The Con Man's Daughter

Chapter 18

Thursday

8:00 P.M.

Dust rose from the dirt floor of the basement of the North End Tavern. The floor had been a dirt one since Kieran Dunne first bought the place in the 1950s. Kevin talked about pouring concrete but never got around to it. It didn't matter to Eddie, who spent more time down there than anyone else. He liked the dank, beery smell; it seemed to fit the raw sport he loved. The sweet science, although not sweet tonight. Viciously, he pounded away on the duct-taped heavy bag that hung from the ceiling's center beam, trying to exorcise all that haunted him. He punished the seventy-pound canvas bag, manhandling it as if it were a feather pillow.

"I remember the first time I saw you hit somebody," Babsie Panko said. She was sitting on an empty beer keg.

"Who did I hit?"

"My brother Gus. At my niece's christening. You were both drunk. Gus got mad and threw a punch. You hit him back. He fell and knocked over the pot of kielbasa. Daddy threw you both out."

Eddie barely remembered. He'd gotten drunk at a dozen

Panko christenings, weddings, or wakes. He'd usually gotten an early start because he helped Babsie's older brothers carry chairs they'd borrowed from the Brelesky Brothers funeral home. They'd carried two dozen folding chairs ten blocks, from the funeral parlor through the streets of Yonkers to their apartment above the butcher shop.

"That was the first time you danced with me," she said.

"Probably why Gus punched me."

"You were a senior, eighteen, I think. I was a freshman, just turned fourteen."

"No wonder he hit me," Eddie said.

Eddie shuffled, working with the bag's movement, throwing hooks when it swung side to side, straight punches when it swung toward him. He remembered Richie Costa breaking his wrist the first time he worked out on the heavy bag. The trick was to hit it with the front of your fist, no angles. Hit in the middle of its horizontal axis and it wouldn't spin.

"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 CO₂ 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."