problem. He hugged and kissed Roy, as is the custom. Little did Nino Gaggi know that Roy DeMeo would soon bring the world crashing down on his balding head.
Richard did not ask for or receive any payment for this hit. It was a favor. But Roy later told him, “The slate’s clean between us,” forgiving fifty thousand dollars Richard owed Roy for porn. All nice and neat and tidy, it seemed.
31
Lady and
Pouilly-Fuisse
Barbara Kuklinski both dreaded and looked forward to weekends. Though she never knew when Richard would be home—he often left the house without any notice, at the drop of a dime, at all times of the day and night—she tried to make plans that included him. Barbara enjoyed getting dressed up and going to nice restaurants, enjoyed good food, good company, good conversation. Unlike her mother, Genevieve, Barbara was outgoing and gregarious and liked the company of friends and other couples on Friday-and Saturday-night outings. In this she was just like her father.
When they went out, Richard always ordered the best of everything. Money was no object. As far as he was concerned money was for spending, and he spent as if he had a tree in the backyard that grew crisp new hundred- dollar bills every time you watered it. Chateaubriand, lobster, three-hundred-dollar bottles of wine, were the norm. Richard also enjoyed putting on hand-tailored suits, silk ties, expensive Italian shoes. Barbara picked out most of his clothes. He trusted her taste; he trusted her social graces and direction. If another couple joined them, as often happened, Richard picked up the tab. He wouldn’t let anyone else pay. Barbara tried to explain that he didn’t have to pay every bill, that it was okay to split tabs or let others pay. But he didn’t see it that way, and her words fell on deaf ears.
Barbara didn’t know where all the money was coming from. She figured he had finally found his way in business and didn’t question him. If she had questioned him, his answer would have been a blank stare, a stone face, as though he hadn’t heard her. Barbara learned to accept, like everything else, her husband’s tight lips…and generous ways. When Barbara and Richard went out for a night on the town, he was usually quiet, didn’t talk much. He just sat there, taking everything in. Barbara, however, talked enough for both of them, and that was fine with him. She’d even answer questions for him. Richard now only drank a little wine. He knew hard alcohol made him mean and he had the good sense to steer clear of it. He was mean enough without it.
Richard was not only generous, he could be amazingly considerate, an incorrigible romantic. He had, for instance, nicknamed Barbara “Lady” and regularly called her that, and he’d arrange for Kenny Rogers’s song “Lady” to be playing when they entered favorite restaurants—Palosadium, Archer’s, Over Rose’s Dead Body, Le Chateau, and Danny’s Steakhouse—and he made sure Barbara’s favorite wines, Montrachet and Pouilly-Fuisse, were in fancy ice buckets next to their table. He even arranged for freshly cut long-stemmed red roses to be placed on their table before they arrived.
Nothing was too good for Lady.
This Richard—the good Richard—Barbara loved in her own quiet way. The other Richard, however, she had grown to hate, and often the bad feelings she harbored for him far outweighed the good ones. Like a pendulum, her feelings swung back and forth—love, hate; love, hate.
When they dressed up and went out, Richard was usually polite, a gentleman. But he was
One Saturday evening they went to a movie in Dumont. As they were leaving, Richard abruptly walked away from Barbara, went over to some guy Barbara didn’t even notice, and demanded to know why he was staring at Barbara. The man told Richard he was crazy; that he wasn’t staring, to “shove it.” Richard punched the guy and knocked him out cold.
“Why, Richard?” Barbara asked when they got outside.
“I saw him staring
“At me?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t even see him.”
“This was between me and him,” he said.
Barbara loathed to be in the car with Richard, for often he got into arguments with people about how they drove, which inevitably caused him to lose his temper, get out of the car, berate people, break windshields with his huge ham-hock fists. Barbara knew that when Richard was like this she could do nothing to reason with him. No one could. Not even a cop with a drawn gun. It was best she just keep quiet because his rage could suddenly be turned on her. Richard was a walking time bomb. When he was mad and you looked at him you could almost hear the ticking. He could go off at any moment. That was reality. That was what she had to live with. Even when he was in the car with his daughters, he’d get into these nutty, nonsensical, violent disputes with men and women about how they drove. He was even arrested for breaking the windshield of a woman’s car when his daughters were with him. However, the woman refused to press charges. She was—correctly—deathly afraid of Richard. To see him in one of his rages was a frightening experience. No one who saw it was apt to forget.
Dwayne was still too young to comprehend fully what a madman his father could become, but both Merrick and Chris well knew how volatile and violent he was, and both of them were terrified of their father, scared to the core of their little beings. Merrick took to trembling when Richard lost it. But he never laid a finger on either girl. Even now, so many years later, both Merrick and Chris pale and tremble at just the sound of Richard’s voice.
Yet, when Merrick had to be hospitalized, as she often was, Richard could not be more solicitous and caring. Oh how Merrick loved that daddy, and oh how Merrick feared the other daddy. It was during the quiet times at the hospital, when Richard and Merrick were alone in the early-morning hours and late at night, that Richard began telling his firstborn about his childhood. How he, his mother, and his brother Florian were brutalized by Stanley; how poor they were; how there was never enough of anything; how he stole to eat. He never spoke like this to Chris or even to Barbara, only to Merrick. She’d look at him with her huge, honey-colored fawn eyes and silently listen to him, having an understanding beyond her years. It wasn’t as though he were trying to rationalize or make any kind of excuse for his temper tantrums and his violence against Barbara. He just wanted her to know the truth; how it had been. But after hearing these things, Merrick only loved her father all the more.
There were times at home when Richard would have one of his outbursts and break things and then lock himself in his office. Merrick would go to him, ask him to calm down, to “please relax, Daddy.” During these episodes Richard would explain in a matter-of-fact way, “You know if…if I kill Mommy, if something happens and she dies, I’ll have to kill you all…. I can’t leave any witnesses.”
“Yes, Daddy. I know, Daddy,” she said.
As strange and horrible a thing as this was to tell a child, Richard was trying to let Merrick know in advance —out of consideration—what might happen. He wanted her to understand that his doing such a thing was out of… love. Only out of love.
He loved Barbara too much.
He loved his children too much.
That was the problem. The only way he could deal with their loss, if he inadvertently killed Barbara, was to kill them. Essentially, that was how Richard had dealt with all his problems since he was a child. Kill it and the problem goes away. Richard had a unique ability to compartmentalize emotional pain and turmoil. He was like two different people who didn’t know each other, two strangers in the same body.
“But you, Merrick…. You’ll be the hardest to kill. You understand?” he’d tell his daughter, she recently explained.
“Yes, Daddy,” she said, and she did understand and readily accepted this. She was, she knew, his favorite, and she coveted that.
That August Richard and Barbara—with her cousin Carl and his wife, Nancy—rented a nice beach house in Cape Cod for two weeks. Barbara was still very close to Carl. Richard had grown to accept and even like Carl,
