The Con Man's Daughter (15 page)

He sipped a cup of tea as he looked into his granddaughter's bedroom. The old radiator clanked as steam rose. He'd planned for years to modernize but had never gotten around to it. In those bad old days, so many things had called him away. Things that Eileen, who'd called him the Hell-Raiser of the Western World, had listed under one simple heading: "Nightlife."

When he was honest with himself, Eddie could admit he'd been wrong. Maybe Eileen would have been different if he had grown up sooner. For too many years, he'd wasted his quality time in bars, being the last guy to go home after a night out carousing. His was a lifetime of booze and recklessness, which had provoked his forced resignation from the NYPD, and culminated in the death of Eileen. The doctors said cancer, but that ugly word didn't even begin to touch his guilt. He had no doubt that the stress of living with him had triggered her disease. Now, because he'd tried to make it up, because he'd grabbed his last chance to be a father, and a priceless shot at being a grandfather, they were going to take it all away.

Grace stirred, kicking the pink bedspread farther down the bed. Her bedroom, the one nearest to the kitchen, had been Kate's when she was a child. He felt sick when he thought about all the arguments Kate had heard, all the sad scenes playing out just a few feet down the hall. In the amber glow of a Hello Kitty night-light, he stood there watching the little girl, who, for no reason he could understand, loved him so much. He was constantly amazed that Grace thought he was so hilarious, so much fun. The one thing in life he was sure of was that no one would ever love him this much again. He couldn't lose her.

A full moon illuminated the quiet street. Eddie noticed a small red sticker on the bedroom window. Eileen had put it there when Kate was a baby. It was meant to alert firemen that a child slept there. Unfortunately, it alerted everyone that a child slept there. He began to peel it off, wondering if he'd blown this surprising and priceless gift just when he'd come to understand it.

Headlights flashed across the bedroom wall as a big vehicle turned into their street. Eddie squinted, trying to see if he recognized the car. He wondered if it was the YPD making its hourly drive-by. A dark SUV, one of the king-size models, towered over his neighbors' Hondas and Tauruses. Brake lights painted the street with a red glow. The bass thump of music reverberated. A little too loud for police work.

Maybe it was a wrong address, some yo-yo looking for his bimbette. Nothing to do with him. Kids, probably. Kids with a case of beer iced down in a cooler on the floor behind them. Probably just driving around, looking for a girl who lived on the hill. She won't do it, but her sister will. But then the big tires bounced softly up onto the curb, bright lights pointed at the house. Eddie put his big silhouette in the center of the window, hoping it would scare them off. On the lawn, near the edge of the driveway, Eddie noticed the small pink doll-house Grace had dragged out there earlier. He still remembered the argument that Christmas Eve when he and Eileen had put it together. The SUV stopped halfway up the driveway.

Please back off, he whispered. Eddie's nature begged him to run outside, but he knew he couldn't abandon Grace. Disappearing had been his old act. He looked back at Grace, who was sound asleep, zonked-out. Maybe she'd sleep through this.

The engine growled as the driver seemed to search for the right gear-reverse, Eddie hoped. He had a bad feeling; the guy was too ballsy. Either drunk or crazy. He prayed for drunk as the music got louder, thumping in his chest. Grace moaned something, half-asleep. Call the cops, he thought. That's what a good citizen would do. The SUV made a sudden hard left onto the lawn, then went right across it, tire tracks cutting deep in the soft grass and aiming directly at the pink dollhouse. The cracking of plastic echoed in the quiet neighborhood as the big tires crushed it.

Eddie raced down the hall and grabbed the Smith & Wesson from his bedroom closet. He didn't care who the hell it was, or how many. He could feel his arms reaching into the SUV, yanking whoever it was out of that car. His hand was on the doorknob when Grace cried out from the bedroom.

"I'll be right back, babe," he yelled. "Everything is okay."

She called him again.

"Just a second, honey," he yelled.

Something hit the front of the house, slamming off the ancient door. Grace cried, "Granpop."

So he ran to her and held her and watched from the pink bedroom as the SUV backed down the driveway. The driver peeled out, tires screeching. Bits of mud and stones pinged off the sides of parked cars. Grace, her voice thick with sleep, asked what was happening, unsure whether or not she was in a bad dream. He held her and said it was just a dumb driver who got lost and that she'd always be safe with him.

Three marked patrol cars from the Yonkers Fourth Precinct responded. In the swirl of light on the lawn, Eddie let Martha snatch Grace from his arms and take her to her house. He told the cops he didn't get a plate number but that even if he had, he was sure the vehicle had been stolen. He led them to the other evidence, a gray canvas bag that had been thrown against the door-the door that no friend ever used. Detectives examined tire marks and photographed the bag. He asked the detectives to contact Babsie Panko and tell her about the canvas bag and its contents. Stenciled on the side was u.s. mail. Inside was a human head.

Chapter 16

Thursday, April 9

1:00 A.M.

For the second time in four days, a yellow crime-scene tape stretched across Eddie Dunne's driveway. Bits of pink plastic dollhouse were scattered across the lawn. Tiny dresses and miniature chairs and tables clung to clumps of grass around deep, swirling wheel ruts. CSU techs dug up chunks of turf for tire-tread comparison. Standard operating procedure, but a waste of time in this case. It might reassure the victim when you went through the evidence-collection motions, but both the techies and Eddie knew the SUV had already been transformed into a metal block and stacked with other metal blocks in some junkyard in the borough of Brooklyn or Queens.

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.