The Con Man's Daughter

by Ed Dee

  At this point, an unidentified human head was all the Yonkers PD had to work with. Until the location where the crime actually occurred could be determined, investigative responsibility fell to the jurisdiction where the head was found. Along with Kate's kidnapping, Babsie Panko had inherited a possible homicide. She volunteered to take the case because in all likelihood it was related to the kidnapping. The canvas bag and its decaying contents were on the way to the medical examiner's office in White Plains. Babsie put the head on the seat next to her and took off.

  Babsie Panko said that so far that year, more serious crime had occurred on Eddie Dunne's lawn than in the rest of the entire Fourth Precinct. She told him she didn't know how he had the guts to look inside the bag. He said it was easy; he had to know. At first, he didn't think it was real, just something you see on the shelves in Wal-Mart on the days before Halloween. But it had weight to it. He'd reached in and turned the spongy skull around. It wasn't trick or treat. He'd taken only a quick look. Enough to know it wasn't his daughter.

  The sun rose before the police cleared the scene. They were slowed by curious neighbors in bathrobes and suppers, who added their individual two cents and then shuffled home. Despite Martha's objections, Eddie insisted that Grace go to school. He wanted her life as normal as possible, and he'd fight Martha daily on that. Babsie Panko arranged for a plainclothes cop to be assigned to Christ the King. After Eddie got her to school and met the cop, he went home, showered and dressed, then drove to Brighton Beach. More than five hours early for his meeting with Matty Boland.

  The skies were gray; heavy low clouds hung over the skyscrapers of Manhattan. A constant pain drummed above Eddie's eyes as he rode down the West Side Highway. He always got a headache before the rain. Staring at every face in every car made it worse. But he thought that if he could only look into every single vehicle, every single room, sooner or later he'd find the face of his daughter. He wouldn't miss that wild red hair. Then all hell would break loose as he slammed across lanes of traffic or through walls. Kate would expect nothing less of him.

  When she was young, Kate hated her red hair almost as much as her freckles. He would hold her and kiss each freckle on her nose until she giggled, then screamed, "Daaaad" in frustration. In grade school, the kids had called her "Howdy Doody." It had infuriated her, and punches were thrown. Eileen, feeling guilty over passing those physical traits along, had claimed Kate was just another "fighting" Dunne. But by the time she got to high school, the freckles had disappeared. She grew tall and straight. Her figure filled in, even curvier than Eileen's. She never heard those taunts again. And somewhere along the line, he'd stopped kissing her on the nose.

  Eddie knew Kate was alive. If they'd killed her, it would have been her head in the bag last night. That would have been a final gesture, he thought. That would have been the move that meant nothing else mattered. If that had happened, he'd be turning Yuri Borodenko's mansion on the Atlantic into a mausoleum. Borodenko would hear the news in Russia, and misery would enter his life.

  Today, there were no cars in front of Borodenko's for him to blow up. Eddie parked halfway down the block, wondering where to begin. They'd cut down the dogwood tree; the scorched logs sat stacked near the curb. All around the stump, grass, blacktop, and sidewalk were blackened in a circle twice the size of a Rolls-Royce. The black circle made the house seem even more of a white stone fortress.

  The borough would have Borodenko's building permit on file. He'd go from there. Find the builder and grab the plans. Buy them or steal them. The builder would be listed, a Russian, for sure. Stealing was the only option. And that would take time, valuable time, and maybe not worth it. Borodenko was too smart to leave a security flaw that an Eddie Dunne could exploit. Too smart to keep a tattooed psycho or kidnapped woman inside his house. So where, then? He wondered where the feds were. Why weren't they watching this house?

  It didn't make sense that they were doing this to him. As bad a life as he'd led, he'd rarely hurt anyone other than his family and himself. And that was in the past. Four years ago, thirty years too late, he'd become the person he always could have been, and he'd spent the nights since regretting every moment away from his family, and every drink that had unfairly shouldered the blame for his weakness. But in that continuous reel of regrets that played in his head, he never saw anyone who hated him enough to torture him this way. No one who wanted him twisting in the wind like this. Maybe he didn't give the Russian criminals enough credit. He never imagined they would make the effort to hurt him this deeply.

  If not revenge, why were they doing this? They were keeping her alive for a reason. If it had been money, there would have been ransom notes, or calls. There had been only one call. He'd listened to the tape. The voice sounded put-on, like a bad audition for the Actors Studio. Someone trying to mimic a deep gangster growl. The caller said, "Prishli mne kapustu." "Send me the cabbage." Melodramatic gangster talk for "Send me the money." Send who the money? No follow-up call, no specific amount, no details. The call was phony. Designed to make him think that this was about money.

  Shortly past noon, he caught a glimpse of motion near the house-the garage door rising. The house had a garage underneath. A steeply inclined driveway led down to it. From where he sat, he could see only the top panels of the garage door as they slid upward, disappearing back into the garage. When it was all the way up, the nose of a dark car appeared. A black Mercedes, one of the big ones. It paused at the top of the driveway, the nose angled upward. The garage door closed behind it. Eddie slumped down in the Olds and waited. They had only one way to go-toward him.

  The car bounced heavily onto the roadway. He could see two occupants. They came slowly. Two women. The driver was dark-skinned, her dark hair shoulder-length. The passenger, sitting up front, was Mrs. Borodenko, but he almost didn't recognize her with short hair. At the wedding in the Mazurka, she had big curly blond hair. What romance writers would call "tresses." Eddie stayed down in the seat as he watched them in his rearview mirror. They stopped at the stop sign, then turned right. He waited a beat, then made a quick U-turn. Within five minutes, he was settled in behind them on the Belt Parkway, going toward Manhattan.

  Shopping trip, Eddie figured. Saks, Bloomies, or some Italian designer with live models on a runway. Perhaps Mrs. Borodenko keeping touch with her old fashion contacts. But they weren't going to Manhattan. The Mercedes moved right and went up the approach to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, going to Staten Island. It definitely wasn't a fashion run.

  Eddie hung back through the tollbooth, then turned onto Hylan Boulevard. He kept driving as they pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant called Jimmy's Bistro. He went a full block, made another U-turn, and parked across the street.

  He watched through binoculars as they got out of the Mercedes. They acted like old pals. The dark-haired driver seemed happier, more relaxed. She was obviously telling Mrs. Borodenko something funny, placing her hand on her shoulder like an obnoxious salesman. Mrs. Borodenko was tinier than he remembered, but he and Lukin had been seated so far back at her Mazurka wedding, he hadn't gotten a good look. He zoomed in on her face. Against the backdrop of dark gray clouds, she looked as if she were made of porcelain.

  He waited until they entered the restaurant, then gave them another ten minutes to get a table. And another ten, in case they were meeting someone who was late. Then he went in. The place had a Mulberry Street ambience. Everything under bent-nose control. Finding them wasn't easy. They were at a table so hidden, it had to be reserved for customers in the witness protection program. A small fountain separated them from the other diners. He saw them sitting opposite each other in the high-backed leather booth, laughing with the waiter. Like regulars. He'd wasted his entire morning tailing women to lunch.

  Chapter 17

  Thursday

  4:30 P.M.

  The two women in Jimmy's Bistro were already on then-second bottle of wine when Eddie left. He drove like a madman, speeding back over the Ver
razano to Brooklyn, late for his meeting with Boland. Weaving in and out of traffic on the Belt Parkway, he started to call Babsie, but he put the phone back down because he didn't want to start depending on that. Breathe, he told himself, just keep breathing. Wait for the opening. Sooner or later, they always give you an opening.

  Matty Boland was dressed to impress-a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a burgundy tie with small polka dots. He didn't seem to notice that Eddie was late. All he wanted to talk about were the events of the previous night, and the severed head.

  "You piss ice water, man," Matty Boland said. "No way would I have had the balls to look inside that bag. Just the idea it might be your daughter…"

  They took the Lincoln Town Car, heading toward JFK. The traffic to the airport seemed unusually light. As they passed the entrance to Marine Park, Eddie thought about the shooting fourteen years earlier. In moments like last night, or that shooting, he seemed to be able to stand outside himself, a spectator to the slow-motion chaos around him. In the ring, it had been the same thing; there were times when he couldn't even hear the crowd, or feel his own body, and all that existed was the enemy before him. In Marine Park all those years ago, he and Paulie Caruso had walked shoulder-to-shoulder into a barrage of gunfire, calmly killing two local punks who'd just committed a double murder.

  "That shit takes a piece out of you," Boland said, shivering. "If you want to talk about last night, I can listen. That's what I'm trying to say."

  "Just take care of them," Eddie said. "I'll be fine."

  For the first time in his adult life, Eddie had asked for help. He couldn't let anything else happen to Grace. He'd called Boland and offered to do whatever he could to help them nail Borodenko, providing the feds protected his family twenty-four hours a day. They even worked a deal with the Yonkers PD to have a policewoman assigned full-time to stay with Grace.

  "Sick guy, this Russian bastard," Boland said.

  "You have no idea, Matty. There's a story floating around Brighton Beach that Yuri Borodenko caught someone listening in on a private conversation. He cut the guy's ears off and made him eat them."

  At JFK, Boland tinned his way past the security people and drove right onto the tarmac. He parked on an angle, facing a red-white-and-blue Boeing 767. Fifty yards away, workers tossed luggage onto the conveyor. Eddie watched the crew preparing the plane, trying to figure out why he was here. Boland had gone through a lot of trouble just to park near the belly of a departing jumbo jet.

  "So who belongs to this head?" Boland asked, adjusting his seat backward and stretching out. "Somebody's gotta be missing it by now."

  "You'd think," Eddie said. "Babsie Panko canvassed the hospitals, morgues, and the cemeteries in the metropolitan area. Some of the older, filled up cemeteries have no phone numbers. She has all the local police departments checking their jurisdictions."

  "You didn't recognize it," Boland said.

  "I didn't look that close. It appeared to be male. Very little hair. Babsie Panko says it's elderly. The face was dark, very swollen and distorted. My guess is that he'd been dead over a week."

  "Just a spare head somebody had sitting around?"

  "Or dug up for the occasion."

  It might not even be Borodenko's people this time, Eddie thought. It could have been any one of the people he'd humiliated in the Samovar yesterday. Or any old acquaintance pissed off and sick enough to dig up a human head and throw it at his door. When this was all over, when Kate was safely home, maybe they'd laugh about it. Some of his old cop pals would have made it a drinking event. Eddie Dunne's annual skull toss. Closest to the door wins.

  "Everybody in the task force has Sergei Zhukov's picture," Boland said. "We're going to find him soon."

  "I figured he was flying out today and that's why we came here."

  "No, Sergei's not flying anywhere. We have a hold on his passport. If he goes, he's swimming."

  "Borodenko flying in?"

  Boland shook his head no. Lights began popping on in the gloomy afternoon. Activity around the plane quickened. A steady stream of luggage and boxes flowed up the conveyor belt.

  "Okay, I give up," Eddie said. "What the hell are we doing here?"

  "Watching the money plane."

  It was almost 5:00 p.m. when a cream-colored armored car pulled up. Two armed guards joined the baggage handlers and began putting large white canvas bags on the conveyor belt. Seconds later, another armored car pulled up.

  "You wanted me to see guys loading money bags," Eddie said.

  "The powers downtown want you to understand what we're up against."

  "Like I don't?" Eddie said. What he did understand was the reason for Boland's power suit. The city detective trying to impress him with the invincibility of the almighty federal government.

  Boland said, "Downtown says all you talk about is minor schemes. They think you underplay it. They want you to be aware that these guys are more than a handful of local grifters. If they're going to make a big investment in you, they want you to understand exactly how dangerous this situation really is."

  "Okay, so you showed me the money plane," Eddie said. "And where is all this cash going?"

  "Nonstop to Moscow. The guards are loading twenty-three hundred pounds of crisp, brand-new American one-hundred-dollar bills. Just off the printing press. Over one hundred million dollars on this flight. And this goes on at least once a week."

  "A hundred million," Eddie said. "Apparently, it's not federal aid going to the Russian government. We wouldn't be here if it were that simple."

  "It's mob money," Boland said. "Stacks of fresh hundreds going into various Russian banks either controlled by or directly owned by Russian organized crime. A hundred mil, still in the Federal Reserve wrapper. Brand-new and already going through the laundry. You can almost smell the soapsuds."

  "And they want our money because the ruble buys shit."

  "They need dollars to operate worldwide, Eddie. The Russian mafiya now owns over eighty percent of the banks in Russia. Over two thousand new banks in just a few years. Most of them way undercapitalized. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, whatever state control there was evaporated. No rules, no regulations. Convicted felons own banks over there. They're using these banks to launder an incredible amount of illegal money."

  "Why rob a bank when you can own one?"

  "Exactly," Boland said. "Criminals everywhere are getting in on this. Now the Russians have brought the Colombians on board. They're well on their way to being the World Bank for illegal drugs."

  "All right," Eddie said. "This money we're looking at now starts out as street money, right? From the sale of drugs or guns, I assume. How does it wind up here, in this plane, as brand-new money?"

  Boland gave Eddie a quick lesson in the rules of money laundering: First, ownership must be concealed. Second, the money must change form; three million dollars in twenties cannot come back as three million in twenties. Third, the process must be obscured-the whole point of money laundering is that the trail cannot be followed; and fourth, control must be maintained.

  "It's all done through bank transfers," Eddie said. "I know that much from Lukin."

  "Almost always," Boland said. "Let's say Borodenko acquires an amount of dirty money. From the sale of any contraband. Like you said, drugs, guns, stolen oil, gasoline, bombs, anything. Say fifty million dollars. They wire the dirty fifty million through several front companies and eventually into a London Eurodollar account. Then a Russian mob-controlled bank orders fifty million in one-hundred-dollar bills from a New York bank. Simultaneously, the London bank wires the fifty million, plus commission, to the same New York bank. That bank then buys fifty million in uncirculated hundreds from the U.S. Treasury. They load it on this flight and it goes directly to the Russian bank."

  "Investigate our banks," Eddie said. "We have control over our own banks."

  "Been there, done that. They're operating legally."

  "Monitor overseas wire transfers."
<
br />   "Sounds easy, but there are over seven hundred thousand of them daily."

  "Well, I told you they were smart," Eddie said. "Lukin always said the worst thing that happened to the United States was the breakup of the Soviet Union."

  "That's the problem," Boland said. "It allowed these people to travel the world freely. The KGB already had spy networks set up throughout the world. When the Soviet Union fell apart, those networks almost instantly morphed into ones run by organized crime. The world was their oyster."

  "Borodenko had KGB connections."

  "And that spells organization. This is where it gets worse. I know you don't like to use that word, but this is spread out all over the world. We have information they are trying to pull Mideastern terrorist organizations into the fold. This money you see here being loaded on this plane might be cash flow to buy Russian nuclear, chemical, or biological weaponry. And that means any Saddam wanna-be who can scare up enough oil cash is in the game. The potential/for harm here is enormous and frightening."

  "One question: If this brand-new money comes directly from the Federal Reserve, why the hell is the government letting it go on?"

  "A lot of this money will never come back here. It costs our government only four cents to make one of these hundreds. For every hundred-dollar bill that disappears into the black hole of the Third World, the government makes ninety-nine dollars and ninety-six cents. That adds up fast."

  "Okay," Eddie said. "I'm softened up, ready for the kill."

  "Obviously, we have to take Borodenko down. We need a serious informant, someone with firsthand knowledge about Borodenko's operation. We want to put bugs in as many locations as possible. I know you tried to hand us Lexy Petrov, but my bosses don't think all those little scams are enough to make him cooperate. They figure you got someone else in your pocket."