The Iceman (17 page)

He pulled the trigger, and Hoffman’s head flew back with the impact of the first shot. But when Kuklinski pulled the trigger again to finish him off, the goddamn thing jammed. Hoffman was on his knees, clutching his throat. He was gurgling, blood pouring out of his mouth. But he wasn’t dead. Kuklinski grabbed the tire iron from the spare tire well and smashed him over the head. The pharmacist scrambled to his feet and tried to run, but Kuklinski hit him again and again. Hoffman collapsed to the floor, flat on his face. Kuklinski stood over him with the tire iron in his hand,
watching the blood pool around his head, then branch off like a snake slowly feeling its way along the oily floor to the drain in the middle of the garage.

Richard Kuklinski waited and watched the still body to make sure Paul Hoffman was really dead before he started to remove the packets of money from the spare tire well. He did a quick count. There was only about twenty thousand. Hoffman had said he had twenty-five. Kuklinski smirked and shook his head as he put the money in a plastic bag and locked it in the trunk of his own car. He then went to the back of the garage where he had a fifty-five-gallon steel drum. He rolled it on its rim to Hoffman’s body, filling the enclosed space with a noise that sounded like a gathering thunderstorm. He turned it on its side and shoved Hoffman’s body in. After setting it upright, he put the lid on but didn’t seal it.

He took the keys out of the tailgate of Hoffman’s station wagon and drove the car down the hill to Route 440 to a Rickel Home Center in Jersey City. He bought five bags of Sakrete instant concrete and returned to the garage.

He removed the lid from the drum and dumped the instant concrete over Hoffman’s body, turning away so he wouldn’t have to breathe in the powdery mixture. He shook the drum after each bag so that it would all sift down. After the fifth bag of Sakrete, he uncoiled the garden hose that was attached to a spigot near the front of the garage and filled the drum with water. When it started to overflow, he turned the spray to the floor and washed all the blood and excess concrete down the drain. He took his time washing the blood off the tire iron, then wiped it down with a rag before he threw it back into the tire well of Hoffman’s station wagon. He re-coiled the hose, then checked the drum to make sure no part of the body was sticking through the surface. He wanted it to look like nothing but solid concrete after it hardened. Satisfied that the pharmacist was totally submerged, he put the lid back on, sealed it, and left it there.

A month later Kuklinski decided it was time to get rid of the drum. He’d read some stories in the local papers about police efforts to find the missing pharmacist, but that didn’t concern him. The damn barrel was just getting in the way. He rented a van and rolled the heavy drum into the back. Then, after dark, he headed down the hill to Routes 1 and 9. The hill was steep, and the barrel shifted as he took a corner, smashing into the sidewall of the van. Kuklinski slowed down and looked over his shoulder. One of the windows had shattered. He turned around in his seat and stepped on the accelerator. Good thing he had taken the insurance, he thought.

He drove north on 1 and 9, then west on Route 46, stopping at a motel in Little Ferry that was next to a little hot dog joint he liked called Harry’s Corner. He pulled the van up alongside the motel and rolled the heavy barrel out the back, letting it drop to the pavement. He rolled it up against the wall so it would be out of the way, turned it upright, and left it there.

A few days later he stopped by Harry’s Corner and ordered two hot dogs with mustard and chili. He sat on a stool at the counter that ran along the window overlooking the driveway between Harry’s and the motel. The drum was still there, right where he’d left it.

Every week he managed to stop by Harry’s Corner for a couple of hot dogs, and he always sat at that counter, staring at the fifty-five-gallon drum as he ate. Then one day he came in and noticed that it was gone. Someone from the motel must have gotten sick of having it there and decided to have it hauled away and dumped somewhere. He just assumed the body was never discovered or else he would have heard about it at Harry’s. It would have been big news if a body in a steel drum full of concrete had been found next door.

Richard Kuklinski bit into his first hot dog. Staring at the spot where the drum had been, he chewed and wiped chili from the
ends of his mustache. He took a second bite. It was a good thing they hadn’t found Hoffman, he thought. Harry made a pretty good hot dog. If they’d found the body, he’d have to stop coming here for a while.

Dominick Polifrone still couldn’t believe it. He was grinning as he drove the Shark through the intersection of Bloomfield Avenue and Route 23, passing a White Castle hamburger joint on the corner. The cassette, a copy of the recording he’d made of the telephone conversation he’d had with Richard Kuklinski and “Tim” that morning, was in his pocket. He was coming from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms offices in Newark, where he’d returned Kuklinski’s call on a phone rigged to a tape recorder. The Operation Iceman task force had been hastily summoned for a meeting, and he was heading for the Organized Crime Bureau offices in Fairfield.

Dominick couldn’t wait to see Bobby Carroll’s face when he heard what was on this tape. The deputy attorney general was gonna get up and do a dance on the table. Kuklinski had actually admitted to killing with cyanide. It was
on tape
. And that business about putting it in a spray mist—Jesus! How could a jury
not
convict this guy when they heard that? Carroll was gonna think it was his birthday.

A traffic light turned red up ahead, and Dominick pulled to a stop. There was a small shopping center with
a Newberry’s on the right and a Chinese restaurant called the Great Wall of China on the left. Suddenly Dominick’s beeper went off. He pulled the device out of his pocket and glanced at the number on the LCD readout just as the light turned green. Area code 609-327.… It was the same number in south Jersey that Kuklinski had called from that morning. The car behind him honked its horn, telling him to go.

Dominick gave it some gas and drove on, wondering what he should do. His policy was to make Kuklinski wait, to maintain his control over the situation, but he had a feeling that might not be the best thing to do right now. He’d asked Kuklinski to find military arms for him; he’d told him it would be a big order, up to a half million dollars’ worth. Even Michael Dominick Provenzano wouldn’t play it cool for a deal that big. It wouldn’t make sense, and Kuklinski could get suspicious. If Kuklinski was as paranoid as most bad guys were, he might think Dominick always took his time getting back to him because he needed time to set up recording equipment. Kuklinski might start to think that he was working with the cops or that he even was a cop. Dominick decided it might be smart to return this call right away. He spotted a phone booth outside a diner up ahead on the left, turned on his signal, and pulled into the lot.

In the phone booth he read the number off his beeper and punched it out. It rang twice before it was picked up.

“Hello?” It was Kuklinski.

“Hello, Rich? It’s me.”

“Hey, Dom. How’s it going?”

“Good. What’s up?”

“You at a pay phone?”

“Yeah, we can talk.”

“Okay, listen. We made some calls, and Tim’s getting a sample for you.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s he getting?”

“A hit kit.”

“What caliber?”

“It’ll be a twenty-two, already fitted with a screw-on silencer.”

“What’s the price?”

“Eleven hundred dollars for this one. You place a bigger order, we’ll see what we can do.”

“That’s eleven hundred for the set, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, that sounds good to me. I’ll give the girl a call and see if she’s interested.”

“Okay. And if she is, we can get together so you can look the piece over. Gotta check the merchandise out before you buy it, right?” Kuklinski was chuckling.

“Of course. Whattaya think?” Dominick laughed with him.

“You know the Vince Lombardi exit off the turnpike up north?”

“Yeah?”

“We can meet there.”

“Okay … that sounds possible.” Dominick was still wondering why he wanted to meet there.

“When do you want to get together then?”

“Well, lemme talk to my girl first. She may not want this kind of stuff.”

“Whattaya mean, Dom?” Kuklinski’s good humor faded. “I thought you told Tim you were looking for hit kits?”

Dominick turned on the attitude. “I did, Rich. But you know how broads are. They ever give you a fucking reason for changing their minds?”

“No, but—”

“Is there a problem with holding on to the piece until I can talk to her?”

“No, that’s not it—”

“Then lemme find her so I can make sure this is what everybody wants. That okay with you?” Dominick was on the border
between aggressive and belligerent. He was stalling Kuklinski, but he couldn’t make it sound like he was stalling.

“All right, I tell you what, Dom. I’ll beep you in a couple of days, and we’ll take it from there.”

“Beautiful.”

“You’re sure your girl wants this stuff? I mean, the whole order, the big one.”

Dominick laughed. “She wants it. Believe me, she wants it. But I’ll be honest with you, Rich. For the first deal she’s gonna bust balls ’cause that’s the way these people are. But once they trust you, she’ll be buying so much fucking shit you’re gonna change your name to Sears. You know what I’m saying?”

“I hear you.” Kuklinski laughed, but it sounded forced.

“Okay, you beep me over the weekend, and we’ll set up a date. I’m ninety-nine percent sure she’ll want these pieces, but I wanna make sure. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll be talking to you.”

“Take it easy.”

Dominick hung up and stared blankly at traffic whizzing by on Route 23. He wondered what Kuklinski was thinking. Did he think Dominick was stalling him? And why did he want to meet at the Vince Lombardi Service Area? Why there? It was a busy place, good for getting lost in the crowd, but a lot of bad stuff went down there. Where exactly at Lombardi would he suggest they meet? In the men’s room? No way. Too hard to place backups in a bathroom. Besides, it was an enclosed space. What if he had a little nasal spray bottle full of cyanide?

Dominick headed back to his car. He knew he was going to have to meet Kuklinski again sometime, and it looked like he might have to go along with Richie’s meeting place of choice, the Lombardi Service Area. The problem was, how would they control the situation there?

He turned the key in the ignition and started the engine. As he
pulled back out into traffic, he wondered how quickly he could react if he was sprayed in the face. Would he stand a chance if he held his breath? Maybe he’d better find out some more about this stuff. His eyes stung just thinking about it.

The Vince Lombardi Service Area off the New Jersey Turnpike in Ridgefield, New Jersey, is always busy. It’s the last rest stop before the highway becomes I-95 again and crosses the George Washington Bridge, going into New York City. Coming the other way, it’s the first rest stop you can see from the road after leaving New York, an oasis for travelers who’ve been keeping their knees together waiting for a bathroom, choosing not to risk the ominous exits along I-95 as it winds through Harlem and the Bronx, where dingy tenements and monolithic housing projects loom and the stripped remains of abandoned cars litter the shoulders like big-game carcasses after the vultures were through with them.

The main building at the Vince Lombardi Service Area has two fast-food restaurants—a Roy Rogers and a Bob’s Big Boy—as well as several smaller concessions. Outside there’s a Shell gas station and two large parking lots—one for cars, the other for trailer trucks. If you look west from the parking lot, you can see vehicles crossing an elevated section of the turnpike, the loud diesel engines roaring through the sky. To the east is the Manhattan skyline. Fields of seven-foot-high grasses and cattails in the
swampy wetlands surround the service area, which is bordered by a ribbon of access road. It takes about three and a half minutes to drive around this access road and circle both parking lots if you drive a little faster than the speed limit, as practically everyone does. On this cool, cloudy Thursday in October, Deputy Attorney General Bob Carroll and Investigator Paul Smith knew exactly how long it took. They’d been doing it for the past forty minutes.

Paul Smith was driving the silver gray sedan; Bob Carroll was in the passenger seat. In their suits and ties they could easily be mistaken for a Mutt and Jeff pair of traveling salesmen, Smith being the junior trainee even though he was actually only two years younger than Carroll.

Investigator Ron Donahue was crouched on the floor of an otherwise unoccupied state police car parked at the curb near the entrance to the Roy Rogers. Two other investigators—a man and a woman—were “making eyes at each other” in another unmarked car in the lot near the bank of telephone booths. They were all watching Dominick Polifrone, who was sitting on a picnic table on the grass near the phone booths, his foot propped up on the seat. They were all waiting for Richard Kuklinski.

Paul Smith sighed and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “So where the hell is he?”

Bob Carroll’s eyes swept the parking lots like a constant lighthouse beacon. “For all we know, Richie could already be here.”

Smith shook his head in disgust. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

They both knew how Kuklinski could be. He was the most cautious criminal they’d ever come across. He’d come to meetings early and just stand around, surveying the scene; then he’d stay late afterward, doing the same. Once, when the state police were following him in an unmarked car on the Garden State Parkway, he just pulled over to the side of the road and sat there for an hour, waiting and watching. They could never figure out how he knew they were following him. He was either superparanoid or supernatural.