The Godfather's Revenge (26 page)

WHAT TOM TOLD THERESA WAS THAT THERE WERE
people who wanted to hurt the family, and that, rest assured, they would not succeed.

They were in their bedroom, behind a locked door.

She dissolved before his very eyes, wailing and sobbing. Theresa was a tough woman, and this, what he’d reduced her to, was hard for him to watch.

When he lifted her up, she spit in his face and called him a filthy name. She was on the edge of hyperventilating.

The look in her eyes was not Theresa. It was barely human. It was the look of a wounded and dangerous animal.

Tom forced himself not to react. He greeted her passions by turning his to stone.

He was, in fact, relieved.

There was nothing at all in the way she was handling this to suggest she’d had anything to do with it. She could have never been so purely angry if at the same time she’d been worried about her involvement in a murder.

Tom told Theresa the accusations were lies, each and every one of them.

Hope flickered across her face. But then she slapped him, then told him to leave her alone. He did, optimistic that she’d come around, that everything would be fine.

The accusations were not all lies, of course. Just the criminal ones. It was an overstatement he soon came to regret. He’d been paying more attention to her reaction than to his presentation.

Hagen’s fingerprints turned up all over both the apartment where Judy Buchanan had been killed and her apartment in Las Vegas as well. This looked bad, but it meant nothing to the case. In the court of public opinion a person could be found guilty of adultery and thus convicted of murder, but in actual court, that was a tough one. In court, going up against Sid Klein, forget it.

But it wasn’t just the public who found the fingerprints meaningful. Theresa took their two daughters and their dog—a collie named Elvis—and went to stay with her parents in New Jersey. She’d done that before, though never over another woman.

Tom wasn’t crazy about the idea, but he understood and supported her decision.

Soon after that, a “police spokesman” cited a “vast cache” of evidence they had come upon that corroborated the illicit nature of Mr. Hagen and Mrs. Buchanan’s relationship.

An incriminating photograph had also been mailed, anonymously, to one of the New York tabloids and had been reprinted in newspapers and magazines across the country.

Not long after that, Theresa had taken nearly all her things and all the girls’ things, too, and moved to the house she’d bought in Florida. She enrolled the girls in school there. She begged Tom not to be in contact with her, told him she hoped he rotted in hell.

“I’m sure I will,” he said.

She laughed at him and hung up.

It made him think of the girl he had married, that laugh. That girl didn’t have it in her to laugh like that. Tom had to face up to it: the bitterness in that laugh, the anger and the cynicism, the loss of innocence, had been his doing.

He’d work this out, he told himself. He was sure of it.

His heart started revving, but as these episodes went, it was a mild one. He stayed at his kitchen table, staring at the phone, alone in his huge white apartment, sipping Crown Royal on the rocks from a misshapen coffee mug little Gianna had made for him. He got up to get more ice, then picked up the phone and called his son Frank in New Haven. He let it ring for a long time, but there was no answer. He called his younger son, Andrew, at Notre Dame, but when he heard the boy’s voice he couldn’t think of what to say.

“Dad?” Andrew said.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Nobody else calls me and doesn’t talk.”

“When else did I ever do that?”

“How are you, Dad?”

“Have you talked to your mother?”

“Yeah,” he said. Every day. He was Theresa’s secret favorite, which probably only Theresa thought of as a secret. “Mom said you’d call. Have you been drinking?”

How was it possible at that age to be such a prig? “What are you, my father?”

“No,” he said. “Your father died from drinking too much.”

“God willing, you’ll live long enough to see that things aren’t so black and white as how I think you see the world.”

“God, huh?”

“How’s school?”

Andrew humored him and talked about it for a while.

“You know that what’s going on here,” Tom said, “it’s a crock, all right? It’s just harassment.”

“I believe you, Dad.”

He said it in a way that sounded reassuring, like absolution. When Andrew first said he was considering the priesthood, Tom was afraid it was because he was such a mama’s boy and worried that she’d loved him so much it had turned him into a fairy, the way Carmela had done to poor Fredo. Now Tom was thinking it was something else. That Andrew thought he needed to atone for the proverbial sins of the father.

“This is all going to blow over,” Tom said. “This is all going to work out, believe me. Things aren’t what they seem.”

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

“Is that right?”

“It’s from
Hamlet,
Dad.”

“That’s the problem with education. You learn something new and you forget that other people sat at that same desk before you got there.”

“I love you, Dad.”

“Good luck with those exams,” Tom said.

He hung up. He rubbed his face, then poured the last of the bottle into the mug. Tom missed them, Theresa and the girls, and his sons, too. It was clouding his judgment, making him sentimental.

Tom realized now that he’d been mistaken. What had happened to Theresa—that hardness that he’d heard in her laugh—was something that happened to everybody. It was the goddamned human condition. Sid Klein was right. There are no innocent adults.

THE FIRST BIG BREAK IN THE CASE SEEMED TO COME
when, canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses, the homicide detective who’d first taken the reins of the case found a woman who’d seen the killers leave. She would have come forward sooner, but she’d heard that the killers were “Mafia hit men” and she was afraid. On the night of the murder, she said, she’d been out walking her dog and had seen two men run out of Judy Buchanan’s building, one carrying a big gun. The woman hid behind a parked car. The men got into a late-model Plymouth and drove away. As they did, the woman got a look at their license number, which she had committed to memory. The woman was a musician and good at memorizing things, which were the only clues the public had about her identity. There were various rumors about the woman and how the detective knew her. There also seemed to be some holes in her story. Until such time as a trial, though, her identity was being protected. Even the breed of her dog was confidential.

The cops ran that license-plate number, and it led them to a Mrs. Robert Dantzler, in a modest house in the outer reaches of Queens. The Plymouth was in the driveway, with a new Corvette parked behind it. They asked the young woman who answered the door if they could speak to her mother, but that
was
Mrs. Dantzler: a plain-faced twenty-year-old in clingy pajamas at noon. She was unfazed by the insult. Her husband (a retired beat cop and licensed private investigator) and her big brother (Vernon K. Rougatis, who was “between jobs”) had gone away suddenly on what they’d called a business trip. They’d packed in a hurry and taken a cab. She didn’t know if
business trip
was code for something else. All
she
knew, she said, was that she was getting tired of her husband’s “bullcrap” (“Mr. Dantzler’s [nonsense],” according to the newspaper of record). The house was crammed with things: new appliances, new furniture, and one whole room full of expensive china dolls. Later, there would be feature stories about how these dolls had been a comfort to her. Mrs. Dantzler stayed on the periphery of this story for a while, unsuccessfully suing to get her husband’s surveillance photos back and to get paid by anyone and everyone who had published them. Even after that, she was a regular guest on
The Joe Franklin Show
.

The sheer amount of material goods—her Corvette had only eighty-three miles on it—seemed beyond Bob Dantzler’s means, but apparently the only sinister element lurking behind all that was a mountain of consumer debt. The finished basement was Bob Dantzler’s part of the house, she said, but police didn’t find anything there that was of much use. Mrs. Dantzler said that in addition to a suitcase, her husband had taken a “really big” satchel with him on his trip. He did have a sizable arsenal down there—sixty-one guns, rifles, and shotguns, as well as hundreds of boxes of ammo, which led to many people’s assumption that he’d been a contract killer for the Mafia, and not merely a man enjoying the bejesus out of his constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Dantzler’s personnel file—he’d spent twenty-five years on the force—revealed no ties or noteworthy run-ins with elements of the Mafia. Neither did the interviews with the men who’d worked with him. He’d been regarded as a capable, unambitious cop, remarkable only because he got divorced and remarried every few years, the way movie stars do.

Days after the search of her house, the plain young woman in the pajamas, the fifth Mrs. Bob Dantzler, found out that she was the last of the line.

Responding to an anonymous tip, police found Bob Dantzler and his brother-in-law on a garbage barge in New Jersey, docked but as yet unloaded. Each man had been shot twice in the back of the head and wrapped in a bedspread. The bullets came from a .45, more gun than was usually used for such assassinations. Their wallets were still in their pants pockets. No acid or quicklime had been used to accelerate decomposition. Their heads, hands, and feet were still attached. Whoever killed them obviously wanted them to be found.

The brother-in-law had A-negative blood, which occurs in only six percent of the American people, the fourth-rarest type. Judy Buchanan’s blood was O-positive. The other blood type found at the scene, which must have come from the shooter, was A-negative. There seemed to be a strong circumstantial case that these were the killers and that the investigation should focus on who had hired them.

“It’s just simple common sense,” Sid Klein pointed out to a group of reporters assembled outside his law office, “that these deaths have nothing to do with my client. What, after all, did Mr. Hagen have to gain from killing the killers? Nothing. No tie between him and these men has been or will be found. What did the people who hired the killers have to gain? Everything. Is it time to look beyond my client and try to find the person or persons behind these heinous crimes? It is. It is past time.”

Nonetheless, the garbage had been loaded at a city sanitation facility only a block from where Tom Hagen lived. That, of course, meant nothing—garbage came there from all over the East Side—but it certainly didn’t look good.

What about the allegation that the police had evidence that showed that Judy Buchanan had been a kept woman for almost ten years, that Hagen had even paid for the bills incurred by her mother and her son?

“It’s a misunderstanding,” Klein said. “Minor accounting blunders, is all that is. The payments in question were perfectly legal fringe benefits she had been given. These payments should have been funded by a company for which Mr. Hagen was a signatory, not by Mr. Hagen personally. It was an honest mistake, and the accountant who made these mistakes has been fired. He accepts full responsibility for these errors, however, and he’s prepared to admit to them, under oath, in a court of law.”

MANY OF THE EFFORTS TO BUILD A CASE WERE VISIBLE
to the naked eye, and it seemed safe to assume that any number of behind-the-scenes things were happening, too. An arrest seemed to be getting closer every day.

And kept not happening.

As the investigation dragged on, it started to seem to some observers that the law-enforcement officials in charge—and it was challenging, from the outside looking in, to discern just who
was
in charge—seemed more interested in keeping the drama before the public than they were in solving the actual murder.

Exhibit A: the hapless NYPD detective initially on the case might never have been replaced at all if not for a newspaper column that revealed corruption galore in his past. Federal prosecutors threatened the columnist with jail if he did not reveal the “underworld kingpin” who’d been his anonymous source, which he refused to do. Years later, however, in the deeply moving and often hilarious memoir
Hard-Bitten,
he claimed he’d been contacted by an expensive public-relations firm in lower Manhattan, which had then coordinated his interview with Eddie Paradise, who had committed to memory the intricate details of the many payoffs the detective had accepted—from the Corleones as well as several other New York Families. They’d all checked out.

According to the book, at the time of the murder, Paradise had no idea that the detective was under his friend Momo Barone’s thumb. He also had no idea that the Roach, his best friend, was conspiring against him. That—and the famous lion—all came out later. At the time, the way Eddie Paradise saw things was that he’d found a progressive and bloodless means of hurting the detective, someone he believed to be a threat to the Corleone Family, and the little guy was intemperately proud of himself for his own cleverness. The chapter begins this way: “Little Eddie Paradise was the first mobster to ever hire his own P.R. flak. He would not be the last.” Later in the chapter,
Hard-Bitten
chronicles the troubles that fateful column unleashed: “It was all just theater. I was acting tough, but that’s all it was—an act. And the sabers the Feds were rattling came straight from the prop department. Fool that I was, though, it all seemed real to me. I was a young man with three kids to feed and a long-suffering wife, so from where I stood the blades on those sabers looked pretty sharp. I had to look inside myself, but back then all there was to see was booze and fear. So I just played my part, like the enterprising red-blooded, true-blue American fake that I was. I put on a brave face, spent a few nights in jail, and when it all blew over, I was a hero. A poster boy for the First Amendment. A couple years later, I won a Pulitzer Prize. Anyone who says this isn’t a great country can kiss my saggy white ass.”