The Con Man's Daughter (11 page)

"Is that Sergei Zhukov, the one with the tattoo on his neck?" Eddie asked, pointing to the guy with the wide lapels.

"You know Sergei?" Lester said.

"Some piece of work," Eddie replied.

"One of a kind, thank God," Lester said. "My panel here shows they got the door locked. Some kind of meeting, looks like. Maybe we better hold off, do it some other night."

"No problem," Eddie said. "Next time, I'll bring doughnuts. Is there a back way out of here?"

"The side door, but that's another sore point with me, Eddie. They lock all the exits. It's a fire violation, but they don't give a shit. You saw that garbage all sitting there, right? It's more important to them to make sure no uncool people sneak in. Until closing, only way out is the stairs you just came up, and out the front door."

No problemo. Eddie let the door to the stairway slam hard. He danced down the stairs, his leather shoes tapping the metal edges, the Gene Kelly of noisy exits. The kid being intimidated by Sergei was Misha. The kid was Borodenko's problem, and guys like Sergei knew only one solution. Eddie needed to get to him before Sergei got bored.

He went back to the swinging kitchen doors and peeked through the glass. Scrub-down was in progress. Eddie felt the ledge above the door. Kitchen help were always smokers. Paulie the Priest used to say the only difference between chefs and cooks was that chefs didn't have tattoos. Real cooks, forced to smoke out in stairways, left cigarettes and matches above door ledges, or wedged in a doorjamb. He found matches, then hit the garbage cans for a discarded copy of the
Daily News
.

Eddie crept back up the stairs, then climbed one flight above the VIP room and the security office. The hallway was dark. He had barely enough light to find the smoke detector. He took the newspaper and rolled it into a funnel shape. He lit the paper, waited until it was fully engulfed, and then held it directly under the smoke detector. It went off, a loud, piercing siren. Eddie dropped the paper in a burning pile on the concrete floor. He ran to the stairway and positioned himself so he could see the door below.

Lester came through the door first, clomping down the stairs on his way to open the exit door. Apparently, their state-of-the-art system couldn't tell which smoke alarm had been set off. Costa came next, followed by Misha and Sergei.

They never heard Eddie behind them. He swung up on the railing and kicked Sergei square in the back. The Russian rocketed forward, pulling Misha down with him to the landing below. Eddie ran down and planted a second footprint on Sergei's sports jacket as he pulled Misha to his feet. The kid was already drenched in sweat. Eddie jammed his Sig Sauer into Misha's cheek, hard enough to imprint the shape. With his mouth right against the kid's ear, he made a point to use his nickname.

"Misha, who stole the black BMW?"

The kid stammered something in Russian. Sergei tried to get up; Eddie put both feet, all his weight, on the center of his back.

"I need a name now, Misha."

Beyond the stairway door, he could hear the stampede of a drunken fire drill. Eddie held tight to Misha's shirt. "You little fuck," he said. "You'll die right here."

"Please," Misha said. "She'll kill me."

Eddie towered over the kid. He wrapped his forearm tighter around his throat and forced the gun into his mouth, the barrel clicking off the kid's teeth. He told him to believe he was about to die.

"Who is she?" Eddie yelled. "I need a name, asshole. She took the black BMW? She who? A name. Give me a name."

The stairway door opened. Richie Costa poked his face in.

Eddie squeezed tighter on Misha's neck. "Who the fuck is'she'?"

Eddie had both arms wrapped around the whimpering kid. Richie Costa swung from the side, a pure sucker punch. Eddie went to his knees, crumbling on top of the kid, both of them on top of Sergei in the crowded stairway. Eddie screamed at Misha, "Give me a name." Costa punched him again. Somebody kept yelling to get the kid out of there. The stairway door stayed open; security goons jammed the doorway. Lester yanked Misha up, pulling him under his arms. Eddie made it hard for him, holding on to the kid's soaked shirt. Costa tried to loosen Eddie's grip but couldn't. They tore Misha's shirt off. Eddie grabbed his belt. Then a lead pipe or a nightstick came down repeatedly on Eddie's forearms and wrists. At some point, he let go.

Chapter 12

Wednesday

7:00 A.M.

Southbound traffic on the West Side Highway, always jammed during rush hour, crawled more deliberately in the early-morning fog. The steady blur of oncoming headlights flickered like processional candles in the gloom. Eddie Dunne's swollen right eye enhanced the surreal haze as his northbound traffic lane moved freely, leaving Manhattan. Most of his life, he'd made his exit at this time, before the sun and normalcy arrived.

This particular morning, Eddie owed his freedom to Russian practicality. The business manager of the Eurobar, rousted from his bed, didn't want any official reports of a scuffle gumming up a spate of license applications he had before the city government. He wouldn't press arson charges if Eddie was willing to walk away quietly. A sweetheart deal, too good to pass up. Live to fight another day.

Eddie squinted, trying to maintain a distance from the taillights ahead of him. He didn't need a car accident on top of everything else. After passing the entrance to the George Washington Bridge, the escaping traffic thinned to a handful of nocturnal misfits. He took the Saw Mill River Parkway, then went over the hill of Roberts Avenue. Eddie had called Babsie and arranged a breakfast meeting, but he had nothing to report. He'd lost the Battle of Eurobar, beaten by a sucker punch from Richie Costa. In the confusion, he'd lost his gun, and the best chance of finding his daughter.

The Eurobar's business manager had told Eddie he'd hired Misha as weekend kitchen help. The confrontation in the VIP room that Eddie had witnessed resulted from the security people catching Misha dealing drugs in the men's room. Sergei Zhukov, whose management duties seemed undefined, was merely in the process of banning him from the Eurobar. The Russians never cared whether or not you believed their lies; they just told the story and stuck to it.

The only good thing that came out of the incident was that if Eddie had ever had any doubts Borodenko was involved, they were gone now. He'd been approaching this all wrong. He needed to forget about the stolen car and go after Borodenko at a higher level, start taking down some of his key associates. Misha, even if he had confessed, might not know what had happened to Kate. And "she," whoever "she" was, probably didn't know, either. Too low-level for the big secrets.

An old boxing truism says that if you attack the body, the head will die. He'd been attacking the body. Now he realized he didn't have time for that strategy. After a nap, some food, he'd be ready to hunt for the head. He parked his Olds in back of Christ the King school.

The Yonkers neighborhood where the Dunne brothers were bora and raised was known as "the End of the Line." The "End" got its name when it was the northernmost trolley stop in the city of Yonkers. The Yonkers trolley line took local residents to and from their jobs in New York City, connecting them with the subway station at West 242nd Street in the Bronx. In the early fifties, the Yonkers trolleys were replaced by buses, and the burnished steel tracks had been paved over with blacktop. Kieran Dunne, father of Eddie and Kevin, was one of several old trolley motormen who never got the hang of driving a bus. Out of work, he took the next step in Irish logic. He bought a bar.

The North End Tavern was located just steps from that last bus stop. Every evening, dozens of workers coming off the bus from their "city" jobs stopped in for "just one" before going home to face the bride. For three decades, Kieran Dunne's North End was the social center of the neighborhood's bustling business district, a two-block thoroughfare on Palisade and Roberts avenues. But times changed. Kids went to college, then moved to tonier parts of the county, old-timers died, or retired to the Sun Belt. The neighborhood hung tough, but fewer and fewer people piled off the bus each evening.

Almost all the stores were still mom-and-pop concerns, many of them remaining in the same family for generations-among them a pharmacy, a small supermarket, a barbershop/beauty shop, and two bars. The glory days of the North End Tavern were in the past, but the new owners, Kevin and Martha Dunne, had somehow managed to keep the place afloat.

With all his heart, Kevin Dunne believed the city of Yonkers would rise from the ashes. The waterfront alone was too valuable to leave dormant for long. The City of Gracious Living had beautiful treed hills sloping down to the Hudson, and a fabulous view of the Palisades of New Jersey. Yonkers was an easier commute to Manhattan than Staten or Long Island, and closer than most of Brooklyn and Queens. Just ask Uncle Kev-o.

It was after 9:00 a.m. when Eddie Dunne walked through the open doors of his brother's bar. The front doors of the North End stood open until noon in all but the worst weather to allow the night's accumulation of smoke and stale beer to escape. Eddie paused to allow his pulse to slow down and let his eyes adjust to the dark. A trio of elderly men sat together in the far corner of the bar, each reading his own newspaper. The TV above them was set to CNBC, the financial channel, the stock market ticker tape running nonstop. Their father, Kieran Dunne, had never allowed the television on unless it was boxing, the World Series, or a NASA space shot. Behind the bar, a full-figured brunette washed glasses.

"I'll get some ice for that eye," Martha Dunne said. Steam rose from the low sink as Eddie's sister-in-law dried her hands on a bar towel.

"I don't need ice," Eddie said. "Is my brother here?"

"You should get yourself up to St. John's and have that looked at."

"I'm glad you're concerned about my eye, but right now I'm looking for Kevin."

Martha had a gravelly voice and long brown hair that hung in bangs, almost covering her eyes. Some said she had the sexy manner reminiscent of an actress filmed only in black and white. Eddie thought they mistook cunning for sexy.

"Then how about coffee?" she said. "I've made fresh coffee."

"Martha. Where is he?"

"At the market, squeezing the tomatoes, or so he'll tell us. A regular comedian, your brother."

"Why didn't you tell me Scott's sister was here?"

"Is that how it's going to be, Eddie? No chitchat, get right to the fighting."

"You know damn well you should have called me."

"I thought Grace would tell you."

"She didn't. She hardly said anything last night. But you definitely should have."

"It was too late when I got home," she whispered, trying to keep the volume down.

"Nine o'clock is too late? You knew that son of a bitch sent her here, and you didn't think it was important enough to call me?"

"Kevin and I needed our sleep, and I didn't want you to frighten Grace. I knew you'd be furious, flying out the door. I thought it could wait until morning."

"You decided that on your own."

"At least we all got a night's sleep."

"Kevin didn't know, did he?" Eddie said. "You didn't tell him last night because you knew he would have called me."

"I saved you both a night of lunacy."

A chin-high wooden partition separated the bar from the back room. The back room consisted of half a dozen wooden booths hidden along the far wall. At night, they were used only by sleeping drunks and cheating spouses, but Martha and Kevin had been building a respectable lunch trade, and the booths were now getting some daytime use. He could see Babsie Panko's blondish gray hair in a back booth.

"You going to tell me what my ex-son-in-law wanted?" Eddie said. "Or do I have to ask Grace?"

"Your ex-son-in-law wasn't here," Martha said. "His sister was. And if you ask me, she's a nice person. Scott asked her to find out how Kate was, and that's what she did."

"Suddenly, he's concerned."

"Grace is still his daughter."

"Jesus Christ, whose side are you on?"

Eddie's voice hung in the sudden quiet of the bar. A scraggly brown mutt named James Joyce padded through the door and flopped down near the heat register. Eddie knew his brother wasn't far behind.

"I'm on Grace's side," Martha said softly. "One of us has to be realistic… for her sake. I think the average person would agree that the father has his rights, too."

Eddie wanted to lean across the bar and shake his brother's wife until a sense of family loyalty filtered into her head. He hated when Martha cited her personal opinion of what the "average person" would do as unarguable evidence for her narrow-minded views. He knew deep down that Martha was worried that the responsibility of caring for Grace might fall to her. Eddie told her he'd wait for his brother in the back booth.

"I heard it all," Babsie said. "When did you find this out?"

"I stopped at school before I came over here. Father Quakers said he saw her talking to Martha. Makes me wonder how the hell Scott found out in the first place."

"Yonkers is still a small town, Eddie. Besides, it's in the paper today."

She showed him a copy of the
Westchester News Journal
. The story was on page one. A new picture of their house, and an old one of Eddie in boxing trunks-a posed shot taken when he was barely twenty years old. Inside, a group photo of Kate's nursing class, a circle around the face of his daughter.

"You were a little hard on Martha," Babsie said. "It wasn't your most attractive moment."

Coming from a huge clan, Babsie understood family politics, but she didn't know Martha that well. Whatever had happened to Martha, she seemed unable to find joy in anything. Eddie's personal gripe with her stemmed from his belief that Martha had turned Eileen into the same rigid, unforgiving "good" Catholic she was. Kevin blamed it all on Martha's hysterectomy, and the marked change in her after the doctors "didn't put me back together right."

"That eye looks ripe," Babsie said. "But I should see the other guy, right?"