Gangsterland

by Tod Goldberg

  “Yeah, I bet,” Fat Monte said.

  “Something I can help you with, Monte?” Jeff asked. “Or are you just making sure I gave you a working number.”

  “You know,” Fat Monte said, “your people aren’t that sharp. There was another body in that dump.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jeff said.

  “A white guy,” Monte said. “About the same height and weight as Sal. But you find the faggot Mexican and make him. That’s why you’re never going to win, you get that?”

  “What’s to win, Monte?” Jeff said.

  “Tonight,” Fat Monte said, “why didn’t you just take me in? Why bust me up and let me go home? That’s not how you guys normally do business.”

  “New policy went into effect,” Jeff said, “right after one of your guys killed three feds.” He sat up in bed and turned on a light, looked around for his minirecorder, since it wasn’t every day that a member of the Family called in the middle of the night with, it sounded like, a few things to get off his chest. Jeff was pretty sure he’d left the recorder outside in his car, and he wasn’t about to go running outside in his underwear when it was zero degrees outside. He fumbled through his nightstand and came up with a pencil but no paper. He’d write on the wall if he had to. “You want to talk to me about that day, Monte? That why you’re calling?”

  “You gotta make me a promise,” Fat Monte said. “I tell you some shit, you go back out to the dump, and you get that fucking body. Because I can’t have that on me.”

  Jeff tried to remember if there’d been any chatter about any guys from Fat Monte’s crew missing around the time of Sal’s disappearance, but part of his brain was still in REM. And anyway, Chema Espinoza wasn’t listed in any of the files. The FBI didn’t care much about the guppies, not when there were whales like Fat Monte swimming around.

  “It’s been months, Monte,” Jeff said. “Whoever you threw in there has probably been picked clean by the rats.”

  “Don’t fucking say that,” Fat Monte said. “Jesus Christ, don’t say that shit. Get some of those cadaver dogs and get out there tomorrow, right? Tomorrow. Promise me you’ll get those cadaver dogs out to the dump, or this phone call is over.”

  “Okay,” Jeff said. He was startled by the desperation in Fat Monte’s voice. There was something happening here, and it wasn’t good. “Okay. I’ll get them. I’ll get dogs and radar and everything, okay? Whatever you need, we’ll get it. We’ll go out together if you want.”

  “Nah, nah, fuck that,” Fat Monte said. He was silent for a moment, and Jeff heard what he thought was the clink of ice in a glass. “One other thing. You keep my wife’s name out of this. She’s got family and cousins, and they don’t need to know what kind of life she was living, okay?”

  “There’s no reason to bring her into anything,” Jeff said. That Monte said “was living” immediately bothered him. And he didn’t say “keep my wife out of this,” he said “keep my wife’s name” out of it. “Where are you right now, Monte? Why don’t I meet you, and we can talk.”

  “Like I need another beatdown? My balls finally stopped hurting.”

  “It won’t be like that,” Jeff said. “We’ll sit down, have a cup of coffee, you can tell me whatever is on your mind.”

  Fat Monte laughed at that. “Look,” he said. “I’m going to tell you two things, and that’s all I got with this. You walked into my life today and ruined it, you get that? Ruined it. Nowhere I can go now, you get that?”

  “I get that,” Jeff said. “But I’m giving you a chance that Neto and Chema didn’t get.” He paused. “Or my guys that Sal murdered. I’m giving you a chance to get out of this with your life.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” he said. “Because maybe that’s the line you gave Bruno when you flipped him and now he’s dead. You know Ronnie don’t forget, right?”

  “So then what is this?” Jeff said.

  “Making my own bed,” Monte said. He cleared his throat, and Jeff heard the clinking of ice again. “First thing, you get that body from the dump, you call my mother. You got her phone number?”

  “Yes,” Jeff said. He had phone numbers for every extended member of the Family, and the FBI had bugs on most of them, too.

  “You call her, tell her you got my cousin Neal. She’s gonna lose it. Don’t play with her, don’t dig on her, no pressure, okay? She’s not in the game, never has been, she just tried her best, you know? That kid was practically a retard, not a evil bone in his body, just real sweet, wanted to start a puppy farm, always had gerbils and hamsters and shit, used to wash them . . . Ronnie always had this idea that he was the perfect guy to have along for things because, well, fuck, what did he know? Right?”

  Jeff had only passing knowledge of Neal Moretti: He was inconsequential to even the smallest investigations Jeff had been party to, his most notable trait being his last name and that he was frequently used as a driver.

  And now he was rotting in the landfill.

  Fat Monte rambled on about his cousin, his words running into each other, and Jeff realized this wasn’t just a confession of some kind, it was maybe a coda, too, that Fat Monte was winding down toward something dreadful, trying to get his mind right. This was not good.

  “Okay, okay,” Jeff said. “I’ll call your mother. We’ll find Neal. We’ll do whatever we need to do to get that to happen right away.”

  “He was like my brother,” Fat Monte said finally. “I’ve done plenty of bad things, you know that, right? You know that?”

  “I know that.”

  “But I was never like Sal. I tried to be this cold-blooded motherfucker, and maybe most of the time I was, that steroid shit, that made it worse for a while, but I tried to get off that when I met my girl, and all of a sudden, all this shit, it starts visiting on me, like flashbacks. So I get back on it, get that rush, you know, invincible. Most of the time, I can put it in the back somewhere, but Neal, Neal, he was like my brother, right? And I had to do him. There’s no returning from that, that’s what I keep thinking about, thinking about how my wife, Hannah is her name, you knew about her, right? What if she found out about that? She’d never be able to see me like she saw me before, and that, that, that, that wouldn’t be something I could deal with.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Jeff said. He was throwing on his pants, had already slipped into a sweatshirt while Monte was going on, was looking for his shoes, trying to figure out how he’d call 911 while he was on the phone, trying to figure out how he’d explain to the cops—shit, to the FBI—how it was that he was on the phone with Fat Monte Moretti and the tenor of their conversation. He’d need to figure that out. But at that moment, his biggest concern was getting to wherever Monte was, since he was becoming increasingly aware of how much Fat Monte was talking about his wife as if she didn’t exist anymore.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Fat Monte said.

  “Why don’t you tell me where you are,” Jeff said. He found his car keys and was walking out into the frigid darkness. “Why don’t you tell me where we can meet and talk, Monte. Just man-to-man. No bullshit.”

  “Kochel Farms,” Fat Monte said.

  “You need to tell me where that is,” Jeff said.

  “I ain’t there, but you’ll find it,” Fat Monte said.

  “Okay,” Jeff said. “Let’s just do one thing at a time. I’m getting into my car right now. Why don’t you let me buy you some steak and eggs over at the White Palace. You know where that is?”

  “It’s too late,” Fat Monte said.

  “No, no, it’s not, Monte,” Jeff said. “We can figure out a good solution here. Get you out of town, into a program, you and Hannah into a house with a lawn and a garage. Send you out to California, whatever you want. Okay? We can do that. I have that authority.”

  “Just get him out of that dump,” Fat Monte said, and then the next thing Jeff heard was the distinctive blast of a .357, followed by the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor.

  CHAPTER TEN
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  Rabbi David Cohen hated to wait. In Chicago, if he had to sit on someone in order to take him out, well, that wasn’t really waiting. That was working. It was part of a process with a discernible end point. Now, however, it was a completely different story. Since his coming-out party at the Hanukkah carnival, he’d become, it seemed, the go-to rabbi/problem solver for any Jew in Las Vegas under the age of fifty—and he’d have to drop everything, get over to the temple, sit in his office, and wait for them to show up.

  Most arrived on time, but then once they were in his office, his new congregants had no compunction about staying longer than their allotted appointment. So David would have to wait for them to get to the point of their problem, which was tiring because it required mental focus in addition to the monastic ability to just sit and listen. Stillness was of paramount importance, according to Rabbi Kales, who was strict about this, telling David over and over again that most people just wanted someone to listen to them, that it wasn’t really up to him to solve their problems as much as provide them the road map to their own decisions. He was to do this by dispensing as many nuggets as possible from all his readings—the Torah, Midrash, Talmud, whatever—though he’d found that if he paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen it generally had the same effect.

  That probably wasn’t going to work today, not with Claudia Levine. She was a New York Jew who’d moved to Las Vegas five years earlier when her husband, Mark, took a job in the accounting department at the Rio and then moved a few streets over to the Palace Station, but that was just too dirty for his taste—physically dirty, as in they didn’t clean it often enough—so he moved up the street to a new resort in Summerlin, which was good because it cut down his commute, since they were living in a charming little townhouse over at the Adagio on the corner of Buffalo and Vegas, just a few blocks down the way from the temple, though, for Claudia’s taste, there were a few too many strippers living there, too, which made her fear the pool.

  David still had no idea of the exact nature of Claudia’s problem, and he was due to meet with Jerry Ford in fifteen minutes. Their little business operation had taken off in the last few weeks. After the holidays, there were far more bodies to be disposed of from natural deaths—old people, David had found, were all about holding on through the holidays before biting it, since no one liked to have Grandpa keel over during Hanukkah or on New Year’s Eve—and unnatural deaths. It made sense: David couldn’t ever remember killing someone on Christmas, or even the week after. Even hit men took that time off.

  But once the second of January rolled around, it was open season. By the middle of January, David had already presided over fifteen funerals, equally divided between real people and hit jobs.

  It was the suicides that left David unnerved. It was one thing to bury some old lady who’d been alive since before there were paved roads and then another thing altogether when he had to eulogize some UNLV student who threw him or herself out of a dorm window. Usually, Rabbi Kales stepped in because of the long relationship he had with the families, but more and more often, David found himself being thrust into situations that weren’t criminal in the least, Bennie telling him it was part of their long-range plan, the selling of this long con.

  Which is why he was now listening to Claudia Levine’s tantalizing story of . . . what? Shit. He didn’t know what she was saying, but he knew he needed a way to cut her off. Problem was, he’d found that he really couldn’t fake his way with New York transplants: They were more Jewish than the average temple member, which required David to stay as focused as possible. It was exhausting.

  “So I say to Martin—you know Martin Copeland, don’t you, Rabbi?” Claudia said, and David realized that he’d done the one thing he was trying not to do: He’d let his mind wander.

  “Martin Copeland,” David said. He put a finger up to his lips—this was something Rabbi Kales did frequently, and it immediately impressed David with how it made the rabbi look contemplative and, at the same time, passively judgmental, as if all the world in front of him was not quite up to snuff—and left it there for a moment while he attempted to pick up the thread of conversation.

  He did know Martin Copeland. He’d provided the seed money for the Dorothy Copeland Children’s Center, gave the temple a check for two hundred thousand dollars to see his dead wife’s name on a wall. Bennie said he’d been setting numbers in town for a generation, but now he didn’t know where he was half the time. “He’s a quart low,” Bennie told him, “but had more oil than all of us to start with.” David met with him a week earlier to talk about the deep moral questions that were now plaguing him, particularly if all his years working in the gaming industry was a shanda, even if it wasn’t mentioned directly in the Torah. Martin was concerned that maybe Bugsy Siegel had set them all on a bad path, that maybe Siegel was a golem, and now that we were only a year away from the turn of the millennium, there was a real chance it was all a terrible omen for the destruction of the Jewish people. Bennie told David to listen to and agree with every word Copeland said, make sure he wasn’t planning on changing his will in any way, since as it stood, the temple was in for a cool million. “He starts giving any hints that he’s spending more than his living expenses or looking to donate to Gamblers Anonymous or something,” Bennie said, “drown him in the toilet if you have to.”

  “Yes, yes, Martin Copeland,” David said, finally. “I fear, Claudia, that Mr. Copeland is not a person you should be going to for advice.” Not that David knew what the hell she was talking about.

  “He said you’d say that,” Claudia said.

  David tented his hands and leaned back in his chair, stole a glance out the window, and saw that Jerry Ford was standing on the sidewalk talking to Bennie Savone, their kids running around on the sidewalk together. Which was fine, generally. David had made the executive decision to let Bennie know all about the deal he’d made with Jerry, and Bennie didn’t care provided he got his beak wet. So they’d gone about it legally, getting the morgue staff trained to harvest tissue, even got all the proper forms, which they then doctored for use with those “clients” whose bodies could still be harvested, which wasn’t many of them. So many amateurs out there, David thought. No honor in their work.

  The mortuary hadn’t received its first official payment yet—Jerry said his company paid on a net-sixty after processing the tissue, which sounded reasonable to David, even if he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant—though already Jerry had made a nice donation to temple, a check for five grand last week, a promise for another five grand this week, which indicated to David that whatever net-sixty meant, it was going to be a nice payday.

  Still, David didn’t like seeing Bennie and Jerry together on a public street, where anyone could snap a photo of them, particularly since that shit over at the club with the tourist getting stomped half to death was becoming a larger problem than Bennie could have imagined.

  He’d followed David’s advice and gave up his bouncers, even offered to pay for the victim’s health care, which seemed to appease Metro, but word was that the feds were taking a hard look at the Wild Horse now, seeing as how both the bouncers were called “mob associates” in the Review-Journal over and over again. And the offer to pick up the medical costs didn’t exactly appease the family of the guy, who were now getting ready to sue the Wild Horse for, Bennie told him, “fifty-cocksucking-trillion-billion-dollars.”

  Then one of the weekly papers did an exposé about how half the strip clubs in town were fronts for organized crime, explained in precise detail how the families had moved from the casino business into the legal skin business, it being more profitable to sell lap dances and overpriced Cristal than to illegally pimp out girls for sex. The house charged patrons twenty bucks just to walk in the door, then took 20 percent from every girl’s cash take, plus another 40 percent from the credit card charges; the girls then had to tip out the bartenders, bouncers, the DJ, the house mom, bathroom attendants, and anyone else who happened to work the room . . .
and then those people had to tip the house 20 percent on their take, too, plus 40 percent on their credit card tips. And then there was just the normal grift: charging twenty-dollar lap dances at a hundred a pop, charging a grand for a bottle of fifty-dollar Champagne, and if the customer complained to management, maybe management responded to the complaint with a hammer to the knees. If the person was smart, maybe they’d go home and dispute the charges at a safe distance from Bennie’s boys, but then who was smart at 3 a.m. in a strip club staring at a couple grand on their corporate American Express?

  Credit cards. It made David’s head spin thinking about how Visa and MasterCard were bankrolling a big portion of Bennie’s crew.

  Cash was another matter. A strip club was the easiest place on earth to wash hard cash, particularly when you could generate paperwork that said Champagne was legitimately billed at five hundred dollars a bottle. It was no fun to wash money twenty bucks at a time, but it was the easiest way to move it around in the mob.

  He’d done it again. Claudia was still staring at him, waiting for his rabbinical ruling on . . . something . . . and he was zoned out, thinking business, making her wait. “Yes, well,” he said. He looked around his office for something to pull from, some bit of arcane wisdom that might solve whatever issue this woman was having, while not actually displaying to her that he had no idea what she was talking about. His eyes settled on a book of poetry about Jews that Rabbi Gottlieb had left. He retrieved the book from the shelf and paced the office for a moment in silent contemplation. “Yes,” he repeated. “Are you familiar with Longfellow, Claudia?”

  “The only Longfellow I know well is the song Neil Diamond has about him,” she said. “We played it at our wedding, even.”

  David sat down on the edge of his desk, only a foot from Claudia, close enough that he could smell the chemical reaction between her nauseating perfume and her hair spray, and he flipped through the pages of the book of poetry with what he hoped looked like solemn appreciation before settling back on the one poem he’d actually read. The key was to make it look like divine inspiration.