Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

By 2:00 A.M. Richard was beginning to think she’d sleep there, but at 2:30 she walked off the boat and got into a red car, and off she went. Immediately, Richard got out of his car and walked to the boat, a .38 with a suppressor he had bought from Motorboat in his pocket. Catlike, silently, as deadly as a puff of cyanide gas, Richard stepped onto the boat, walked to the cabin and inside, the gun in his hand. When the mark saw him, big and mean and deadly serious, he was so stunned he nearly fell over.

“What da fuck?” he demanded.

“You’ve made some enemies,” Richard said. “How do you want it, quick or slow?” he asked, subtly tormenting the mark.

“Please, man, I got kids, a wife—”

“That your wife that just left?” Richard asked.

“No, my gomatta. Please, Rich, I got money, I’ll give it all to you, please, Richie, please… you know me, I—”

“My friend,” Richard calmly told him, “when you see me it’s the end of the line. I’m the grim reaper, my friend,” he said, a nasty, sardonic smile playing on his stone-cold face.

“Please, no, please,” the mark begged, now getting down on his knees, his hands in a twisted knot as if he were fervently praying.

“I’ll do you a favor,” Richard said.

“What?”

“I’ll kill you quickly.” And with that Richard shot him in the forehead, just above the ridge of his nose. A finger of blood came squirting out of the sudden hole. Richard waited for the blood to stop, for his heart to cease. When that happened, he dragged the mark, careful not to step in the blood, onto the deck and threw him in the water, cursing him silently. He then walked back to his car.

Off in the distance, out at sea, a lightning storm started up and for a while Richard sat in his car and watched giant lightning bolts dance madly across an ominous velvet black sky, knowing fish and crabs would eat the mark, piece by piece.

He was lucky I didn’t torture him. I was in… a good mood, I guess, he thought.

It was 1959. Richard was twenty-four years old and had acquired a serious drinking problem; he often got drunk, became nasty and belligerent—just like his father—and inevitably got into fights, which all too often ended in a spur-of-the-moment murder.

He was in a bar called the Pelican Lounge in Union City, drinking boilermakers—hard whiskey followed by beer chasers. He had words with another man at the bar, and the guy hauled off and slugged Richard. Before Richard could do anything though, the bartender, a guy Richard knew, asked him to “take it outside.”

“Come on,” Richard encouraged the man. As they made their way onto the sidewalk, Richard took hold of his hunting knife, secreted in his coat pocket, and just when they reached the sidewalk, Richard turned quickly, and in one swift movement, like the strike of a rattlesnake, brought up the blade, and stuck it directly into the man’s throat, at an upward angle, the blade immediately entering his brain.

Dead, he hit the ground.

Calmly, Richard walked off. When the police came around asking questions, no one knew anything.

Richard was in the Orchid Bar in Union City, drunk and a bit rowdy. A huge, burly bouncer made him leave, pushed him outside, which Richard accepted, but the bouncer kicked him in the ass as he went; this outraged Richard. Knowing, however, he was too drunk to defend himself properly, he vowed to return. The bouncer spat at him—his second mistake. Richard didn’t like bouncers. Most of them, he felt, were bullies: Richard despised bullies. Richard was, in fact, a slayer of bullies.

Two days later Richard was back, sober, deadly—murder on his mind. He waited in his car for the bar to close, the bouncer to leave, which he did. Richard stepped from his car, carrying a hammer. He followed the bouncer, who got into his car and started it up. Richard approached. “Hey, big guy, remember me?” he asked.

“What da fuck you want?” snarled the bouncer.

In the bat of an eye Richard swung the hammer and struck him in the side of the head so hard that the hammer entered his skull. Richard hit him again, again, and again. When he finished, the bouncer was dead—destroyed, unrecognizable. Now Richard spat on him and walked away.

No matter how much money Richard made, he was often broke, for he was a chronic degenerate gambler and most often lost. He also tended to gamble when he was drinking, which only compounded his losing and his problems….

He wasn’t happy with his life, where it was going: essentially, Richard had come to hate the world and most everyone in it. He viewed the world as a mean, hostile jungle crowded with dangerous creatures, a dog-eat-dog place filled with brutal iniquities. He did, however, realize that his drinking and gambling were becoming a problem, though he didn’t know how to stop either one. In the circles Richard was moving in, everyone drank and everyone gambled, everyone hustled, everyone lied and cheat and stole. He trusted no one; at the drop of a hat he’d kill. For him it was a simple equation: Kill or be killed—eat or be eaten.

Unsettling rumors about Richard’s younger brother Joseph were circulating. Richard kept hearing these rumors—that Joseph was taking drugs, that Joseph was gay —and became disturbed. Richard viewed drugs as a one-way trip to nowhere, an early grave.

Richard heard that Joseph was hanging out in a gay bar called Another Way in Guttenberg, New Jersey.

How could that be? he wondered: he saw Joseph with girls on numerous occasions. The thought of this, that his brother was gay, a fag, was for him unsettling. Not believing such a thing, wanting to see it with his own eyes, Richard went to the bar on a Friday night. The place was crowded with men and boys who openly showed affection to one another, and there was Joseph, kissing a man dressed as a woman. Richard’s face reddened at such a sight. He ordered a beer with no glass, not even wanting to drink from a glass in that place. Back then, Richard would later say, there was a big stigma associated with, you know, being homosexual, and I wasn’t at all at ease in this joint, where men were kissing and holding hands right out in the open. Probably my own shortcoming, but I couldn’t help it; I didn’t know any better. I mean, I know people don’t really have much say over that, their sexuality… but, still.

When Richard looked up, his brother and his friend were suddenly gone. Where had he disappeared to so quickly? Richard looked all over the place but couldn’t find Joseph. He wanted to talk with him, tell him he was doing the wrong thing. He went to the bathroom and saw under the toilet stall door that two people were inside. He heard his brother’s voice. His stomach turned at the thought of what he was doing. A strange kind of rage came welling inside him. He kicked open the locked door and there was his brother, performing fellatio on the other guy—an infamy right there before his eyes.

Shocked, Joseph stood. Before he could say anything, Richard struck him and knocked him down to the floor, out cold. He also hit the transvestite and knocked him out, too. Oh, how he wanted to commit more violence, break bones, draw blood, but instead Richard turned and left, his mind reeling with the implications, enraged.

Like some kind of wounded animal, he went back to Hoboken, to the Ringside Inn, in a foul mood. He walked up to the bar and began drinking. He had a rule of never getting drunk here. This was his home base, his regular hangout, and he was afraid he’d hurt someone—maybe kill someone—and not be able to come back, as had happened in numerous drinking establishments.

The Ringside Inn was owned by a cantankerous, tough woman, ugly as sin, says Richard. Her name was Sylvia and she looked like a chimpanzee who’d been struck with an ugly stick in the face a few times. One eye was bigger than the other; her nose was flat like a pancake with two holes—her nostrils; her face was framed by wirelike tendrils of frizzy bleach blond hair. Sylvia liked Richard because he was handsome and he played high-stakes pool games in her place that brought in business. Men—and some women—came from all over the East Coast to play pool with Richard for as much as two hundred dollars a ball.