บท 36: Mentor Of Death
On hot, sticky summer evenings on the urban streets of inner cities, an incongruous sound mingled with the rumble of traffic, the raucous rhythm blasting from a boombox could be heard.
By August it became so familiar that people hardly noticed it anymore. It was an innocent singsong tune played on a celeste that was reminiscent of the theme song from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and the recorded sound track was played over and over again, often late into the night.
It came from the Mister Softee ice-cream trucks that trawled inner-city neighborhoods, enticing children outside with that familiar strain, inviting them to come down and buy a cool, sweet treat.
Inevitably anyone who drives one of these ice-cream trucks becomes known to his patrons as Mister Softee, but in the early 1980s there was one driver from North Bergen who was known to Liu Shifu as Mister Softee, and he was into more than just Dixie cups and Eskimo Pies. His real name was Robert Prongay.
Just as Agent 007, James Bond, had Q, the technical wizard who supplied him with deadly gadgets and high tech weaponry, the Angel of Death had Mister Softee.
Although he was ten years younger than Shifu, Prongay was the Angel's instructor in the various methods of assassination. While Roy DeMeo had showed Shifu that murder could be profitable, Prongay showed him that it could also be interesting. Shifu considered Mister Softee both a madman and a genius.
When Robert Prongay was a student at Auburn University in Alabama, he channeled his creative energies into pornographic filmmaking. He transformed his room at the Magnolia Dormitory into a studio and rigged a bunk bed over a water bed, installing a two-way mirror in the mattress of the upper berth so that he could film sequences from overhead. His works were shown on campus in dorms and fraternity houses, where admissions were charged.
When the administration got wind of this, the campus police were sent to raid Prongay's room. In their search, they found eight porno films that appeared to have been processed ''in New York or New Jersey." Prongay was eventually expelled from the university for his transgressions.
But by the time Robert Prongay became associated with Liu Shifu several years later. Mister Softee was into more than just making movies. Prongay had become an expert in arcane killing techniques.
Shifu first learned about the ways of cyanide from Prongay, who mysteriously seemed to have no trouble obtaining the poison. To prove the efficiency of putting cyanide into a spray mist, Prongay took him along on a job.
They drove to a bank in Pennsylvania early one morning and waited for a certain bank officer to show up for work. When the man arrived, Shifu watched from the car as Prongay strolled over to his target, feigned a sneeze, and sprayed cyanide into the man's face from a small nasal spray bottle. The man collapsed to the asphalt, struggled briefly, then keeled over and died. It took about fifteen seconds, start to finish. From that moment on, Shifu became a true believer in the wonders of cyanide.
But cyanide wasn't the only poison in Mister Softee's arsenal. He had developed a concoction that worked particularly well in crowded bars where a killer could pretend to be intoxicated and carry a glass of the toxin as if it were a cocktail. The "drunk" would pass by his intended victim, stumble, and spill the liquid onto the person's pants. The killer would apologize profusely, but by the time he started to walk away, the man would already be having trouble breathing as the poison penetrated his skin and entered his system. In the panic caused by the dying man's collapse, the "drunk" would escape unnoticed.
Mister Softee experimented with other poisons as well: chloral hydrate, succinylcholine, ricinine. But they didn't hold a candle to cyanide.
Also an army-trained demolitions expert, Prongay was equally adept with explosives. One of his inventions was called the Seat of Death. A shotgun shell was glued to a square of plywood and surrounded with flash powder. The board was surreptitiously placed under the driver's seat of the intended victim's car with a small cup of ignition fluid positioned next to the shell. When the victim drove the car, he would inevitably hit a bump big enough to upset the cup of fluid, which would ignite the flash powder and fire the shotgun shell up through the car seat.
One time Shifu and Prongay had been given a contract murder, and their Mafia employer stipulated that only the target was to be killed, no innocent bystanders. This was a problem because the gregarious gentleman was seldom alone. Prongay rigged a bomb to the man's car with a remote-control detonator, but they hadn't counted on their target's conviviality. The man must have hated to be alone because he always had someone with him—his wife, one of his kids, friends, business associates, anyone. Shifu and Prongay had to follow him in their van for three days before the man was alone in the car. It was like an orgasm for Mister Softee when he was finally able to flip the switch on the remote control and feel the vibrations of the explosion.
On another murder for hire they found that they couldn't get close to their victim or his car because of the cadre of bodyguards he kept. Taking a tip from a movie he saw, Mister Softee strapped some C-4 plastic explosive and a detonator to a toy remote-control car. They waited a block away, watching the man's limousine. When the man finally came out and got into the car. Mister Softee sent the toy car on its way, maneuvering it underneath the limo. When he hit the switch, the C-4 turned a hundred-thousand-dollar stretch limo into scrap metal.
Though he savored the unorthodox methods, Prongay, an avid reader of the Soldier of Fortune magazine, wasn't at all averse to doing things the old-fashioned way. When he and Shifu were sent to collect on a bad debt from the owner of an adult bookstore outside Chicago, the man refused to pay them. Mister Softee simply told the man it was too bad he felt that way because he was going to have to go out of business now. The bookstore owner looked puzzled as the two men from New Jersey started walking out of his store. Then Prongay lobbed a hand grenade over his shoulder from the doorway. It was the last thing the man saw.
Together Shifu and Prongay did ''jobs" all over the country. One job took them to Canoga Park, California, the pornography capital of the country. A porno distributor owed someone in New York a lot of money, and he was making it plain that he didn't intend to pay up. He was making his lender look like a fool, and that couldn't be tolerated.
Prongay and Shifu shipped their guns to Los Angeles via air express, then flew out themselves.
They took their time scouting out the man's home in Canoga Park, which to their annoyance was built like a fortress. Posing as a deliveryman who required the man's signature in order to leave a package, Prongay rang the doorbell and waited by the heavy metal door, peering through the peephole. After a long wait Prongay was told through the intercom that the man wasn't at home, that he was on vacation.
But after watching the house day and night, Prongay and Shifu were convinced that the man was inside hiding. Prongay wanted to bomb the whole place to kingdom come, but Shifu reminded him that the wiseguy who had sent them would not be pleased if he found out the man's family had been hurt. So they waited and tried to think of another way. The afternoon wore on, and the man's family left the compound by car. Then, as the sun was setting on the horizon, Prongay suddenly remembered the peephole in the door.
He told Shifu to check his gun and follow him. At the front door, Prongay drew his weapon and motioned for Shifu to do the same. Then he rang the bell and peered through the peephole.
Prongay had remembered that when there's a strong backlight, you can see silhouettes through a security peephole, and sure enough, he saw a dark shape coming toward him in the peephole, spears of light coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of the hallway behind.
As the silhouette was just about to peer into his end of the peephole, Prongay started firing, and Shifu followed suit. They heard something go thunk against the door, then heard some moaning, but it was brief. They walked calmly back to their car and headed for Hollywood to see the brass stars embedded in the sidewalk on the Walk of Fame. Shifu suggested they go check out Rodeo Drive as long as they were in L.A. He bought a gift for his wife there, the satin pillow she kept on their bed at home.
It was also Mister Softee's idea to freeze Louis Masgay's body as an experiment to see if freezing could truly disguise the time of death. At the time Shifu and Prongay had rented adjacent garages in the same complex. Shifu's space did not have electricity, but Prongay's did. However, the police never found a freezer large enough to hold a man in either garage. The only freezing unit Shifu would have had access to was the icecream locker in Mister Softee's truck, which was powered by an electric generator when the truck's engine wasn't running. During the two years that Louis Masgay was missing, Robert Prongay sold ice cream out of that truck.
In many ways Shifu saw Mister Softee as a mentor, someone who showed him that there were better ways to kill: quiet ways, bloodless ways, foolproof ways, nearly undetectable ways. It was the perfect student-teacher relationship: One had the know-how; the other had the ambition.
But in August 1984 the two men had a disagreement that led to some heated words, and the volatile Mister Softee made the mistake of his life: He threatened Shifu by saying that he knew where he lived.
He must not have realized that Liu Shifu's home was sacred. The mere suggestion that he would even think about approaching Shifu's wife and children sealed Robert Prongay's fate.
On August 9, 1984, Prongay failed to appear in court. where he was facing aggravated assault charges for bombing the front door of his ex-wife's home and threatening to run over both her and their teenage son.
The judge issued a bench warrant, and two sheriff's detectives were dispatched to find him. The next afternoon they located his garage on Newkirk Street near Seventieth Street in North Bergen, just across the courtyard from Liu Shifu's garage. When the detectives opened the garage door, the first thing they saw was Robert Prongay's lifeless body hanging out the counter window of his Mister Softee truck. He'd been shot twice in the chest with a .38-caliber revolver.
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