Ed Dee - The Con Man's Daughter

"Don't worry about it," Eddie said. "I have a high pain threshold. I don't care what the hell they dredge up, as long as they keep looking."

On the corner of Worth Street, familiar faces gathered in the early stages of a small demonstration. The same core group had manned every antigovemment rally for the past twenty years. Yellow signs stood ready, stacked against a pole. The slogans demanded freedom for the manipulative and articulate killer of a Philadelphia cop.

"I gotta ask," Boland said. "How come you refused to testify against the Priest? You could have saved your own ass."

"It was a bullshit case; they were trying to nail him for other things."

"I heard he was a very dirty cop."

"It depends on what you mean by 'dirty.' The Priest was a dinosaur. He never saw anything wrong with accepting a free meal or a free cup of coffee."

"Free hotel rooms, free cars, free trips to Puerto Rico," Boland added.

"Probably a lot more than that in his early days. He slowed down after the Knapp Commission, but he was a stubborn bastard. He should have seen the handwriting on the wall and retired."

"They got you guys for consorting with known criminals," Boland said.

"At his niece's graduation party. He'd been consorting with those people all his life. He couldn't've avoided them if he'd wanted to."

"Story I heard is that half the Gambino family was there. That's what bothers me, Eddie. You had to have known that someone would be taking pictures. The feds or the rat squad, somebody. I can't believe you just walked into that."

"It was during my Johnnie Walker Black period. All I cared about was the next glass in my hand."

The view from the small conference room on the twenty-eighth floor of 26 Federal Plaza was spectacular. The confluence of the Hudson and East rivers at the tip of the narrow island gave a clear perspective on the amount of water surrounding and bisecting the boroughs. But like most natives, Eddie Dunne was more interested in the brick and mortar than the coastline. He looked for roofs he'd made love on, roofs he'd caught homicides on. He had to amuse himself somehow; thus far, they'd excluded him from the meeting.

Eddie had finished his coffee and bagel and read all he wanted of the New York Post . He started looking around the room, trying to figure out where they'd hidden the camera and mike. The FBI tech men were much better than in the days when they wired a mike into a TV set, then sat it dead center in the middle of the room. The only thing in the center of this room was an odd-shaped chunk of polished brown granite in the center of a small table. On it was a brass plaque that read Alfred p. murrah federal

BUILDING, APRIL 19, I995.

No goddamn reason for making me wait this long, he thought. Arrogant bastards couldn't find a junkie in Harlem without guys like me. Eddie walked over to a large mirror and placed his fingernail against it. There was no gap between his fingernail and the image of it in the mirror. It was a two-way mirror. If it had been a real mirror, there would have been a space between his nail and its image.

After ninety minutes, he heard the sound of heels clicking on the tile floor. Special Agent Stacey Powers, a young woman with a Southern accent, led him two turns down the hallway, then into a conference room that faced uptown. She pointed out a seat at the end of a long, polished table, next to a grim-faced Matty Boland. Yellow pads and pencils were stacked in the center of the table. Powers introduced seven nonsmiling males, agents or attorneys, all crisp and buttoned-down. Then she went straight to the first question: When was the last time he'd seen Paul Caruso?

"Fourteen years ago at a party in Queens," Eddie said. "I never saw him again after that."

"Any correspondence between you since he moved to Sicily?"

"None."

"Do you know if Detective Caruso ever returned home to the United States again after that?"

"If he did, he didn't call me," Eddie said. "Ask his brother."

"We spoke to Mr. Caruso," Powers said.

Agent Powers gave Eddie a quick, annoyed glance, then said there was no record of him ever returning, not even this time. Friends and neighbors thought he was traveling in Europe again. Local police considered Paul Caruso an international playboy, jetting off to Amsterdam or the French Riviera on a whim. No one had any idea how his skull had arrived in New York, or where the rest of his body might be hiding.

Agent Powers said, "According to your department's records, you had a fistfight with Detective Paul Caruso at a graduation party in June of 1984, in the backyard of Angelo Caruso's house."

"It wasn't a real fight."

"He needed extensive dental work following the encounter."

"Paulie liked to do Robert De Niro imitations," Eddie said. "He was doing De Niro playing Jake La Motta in Raging Bull . I was supposed to be Sugar Ray Robinson. He'd had a little too much to drink and stepped into a punch."

"I understand that was the last time he spoke to you."

"That's true."

"Tell us about Marvin Rosenfeld," a new questioner said from behind them.

All heads turned to a man sitting in one of the four leather chairs that surrounded a glass coffee table. French cuffs, blue shirt with a white collar. He'd come in after the introductions, carrying a teacup, complete with saucer.

"Marvin Rosenfeld started out as a tax attorney," Eddie said, addressing his answer across the table to Agent Powers. "He had an office on Remsen Street in the seventies. Then he started working as a financial adviser for a scumbag Russian crime boss named Evesi Volshin."

"Rosenfeld lived in Manhattan Beach," French Cuffs said.

"And he died there," Eddie added.

Eddie figured French Cuffs was the assistant special agent in charge. The one who claimed to know the musical roots of the subway bing-bong . He had no yellow pad of his own. Eddie figured the conversation was being recorded. Agent Powers took notes for effect.

"Rosenfeld was murdered at home in March of 1984," French Cuffs said. "Tell me about that homicide and the Marine Park shooting that followed it."

"Nineteen eighty-four was a long time ago. Agent Powers has the files in front of her."

"Humor me," French Cuffs said. 'Tell me about that day."

Eddie told him that he and Detective Paul Caruso were working off the detective chart, investigating a rash of burglaries in upscale Manhattan Beach. They spotted a souped-up Dodge Charger parked in the driveway of the expensive home of local attorney Marvin Rosenfeld. They figured Rosenfeld wasn't the muscle-car type. Detective Caruso drove around the block once more. On the second pass, they saw two men they knew to be Brooklyn thugs tossing black plastic trash bags into the Charger. It didn't look like trash removal or anything legitimate. It looked purely wrong. Caruso parked half a block away. A few minutes later, the Charger backed out of the driveway. They followed it a short distance east on the Belt Parkway to a deserted employee parking area in Marine Park. The Charger pulled behind a park storage building, where the two men had apparently hidden a second vehicle. When they began transferring the bags to the second vehicle, the two detectives moved in. They came up on them quickly, guns drawn, loudly identifying themselves: "Police! Freeze!" The two thugs began firing. The detectives returned fire, killing both men. Eddie pointed out that both he and the Priest won the Medal of Honor for this incident, the highest decoration awarded by the NYPD.

"You just happened to be there," French Cuffs said.

"It's called police work."

"You didn't call for backup?" he asked.

"No radio. Not all detective cars had radios in those days. We always signed out the cars that didn't."