Gangsterland Page 6

  “Get him a puppy,” Jennifer said absently. “Or a brother.”

  “He’s adorable,” Matthew said.

  “Right now he is,” Jennifer said. She shook her head just slightly, and then her pinkie went back into her mouth. She was only thirty-five, still a young woman, but Jeff wondered how much pressure she could take. Jeff took off his seat belt and got out of the car then, not bothering to put on his suit coat. He didn’t imagine she had a lot of allies in this world. He wanted to put an arm around her, let her know it was going to be okay, though of course he knew it never would be. So, instead, he handed her his business card. She looked at it briefly and then stuck it in her back pocket.

  “Your husband,” Jeff said, “is not in state custody, and that body? That’s not him, either.”

  “You have his DNA or something?”

  “No,” he said. “But I don’t need it. I know the truth.”

  “What’s that?” Jennifer said.

  “We’ll get a court order and DNA your son at some point, compare it to the samples we have, and then it will be a big deal in the newspapers and such. It wouldn’t be good PR to do it now. Might not even be good PR for another year.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Jennifer said. “I don’t care if you believe me.”

  “I believe you,” Jeff said.

  “You do?”

  “You’ve got no reason to lie,” he said, though of course she did. Everyone Jeff had ever known had a good reason to lie; it’s just that those reasons rarely panned out in the long run.

  Jennifer Cupertine nodded twice and then took a deep breath through her nose and let it back out slowly through her mouth, then did it again. It occurred to Jeff Hopper that he shouldn’t have come here. Not because he didn’t appreciate the small amount of information he’d received, but because he was sure that this was another bad day Jennifer Cupertine would remember for the rest of her life. Another in a series of shitty days, this one featuring Special Agent Jeff Hopper and Kid Agent Matthew Drew, the lacrosse superstar who was now in the middle of his own career suicide, or would be once he got back to the office and was quizzed by the senior agents about what the fuck he was doing out at Sal Cupertine’s house when he was supposed to be running boxes.

  “Why are you here?” Jennifer asked.

  “I wanted you to know your husband was alive,” Jeff said. “And to tell you to keep away from Ronnie Cupertine and his people. They don’t have your son’s best interests, Mrs. Cupertine. This is a chance for you, for him. Make a different life. Get out of Chicago. This is your opportunity to get away from this gangster bullshit, Mrs. Cupertine.”

  “No,” she said. “This house is paid for, and I’m going to stay in it until Sal comes back.”

  “Sal comes back, he’s going to prison,” Jeff said. “If he’s lucky.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, “but he’ll come here first, and I will be here, no matter when that is.”

  “Fair enough,” Jeff said. He extended his hand toward Jennifer, and, surprisingly, she took it. “You hear from your husband, call me. I can help him.”

  This made Jennifer laugh. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll be sure to do that.”

  Jeff watched as Jennifer Cupertine gathered up the stray dinosaurs on her front lawn and then called for her son to put his Big Wheel away and come back inside. A simple domestic scene. And maybe what Jennifer Cupertine said was true—maybe Sal Cupertine was the most loving man on earth. It didn’t change the fact that he was also a murderer.

  Something else Jennifer Cupertine said started to bother Jeff, so before she went inside, he said, “Mrs. Cupertine, just one more question.”

  “What’s that, Agent Hopper?”

  “How did you pay off your house?”

  Jennifer Cupertine smiled. “Don’t you know?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “Cousin Ronnie paid it off,” she said. “An early birthday present for William.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  For the first week, Rabbi David Cohen still couldn’t open his mouth more than half an inch, just enough room to shove in a fork and do some good chewing. Soft foods mostly. Potato salad, pasta. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, as he brushed his teeth with the fancy electric toothbrush he’d picked up after Gray Beard had finished his wire excavation, David realized his mouth had regained nearly full mobility.

  His jaw still hurt at the joints, which made long conversations somewhat painful, not that he and Slim Joe were having long and involved chats. David had learned that Slim Joe’s main job was working the door at the Wild Horse, a job he’d gone back to after David was allowed out the front door, and that he was nominally in charge of shaking down the pimps who brought their girls in to work the club. It was a small percentage of the two hundred or so girls who worked on a weekend night, enough to keep him in Nike tracksuits and gold chains. His other job, David had gleaned, was to provide a bit of de facto security for David. The closed-circuit TVs were in Slim Joe’s closet, along with an armory to put up a good long siege if that came to pass.

  David had also learned that Slim Joe had two big ambitions: He wanted to open up a cart on the Strip serving all kinds of different hot dogs, as well as slices of homemade pies that he envisioned his mother would be in charge of fixing. It would be open from midnight to 5 a.m. when all the drunks and tweaks were fiending and when the dancers got off shift. “I’d do it real classy,” Slim Joe told him. “None of that taco truck shit where you don’t know what kind of cheese you’re getting. I’d be cutting fresh cheeses, too, deli-style. It’ll be off the hook.”

  “You need a permit for that,” David said. “You really want the state looking into you?”

  “On the real?”

  “What’s your other idea?”

  “Bennie had me take some classes over at CCSN,” Slim Joe said. “Computers and shit. I had this idea of making a website where people would just, like, put up their thoughts every day. Like two sentences about what was on their mind. Call it Expressions, but with a z.”

  “Why don’t you just call it Snitches?”

  “Don’t be a bitch,” Slim Joe said, like they were friends.

  David told Slim Joe that if he ever called him a bitch again, he and his mother would be selling hot dogs and pies in the middle of the desert from the trunk of a burnt-out Cadillac. It was the first time he’d threatened Slim Joe, the first time in six months he’d threatened anyone, and it made him feel great.

  Like he was back in the game.

  But all the books he’d been reading were having some kind of residual effect on David, because his elation was short-circuited by the honest look of hurt on Slim Joe’s face. And then he thought about something he read in the Talmud: Hold no man responsible for what he says in his grief. Because the truth was, he didn’t give a shit if Slim Joe called him a bitch or anything else. Those were just words, and it’s not as if Slim Joe even knew what he was saying; the kid was practically illiterate. David was just mad about . . . everything. The whole nut of his life had been cracked open.

  “Look,” David told him, “there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone else’s dreams, right? But these are good ideas. You should save some money and do it.”

  “Really?” Slim Joe perked right back up, like a dog that’s chased a ball into the street, only to get hit, but still wants to get that fucking ball. “I ain’t told no one about this shit because I don’t want no one biting my game. So you think, on the real, that it could work?”

  “On the real,” David said, and then he went back upstairs for the rest of the night. He just couldn’t listen to anything more about anything.

  David spit out his toothpaste, wiped off his face, and went into his closet to pick out a suit. He was supposed to meet Bennie in thirty minutes at something called the Bagel Café. “Bring all of your fancy Jew books with you,” Bennie told him. “You’re gonna meet someone important.”

  David had no idea who that
might be, though the idea of bringing all his books with him set up a bit of a practical dilemma. The nice thing about Christians is that they had just one book, the Bible, and inside of it were all the secrets of life. The Jews, however, had the Bible, and the Torah, which was really just the five books of Moses from the Bible, and the Talmud, which ran six thousand pages, or what David thought of as his sleeping pill.

  And then there was the Midrash, which was like someone went through the Bible, Torah, and Talmud and filled in the empty parts, or explained what everything meant, or what they thought everything meant, since some of it was pretty clear to David and, yet, there was an explanation that was completely contrary to his understanding. Finally, there were the stacks and stacks of books on “Jewish thought” that had been dumped off at the house over the weeks, which were like reading a combination of someone’s diary filled with their thoughts on all of the other books combined.

  All this for a fucking cover? David thought it would have been a lot easier to say he was a butcher.

  David picked out a gray Hugo Boss suit and put it on with a white shirt and a blue tie and those five-hundred-dollar black Cole Haan dress shoes, found a handkerchief and put it in his breast pocket, and then called downstairs to Slim Joe to help him with his books.

  “You look like a pimp, dog,” Slim Joe said when he saw David, and then, quickly, he added, “that’s a good thing, yo. Just on the real.”

  All this time, Slim Joe had treated him like nothing. Didn’t fear him. Didn’t respect him. Didn’t disrespect him, either, but generally regarded him as nothing but a warm body he was tasked to bring food to and help change bandages for early on in the process. But since David threatened him twelve hours earlier, the kid was now acting deferential, maybe even a bit scared, which struck David as funny since he looked less menacing than he ever had. His words, though, still carried weight. He liked that.

  “You think so?” David said. “I don’t look like a pussy?”

  “Never, dog,” he said. He examined all the books stacked up on David’s dresser. “You need to take all these?”

  “That’s what Bennie said.”

  “Sometimes, I think he just says things to say things, you feel me?”

  “He’s the boss,” David said.

  “Is he your boss?”

  Slim Joe had never asked him a single organizational question; it was as if he’d been strictly informed to steer clear of any such talk, which seemed like a reasonable possibility, which made his sudden boldness questionable.

  “Just put the books in the car,” David said.

  Back home, David drove a 1993 Lincoln Town Car his cousin Ronnie got for him. When he had to do a job for the Family, someone would show up with a car for him to use, something that could be torched or cleaned and resold. When he had a freelance job, he’d take the bus over to O’Hare or Midway and steal a car from long-term parking. Weird thing was that he always had his license with him, even on the jobs he did freelance, on the odd chance he was pulled over for speeding or running a stop sign—not that he’d gotten a ticket since he was a teenager. Having a valid identification was a good way to avoid ancillary problems.

  He had a temporary Nevada license in his wallet—Bennie brought it by over the weekend, along with another test, this time about what happens to Jews after they’re resurrected, which was some of the most absurd shit Dave had ever read, as it involved Jews rolling from their graves all the way to Israel, which made no sense whatsoever—and had been told over and over again that his paperwork was legit and not to worry, which was easy enough for Bennie to say. He wasn’t the guy driving around in a gold Range Rover with tinted windows, which made David feel as inconspicuous as the Sears Tower and just as big. So David drove from his house in Summerlin to the Bagel Café, located five miles away on the busy intersection of Westcliff and Buffalo, at about ten miles below the speed limit, which brought him to the restaurant fifteen minutes late.

  When David walked in, he noticed first all the old people. There was a bakery section at the front of the house, and the seniors were lined up five deep by the pastry windows, the din of their hearing-aid-loud conversation bouncing off the walls of the place, the cacophony reminding David of a bingo parlor the Family ran back in the day on the South Side. On the other side of the bakery was the seating area—a U of booths around the perimeter, which looked out to the street and the parking lot, and then a dozen or so tables in the middle. David had always been freaked out by old people, never able to imagine himself living past fifty or so, not even after Jennifer had William and his life began to feel . . . different. More valuable. It just didn’t seem feasible. His father was dead by forty. Never knew his grandparents. His mother remarried and moved to Arizona as soon as he graduated high school, and he’d lost complete contact with her, though he guessed she was probably still alive. His dream of retiring to California as a top dog was just a dream, something to put in the back of his head when he was doing contract killing in Champaign. As it turned out, Sal Cupertine was dead. David thought he might start keeping a list of all life’s cruel ironies, just to be sure he wasn’t imagining half of the shit that was happening.

  He spotted Bennie sitting alone in a booth at the near corner of the restaurant, a bunch of papers spread out in front of him, three waters on the table. He had a pair of reading glasses in one hand, something David had never seen before.

  “You’re late,” Bennie said when David slid in across from him.

  “It took Slim Joe a while to get all the books downstairs,” David said.

  “How’s that working out?”

  “He’s fine,” David said, though the truth was he really wanted him out of the house, David not having any time to himself since the day of the shooting.

  “He’s an idiot,” Bennie said.

  “He’s all right,” David said, not really sure why he was defending Slim Joe.

  Bennie put on his glasses and examined David’s face. “Any pain?”

  “Nothing I can’t manage.”

  “Swelling?”

  “Around my chin some,” David said. “Probably couldn’t take an upper cut, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Jaw looks good,” Bennie said. “The beard is coming in nicely.”

  “I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror.”

  “That was the point,” Bennie said. He gathered up some of the paper in front of him—they looked to David like blueprints and spreadsheets, actual business work—and slid them into a manila envelope. “Anyway,” he said. “You ready to start earning?”

  “Yeah,” David said, not sure what he was agreeing to. Anything was better than sitting around reading and watching the local news. Maybe Bennie would send him out to hit the weatherman on Channel 3 who needed a dog to sit next to him every day while he told Las Vegas it would be eighty-eight degrees for the fiftieth straight day, as if the stress of blue skies, dry air, and a city full of strippers was too much to handle by himself. “I need to get out of the house.”

  A waitress walked up to the table then and smiled warmly at Bennie. “Hi, Mr. Savone,” she said. She was maybe eighteen, no more than twenty, tall, brown hair, had a hole in her nostril where David presumed she usually kept a ring, a little butterfly tattoo on her ankle just above her no-show socks and white Keds. The servers—male or female—all wore the same outfit: tan shorts, red polo shirt, white shoes. It looked to David that this waitress had hemmed her shorts a little higher than most of the other ladies. Not that he had a problem with that.

  “How are you, Tricia?”

  “Super,” she said. “How’s your wife? I haven’t seen her at temple in forever.”

  “She’s been sick lately,” Bennie said.

  “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

  “Lady problems,” Bennie said. David marveled at how Bennie showed absolutely no embarrassment at all. “What’s it called? Endometriosis? When it gets bad, she just can hardly get up. But what can you do, right?�
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  “Oh, no,” Tricia said. “Well, when she’s feeling better, if you guys need someone to watch the kids for a date night or whatever, I’m happy to come over to help anytime.”

  “I appreciate that,” Bennie said, and it sounded to David like the truth.

  “Are you waiting on Rabbi Kales?”

  “He just went to the restroom, so maybe just get him his usual,” Bennie said. “And I’ll have bacon and eggs, scrambled wet. Bring me a plate of sausage, too.”

  “And what about for you?” Tricia gave David that same warm smile, which immediately made him feel uncomfortable. When was the last time he’d even seen a woman, much less spoken to one?

  “Rabbi,” Bennie said, “you want some bacon and eggs, too?” Bennie not just fucking with him now, but also letting him know that he needed to act like a Rabbi in this place.

  “I guess I’ll have an onion bagel and coffee,” David said. A plate of fucking sausage would work, too, the mere thought of it making his mouth turn on for the first time in months. No, no, not sausage. A plank of honey ham and a couple eggs fried in the ham fat and some corned beef hash. Glass of buttermilk to wash it down. Why were they meeting at a deli when Bennie knew Rabbi David Cohen couldn’t eat anything he might want?

  Tricia took down his order but didn’t scurry on, which David really wanted her to do. The combination of his ham fantasy and her legs, which had to be ten feet long, was distracting. “So, I have to ask,” Tricia said, “are you going to be the new youth rabbi we’ve been hearing about?”

  “He is,” Bennie said before David could answer. “He’ll be taking over in a couple of weeks.”

  David couldn’t help but think of something he’d read a few mornings ago about the nature of good and evil, which basically said that no man was born entirely one or the other, that the moral freedom to be a complete asshole is inherent in all men. If you were largely a decent human, that was called yetzer tov. If you were not, that was called yetzer hara. Bennie Savone, the fat fuck, with his order of sausage and bacon, with his complete inability to inform David of things like the fact that he was about to become some kind of youth rabbi, clearly had made his choice. This was a personal choice to surprise him, put him off-center, show him that he had no control over anything. The Jews, they were always going on about personal liberty and truth—what did they call truth? The seal of God, not that David believed in God, but the sentiment was concise enough.