Las Vegas Noir

by Jarret Keene

  “Get a good look?” Jimmy said. “Because that’s the last you’ll see of her.”

  He was performing for the other cops, the coward. “You can’t do that.”

  “No? Consider it done.”

  Sam struggled to her feet. “You can’t … No …”

  He nudged her back down. She tried to kick him but he pushed her legs aside. Crouching down, he locked them against his body with one arm, his free hand gripping her chin. Voice lowered, eyes fixed on hers—and, finally, she thought she saw something hovering behind the savage bloodshot blue, something other than the arrogance and hate, something haunted, like pity, even love—he whispered, “Listen to me, Sam. I want to help you. But you’ve gotta help me. Understand? Give me a name. It’s that simple. A name and we work this out. I’ll do everything I can, that’s a promise, for you, for Natalie—everything. But you’ve gotta hold up your end. Otherwise …”

  He let his voice trail away into the nothingness he was offering. For Sam knew where this led, she remembered the words exactly: I have men who take care of certain matters … The timewill have passed for you to say or do anything to help yourself …

  And there it was: her daughter or her life, she couldn’t save both. Maybe not today or tomorrow but someday soon, Claudia’s threat would materialize, assuming a face and form but no name—the police would promise protection, but the desert was littered with their failures—and Sam would realize this is it, that pitiless point in time when she would finally know: Which was she? One of those who tried to kick and claw and scream her way out, even though it was hopeless. Or one of those who, seeing there was no escape, calmly said, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for a long, long while.

  MITZVAH

  BY TOD GOLDBERG

  Summerlin

  That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly even thought of it anymore except when ordering breakfast down at the Bagel Café. He’d sit there across from Bennie Savone, that fat fuck, watching him wolf down ham and scrambled eggs, or French toast with a steaming side of greasy link sausage, and his mouth would actually start to water, like he was some kind of fucking golden retriever. He didn’t even think Bennie liked pork all that much—sometimes Bennie would order a cup of coffee and a side of bacon and would leave the bacon uneaten in, David assumed, not-so-benign mockery—though David knew Bennie liked letting him know who was in control of the situation.

  But now, as he sat in his normal booth in the back corner facing the busy intersection of Buffalo and Westcliff, waiting for Bennie to roll up in his absurd black Mercedes that might as well have a personalized plate that said MOBSTER on it, he thought that he probably qualified as a Jew by now, if not in the eyes of God, then at least in his own eyes. It’s not that he gave a fuck about religion—his personal motto, before all of this shit, had been “everybody dies”—but it was true he probably knew far more about the Torah and the culture in general than the people who belonged to his temple. And had he grown up with it, David was fairly certain he would have appreciated the subtle nuance of kugel.

  After fifteen years, though, he still couldn’t get used to the idea of baked noodles, raisins, apples, and cinnamon as a fucking entrée. Now pork loin. Pork loin was something he could get behind, especially this time of year, what with Christmas coming up. Back in the day, his wife Jennifer knew how to make it just how he liked it. Brined in salt overnight, covered with juniper berries, a bit of garlic, maybe some thyme, and then slow-roasted for three hours, until even the garage smelled like it.

  Christ.

  Fifteen fucking years and for what? He understood that his situation was fairly untenable these days, that those fucking Muslims had changed the way Family business was handled, particularly as it related to guys like David whose fake paperwork was fine in a company town like Las Vegas but which wouldn’t even pass muster in Reno. David wasn’t inclined to give too much thought to the whole Israel-Palestine issue, but he had to keep abreast of shit in case someone dared ask his opinion, though he never could confide in anyone that he shared some anger issues with the Palestinians, at least as it related to real estate, confined as he was to Las Vegas.

  “Can I get you something, rabbi?”

  David looked up from his reverie and saw the smiling face of Shoshana Goldblatt. Her parents, Stan and Alta, were two of the biggest donors Temple Beth Israel had, and yet here she was busting her ass on a Tuesday morning running tables. And that was an ass, David had to admit. She was only eighteen and he’d known her since she was five, but … damn. “A cup of coffee would be fine, Shoshana. I’m waiting on Mr. Savone, as usual, so maybe just a toasted onion bagel for now.”

  Shoshana took down his order but he could tell that something was vexing the girl. It took her nearly an entire minute to write the words coffee and bagel on her pad, her eyes welling up with tears the entire time. It was always like this. He’d go somewhere to just chill out, maybe smoke a cigar and catch a ballgame over at J.C. Wooloughan’s Irish Pub, and next thing he knew, one of his fucking Israelites would pull up next to him with some metaphysical calamity.

  “Is there something wrong, Shoshana?” he asked. When she slid into the booth across from him and deposited her head into her hands, thick phlegmy sobs spilling out of that beautiful mouth he’d just sort of imagined his dick in, he felt himself wince and hoped she didn’t notice. He’d spent the better part of his life avoiding crying women of all ages, never really knowing what to say to them other than “Shut the fuck up, you stupid whore,” and that hadn’t seemed to help anyone, least of all himself. Whatever was wrong with Shoshana Goldblatt would invariably ruin David’s whole fucking day. First there’d be the guilt he felt hearing her secrets and then there’d be the guilt associated with him finding it all rather humorous.

  “Oh, rabbi,” she said, “I wanted to just come in and talk to you in private, but there’s always such a crowd, and my mom, you know, she’s always telling me to not bother you with my problems, that you’re a busy man and all, so I’m like, okay, I’ll just figure it out for myself, but then, like, you’re always saying that we should trust that the Torah has answers to all of our problems, right?”

  “That’s right, Shoshana,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if he’d ever said such a thing. Most of the time, he just downloaded shit off the Internet now, but it seemed plausible that at some point he’d said something like that.

  “I’m just so confused,” she continued, explaining to David a scenario that involved, as best as he could suss out, her having sex with three different black guys from the UNLV basketball team while a graduate assistant coach filmed the whole thing on his camera phone. It was hard for David to concentrate completely on the story since Bennie Savone had entered the restaurant about five minutes in and was stalking angrily about the bakery area, dragging his black attaché case against the pastry windows, like he was banging his cup against prison bars. So when David sensed that Shoshana had come to the basic conclusion of the issue—that she’d liked it, that she wondered what was wrong with her, but that she wanted to do it again, and with more guys—he reached across the table and took both of her hands in his.

  “There’s a part of the Midrash that says, essentially, we are all allowed to find enjoyment in the company of others.” He’d found that if he simply dropped the Midrash into conversation, rejoined with the word “essentially,” and then paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen, people left him feeling like they’d learned something. It was true that he knew a few things from the Midrash, had even read a great deal of it, but in dealing with an eighteen-year-old girl just learning the joys of a filmed gangbang, he didn’t feel the need to reach too deep. “Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, Shoshana? Of course not. It’s something far, far worse. Do you understand?”

  He let go of the girl’s hands then and passed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sport coat. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and smiled wanly at David, thoug
h now he couldn’t even look her in the eye. “Thank you so much, Rabbi Cohen. I think I see that path now.” She slid out of the booth, not even bothering to return his hanky.

  Bennie, unfortunately, took her spot. “Fuck’s wrong with her?”

  “Confused about love,” David said.

  Bennie nodded. “Who isn’t?”

  It was weird. Over the course of their rather unconventional business relationship, Bennie Savone had found it necessary to use David as his father confessor too, even though he knew that Rabbi David Cohen was previously Sal Cupertine; that before he was a fake rabbi, he was a Chicago “associate” who’d accidentally killed three undercover Donnie Brasco motherfuckers on the same botched contract; and that, barring a sudden religious experience the likes of which only happened in prison movies, David’s moral center was still pretty opaque. Still, David reasoned that Bennie needed to talk to someone, particularly since the one person Bennie could depend on previously had been the guy David replaced three years ago, Rabbi Ronald Kales, who also happened to be Bennie’s father-in-law … or was until that unfortunate “boating accident” on Lake Mead claimed his life.

  David knew that Bennie’s decision not to fish out of the same shallow, polluted pond of local and loyal Italian women or coke-whore strippers most of his friends and coworkers had, opting instead to get connected with the real Las Vegas money—the Summerlin Jews—was still a source of some lingering organizational shame; an issue David was certainly intimate with.

  “Yes, well,” David said, “she’s still young.”

  “My daughter tells me Shoshana likes black guys.”

  Sometimes David tried to imagine what his life would be like if he were still in Chicago, if he’d somehow had a different kind of upbringing, so that now he was selling real estate on the North Shore or running a sports bar or deli or was just a fucking Culligan man, his ends meeting, his life happy. Would he still end up on Tuesday mornings gossiping about whom eighteen-year-old girls were or were not fucking?

  “I have to prepare for a talk at the Senior Center this afternoon,” David said, “so I’m afraid I don’t have much time to chat. Can we get down to business?”

  “Of course, rabbi. I’d hate to get in the way of your busy schedule of dick and ribbon cuttings.” Bennie reached into his attaché, pulled out a manila envelope, and slid it across the table. “You got a funeral on Thursday and one coming up next week too. Maybe two. Have to see how that one shakes out. Got a very sick relative. Could go anytime.”

  David just nodded. The holidays tended to be Bennie’s busy season with murder, and now that they were flying bodies (or at least parts of them) in on private jets periodically from Chicago or driving them up from Los Angeles, David expected the news. Plus, David sort of marveled at Bennie’s ingenuity; the guy seemed like a dumb crook from the outside, but on the inside he had a real aptitude for business. Stan and Alta Goldblatt might have been big donors, but Bennie Savone, with his Jewish wife and three Jewish children, was like fucking UNICEF to Temple Beth Israel. He single-handedly financed the building of Summerlin’s first Jewish mortuary and cemetery behind the temple’s expansive campus on Hillpointe, championed the new high school that was breaking ground in the spring, and, of course, regularly met with the esteemed rabbi over at the Bagel Café to discuss the livelihood of the Jewish faith (or whatever the fuck that shit-rag mob columnist John L. Smith in the Review-Journal said in one of his weekly innuendo-fests; if David ever had the desire to start killing people again, he’d start with that hack). David imagined that Bennie’s long-range foresight could help a lot of Fortune 500 companies—it’s not like any other mobsters had the fucking chutzpah to bury their enemies and war dead in a cemetery, or the willingness to put all the pieces in place years before they’d even see them in action. That Bennie earned most of his living from strip clubs didn’t bother anyone at the temple. That’s where everyone did business anyway.

  “Fine,” David said. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, my wife wants to know what your Hanukkah plans are this year.”

  “I’ll be staying home,” David replied, though the truth was that at least half the time would be spent at the temple making sure the young rabbi he’d entrusted with most of the social activities didn’t burn the fucking place down, literally. That kid was a menace around an open flame.

  “You know you got an open invitation,” Bennie said. “Come over all eight nights. Spin the fucking dreidel. Eat fucking pancakes. Listen to Neil Diamond sing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ You like Neil Diamond, right, rabbi?”

  What David really wanted, more than anything, was to get up from the booth, climb into his Range Rover, and drive it into a brick wall, just to feel something authentic again, even if it was pain. Because this shit with Bennie? This was an existential suffering he could do without. “The Jewish Sina-tra,” David said.

  Shoshana brought David his bagel and coffee and discreetly set his hanky back down on the table. He looked up at her and she seemed … happy. Like she’d had a tremendous weight lifted from her shoulders and could now go on living her life in perfect happiness, her every orifice filled with big black cock. David felt something shift in his bowels; something he thought might be his conscience picking up enema speed.

  “Listen,” David said quietly after Shoshana left, “I gotta get out of here. A vacation. Something. I’m about to lose my mind. Promise me, after Christmas, you’ll look at this situation. It’s been fifteen years, Benjamin.” He said Bennie’s full first name just to piss him off a little. “You realize I haven’t even left the city limits since 9/11?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bennie said, “sure. Talk to me again after the holidays. We’ll see what we can do. Don’t want you getting soft … Sally.”

  Rabbi David Cohen looked out the window again and wondered how it was he was the only fucking person who happened in Vegas and now had to fucking stay in Vegas. Put his old mug shot on a tourist brochure, then see how many people kept visiting.

  When David first came to Las Vegas in 1993—back when he was still Sal Cupertine—he couldn’t get over how wide open the desert was, how at night, if you weren’t on the Strip or downtown, the sky seemed to stretch for miles unimpeded. At dusk, Red Rock Canyon would glow golden with strands of dying sunlight and he’d imagine what his wife Jennifer would have made of the vision. She was always taking art classes at the community college in Chicago, though never with much success, but he thought then that if she were with him in Las Vegas and had tried to paint the sunset, well, he’d pretend to love her interpretation. Used to be pretending was hard work. He was only thirty-five when he got to this place, but still felt seventeen, which meant he wasn’t scared of anyone and didn’t give a damn if he hurt people’s feelings. It was a good skill set for his previous line of work, but David had long ago concluded it was shit on his interpersonal relationships. And the irony, of course, was that now all he ever did anymore was pretend while listening to people’s problems. David was inclined to believe that his adopted religion was right about heaven and hell being a place on earth.

  It was 4 o’clock on Wednesday and David was already late for a meeting at the temple about next year’s Jewish Book Fair, but he couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the previous morning’s conversation with Shoshana and the one directly following it with Bennie had somehow clarified a few things that had been gnawing at his mind the last several weeks. So instead of attending the meeting, he drove his temple-purchased Range Rover the four blocks from his temple-purchased home on the fifteenth hole at TPC over to Bruce Trent Park, where he wandered among the stalls being set up for the farmer’s market and tried to line up his priorities.

  He stopped and smelled some apples, made idle talk about funnel cakes with the Mexican girl fixing them over what looked like a Bunson burner, watched children fling themselves over and under the monkey bars. If he closed his eyes and just focused on what he could hear and smell, it was almost like he was back in Chic
ago, though by now the sounds and smells tended to mostly remind him of his first days in Las Vegas when he spent all of his time foolishly searching for things that reminded him of home. It had grown increasingly difficult for David to even conjure that memory accurately since the landscape, both mental and physical, had changed so drastically in the intervening years. Where there used to be open vistas, the Howard Hughes Corporation had built the master planned community of Summerlin, filling in the desert with thousands of houses, absurd traffic circles instead of stop signs, acres of green grass, and the commerce such development demanded: looming casinos that eroded his favorite mountain views, Target after Target, a Starbucks every thirty paces, and shopping centers anchored on one corner by a Smith’s and on the other by some bar that was just a video poker machine with a roof.

  But something about today seemed to cloak everything in radiance. Orthodox Jews tended to talk about such things as if they were moments of vast spiritual enlightenment, though David tended to think the Orthodox Jews were a little on the fruity side of things—always dropping Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Bones like that guy wasn’t a fucking whack job of the first order—so it was a good thing Temple Beth Israel was reform, which meant David just had to know some of that hocus-pocus shit, but didn’t have to talk about it too much and certainly didn’t have to dress in that stupid black getup. Still, his mind felt clear today, and whether it was a religious experience or just the settling of some internal debts didn’t particularly vex David, because the result was the same, chiefly that he knew he needed to get the fuck out of Las Vegas before he killed himself and took twenty or thirty motherfuckers with him in the process.