The Iceman

by Anthony Bruno

  Dominick had waited all day Monday for Kuklinski’s promised phone call, but it never came. Tuesday had passed, and there was still no word from him. Dominick was discouraged. He’d thought about calling Kuklinski himself, but he didn’t like that idea. The way Kuklinski had sounded the last time they talked, it was as if they’d never met. At this point, if Dominick called him, in effect they’d be starting all over again, clean slate, except Dominick would be in the weaker position because he’d be the one doing the pursuing. That, he didn’t want. He’d decided to wait it out a little longer and see what would happen.

  Then, that morning, Kuklinski finally beeped him, but when they’d talked, he was still cool and evasive. He was making excuses, telling Dominick that he’d lost his number and that’s why he hadn’t called sooner. Dominick said he wanted to meet him so they could discuss a few things, but Kuklinski tried to put him off, saying that he didn’t have the time because he was leaving for south Jersey in a little while. Dominick insisted, and Kuklinski finally agreed to meet him at the Vince Lombardi Service Area.

  Dominick scanned the parking lot through the glass doors, then looked at his watch. He knew he was going to have to make the sales pitch of his life. Not hard sell, though. That would just send Kuklinski back into the bushes. No, he was going to have to be very subtle but also totally up front. He was going to have to appeal to the only thing that apparently turned the Iceman on: money.

  The restaurant was visible in the reflection of the glass doors. Outside, it was cold and blustery. Dominick didn’t like the idea of meeting Kuklinski inside, but given the weather, he didn’t have much choice. For one thing, there were too many people inside. What if something happened and he had to pull his gun? Then there was the bathroom problem. What if Kuklinski wanted to go talk in the men’s room? It was an enclosed space. What if Kuklinski was on to Dominick and he’d decided to get rid of him with his cyanide spray? The man stationed in the toilet wouldn’t be much help in that case. That’s why Dominick had already decided that he would try to head off any suggestion that they go into the bathroom by saying he hadn’t had lunch yet and he was starved. Of course, the thought of eating with Kuklinski wasn’t very comforting either. All Dominick could think of was Gary Smith’s last hamburger. He was definitely going to make sure that he ordered the food and that it didn’t leave his sight. He was glad Ron Donahue was sitting there. Ronnie would watch for something like that, and Ronnie wouldn’t hesitate if he saw Kuklinski trying to pull something.

  At two o’clock on the nose Kuklinski arrived, this time in a different car, a red Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais. Dominick watched the big man cross the parking lot. He was wearing his gray leather bomber jacket and pressed jeans with a sharp crease down the leg. He was also wearing the dark glasses again. A bad sign. The members of the task force had agreed that these were his “motherfucker glasses.” Whenever he wore them, that was usually the attitude he had.

  Kuklinski pushed through the glass doors. “Hey, Dom. What’s new?”

  Dominick shook his hand. “You’re getting smaller and smaller, my friend. Whatta’you, on a diet?”

  Kuklinski laughed, but Dominick could tell that it was forced.

  “You want coffee? I haven’t had lunch. C’mon, let’s have something.”

  “Not for me. You go ahead.”

  They headed for the counter and stood in line together so Dominick could get something to eat.

  “Those things I wanted, Rich. The five or ten? You know what I’m talking about? Can you get them for me?”

  Kuklinski shrugged. “They’re down there if you want ’em. You go get ’em yourself, though. They’re in Delaware.” He kept his glasses on.

  “And you know that he’s got ten?”

  “Ten, twenty, thirty, whatever you want. But I don’t wanna transport them. If you want ’em, you go get ’em.”

  Kuklinski was wearing his attitude like a fur coat. Dominick knew it was time to start his pitch.

  “Tim explained to you that these pieces aren’t for the girl, didn’t he? This is a favor I’m doing for a wiseguy in New York. Small change. This isn’t the big one. That’s what I gotta talk to you about.”

  Dominick got to the head of the line, and Kuklinski waited for him to order. Behind the counter a pimply kid in a paper hat punched out Dominick’s selections on the cash register, then went to fetch his order.

  “My people are ready to buy. They said they don’t need samples. All they want is a list of what you can get.” Dominick lowered his voice. “I know they got at least five hundred grand to spend on ammo alone.”

  Kuklinski didn’t answer. He was looking down at Dominick’s plastic tray as the kid behind the counter filled it: a carton of milk, a Coke, large fries, and a cheeseburger. As Dominick paid, Kuklinski went to find an empty booth at the far end of the room by the windows. Dominick carried his tray over to him, passing Ron Donahue sipping his tea. They didn’t look at each other.

  At the table Dominick unwrapped his cheeseburger and took a bite. He wasn’t going to put it down until it was finished. Kuklinski sat there with his fingers linked on the tabletop, a stone face behind the dark glasses.

  “My people are looking for grenades, machine guns, all that kind of shit. You know what I mean? We’re ready to put in our order.”

  Kuklinski sucked on his teeth. “Yeah, I keep hearing about this big order, but my guy wants to know when. It’s getting embarrassing for me.”

  “I’m giving you the order now. If Tim can handle it, we’re buying. Just get me a list of what he’s got.”

  “Okay. I’ll get you one.” The big man sucked his teeth. “What’s your girl gonna do over there? Start a war? I wanna know so I can move outta the way a little bit.” Kuklinski was smiling. It seemed genuine.

  “Rich, I don’t give a fuck what she’s gonna do with it. As long as her cash is green, that’s all I care about.”

  “That’s all I care about, too. I just want to get you two guys together and let you do your thing. I’m gonna step aside and stay out of it. All I want is my commission when it’s all over.”

  “Of course.” Dominick stuck a straw in his soda and took a drink. “But right now I need those ten pieces. Tell me the truth now, can I get ’em right away? I promised this guy I would try.”

  “You willing to go down to Delaware to get ’em?”

  “No problem. I’ll pick ’em up. Wherever they are.”

  Kuklinski took off his glasses. “Tim’s got ’em. They’re down there. If you’ll pick ’em up, there’s no problem.”

  “Good. You make the arrangements and get back to me, tell me when and where. Okay?”

  Kuklinski nodded. “Will do.”

  Dominick stuffed a few french fries into his mouth.

  “So what happened with your little Jewish friend?”

  Dominick took a drink of soda and swallowed. “I wanted to talk to you about that. The kid says he may want to do two or maybe three keys now. Is it still possible to do what we talked about, you know, with the cyanide shit?”

  “Dom, if you can get me a little bit of cyanide, I could take this kid out easy. Just walk up to him, spray it in his face, and he’ll never see the next fucking minute.”

  “Guaranteed?”

  “My friend, I’ve done it already. The kid will never know what hit him. Once it gets into his system, he’s done for. He’s gone.”

  “What about his car and stuff? What do we do with it?”

  Kuklinski shrugged. “What do you want to do with it? All I’m interested in is taking his money. Just leave him. Don’t touch nothing. You wanna move him, move him. But I don’t see it as a problem. Just leave him where he is. He’ll look like he’s sleeping.”

  “That’s what I want. Whack him without any fucking problems. Then we got his cash, plus the coke I bring to the meet.”

  “See that old guy sitting over there.” Kuklinski pointed with his glasses.

  Dominick turned around in his seat. He was
pointing at Ronnie Donahue. Dominick’s hand went to his lap, ready to go for the gun in his pocket. “Yeah. What about him?”

  “I could walk by and—pssst—give him a little swish in the face, and I could walk right outta here and no one would even realize what happened to the guy. Except when someone asks him to get up and move. That’s when they’d realize he wasn’t with us anymore.”

  Dominick relaxed and reached for his soda. “You know, I get offers for these kind of jobs in the city sometimes. Would you be willing to teach me how to use this stuff on somebody? What’s the best effect?”

  “The best way is to hit ’im right in the nose with a spray so he inhales it. Once he inhales it, he’s done. There ain’t nothing he can do about it. Only thing is, you gotta be careful you’re not downwind, ’cause if you inhale it, you’re gone.”

  Dominick nodded. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

  “My friend, I’ve done it on a busy street where they thought the guy had a heart attack. I walked right up to him, made like I was sneezing into my handkerchief to protect myself, and sprayed him in the face. He tripped and fell, and everyone thought he had a heart attack. Later on they found out that that wasn’t what killed him. I’ve done it on the busiest street in the world. People all over the place.”

  Dominick smiled and shook his head in amazement. He was trying to imagine what Bob Carroll’s face was going to look like when he heard this. This was pure gold.

  “And the beautiful part is, when they find out it’s not an accident after all, they’re not gonna know what happened. Once they do the autopsy, they’re gonna know he sniffed something, but they’ll never figure out that he sniffed cyanide. Nobody sniffs fucking cyanide.”

  “Right. Of course not.”

  “If you gotta do a job, Dom, that’s the way to do it. Nice and neat. No mess.”

  “You’re right. Nice and neat … nice and neat.”

  Dominick looked down at the last bite of cheeseburger in his hand and the french fries spread out on the plastic tray, and he suddenly remembered the photos of Danny Deppner’s body. He wondered if that one had been “nice and neat,” too.

  EIGHTEEN

  In the last days of 1982 Danny Deppner kept having the same nightmare: that Gary Smith wasn’t dead.

  Deppner had watched Gary Smith eat the cyanide-laced hamburger that Richard Kuklinski had brought to the York Motel. He had seen Gary’s eyes “go goofy” as he fell back on the bed and clutched his throat. He was the one who had taken the lamp cord and finished the job, strangling Smith until he stopped struggling. He had rolled Smith’s lifeless body off the bed and helped Kuklinski get him into the bed frame, covering him with the box spring and mattress. But lying in bed, staring at the cracked ceiling in another motel room, Danny Deppner began to wonder: Could Gary still be alive?

  On Christmas Eve, in Room 55 at the Skyview Motel in Fort Lee, Danny was jittery. He was stuck there, afraid to move, afraid to leave the room. Richard Kuklinski had paid for the room but again left him with no money. Danny kept the TV on to keep him company, but there was only a lot of dopey Christmas stuff on, cartoons and crap. He left it on, though, because the silence of the night made him nervous. He dozed off on the bed with his clothes on and the television going. That’s when he had the nightmare for the first time.

  Gary hadn’t died. He was under that bed, but he wasn’t dead. He was reaching out, trying to get out from under the mattress and box spring. He was struggling and moaning. Danny was lying on that bed, sleeping, tossing and turning, having the nightmare. Beneath him, Gary was on his back, reaching up. Danny wanted to escape, but he couldn’t move. Suddenly Gary’s rotting hands emerged from the mattress on either side of Danny’s face—

  Danny Deppner’s eyes shot open, and he bolted off the bed. He stared at the mattress, looking for Gary’s hands. He was drenched in sweat.

  On Christmas Day, not knowing who to turn to, Danny called his ex-wife, Barbara, and asked her to come down for a while. Terrified herself, knowing what she knew about Gary Smith’s murder, she told him she didn’t think that was such a good idea. He begged her, but she refused. He was getting low on cigarettes, he told her, he had no money, and he needed a drink bad. An alcoholic who’d been trying to reform, Danny had started drinking again. His ex-wife kept saying no, she couldn’t come down and be with him. She was too scared.

  Danny Deppner spent the day alone in Room 55, fighting the urge for a drink and a cigarette, flipping channels on the TV, avoiding that bed.

  That night he dozed off on the armchair and had the nightmare again. He didn’t get much sleep.

  The next day Barbara Deppner changed her mind and went to the motel to be with Danny, but he wasn’t there. Afraid that he might be dead, too, she called the only other place she thought he could be, “the store.” She asked if Danny or Big Rich had been around, but no one had seen either of them lately.

  Later that day she returned to the motel and found Danny in his room. He said he’d gone out for a long walk, anything not to be cooped up in that room. She could see that he was a mess. He couldn’t stop talking about how he and Kuklinski had killed her cousin Gary, begging her to listen to all the gory details. But she didn’t want to hear about it. She had her own problems. Percy House was still in jail, and she had all those kids to take care of by herself. Anyway, the whole thing about what they’d done to Gary made her sick. But Danny had to tell somebody. If he didn’t let it out, he’d go crazy, he said. She tried to get him to change the subject, but he wouldn’t. He wanted her to go to Gary’s house that night and ask Veronica Smith if her husband had returned home. Barbara thought her ex-husband had finally snapped, but Danny insisted that she do it. He had to know if Gary was really dead.

  As she tried to reason with him, the phone suddenly rang, and they both froze. Danny picked it up. It was Kuklinski. He wanted them to meet him right now at the Fort Lee Diner, a five-minute drive from the motel. They were both too scared to disobey.

  Kuklinski wasn’t there when they arrived, so they waited in the parking lot. It wasn’t long before the white Cadillac with the blue top pulled into the lot. Kuklinski motioned for them to get into his car, but Barbara shook her head. She was terrified of him.

  Richard Kuklinski didn’t like people saying no to him. He jumped out of the car, enraged, and snatched Barbara Deppner by the wrist. Where the hell did she get off calling “the store” and asking about him? he wanted to know.

  Danny tried to defend her, but he knew better than to challenge Big Rich.

  But then, as suddenly as he had erupted, Kuklinski calmed down and suggested they go into the diner and have something to eat so they could talk. Danny was suspicious. Why was he being so nice all of a sudden?

  Inside, over coffee, Kuklinski explained his problem with this whole situation. He couldn’t go on carrying Danny indefinitely, paying for motel rooms and bringing him food every day. Danny had to start pulling his own weight because he just couldn’t afford it. He suggested that Barbara take Danny to a liquor store so he could hold it up.

  After they left the dinner and Kuklinski departed, Danny told his ex-wife that he knew of a convenience store up in Sussex County that would be easy to knock off, the Ding Dong Dairy Store in Hardystown. Forget it, she told him. Her uncle worked there now. She didn’t want him getting hurt. Danny pleaded with her, promising that he wouldn’t hurt anyone, but she stuck to her guns. She dropped him off back at the motel and headed home. She wasn’t going to help him rob stores. She already had more trouble than she needed.

  On December 31, 1982, Richard Kuklinski moved Danny Deppner to the Turnpike Motel on Route 46 in Ridgefield, where Danny registered under the name Bill Bradly. His room was paid for each day just before checkout time. One of the maids at the motel remembered “Mr. Bradly,” a tall man with dark, woolly hair and a thick mustache. He had tired eyes and drawn face. “Mr. Bradly” would never let her clean his room, just took the clean sheets and towels at the door and said he’d take
care of it himself. She also remembered the white Cadillac with the blue top that came every day just before checkout time and parked in front of “Mr. Bradly’s” room.

  Danny was sleeping a little better now, but every once in a while he’d wake up in the middle of the night with that nightmare, Gary trying to grab him through the bed.

  On Saturday, February 5, 1983, forty-four days after Gary Smith’s death, Richard Kuklinski moved Danny Deppner once again, this time to an apartment in a residential section of suburban Bergenfield, New Jersey. The studio apartment belonged to a young man named Rich Patterson who was dating one of Kuklinski’s daughters at the time. Patterson was away for the weekend, and Kuklinski had his own set of keys. Apartment 1 at 51 Fairview Avenue, Bergenfield, was the last place Danny Deppner ever had that nightmare.

  * * *

  On Sunday, May 14, 1983, a man was riding his bicycle along Clinton Road in Milford Township, New Jersey. It was a warm spring day, and the early-morning sun was sparkling off the waters of the Clinton Reservoir. The air was fresh, and the woods were alive with new growth. There was seldom very much traffic on this road, especially on Sunday mornings, and there wasn’t a house for miles. It was beautiful.

  As the man rode along the reservoir, something caught his attention to his left. An unusually large black bird was perched high in a tree. The man pulled his bike to the side of the road and stared up at the bird. It was a turkey buzzard, the biggest one he’d ever seen. He figured it must be looming over a carcass, probably a dead deer left behind by hunters. He got off his bike and went into the woods to investigate. Under the buzzard’s tree he found something wrapped in green plastic garbage bags. One end of the large bundle was ripped, most likely by the scavenger bird. As he stepped closer, his stomach lurched. Part of a human head was peeking through the tear in the bag.