The Con Man's Daughter (20 page)

"All Russian guys. I couldn't remember even if you tortured me. I went to that one game. Miserable. I remember the food sucked. All this greasy shit, little white fish that looked like that Jewish shit. All kinds of greasy white sauces I never saw in my life. Some guy in a lab coat delivered it. Sergei was bragging about the food. He said they get it catered from some big deli in Brighton Beach."

"M and I International?" Eddie said.

"Could be. Don't hold me to it."

Richie jumped when Eddie went to shake his hand. Richie wasn't accepting apologies. The Bronx Knights were never going to forget that beating, so Eddie grabbed the cannolis, said, "Ciao," and left.

Chapter 22

Friday

6:00 P.M.

Big stakes card games are all-night affairs. Eddie knew he wouldn't get to bed before dawn. He had a few hours before the start of his high-roller hunt for Sergei Zhukov, so he drove to Yonkers to touch base with the people who loved him, win or lose, his little cheering section from the hill. Friday nights, he knew exactly where they'd be.

It had taken Kevin Dunne several years to unearth the hidden character of the North End Tavern. He took all the credit because he and Eddie had done most of the work themselves. The art of renovation, Kevin claimed, was in knowing what not to change. Except for a steam cleaning, the old tin ceiling remained untouched, as did most of the original woodwork. They'd sanded and refin-ished the oak floors and replaced the bar with a classic mahogany horseshoe-style one they'd bought from a Connecticut salvage yard. The biggest visual difference came when they stripped the plaster walls away to expose the old brick, a move that sent the bar regulars home clucking about the latest Dunne brainstorm.

Kevin hoped the step back in time would help lure back several decades' worth of Yonkers kids who'd moved upstate, the majority of them less than an hour away. Nostalgia was the hook. Kevin scoured the city, collecting old street signs and photographs of the city: the trolleys, Getty Square, the Schoolboys' Race, the Sacred Heart High School Bagpipe Band, the Yonkers Marathon, dozens of high school sports photographs, and Eddie Dunne's face on the cover of
Ring Magazine
. Every time you looked at the walls, a new black-framed remembrance stared back at you. Most of the former Yonkersites who appreciated these images were in or near retirement. Kevin's goal was to trade regular trips down memory lane for some of their discretionary income.

The plan included a series of special nights: Gorton High School night on the second Thursday of every month; Sacred Heart on the third Tuesday; Yonkers Fire Department and PD retirees, and so on. "Mini-reunions," he called them. All he had to do was contact the alumni associations and word of mouth would be all the advertising they'd need.

The limited menu presented the biggest problem. The present limit was one dish a night, and Martha was adamant about sticking to that. "The customers are family," she said. "Family members do not get a menu." On Sunday, the lone entree was pot roast, mashed potatoes, and string beans. The same vegetables came with the entries all week long. Occasionally, a seasonal vegetable would replace the string beans. Monday brought roast chicken; Tuesday, liver and onions; Wednesday, franks and beans; Thursday, beef stew; flounder on Friday; and Saturday was burger night. For the hard to please, burgers and fries were available every night except Friday. Saint Martha would not sell any meat on Friday, no matter what the old men in Rome decreed. But one Friday night, Kevin let a regular customer run to the corner to pick up a pizza for his fish-hating kids. Martha said, "There you go; the floodgates are open."

The usual Friday crowd surrounded the bar when Eddie walked in with a pizza and a box of cannolis. The subject at the bar was the latest plot of bartender B. J. Harrington. At issue was the wisdom of the deceptively tough Harrington's ongoing public effort to engage Britain's Prince Charles in a boxing match to decide possession of Northern Ireland. B.J. was attempting to have a crown he had purchased at a theater auction declared the official crown of the king of Ireland. Possession of the official crown, he figured, would give him legal standing to challenge the Brits. Although he was twenty years older than the prince, B.J. was confident. He'd lined Eddie up to train him. Five rounds, winner take all. Registered letters were flying back and forth across the pond.

Babsie Panko and Grace waited for Eddie in a back booth. For him, it had been a day of carrying white boxes. Babsie grabbed the cannolis and put them on her side of the booth. "Dessert for later," she told Grace.

"Don't let Aunt Martha see the pepperoni," Grace said.

Babsie opened the pizza box and cut slices all the way through. She scooped them out one at a time and put them on the rose-trimmed plates Kevin had bought from a wholesaler on the Bowery. The restaurant had been all Kevin's doing. Their father, Kieran Dunne, had not emphasized food in his thirty years in the bar business.

"You look beat," Babsie said.

"I'm fine," Eddie said. "I'll go see if Kevin wants a slice."

"Your brother is putting new ice in the urinals," Babsie said.

"Why does he do that?" Grace asked.

"It's a guy thing," Babsie told her.

"It's stupid," Grace said.

"God, you're getting more like me every day," said Babsie.

Grace ate half a slice, then went to the jukebox to press numbers. The Wurlitzer played only songs from the fifties, mostly doo-wop and Elvis. You didn't need quarters; Kevin kept it on free play. An Irish bar without music, he claimed, was just another wake.

"What happened with the feds today?" Babsie said.

"Nothing helpful. How's Kate's bedroom working out for you?"

"It's fine."

"If I haven't said it before, Babsie, I really appreciate your moving in. I mean it."

"Expressing gratitude is an effective way of changing the subject. It forces a polite Polish Catholic girl like me to say, 'You're welcome.' I said it Now, let's try to remember that I'm not the baby-sitter; I'm the lead detective. Tell me about the meeting."

"They wanted to rehash the Rosenfeld case."

"That's your claim to fame, right? You and Paul Caruso. The shoot-out in Marine Park. You recovered a couple million dollars."

"Money that Rosenfeld had been laundering for Evesi Volshin from the gas-tax scam."

"Remind me how that worked," Babsie said.

Like all great rip-offs, the gas-tax scam was simple. A handful of gasoline distributorships were responsible for paying the twenty-eight-cents-a-gallon tax. Anatoly

Lukin, who worked for Evesi Volshin at the time, had front men buy wholesale gasoline for their distributorship. They then moved it, on paper, through a series of bogus corporations. The gas was sold to independent retailers at cut-rate prices. The retailers received a forged invoice stamped "All taxes paid." Of course, the taxes were never paid. Lukin always designated one of the corporations in the daisy chain as the "burn" corporation, the one required to pay the taxes. For years, nobody missed the tax money, but then investigators finally discovered the "burn" corporation was nothing more than a post office box in a dry cleaner's. The corporate principal was an elderly Russian émigrés, who suddenly disappeared.

"It's easy to believe the big money estimates," Babsie said. "Ripping off the government for twenty-eight cents for every gallon, and this went on for years. Boland said the money was coming in so fast, Rosenfeld had trouble washing it all. That's why he had it in his safe at home. He kept it there until he could move it."

"You talked to Boland?"

"He called me after you walked out of the meeting."

Babsie was wearing jeans and had her shoulder-length gray hair held back in a ponytail. Each time one of them took a slice of pizza, she closed the box and put the napkin holder on top to hold it down.

Eddie said, "They think that I took these black binders that contain the paperwork for a slew of phony corporations."

"Boland told me someone removed the binders from Rosenfeld's house after the double homicide and that they wound up in Lukin's possession. Now they're missing again. You're the natural suspect."

"I don't know where they are now, Babsie. But apparently, my partner sold them to Lukin after the Rosenfeld murder. I saw his brother Angelo today; he said that Paulie told Lukin I was in on it. I wasn't."

"I believe you. Your partner is another matter. He sold those black binders without you knowing it; no telling what else he did behind your back."

Kevin was hustling from one table to the next. Grace was telling him to "bend a leg." Eddie figured she meant "shake a leg." He loved the way the kids today were comfortable around adults. It wasn't like that when he was growing up. But it was a trade-off. In his day, the kids from the North End learned discipline and were pushed by the nuns and priests at St. Joseph's and Sacred Heart, and all the now-closed Catholic grade schools in every parish in Yonkers. Even the street kids, like the Dunnes and Pankos, came away with a great education.

"I have no idea why Paulie's head wound up at my door, Babsie."

"I don't doubt that for a second," she said. "But you gotta understand: Nobody trusted your partner, so they're gonna assume you're the same kind of guy."

"Paulie liked living large," Eddie said. "But he wasn't a money vacuum. It was more about the thrill of the scam. He was a guy who'd drive ten miles out of his way to buy a pack of untaxed cigarettes."

Eddie told her about the first time he met Paulie Caruso. It was in the squad room in the Coney Island precinct. Paulie took him out drinking. They left the precinct in a late-model Cadillac Seville. At some point during the evening, Eddie found a green NYPD property voucher above the visor. When he read it, he realized they were cruising around in a car used in a homicide two years earlier. It was seized as evidence by Detective Paul Caruso, and he'd been examining it for 23,000 miles.

"People think money was skimmed from the Rosenfeld robbery," she said.

"I know. It was all we heard from cops for months after that. But you know how cops are. Any time someone turns in a lot of money, his brother officers say the same thing: 'I wonder how much was really there.'"

"I read the reports," she said. "I think he grabbed the money in the park that day, and someone knows."

Immediately after the shooting, Eddie drove to find a telephone to call it in. Paulie the Priest waited at the scene. Eddie found a phone near the service road. Like he told IAB, he couldn't see the Dodge Charger, and he lost sight of Paulie. They knew all this anyway; they'd checked the phone he'd used. But he was positive no one else had entered or left the lot while he was gone; he returned less than ten minutes later. He'd been able to see the entrance to the lot the whole time.

"Okay," she said. "Where do we go from here?"

Babsie meant with the case, but he hesitated, thinking she'd read his mind. He'd been thinking about her. What was the state of Babsie Panko's social life? He knew she'd been divorced for years. She hadn't mentioned boyfriends.

"To look for Sergei Zhukov," he said.

"You know where to look?"

"Richie Costa gave me some good hints."

"After he sucker punched you, he helps you out. He must have had some change of heart. I wonder what happened to make him suddenly see the light."

"I don't remember you being this sarcastic," Eddie said.

"It's become my best quality," she replied. "When are you going to follow up on Richie's good hints?"

'Tonight."

"I'll get someone to watch Grace and go with you."

"You can't, Babsie. What I'm doing isn't exactly legal."

Grace played "Earth Angel" and was dancing around, hugging an imaginary partner, assaulting him with a very theatrical smooch. Eddie imitated her, so she exaggerated even more.

"Roughly, how illegal?"

"I've answered questions all day, Babsie. Can we change the subject?"

"Okay, how about this: Is Kevin making money with this place? The neighborhood isn't what it used to be, to put it mildly."

"He's doing good now-especially since B.J. came here. Bartenders make or break your place."

For whatever reason, people were drifting back to the North End Tavern. Nights were solid and afternoons, especially Saturday, were drawing more guys, some stopping in after golf somewhere. Old faces were showing up after a spin through the old neighborhood. Most of them hadn't been on the block in twenty years.

"B.J.'s a legend," Eddie said. "He brought a following."

"And what about your following?" Babsie said. "All those fifty-year-old ex-prom queens who show up nights you're behind the stick. I hear they're cashing their alimony checks at the bar."

"Yeah, but they fall asleep by eleven."

"Granpop," Grace yelled. She stood on a wobbly chair next to a posed picture of Eddie in boxing trunks. He struck the pose for her from his seat. She put up her fists and made a valiant attempt at a game face.

"She's a great kid, Eddie. She really loves you."

"I know. She thinks I can do anything. What happens when I can't find her mother?"

"We're going to find her. If you ever let anybody help you."

"Not tonight," he said, looking up at the clock. "Tonight, I can't."

Eddie wondered why he'd never really looked closely at Babsie Panko before. Since his last drink, he'd come to think of himself as a man who'd had amnesia. The beauty of it was that the life he discovered had always been his.

"How do you think they got Paulie's head over here?" Babsie said.

"I'm thinking it either came by ship or was mailed to one of the private boxes in Brighton Beach."

"I can't get my mailman to walk up five steps," she said. "But heads they deliver."

Chapter 23

Friday

9:45 p.m.

Sergei Zhukov's Cadillac sat at a meter in the parking lot on Brighton Eighth. The cars around it ran the high-roller gamut from world-class rides to death traps. Almost every car contained a
Racing Form
, a newspaper turned to the sports page, or some new casino rag with an article on the latest foolproof system. The high rollers always find the action, Eddie thought. Sitting under a streetlight with the motor running was a black Mercedes. The driver wore a Yankees hat that fit his oversized skull like a blue stocking. He flipped the pages of a magazine and looked up every now and then to check for newly arrived players. He was Eddie's backup plan. If what Richie Costa had said about the luggers was true, plan A needed to work.