Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “I’ll talk to him,” Jennifer said.

  Horace nodded again, straightened up, kept one hand on the nub of the passenger window, looked both ways, like he wanted to make sure no one was watching him. “Thing is,” he said eventually, “Mrs. Cupertine, everyone here knows who you are. Difference is, I don’t hold you personally responsible for the actions of your husband.”

  “I’m not personally responsible for his actions,” Jennifer said.

  “See, it’s good to know you feel that way,” he said. “Because this is my part-time job here. Nights, I’m working in Evanston, at the college? Doing community policing. And only authority I have here, at Mount Carmel,” he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, “is to get that door locked, make sure no strangers come onto the campus and start killing kids. Same basic job as at the college, but there they give me a gun. Here I’m just a human shield. You understand?”

  She was beginning to. Jennifer glanced into her rearview mirror, half expecting some blacked-out Suburban to be behind her, sort of hoping the FBI was tailing her, since at least they now made a pretense of not being crooked, unlike these cops. Instead, she recognized Tom Gehrlein, one of the single dads who seemed nice, pulling up in his gold Lexus. He was mid-argument with his daughter, Jennifer able to make out tears on the girl’s face.

  Good.

  If need be, Jennifer could throw her car into reverse, slam into Tom’s car, cause a scene. Maybe Tom’s daughter would get whiplash. Small price to pay. Girl that young shouldn’t be sitting in the front seat, anyway.

  “I’m running late for work,” Jennifer said.

  “That’s fine,” Horace said. “I’ll only keep you a minute longer.” He reached through the window with surprising quickness for a big guy and pulled her keys from the ignition, tossed them into the backseat.

  “If you’re trying to scare me,” Jennifer said, “get in line.”

  “Scare you? I’m trying to protect you.”

  Jennifer wished she kept a gun under her seat or in the glove box instead of just in the crawl space of her house. But she’d made a choice to not have guns around William. To not talk about guns. To not watch TV shows with guns in them. To not even have guns be part of William’s vernacular.

  A car door slammed, hard, startling both her and Horace, both of them turning to watch Tom Gehrlein’s daughter storm away from her father’s car and up Mount Carmel’s front steps. What was her name? Bethany or Britney or Whitney. One of those names that didn’t exist ten or fifteen years ago, except in movies, and then as a joke. She reached the locked doors, yanked on them one, two, three times, making a racket, then turned and glared in Horace’s direction.

  “One minute, sugar,” Horace called, then turned his attention back to Jennifer. “Look, I’m trying to give you some advice,” he said. “Older kids find out Billy’s dad is a tough guy, everyone will want to take their shot. Billy, he’s a sensitive boy, is what I’m saying. No need to put him through that. What if some sixth grader comes to school with a pocketknife? Billy ends up wearing an eye patch for the rest of his life, or missing an ear? See what I’m saying?”

  “My son,” Jennifer said, “barely remembers his father.”

  Horace looked up and across the street, Jennifer getting the sense that maybe he wasn’t looking to see if anyone was watching him as much as he was making sure someone absolutely was watching him. “Problem is other people do.” He reached into his jacket pocket and Jennifer recoiled, prepared to have a gun in her face, except Horace came out with a multicolored brochure featuring a girl sitting quietly on a sofa and an older woman looking over her shoulder, approvingly. “Take this,” he said.

  “I don’t want whatever that is,” Jennifer said, figuring there was something stuck between the pages—money, some directions out of town, another threat, probably less vague, who the hell knew anymore?

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and tossed the brochure into the backseat, too. “Used to be a stigma with homeschooling. But plenty of people do it now. That brochure has some info about services that provide study guides, book lists, whatever you need. I’d look into it. Because what if there’s a day when I’m not on the job, and one of the kids takes it too far? Imagine having that sitting on your conscience?” Horace whistled through his teeth. “That’d fuck you up but good. Not that you look like you’re hanging on to a thick rope, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I’ll let my husband know you feel that way the next time I see him.”

  “Oh,” Horace said, all fake sincerity, “is he back? I could use half a mil.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise for you,” Jennifer said. “Walk out to harass me and the Rain Man is sitting here, waiting on you.” Jennifer saw something pass through Horace, realized he was just the guy giving the message, that he probably hadn’t really considered what that meant, exactly, but now he did. “What would you do then, Officer?”

  A horn honked before Horace could answer—just a light tap. Tom Gehrlein double-parked next to Jennifer’s car and, when she looked over at him, he hit a button and lowered his passenger window, so she cranked her window down, too. “Everything okay, Jen?” he asked.

  Jen. No one called her Jen. “Yes,” she said, because what else could she say? Jennifer tried to remember what he did for a job. Copy machine sales? Or maybe it was computers? No. Wind. He worked for a company that was trying to get wind energy turbines installed in Illinois. He literally sold air. Wasn’t that a game. “Everything is just fine.”

  “That’s real good,” he said, and then pointed at his crying daughter. “You ever have mornings like that with your son?”

  “No,” Jennifer said. “He doesn’t throw tantrums.”

  “Well, you’re lucky,” he said. He looked beyond Jennifer, addressed Horace. “If you wouldn’t mind, could you let my daughter in? She cries much longer, she’ll throw up.”

  “No problem,” Horace said, though he didn’t move.

  “You going to Open House next week?” Tom asked Jennifer.

  “Probably,” Jennifer said.

  “I’m going to try to have the stomach flu,” he said, “see if I can get my ex to handle it. But if I end up well, maybe we can stand together in the library and avoid the reproachful eye of the nuns?”

  “Maybe,” she said, realizing, maybe, that he was flirting with her, or what amounted to flirting before 8:00 a.m. She also considered that he probably didn’t know anything about her, which was nice—until she realized that if he did get to know her, he’d probably end up under government surveillance. If he wasn’t already an FBI agent. Then the Family might subcontract out a kidnapping on his daughter, pay some pedophile a couple thousand dollars to pick her up. Sal used to tell her how the Family wasn’t in that dirty business, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t hire out periodically if they really wanted to send a message.

  “Great,” Tom said, then paused, like maybe he wanted to say something else, and finally settled on, “Well, I’ll let you get back to it,” then gave both Jennifer and Horace a two-fingered salute and pulled away.

  “Looks like you got a boyfriend,” Horace said. He’d worked a big ring of keys from his belt and was thumbing through to find the one he needed. “Anyway,” he said once he found what he was looking for, “I wouldn’t ignore the problem, if I were you. Billy’s a bit of a pussy. You’re gonna be picking him up in pieces if you don’t do something.”

  He smacked the roof of her car, twice, the sound reverberating like a gunshot, the real echo being Jennifer Cupertine’s stunned realization that there wasn’t a single safe space left for her.

  It also occurred to her, watching him walk off, that she’d probably never see Horace again, that he was the horse’s head inside her bed, as it were; nothing original left in the world.

  •

  The next day, on her lunch break, Jennifer Cupertine walked a fe
w blocks from the museum to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She took the elevator up to the ninth floor, home to the Ronald J. Cupertine Physical Rehabilitation Center, which occupied a considerable portion of the east wing, more than twenty rooms, most of them private.

  All the common spaces were done up in soft, blond wood and recessed lighting, the private rooms had big-screen TVs, DVD players, some even had wider beds, and, if you weren’t on a restricted diet, you could order food off an actual menu. Jennifer knew all of this because just like everyone else in the family—the real family—she’d given birth to her son at Northwestern, had been put up in the Cupertine wing after a particularly difficult C-section and complicated recovery, and never got a bill for the services. Ronnie himself didn’t show up to the hospital, but his second wife, Sharon, was there every day for a week. Jennifer would wake up and Sharon would be sitting on the chaise sofa across the room, reading Vanity Fair or Architectural Digest, or at least looking at the pictures, and as soon as Jennifer’s eyes were open, she’d get to work, ordering nurses around, fluffing pillows, changing flowers, chatting Jennifer up about whatever the news of the day was, or the pictures she’d seen—for a few days, Jennifer remembered Sharon being inordinately fascinated by rainfall showerheads—just normal, dumb stuff. And for a time afterward, Jennifer and Sharon had been friends.

  That time was over.

  Jennifer hadn’t spoken to Sharon since she’d been enlisted as the go-between for the Family, telling Jennifer that what happened with Sal “was all in the game” and that she just needed to be a good widow and the Family would take care of her.

  Like Jennifer was going to let the people who got rid of her husband tell her how to live. Tell her that it was all some kind of game. Maybe she’d believed that when she was a kid, thought it was exciting and cool that her boyfriend (and then eventually her husband) was a person others were scared of. But Jennifer Cupertine was almost forty now, plucking a single gray hair from her right eyebrow every two weeks, and some asshole had just threatened her and her child at school. Yeah, she’d let Ronnie pay off her house, but only so she could mortgage it for cash, which had been a mistake, since now she was in business with Countrywide, and they were just as bad as the Family, except the Family killed you faster.

  She’d tried Sharon at home and on her cell a good ten times, but she hadn’t picked up. Neither had the maids or the kids or the answering machine. She even called the number Sal told her never to call unless the feds were kicking down the doors, but even when that had actually happened, that night he disappeared, she didn’t call it, because what good would it have done?

  That one just rang and rang, too.

  So she’d come to the hospital where Ronnie Cupertine was recovering from his sunstroke—the Sun-Times even had a quote from him hailing the slate of movies he was sad to be missing at the film festival he’d underwritten, another blurb big-upping the Native Short Film Festival, debuting after the first of the year, where he was “looking forward to being in the front row!”—to let Sharon know this bullshit was not going to work on her. If Sharon wanted to keep her comfortable little life, she’d tell these bastards to step the fuck off. And if Sharon wasn’t there? Maybe she’d tell Ronnie directly.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  Except when she got to the reception area, there was a security guard sitting behind the desk, not one of the usual volunteers she recalled from her time on the wing. Behind the security guard, the floor opened wide into a U of patient rooms with a nurses’ station between them, and then one long spoke of a hallway. Nurses milled about, moving in and out of rooms, no one in a terrible hurry. This wasn’t the floor where emergencies happened. It was where you recovered from emergencies.

  Fat Monte’s mostly vegetative widow, Hannah, was also living out her days on the wing. Jennifer had come to see her a few times those first couple months, always late at night, but couldn’t bear to return. Hannah didn’t have a real head anymore, just a combination of skin and bones that approximated one.

  “Help you?” the guard said. He was sitting, but Jennifer could see that he had on a Kevlar vest under his shirt, but no gun, which seemed silly. He had the Tribune crossword open in front of him and was puzzling over 4 Across: Royal elephant.

  “I’m here to see Hannah Moretti,” Jennifer said.

  “Your name?”

  “Jennifer Cupertine,” she said.

  The guard tapped at his computer. “You have ID?” She gave him her license and he examined it under a light, then pushed his chair back from his desk to a small copier, made a quick photocopy of it then gave it back to her, made out a guest pass and slid it into a lanyard, handed it to her. “You’re on the list,” he said, like he was a bouncer at a club, “but I’m going to need to look in your purse.”

  “For what?”

  “This is a private floor,” he said.

  She pointed at the gilded Cupertine on the wall. “That’s my name.”

  “Not my rules,” he said, so she opened her purse and let him shine a pen light over its contents. “Room 913.”

  Jennifer started to walk off, thought about something, came back. “What do you do with the copy of my license?” she asked.

  “Stick it in a file,” the guard said, “then at the end of the day, we shred them.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “Not my rules,” he said again, this time with a shrug. “If it was up to me, I’d be on Navy Pier with my kid.”

  Jennifer knew the feeling. “Babar.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Four Across,” Jennifer said. “You can put that in pen.”

  Jennifer found Hannah Moretti’s room toward the back of the wing. When she was first moved to the Cupertine Center, Hannah was in a huge room that looked out over the lake, but now her room wasn’t quite as nice. From the hallway, Jennifer could make out the end of Hannah’s bed, the tent of sheets and blankets where Hannah’s feet were, an understuffed side chair, and a single window that looked out to a parking structure.

  “You here to visit Ms. Moretti?” a nurse asked from behind Jennifer. She was young, maybe twenty-five, and had eyebrows that she’d drawn in, not very well. She was preparing an IV stand, the bag filled with a chocolate-brown fluid. Behind her was a three-foot-tall whiteboard that listed each patient’s pertinent information: name, room number, day nurse name, doctor. Jennifer scanned it, found what she was looking for: R. Cupertine/930/Matt/Dr. Biskar/NA. She drifted down, found Hannah: H. Moretti/913/Connie/Dr. Gay/8/29. There were fewer than a dozen other patients listed, but their last names read like the donor wall of every museum and art institute in the city, including the one Jennifer worked in. The only prominent Chicagoland names missing were Wrigley, Comiskey, and those of governors and senators already doing time.

  “Yes,” Jennifer said.

  “That’s a surprise,” she said, but not in a nice way. Jennifer wondered who came to see Hannah, who she had in this world. She had a mother in St. Paul, she remembered that, but Ronnie had probably paid her off years ago, to keep her away, keep her quiet. The only family Fat Monte still had around wasn’t inclined to visit, Jennifer was sure. His mother had been farmed out to an assisted-living facility in Las Vegas and the son Fat Monte had fathered to a stripper out in Springfield was barely seven, if that. Not that she imagined the kid would be dying to come up to see the woman his father had shot in the face.

  The nurse pushed the IV stand from around the station and into the hallway. “She’s due to be fed and have her stomach tube cleaned, so maybe come back in fifteen? Unless you want to watch.”

  “No,” Jennifer said. “I’ll come back.” She pointed at the board. “What does the 8/29 stand for?”

  The nurse turned around, looked at the board. “That’s the expected discharge date,” she said.

  That was in two days. “She’s being moved?”

  “No,
” the nurse said. “They’re taking her off the machines. Maybe tell anyone who cares.”

  Room 930 was wedged into the far western corner of the building, down a long hallway off the main floor. There were cameras and closed-circuit monitors all up and down the corridor. No one was going to creep up on Ronnie Cupertine in his own hospital wing . . . especially not with the two guys standing outside his door.

  Jennifer recognized Bobby Lopiparno when she came around the corner. The boys in the neighborhood called him Lollipop or Sugar back in the day, because he had diabetes. But then, in high school, he got into selling coke, so Sugar stuck. She didn’t recognize the other man, but he was tall and thin, and wasn’t wearing a tie, unlike Sugar, who had on a full suit, vest and everything, which made him look like he might be the clergy, though Jennifer suspected he was aiming for some Sonny Corleone bullshit. Both men had on the same hospital lanyard Jennifer wore, which gave them a multilevel-marketing-seminar vibe; no one looks particularly tough with a plastic bag around their neck, turns out, but the thin guy also had on a gold bracelet and had a single diamond stud in each ear, like he was the dangerous one in a boy band.

  “Hey, little Jennie Frangello,” Sugar said, calling her by her maiden name, like all the boys still did when she saw them, as if she’d never grown up, never become a Cupertine. Would that it was so simple. He sprang his arms open, as if he expected her to jump into them, which wasn’t going to happen. There was a closed-circuit TV hanging over him, another at the end of the hall where she’d been walking. Sugar was sweaty, wide-eyed, and as twitchy as a rabbit—high as fuck, by Jennifer’s estimation—though the other guy looked perfectly at ease. Could be that was just because the skin on his face was so clear and hairless that Jennifer could see the big open pores on his cheeks from a few feet away.

  “What are you doing here?” Jennifer asked. She hadn’t seen Sugar in a good five years, not since the night he and his wife, Bonnie, came to their house—with a good bottle of scotch—and Sugar and Sal spent the next several hours in the backyard, drinking and talking quietly, their heads close, Sal periodically shaking his head, getting up, pacing. When Sugar and Bonnie finally left, Sal came in and told her, “He’s Ronnie’s guy in Detroit now. You believe that? He can’t count to ten unless he uses his toes, but he’s Ronnie’s guy in Detroit.”