Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

The following day he went to meet the insurance appraiser who had turned them on to the job. They met in a crowded bar in Teaneck. When he wasn’t looking, Richard put a boost, as he calls it, in the insurance guy’s drink. Within minutes he fell to the floor—still another heart attack in a Jersey bar; how sad. Still another murder not attached to Richard Kuklinski.

Richard wound up selling what they stole to a fence he knew in Hoboken. Altogether he earned four hundred thousand dollars. He put it in one of the two safe-deposit boxes he rented in different Jersey banks.

Most of that money, however, was soon gone—Richard gambled it away. As far as he was concerned it was easy come, easy go.

Barbara would have been livid if she’d found out he was squandering amounts of money like that. He never told her about it, or even about the safe-deposit boxes he had. They were, like much of Richard’s life outside the home, his secret. His business.

That Sunday Richard was watching Wild Kingdom, one of his favorite shows. Richard liked animals far more than people. When he saw a large male lion subdued by a tranquilizer gun, he got an idea: Why not use such a gun on humans, he thought. It would be, he reasoned, an ideal way to snatch people marked for death. Monday morning, Richard went to see his buddy Phil Solimene and asked him if he could get him a tranquilizer gun, with the darts and tranquilizer.

“Sure, I’ll ask around,” Solimene said, and within two days Richard had the gun, thirty-five darts, and enough tranquilizer to put a football team to sleep.

Richard was given a contract to kill another mob guy by the notorious De Cavalcante Jersey family. The job specifically called for torture. The mark had to suffer severely; that was a prerequisite.

This was a particularly difficult job because the man knew he’d been marked for death and was wary and paranoid, as skittish as a house cat around a crazed junkyard dog. The mark often doubled back for no reason when driving, would suddenly pull over and let the cars behind him pass. Richard followed him for eleven days and could never get the opportunity he needed. Then he figured out that the mark met a woman at a Marriott Hotel in Queens, either a nurse or a beautician because she wore a white uniform. They would spend afternoons and evenings in one of the deluxe rooms. Richard began hanging around the hotel, looking for a clear chance to snatch the mark, waiting for the right moment.

While in the elevator, coming down from the floor where the mark was having his romantic tryst, Richard first ran into him—a small dark-haired man with shifty eyes, a thin nasty mouth, and bushy eyebrows who was definitely up to no good, Richard was sure. They smiled at each other. Richard knew the guy was a player. The elevator opened. They went their separate ways. A few hours later, Richard went to use the hotel bathroom (he had taken a room in the hotel), and as he was standing at the urinal taking a leak, the shifty-eyed guy walked in and took the urinal next to him. Richard thought this guy was stalking him, and got ready to draw his gun, do battle, kill him right there.

“How ya doing?” Richard asked, looking down at him, a tight smile about his face.

“Yeah, okay.”

“We keep running into each other.”

“I know.”

“You following me?” Richard asked, facing him head-on.

“No… you me?” the guy asked.

“No. I’m doing a piece of work, that’s all. You’ve nothing to do with it.”

“So am I.”

“You sure your business isn’t with me?”

“Positive. Yours with me?”

“Absolutely not.” They stared at each other.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

They both finished their business and washed their hands. Richard reached out and shook the guy’s hand.

“Okay,” he said, “good luck to you.”

“And to you,” the other said, and they parted.

Richard had an uncanny way of discerning immediately other contract killers. He knew intimately the moves, the looks, the eyes, the body language, and he could spot another killer a mile away, hands down, with one eye closed, and he was sure the little guy was stalking someone to kill him. Richard even contacted the people who’d given him this job to ask if they’d given it to more than one person. He was assured they hadn’t.

Hmm…

Several days later, Richard was sitting in his van (these days he most often used the van for stalking marks). He had with him the animal-tranquilizer gun and four darts filled with animal tranquilizer. If the mark was true to form he’d soon be showing up at the hotel. Richard was planning to snatch him right from the parking lot, if circumstances permitted such a move. It was a warm day. Richard was thirsty. He had already drunk the sodas he’d brought from the house and eaten a turkey on rye Barbara had prepared for him. Richard heard the familiar jingle of a Mister Softee truck. He saw in his rearview the white truck slowly coming down the block. Richard stepped from the van and waved the truck down, sweat beading on his high, wide brow. He walked up to the window and was stunned to see the guy from the bathroom inside the Mister Softee truck.

“You again,” Richard said, amused though suspicious and on guard.

“You again,” the guy said.

“What’re you doing?” Richard asked.

“This is what I do. I’m Mister Softee…. I use the truck to do, you know, surveillance, to follow people,” he said.

“Really… fucking clever!” Richard said, impressed, admiring the originality of it. Who would ever suspect a Mister Softee? Brilliant.

“You still working?” this Mister Softee asked.

“I am.”

“You want something?”

“Yeah, how about a Coke?”

“Sure thing,” he said, and gave Richard a cold can of Coke. Richard tried to pay.

“It’s on me.”

“I like this,” Richard said. “Great idea. Talk about blending.”

“My name’s Robert, Robert Pronge,” he said, offering his hand.

“How you doing? I’m Richard.” They again shook hands.

“Funny how we keep running into each other,” Richard said.

“I keep my truck in a garage nearby. So you’re doing a piece of work?”

“Yeah. Guy’s very hard to pin down.”

“Does he drive?”

“Yeah.”

“Use the car.”

“Can’t be that way—there’s a special request involved here.”

“Got you. Look, if you can come over to the garage I’ll show you some interesting stuff.”

“I’ll come now. I’ll follow you,” Richard said, and he got into his van and, curious but on guard, followed Pronge to a garage in a quiet Queens neighborhood.

Pronge parked his truck in the garage and opened a battered gray locker in the rear corner of the garage. It was filled with weapons—rifles, pistols, hand grenades, boxes of ammunition. Richard was impressed. He’d never heard of an ice-cream man who killed people. What better disguise could someone take on? He showed Richard a hand grenade he had wired up so it could be detonated by remote control. Robert Pronge, as it happened, was also a contract killer.

“What I do,” Pronge said, “is put the grenade under the driver’s seat of the car and set it off when the moment’s just right. It’s got a radius of about two blocks.”

“Very clever,” Richard said, noticing a bottle of poison. “I see you use poison.”

“Absolutely. I use it whenever possible. I made a spray, but you gotta be real careful about the wind.”

“How do you mean a spray?”

“I mixed cyanide with DMSO [dimethyl sulfoxide, a solvent easily absorbed through the skin] and put it in this,” he explained, and showed Richard a sturdy white spray bottle.