The Con Man's Daughter

Chapter 28

Sunday

3:00 P.M.

Angelo and Ann Marie Caruso lived in the shadow of Aqueduct Race Track in a two-story redbrick home on a Queens street of identical homes. Angelo could have afforded a bigger home in a swankier locale, but Ann Marie refused to leave the neighbors she'd known since she was a young bride. In the Carusos' small front yard, the grotto of the Blessed Virgin ruled center stage. A white tin awning covered the front step. Folding chairs lined the narrow, sloping driveway. Underwear, white T-shirts, and socks were draped across the chairs, drying in the sun. Every day for the fifty-five years of her marriage, Ann Marie had washed clothes by hand and dried them this way. Paulie the Priest had told Eddie that his sister-in-law rarely used the washer and dryer. She'd never used the oven upstairs. Upstairs was for company, for special occasions. The downstairs was set up like a separate apartment. They cooked, ate, watched TV, and died in the basement.

Eddie led Boland down the driveway. Eddie hadn't been in the Caruso home since June of 1984, when

Angelo and Ann Marie threw a high school graduation party for their niece. It was held in the backyard, where Angelo showed off an immense barbecue grill he'd built from bricks salvaged from the demolished tenement in which he was born. Angelo roasted a sixty-pound pig that day. And the event had been immortalized on film by the FBI from a van across the street.

They entered the basement through the garage. A young uniformed cop sat at Angelo's workbench, where Angelo'd accidentally cut off a finger he later credited to a battle with a brutal pistola from the old country. The young cop said the house had been torn apart by intruders looking for money and jewelry. He expounded on how some burglars read the obituaries printed in the newspaper; the obits told them exactly when a family would be at church. Grieving people are distracted: They leave doors open, money lying around. The Carusos had probably arrived home early from the service at Our Lady of Consolation. They'd surprised the burglars and lost their lives. Paulie the Priest would have told this cop that he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

Ann Marie had been shot once in the head. She lay next to her stove, covered by a sheet, the victim not of a burglar but of a poor choice in men. Angelo, her chosen, lay in the exact center of the room on a circular multicolored rug that Ann Marie had woven from loose scraps of cloth. Angelo had been strategically placed, as if he were the room's centerpiece. His mouth was stuffed with U.S. currency. He'd choked to death on money.

"Any thoughts?" Boland said.

"I always liked Ann Marie," Eddie said

"When was the last time you saw them?"

"Ann Marie, fourteen years ago. I saw Angelo on Friday at the Howard Beach Boccie Club. First time in about five or six years."

"Who initiated that meeting?"

"I did. I wanted to find out what he knew about Paulie. He said he thought his brother was still in Sicily."

After conferring with the detectives from the 106th Precinct, Boland said the Carusos came straight home after the service for Paulie. They were probably moving in order to prepare for the company that would follow. The first couple arrived not more than twenty minutes after the Carusos themselves. Whoever killed them had been waiting, and it all happened fast.

"If they all left the church around the same time," Eddie said, "why did it take the friends twenty minutes longer?"

"Food," Boland said. "They went to their own houses first to pick up whatever covered dish they'd made."

The floor above groaned with the weight of a few dozen of the Carusos' family and friends. Eddie wondered if their murderers had desecrated Ann Marie's living room. Eddie had never set foot beyond the velvet rope that declared the pristine parlor off-limits. He'd only viewed it from a distance: the plastic-covered white sofa, the tasseled velvet pillows, fringed brocade lamp shades, and the gilt-framed reproduction of the Mona Lisa. If they'd defiled her pride and joy, Ann Marie would find a way to curse them from the grave.

Boland said, "Angelo have any theories on how or why Paulie's head arrived unannounced?"

"If he did, he didn't tell me."

"He seem worried about anything?"

"Angelo always seemed worried."

"So what happened here today?" Boland said "It doesn't look like a mob hit to me."

"No," Eddie agreed. "The Italians wouldn't have done it like this. Not at home, and they wouldn't have destroyed the house. They'd know Angelo wouldn't keep money here. And they definitely wouldn't have killed Ann Marie."

"Russians?"

"That's my guess," Eddie said.

"Money jammed down his throat is saying something. Angelo get a little greedy maybe? He worked with the Russians a long time, didn't he? Going back to the seventies and the gas-tax scam."

Eddie told him how Angelo Caruso had originally struck a bargain with Evesi Volshin. Caruso had heard about the humongous windfall of the Russians' gas-tax scam. He demanded the Gambino crime family be cut in for a penny a gallon. At the time, the tax was twenty-eight cents on the gallon. The Russians were keeping it all, but they convinced Angelo they were paying part of it. After Volshin was gunned down in the Samovar, Lukin took over. The partnership continued, with Caruso now getting two cents a gallon. It all fell apart when the indictments came down and the Italians took the brunt of the fall.

"Angelo have anything to do with Evesi Volshin's murder?" Boland said.

"That's a safe bet."

"Maybe what goes around comes around," Boland said.

Eddie told him that Angelo'd sworn he'd never work with the Russians again. But the young Italian mafiosi had formed alliances with the new Russkie in town, Yuri

Borodenko. Richie Costa and the Bronx Knights, for example, doing stock pump-and-dump jobs with Borodenko's crew. As well as the partnership in the Eurobar. The Russians do the thinking and organization; the Italians provide the muscle and connections.

"This is a current beef," Eddie said. "Possibly Borodenko sending a message. He wants to be the American Stalin."

"I'm not sure I know what the hell thai? means," Boland said. "But I don't have a better answer, not yet anyway."

"Read Solzhenitsyn. Other than that, I don't know what to tell you."

"Borodenko is still in Russia," Boland said. "We'll talk to him the second he lands on American soil."

"Yuri Borodenko is going to stay overseas until this is over."

"You mean it's not over?" Boland said. "Who's left-you?"

Eddie hated it when guys like Matty played the tough guy. It came off as false. Tough guy lines were best understated. He didn't have to say, "Who's left?" It was obvious. The fact that Paulie Caruso's head had wound up on Eddie's lawn linked him to any scenario imaginable. The only reason they hadn't come after him already was because they knew cops and FBI were hanging around his house, working the kidnapping.

"I'm going home to have dinner with my granddaughter," Eddie said. "Then I'm going to look for Freddie Dolgev. Call me if you find him first."

"Dead or alive?"

"That depends on who finds him."

You could stay away from the North End Tavern for twenty years, and then the moment you stepped through the door, B. J. Harrington would start mixing your favorite drink. B.J. never forgot an old friend or a cocktail. He gave Babsie a 7 &7 because that was the same drink he'd given her on her eighteenth birthday. After five decades of bartending in Yonkers, B.J. knew all the secrets, where all the bodies were buried. Dressed in his usual V-necked sweater over a starched white shirt and black tie, he held court as much as served drinks.

"The sister of your ex-son-in-law was nosing around again today, Eddie," B.J. said. "I didn't give her the time of day."

"I'm going to need a lawyer for this," Eddie said.

"I thought you'd never ask," he said. He took a card from his pocket and handed it to Eddie. "Best guy in family court," B.J. said. "Mention my name. He's owed me a favor for thirty years." He then turned toward the end of the bar, where Grace was reaching over, trying to turn up the volume on the jukebox. "Grade," he said, never raising his voice, "get down from my bar or I'll have the police haul you away."

When the Sunday dinner crowd started to thin, Eddie and Babsie grabbed a booth. She'd already filled him in on the NYPD Crime Scene Unit's search of Dolgev's apartment. Nothing definitive had been recovered that would nail down Kate's presence. Prints needed to be checked, other evidence analyzed. The CSU guys said they'd send Boland the results. For now, he didn't want to tell anyone about finding the scrunchy. Too much talk spooked the angels.

"I have an appointment at One Police Plaza in the morning to look through your personnel file," Babsie said.

"You could just ask me."

"Might be a few too many things rattling around in your head that you haven't put together, or that you forgot."

"Like what?"

"You know what I mean, Eddie. Everything seems to be coming back to the relationship between you and the Caruso brothers-the now-deceased Caruso brothers."

"Fourteen years ago," Eddie said.

"Fourteen is an odd number to remember. Most people say ten or twenty. You have the exact number on the tip of your tongue. See, it seems that the past keeps raising its ugly head here, and that worries me. I want to read Paul Caruso's file, your file, and I want to read up on the Rosenfeld case."

"You know the Medal of Honor we won for that case was actually twenty-two-karat gold," Eddie said. "The Priest had his melted down, then had a cheap fake made to replace it."

"What happened to yours?"

"The real one? Last I remember, some barmaid had it around her neck."

"That's what I mean," she said. "Maybe you blanked on a few wacky moments from your Wild Irish Rover days."

The chatter of the Sunday crowd was now a softer buzz. BJ. kept the jukebox lower on Sunday. It was a day for families to talk, he said. Kevin brought the pot roast to the tables. All you could eat for $7.95. Martha tended to the kitchen. They'd originally tried it the other way around, but Kevin's personality worked better in the dining room.

"Look," Babsie said, leaning close to him. "Tomorrow is a week, and not a word. We keep calling it a kidnapping, but it's really not. This is something else, some old vendetta, and you and I both know it."

"You think I'm lying?"

"Absolutely not."

"What else is wrong?" he said.

Babsie shook the ice cubes in her empty 7 &7, looking into the glass as if for answers. Eddie could have told her that never worked.

"Okay," Babsie said. "You don't allow yourself to think the worst, but what happens if we find the worst?"

"She's going to be fine."

"I know, I know. But the thing I fear now, no matter what happens, is that every time you look at me for the rest of your life, all you're going to see is Kate calling you from the back of that car."

"I liked it better when you were calling me a liar."

"We have to talk about it sometime."

"Not tonight," he said.

He didn't want to think about this right now. Whatever was happening between them, it was all he had to hold on to. It seemed as if his whole life depended on her, a child, and a few red hairs clinging to a piece of green cloth.

"Okay," she said. "Tell me about those two hoods again, the two guys who killed the Rosenfelds."

"Santo Vestri and Ray Nunez," Eddie said. "Idiots who spent most of their lives in the system."

"But yet they stumble across a four-million-dollar score."

"Four point two."

"It seems weird for two reasons. One, that they knew Rosenfeld would have that much money; and two, that Rosenfeld didn't have a bodyguard with that kind of cash sitting around."

"I seriously doubt these guys had any clue that there was that much money on hand. And I don't have an idea why Rosenfeld wouldn't have had some kind of security. But then again, I remember he worked for Evesi Volshin, one of the most arrogant people on the face of the earth. This guy thought he was the king of the world. No one would dare rip him off."

"And you think there's no way the murder of Angelo Caruso and his wife is connected to that incident?"

"I gave my best guess to Boland. The past is the past. I think it's a brand-new world and all the new roads lead to Yuri Borodenko. Maybe he's getting rid of all the tough old birds. Then there'll be no doubt who's in charge. I remember reading in The Gulag Archipelago that the KGB would watch the crowd cheering during a rally for Stalin. The people would stand there applauding and yelling for hours and hours. But then someone would realize the stupidity of this and sit down. Then a few others. Then they'd all sit down. The KGB would make a note of who sat down first. They'd have those people eliminated. They knew that any independent thinking was dangerous. Borodenko is doing away with the independent thinkers."

"Are you an independent thinker?" she said.

Eddie reached across the table and held her hand. Her hands were cold.

"I want you to know that no matter how this turns out,

I know that I brought this on myself. You are the good that's come out of it."

Eddie's phone rang. Kevin looked over, recognizing his signature Irish tune. It was Matty Boland. They'd found Freddie Dolgev.