spirit hit him. It was the least of his sins. Paulie the Priest was instant insanity… just add alcohol and stir. He danced the tarantella… straddling the fragile line between heaven and hell.

"Any truth to the rumor he was working for the Gambino family?" Babsie said.

"He probably told his brother some things. But he didn't work at it."

Eddie's friendship with Paulie the Priest was one of many bad choices he had made in those days. The Priest had been in the Coney Island squad for five years when Eddie arrived. At that time, the precinct was a dumping ground for detectives on the verge of losing the gold shield. The new police commissioner failed to see the wisdom of throwing all those fallen angels into the same pit. He set out to change the practice, infusing the old dumping-grounds precincts with top-notch detectives. The Priest welcomed Eddie to Coney Island with an extended tour of local watering holes. Eddie's career went downhill from there.

"So, any case stand out in your mind?" she said. "Any one thing you and Caruso did together that might be coming back to haunt you?"

"How long have you been a cop?" Eddie said, breathing hard. He stopped throwing punches and held the heavy bag from swaying.

"Almost twenty," she said.

"Then you know this could be from one small confrontation that happened years ago. A traffic ticket, or a domestic dispute where the husband blames you for humiliating him in front of his wife. You forget about it ten minutes after you leave the apartment, but for the next ten years, he plots to kill you."

"Why don't we just focus on the Russians and the years you worked them with Paul Caruso. I'm betting there's something hinky buried in there somewhere."

"He was the best cop I ever worked with."

"Funny," she said. "I heard he was a no-good thieving bastard."

"That, too."

The Priest was almost too good a cop. Eddie always said that if his life was in danger, he'd want him on the case. The Priest not only saw through every lowlife's con, but knew how much swag they had in their pockets, and when it would be his. But everything he did, he did to excess; one drink was too many, a thousand not enough. He lived his life with a kamikaze recklessness, as if trying to guarantee an obit listing every cause of death known to modern man. Although beheading would not have been on Eddie's list of predictions.

"Boland said the reason you resigned is because IAB asked you to wear a wire to bring down Caruso."

"In those days, you didn't entrap your partner," Eddie said.

"What I get from you is, He's my partner, right or wrong."

"I didn't say that."

"They had a picture of his villa in Sicily in the
Daily News
today. Right on the water. Worth over a million dollars. Sounds dirty to me, Eddie."

Grace moved from the ring to a line of beer kegs, making noise just to hear it. She played some kind of clanging song with an old rusted hammer. Pipes ran from the kegs up to the taps at the bar. Kevin had put some of the kegs into a refrigerated locker-mostly for the younger crowd, the light-beer lovers. The old-timers didn't like their beer that cold, so Kevin let a few kegs sit out. Kevin claimed that tap beer was better years ago, the heads fuller, when you had to pump the lines by hand. Now with compressed-air systems, it came out flat. The new nitrogen and CO
₂
combination tanks were hard to keep in balance. Clean the lines often and wash the glasses in hot soapy water, that was Kevin's simple rule. Either way, the basement still smelled like a brewery.

"What do you want me to say?" Eddie said, stopping for breath. "Paulie was a guy who would take a hot stove and the kitchen sink. And maybe he did work for the Gambino family. The bottom line is, I don't care. All I care about is getting Kate back."

"That's all I want, too, Eddie. But Paulie Caruso
is
the bottom line. Paulie and you. What's happened here is not coincidence."

"I know that. I've thought through all the old cases. We pissed a lot of people off. But we're talking about fourteen years ago." Eddie grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. "You know anyone in customs?" he asked.

"Don't change the subject."

"I'm not. You mentioned customs before and it got me thinking. You know anyone who could expedite a passport?"

"Why do you need a passport?"

"I don't," he said, pointing a gloved hand at Grace. "I have a passport, but I've been thinking about a trip to Ireland this summer. My mother has never seen Grace. We've got a slew of cousins over there."

After she sold the bar to Kevin, Teresa Dunne took the proceeds and her Social Security checks back to Ireland, where she bought a drafty two-story stone house in Dungarvan, County Waterford, the town of her birth. Always content alone, Teresa now spent her days walking among her ancestors in the windswept St. Mary's graveyard and staring out at the Irish Sea.

"This came up suddenly," Babsie said. "Some people are going to think the wrong thing. Like maybe, say, your son-in-law makes a move to gain custody. You're planning to whisk her out of the country."

"Who cares what they think?"

"I know somebody," Babsie said. "But you gotta promise me you won't do anything stupid."

"Stupid was dancing with you when you were fourteen years old. We didn't do any Irish dancing, did we?"

"Are you kidding? In my father's house? No, it was a slow dance. Johnny Mathis, 'The Twelfth of Never.'"

"Jesus. Your brother should have shot me."

Chapter 19

Friday, April 10

9:00 A.M.

City cops brought their own coffee into the FBI building, even though they knew the rich kids had everything. Eddie Dunne found Matty Boland at the dingy lunch wagon wedged under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, directly behind NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza. They were both due at the FBI's New York headquarters for a hastily called meeting of the joint task force investigating Russian organized crime in the United States.

"Why the hell are we here?" Eddie asked. "Why aren't we out knocking on doors?"

"Buyer's remorse," Boland said. "It's the whole thing with Paulie Caruso, Eddie. Guys like the Priest make them nervous."

The sudden appearance of the severed head of Eddie's old partner had injected doubt into the task force's plans to use him as the foundation of their assault on the Russian
mafiya
in New York. He couldn't blame them for being careful; the feds didn't need another embarrassment. But shouldn't his daughter's life outweigh their anxiety?

Eddie bought a container of black coffee and a buttered bagel at the wagon. Today, they'd run a hard-nosed Q &A, "give him a scare," as Paulie the Priest used to say. Then, he hoped, it would be back to the business of finding his daughter. The caffeine jolt would help him stay sharp through the barrage of fedspeak he was sure to hear.

"Maybe you should give some serious thought to calling a lawyer," Boland said. "They're going to screw you around up there. I don't have to tell you the horror stories; you know them as well as I do."

"I need these people to help me, Matty. I'm willing to listen to what they have to say."

"I
know
what they're going to say. They're going to put this case on hold until they can figure out exactly how you and the Priest are involved. The feds are great for holding off and hoping the problem goes away. And remember…" Boland put his hand to his ear in the universal sign for a phone call.

"They're already tapping my phone," Eddie said.

"Then check your house for bugs. They're going to protect their own asses. That's priority one with the high-level feds. By the time they jump back in this case, the Russians will have sold the Lincoln Tunnel to the Iranians. We'll be swimming to Jersey."

"I'll swim to Jersey. Just find Kate."

Eddie had parked his Olds in the underground public garage at Madison Street and the Avenue of the Finest. The garage was located directly underneath NYPD headquarters. Uniformed cops stood at the entrance, checking for car bombs. Eddie wound up parking three levels below the building. It marked the closest he'd been to headquarters since the day a civilian clerk had flipped his detective shield into a cardboard box containing the badges of the recently quit, fired, retired, or dead. The guy just tossed it on the anonymous pile with dozens of numbered metal pieces engraved with the seal of the city of New York.
Clink
, it's over. Finality bestowed by some overweight desk jockey treating each shield as if it were a meaningless chunk of tin. The lazy bastard couldn't have cared less that each one of those shields had spent the last few decades pinned to some cop's breast pocket and was therefore witness to the unspeakable. Each could tell a million stories. He should have genuflected in their presence.

"The guy who called this meeting is a pretentious bastard," Boland said. "Last month, we were at the Ninth Precinct with the two uniformed cops who locked up that diplomat's kid. We needed to get downtown quick for a press conference, so we grab the subway. We get to the platform and this guy hears the
bing-bong
-you know, the signal that they're closing the subway doors. He tells everyone that the
bing-bong
is a descending major third-like an E to a C-like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth. The cops looked at him like he was a Martian or a stone fag. I was embarrassed to be with the guy."

It was a five-minute walk across Foley Square from One Police Plaza to 26 Federal Plaza. On weekdays, the square was populated by jurors, bored civil servants, tourists looking for Little Italy or Chinatown, and film crews using the steps of the Federal Courthouse for background. Sometimes, when they were shooting a movie scene, you'd have to walk around police barriers. It was still only a five-minute walk. Boland was stalling.

"I can't believe you remembered 'a descending major third,' " Eddie said.

"My mother was a music teacher. But my point is, I wouldn't say that in front of cops."

"You have something you want to say to
me
, Matty?"

"Yeah, I was just going to tell you. Internal Affairs is sending a courier with your file and the Caruso file. I offered to bring them, save them the trip-that way, you'd get a peek. But no dice."

"You'd probably get a hernia lugging those files."

"I just want to warn you that IAB will be there dredging up the past. I know you're out a long time and all. But at this stage of my career, I don't need anyone thinking I'm part of some rat squad ambush."

"Don't worry about it," Eddie said. "I have a high pain threshold. I don't care what the hell they dredge up, as long as they keep looking."

On the corner of Worth Street, familiar faces gathered in the early stages of a small demonstration. The same core group had manned every antigovemment rally for the past twenty years. Yellow signs stood ready, stacked against a pole. The slogans demanded freedom for the manipulative and articulate killer of a Philadelphia cop.

"I gotta ask," Boland said. "How come you refused to testify against the Priest? You could have saved your own ass."

"It was a bullshit case; they were trying to nail him for other things."

"I heard he was a very dirty cop."

"It depends on what you mean by 'dirty.' The Priest was a dinosaur. He never saw anything wrong with accepting a free meal or a free cup of coffee."

"Free hotel rooms, free cars, free trips to Puerto Rico," Boland added.

"Probably a lot more than that in his early days. He slowed down after the Knapp Commission, but he was a stubborn bastard. He should have seen the handwriting on the wall and retired."

"They got you guys for consorting with known criminals," Boland said.

"At his niece's graduation party. He'd been consorting with those people all his life. He couldn't've avoided them if he'd wanted to."

"Story I heard is that half the Gambino family was there. That's what bothers me, Eddie. You had to have known that someone would be taking pictures. The feds or the rat squad, somebody. I can't believe you just walked into that."