Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  Matthew stuffed the papers back into the envelope, folded it all back into the newspaper, walked over to where Poremba was standing.

  “They somewhere safe?” Matthew asked.

  Poremba closed his phone, nodded.

  Witness protection made sense. Whatever had happened with the kid, it surely wasn’t the whole story. The Family, or whatever constituted the Family now, was making a move. Jennifer must have come in, maybe staged an arrest so she wouldn’t get marked as a snitch, get Sal marked as a snitch, too. Smart. And then . . . something went upside down.

  “Do you know where?”

  Poremba shook his head.

  Matthew supposed it was better if neither of them knew. Two fewer innocent people who might end up dead. Nina should have been so lucky.

  “What happens if this security guard dies?” Matthew asked.

  “We’ll add him to the list,” Poremba said.

  “Other people saw this happen,” Matthew said. “Someone is going to say something.”

  Poremba laughed, but then stopped himself, like a faucet had been turned off. “No, they won’t. There’s no good guys anymore, Matthew.”

  A Fed Ex truck came down the street, pulled up in front Diamond Logistics, the driver sprinted out with a box, hit the buzzer on the front door, left the box, ran back to the truck, thirty seconds.

  “Boom,” Matthew said.

  “You’re learning,” Poremba said. “Know what’s coming for you. That’s my policy. I guess judging from all those guns, maybe it’s your policy, too.”

  “The opposite,” Matthew said. “I was thinking of going on a hunting trip.”

  “All those guns registered?”

  “Most of them,” Matthew said.

  “Not the time to get caught riding dirty,” Poremba said. “You don’t have a lot of friends left in the Bureau.”

  A yellow cab turned onto the street and Poremba waved his hand in the air. “I was under the impression that now was the time to do something you might otherwise regret,” Matthew said.

  “Your focus is on the wrong people,” Poremba said.

  There were, Matthew understood, things Special Agent Lee Poremba could not say out loud.

  “Ever been to Carson City?” Poremba asked.

  “No,” Matthew said.

  “It’s just outside of Reno,” Poremba said. “I was there for three weeks, after Hopper’s rental car turned up. Carson City is twenty-five, thirty minutes away. Not far. The kind of town you’d only stop in if you needed gas. But I have to tell you, the drive between Reno and Las Vegas? It’s beautiful. You’ve never seen the color red until you’ve seen it in the desert. It’s like seeing the planet rust. Before you decide to take all those guns and ammo and do something stupid, you should make that drive. Give yourself something to remember in your cell.”

  “What do I do when I get out there?” Matthew asked.

  “Honor your friend,” Poremba said. “Walk where he walked. See what he saw. Maybe it will give you some kind of closure. You still have that information, I presume? Where he was planning to visit between Las Vegas and Reno?”

  “I do.”

  “I found it cathartic, Agent,” Poremba said.

  “I’m not an agent anymore,” Matthew said.

  “Good for you,” Poremba said. The cab pulled up to the curb and Poremba opened the door, got in, but didn’t close the door.

  “I’m not a good guy, either.”

  “I’d think about that,” Poremba said, closing the door, “because if you find Sal Cupertine, you’re eligible for the reward.”

  14

  Used to be the Purple Hotel in Lincolnwood wasn’t a great place to stay. The Outfit ran girls and numbers out of it for years, up until Allen Dorfman caught six bullets to the dome walking through the parking lot back in ’83, a couple days before he was due to be sentenced on fraud and racketeering charges. He was killed in case he decided to flip and give the feds information on the casino grift he oversaw in Las Vegas. He’d been on the job going all the way back to Jimmy Hoffa, so if he started talking in hopes of getting a lighter sentence, could be that a lot of people would end up in prison at best, dead at the least. Turned out it didn’t matter. The feds knew everything anyway, and within five years, the Outfit was out of business, both in Chicago and Las Vegas. So the Outfit could have let Dorfman live, but the Outfit had no inside intel, so they did what they had to do, which to Peaches Pocotillo was the right way to handle business. Why worry about the potential for liability? Better to solve a problem when it presents itself to you.

  That was the difference between the Outfit and the Family, Peaches supposed.

  It was after midnight on Halloween and Peaches sat in the lobby of the Purple, waiting for his nephew. The hotel was operated by Ramada these days, a suburban tourist attraction for its classic ’60s architecture, distinctive purple bricks, and giant indoor pool. The kind of place where dentists had conferences, where Jews held bar mitzvah parties, where atheists had weddings . . . which meant it was too cute by a mile, what with the pictures depicting the history of the joint lining the walls. Mayhem, avarice, and murder were fond civic memories equal to the exploits of the Cubs, Bulls, and Bears: gangsters in fedoras eating steaks, pretty girls on their laps; row after row of black Cadillacs, gleamed to obsidian shine; Dorfman’s body covered by a sheet. Then: artful black-and-whites of Ernie Banks, Michael Jordan, and Mike Ditka, each in mid-victory. In the coffee shop, you could get a Capone Burger (bloody rare), a Lombardo Pancake Breakfast (the cakes looked like clowns, if you squinted just right), and a drink called the Ness, which was a greyhound.

  Isn’t that cute.

  But then, everything these days was too cute. Like how instead of killing Sal Cupertine, the Family tried to set him up, have the feds do the job for them. When that didn’t work, they got even cuter, boxed him up, sold him to the highest bidder.

  Not that Peaches knew who that bidder was. Ronnie told Peaches from the get-go, almost a year ago now, that he wouldn’t give up that information, that if Peaches thought Ronnie needed to tie up loose ends, he wasn’t gonna make more of them. Which was probably why the Family was still in business and the Outfit was on the Purple’s Wall of Fame. Ronnie Cupertine’s business was antiquated, yeah, but his desire for self-preservation remained pretty astonishingly acute.

  Peaches was willing to bide his time. Consolidate his power. He’d been doing that for years. It was why he had three kids from three different women from three different tribes—Oneida, Ho-Chunk, Menominee—all under nine, starting right after the state entered its gaming compact with the tribes in ’92. All girls. A son would have been fine, the money was the same either way, each getting a monthly nut from the gaming and bingo operations. They were all asleep upstairs, along with the babysitter, whom he was fucking, even though she wasn’t connected to anything, other than the Pink Coyote strip club in Stone Park. His girls all lived in small, shitty Wisconsin towns, so every Halloween, he picked them up, drove them down to Chicago, found a nice, safe neighborhood, and let them roam free.

  This time, Lincolnwood fit the bill. Every home in the leafy subdivision was elaborately decorated, there were passels of kids on every corner, and five or six houses handed out full-sized candy bars, which Peaches knew was really a protection scheme. No one fucked with the houses that gave out the full-sized Butterfingers. Mostly, he just liked watching his girls shake suckers down for candy. Trick or treat wasn’t really accurate. Everyone was getting tricked.

  By virtue of his girls, Peaches had his hooks into three different gaming operations, in addition to the Chuyalla. He hadn’t started working the skim in the other locations, didn’t have the Native Mob fully established in everyone’s gaming side, but Ronnie Cupertine had taught him well these last several months. Gave him a blueprint. Integrated Peaches into all phases of the Family. Drummed up
some of that Gold Coast money to invest in the golf course and all the commercial and residential construction they were doing on the casino grounds outside Milwaukee. Ronnie took his cut right off the top. Peaches took his cut, too, and it was still enough to get some associates out there to start pushing dirt around. Move a pile from one end of the grounds to the other. Next week, move it back. Spend a week digging a giant hole. Spend the next week filling it back up. Blow up some boulders, spread them around. Couple weeks later, blow up the rocks, turn them into pebbles.

  Maybe something would get built or maybe it wouldn’t.

  No one was going to come after the Family for their investments if it all fell through. Wasn’t like people were going to lawyer up against Ronnie Cupertine.

  That was the beauty of it all. Because these days, Ronnie Cupertine was shitting in a bag.

  Might spend the rest of his miserable life in and out of an induced coma.

  Wasn’t the outcome Peaches expected, but in truth? It was a better arrangement. Having Ronnie alive but not functional made Peaches the de facto head of all things without the complications of an assassination. Capos like Sugar Lopiparno just wanted to do their jobs, make their money, kick up their percentage, go on vacation, buy new cars, everyone trading in their Lincolns and Caddies for Hummers and Navigators. And if that action moved through Peaches because Ronnie was in the hospital and couldn’t take visitors?

  Fine.

  For now, anyway.

  No one wanted to ruin a good thing. These days, cops and the feds didn’t give a fuck what you did, unless you showed up somewhere with a bomb strapped to your chest. Production was up across the board, all phases of the business getting a bump—everything from extortion to mortgage fraud—but it was the pill game where Peaches predicted they’d make real cash. They were charging two or three dollars per milligram on Oxycodone out in the rural areas, a single 30 mg pill going for almost a C-note the farther you got from the city, but Peaches cut prices for the first two weeks after the planes hit, had his boys selling pills at fifty cents a milligram for a week, pushed out full bottles, then started gouging. They were minting cash on Xanax and Ambien, too. No one could stop panicking. No one could sleep. Next move was to diversify even more. Hit up the Indian gaming in other parts of the country. Some old Chicago humps were out west partnering with the tribes in Palm Springs, Ronnie already doing some consulting work when the shit went down, so Peaches slid right in, no problem. Mike was going there in a couple weeks, fix a few things that were troubling them in Indio.

  Two women, one dressed as a slutty nurse, the other dressed as a slutty cat, stumbled out of the costume party raging in Sea Gars, the Purple’s cocktail bar. They stopped in front of Peaches.

  “What are you dressed as?” the nurse asked. “A tourist?”

  “Keep moving,” Peaches said. He didn’t give a shit what season it was. He liked wearing linen now. That’s how he dressed. And no one fucked with someone who wore sunglasses inside. Most of the time, people thought he was blind.

  “He’s dressed as an asshole,” the cat said. “And smells like one, too.”

  Peaches watched the women bungle into the restroom. Their laughter echoed out into the lobby. The girl at the front desk could barely restrain her own laughter, tried to cough through it. Same with the old queen at the concierge desk. Everyone thought he was some kind of joke. He was the fucking boss of Chicago now, and in Lincolnwood, that didn’t mean shit. If Ronnie Cupertine were sitting here, people would be asking for his autograph.

  Cute.

  It would be real funny when he went into the bathroom and strangled those women, came out and popped these giggling assholes, which he’d decided he was going to do . . . right when Mike pulled up in his new Ford Expedition.

  “You have a good night, sir,” the front desk girl said when Peaches passed her.

  Peaches stopped, tipped his glasses down, examined her. “You got lucky tonight,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said, because that’s all these people ever said, their scripts never deviating. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good night. Thanks.

  “You’re welcome,” Peaches said. Because one day? When he was long gone? His picture would be up on the wall, too. Holding the Rain Man’s head in his hand.

  Sal Cupertine’s house was only a mile from the Purple Hotel, just off Birchwood, middle of a quiet street, big lawns, long driveways, Japanese cars, basketball hoops, ghosts and goblins and red decorative lights, toilet paper flung around some old-growth trees and box hedges, a touch of light Halloween vandalism, the kind the vandals would help clean up in the morning. The Cupertine house had a white picket fence surrounding the front yard, but even now, after midnight, and with sunglasses on, Peaches could see when they crawled by that the front lawn was overgrown and the mailbox on the street overflowed with paper. Wasn’t a single light on. He’d checked and the electricity hadn’t been turned off. Nor the gas. Some bills were still getting paid.

  “What do you think?” Mike asked. He was dressed like Elvis in the 1968 Comeback Special. Wig and leather jacket and everything.

  “Go around the block one more time,” Peaches said.

  There were still people outside, mostly teenagers in costume, hanging out in their garages, bullshitting. No cops, though, not out here. Peaches wasn’t yet in the position to get an escort during his crimes. If he was going to a meeting, yeah, he could get them to show up, watch the street, make sure he wasn’t about to get wet up. A night like tonight, he didn’t need any extra eyes.

  More important, Peaches didn’t make any government agents. Every car they drove by had state license plates. No beefy white guys sat alone in sedans. It had been eight weeks since Jennifer Cupertine and her kid disappeared. Sugar told him the scene at Carson’s was chaos and he wasn’t about to stick around for it. Not that Peaches blamed him, but shit. The plan had been to grab them both, use them as leverage to get the Rain Man to show his face, then take them all out at once. Now that was fucked, so Peaches had to move to plan B.

  If there was no one watching the house, that meant the feds knew Jennifer and the kid’s location, weren’t worried about Sal Cupertine showing up and whisking them away. Not like they were watching Ronnie’s house on the Gold Coast these days, waiting for Sharon and the kids to return. No one in the Family had an opinion on where Sharon might have gone, because even suggesting she’d gone to the feds was like putting the whammy on themselves, everyone in the Family superstitious. Peaches wasn’t into that mystical shit. If he were Sharon? He’d have gone straight to the feds the day Ronnie got his ass beat, then stroked out in the ambulance. But that didn’t happen. Because Sharon Cupertine, she was one of those Family ladies that thought it was the 1960s, that families were hands off.

  Those were the old ways, as Peaches liked to tell Mike, and Mike liked to repeat it as if he came up with it himself.

  The only person out there keeping Peaches from total control of Chicago was Sal Cupertine. So fine. If Peaches couldn’t find him, he’d figure out something else.

  “All right,” Peaches said, once they were back at the top of the block, the Cupertine place four houses away, Peaches able to see the tire swing in the front yard from this perch. “Go up to the door. A neighbor comes out and asks you what you’re doing, you’re looking for a party. You’re a little high and you’re lost.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mike said. He rubbed at his nose with his thumb. He was a little high. Still, he’d proven to be an able lieutenant, smarter than Peaches initially thought, willing to take on tough jobs. “And then take them out?”

  “No,” Peaches said. “You’re dressed like Elvis. Tell them thank you, thank you very much, and walk away. We’ll come back tomorrow. No one comes up on you, handle your business. Efficiently, understand?”

  “A’ight,” he said. “Made something special.”

  He reached into a bag in the ba
ckseat, came out with a bundle of construction-grade dynamite. Five sticks. He’d affixed six feet of safety fuse line to it, which burned about an inch every four seconds. That gave them almost five minutes to get moving. Plenty of time.

  Mike shoved the bundle inside his leather jacket and got out. Peaches watched him saunter down the block, kept track of the other houses, in case someone popped out with a gun. He’d done his homework, so he wasn’t all that worried. None of the houses had been sold in the last five years, none of the utilities records on the block had been shifted to another name, and when Peaches took his girls through earlier this evening, all he saw in every house was people watching CNN.

  Still, they had to be smart, which is why when Mike turned up the Cupertines’ driveway and disappeared into the darkness, Peaches took out a burner phone from his jacket, dialed 911, but didn’t hit call just yet. There was a fire station two miles away. They’d be able to get an engine here in just a couple minutes. Burn down the Rain Man’s house? Fine. Kill a bunch of civilians? Not so good. Not in this climate.

  A minute later, Mike came back down the driveway, his gait brisk. Not running. People notice running. Just moving at a good clip. Thirty seconds, Mike was in the front seat and they were moving. Three minutes, they were cruising down Lincoln Avenue, windows down, about to turn onto Touhy, a block from the Purple, when Peaches heard the boom. He turned around in his seat to see the night sky fill with a column of thick black smoke.

  Peaches hit call, waited. “Yes,” he said, after a moment, “I think I just saw a small plane crash into a house.”

  15

  Rabbi David Cohen hated Chinese food, which made it difficult to be a Jew. Temple Beth Israel congregants always wanted to drag him to Chinatown to eat every combination of shellfish and pork they could imagine, as if being in a Chinese restaurant somehow made Kosher rules null and void. “You don’t want to be rude,” Rabbi Kales told him one time, when Stanley Alexander took them both to lunch to talk about starting a music program for seniors at the Performing Arts Center, Stanley some big macher on Broadway back in the day. “Pretend the suckling pig is veal. Pretend the crab is salmon.”