by Tod Goldberg
That didn’t mean there wasn’t something, Jeff understood, only that it was buried so deep it didn’t exist on paper. Fat Monte didn’t just throw out the name Kochel Farms because he saw it on the side of a truck and thought it would be a funny joke to play on the FBI, not after he’d already buried a bullet in his wife’s head, and not while he was working up the guts to put one through his. Jeff knew that much. What Kochel Farms really meant was another matter.
Could be Sal Cupertine was now a Big Mac, but that just didn’t make a lot of sense. He couldn’t see Ronnie Cupertine engaging the services of civilians to help get rid of one of his dead bodies. There was just too much risk involved in having some ten-dollar-an-hour farm employee shove a human being into the slaughterer, even if Ronnie had Fat Monte hand over a stack of bills in compensation. Could be it was Chema Espinoza or Neal Moretti who did the honors—not that they’d found Neal’s body in that landfill, nor did Jeff think they ever would—but, still, why would Ronnie bother making them do it all the way out here, when they could have used whoever was doing the job Paul Bruno used to do? Not that they’d found his body, either.
If Kochel Farms was somehow involved in the disappearance of Sal Cupertine, Jeff thought it was a more passive experience . . . a point he’d been trying to elucidate to the FBI for the last several weeks to little avail. Which also made perfect sense, since the leadership of the FBI in Chicago weren’t exactly charter members of the Jeff Hopper Fan Club, not after the Fat Monte suicide hit the Sun-Times and Tribune.
It took a few days for everything to come out due mostly to the fact that Chicago was more interested in dealing with the fallout of the blizzard that had drilled the city than the suicide of a gangster and the attempted murder of his wife. But once the city began to thaw and journalists could actually get to their offices, what had been a page 3 blip turned into a front-page embarrassment with “confidential sources” confirming that “Family enforcer” Fat Monte Moretti’s last conversation had been with an FBI agent, who, it turned out, was currently on paid administrative leave for misconduct. Those same “confidential sources” were happy to suggest that the agent in question was Jeff Hopper and that it was believed he would soon be relieved of his duties completely, particularly in light of the murder of four people under his supervision the year previous and his now questionable relationship with a known crime figure.
Jeff was pretty sure that the “confidential sources” named in all the stories was in fact Kirk Biglione, who at the moment was trying to explain to Special Agent Poremba how much he was going to enjoy Chicago once spring came around, now that Poremba had been hired ostensibly to replace Jeff. “Lots of great restaurants,” Biglione said. “And if you like to hunt or fish, it’s just a couple hours to some great spots in Wisconsin. I’ve got this place I’ve been dreaming about building in Fond du Lac.”
“I don’t hunt or fish,” Poremba said.
“What do you like?” Biglione asked.
In the time Jeff had worked with Lee Poremba, that was the one question everyone had about him: He didn’t seem to like anything other than his job, which made him, at the time, seem like one of those guys ready to stab you in the back. Except it just happened that he was a fairly boring guy who had a pretty firm vision of what his life would be like, one where he caught bad guys and then went home and tended to his three springer spaniels. This was information Jeff had learned only after being asked to do some background on him when he was up for a promotion in Kansas City, as the FBI was typically concerned with agents who didn’t seem to exist outside their jobs. It wasn’t normal not to leave some kind of footprint, somewhere.
It had been several years since he’d done the background report on Poremba, but Jeff still remembered the most salient details of his life: a brother in Tampa, an ex-wife in Santa Fe, and, as far as Jeff could find, no one else. Incorruptible, Jeff had said about him in his report, because his tastes are so base. A good book, his dogs, a place to sit, a matinee movie every Saturday afternoon when he wasn’t working. And if he was working, he’d see a matinee on Sunday instead. Preferred romantic comedies and anything with talking animals.
“I like to read,” Poremba said.
“You still have springers?” Jeff asked.
Poremba turned in his seat and stared at Jeff for a few seconds. “Yes,” he said finally. “They’re still in Kansas City at a kennel. Can’t have them living with me at the Comfort Suites.”
“Last I knew,” Jeff said, “you had three of them. You’ll need a place with a yard in Chicago. Probably need to look out in the suburbs. Batavia is nice, I hear.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” Poremba said.
“Oh yeah?” Jeff said. “I thought you were permanent.”
“I have a feeling I’ll be moving around some in the next few weeks,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Biglione said. “We may find what we’re looking for today, and then you’re knee-deep in moving boxes by the end of the week.”
“Maybe,” Poremba said. Biglione was technically Poremba’s equal in rank, but it was clear to Jeff that Poremba had been brought in to fix a potential nightmare for the FBI. Once word got out that the body in the dump wasn’t Sal Cupertine, or that there was another body somewhere in the dump that they couldn’t find, big questions about the FBI’s investigation into the Family would begin to be asked. The only reason the press hadn’t discovered this information already had a lot to do with the present situation Jeff Hopper found himself in.
As soon as Jeff heard Fat Monte’s body hit the floor, he knew that the rules had changed. In all his time working organized crime, he’d never run into a made guy killing himself outside of prison, and even then it was rare. That he tried to kill his wife, too? That didn’t happen, ever. He also knew the fact that Fat Monte was on the phone with him would be the sort of thing that the press would eventually discover, which meant it was the sort of thing the FBI would offer up to them in form of sacrifice—a juicy tidbit that might keep them from digging much further into the real story, namely why Sal Cupertine was allowed to disappear. As it happened, it wasn’t that much different than the Family offering up the body of Chema Espinoza. Tit for tat, everyone stays in business, and the world keeps spinning.
It was how business was conducted in Chicago. And it made Jeff Hopper sick to know he was going to need to cut a similar deal if he wanted to protect the one person with something real to lose: Matthew. The only way to do that was to push the FBI into a corner. Jeff knew he had the one thing that the FBI needed: information.
If the public learned about the FBI’s decision to let the body of Chema Espinoza stand in for Sal Cupertine’s, even to the point of having what was left of the body cremated and delivered to Jennifer Cupertine simply so they could solve the murder of their three agents and CI without compromising their long-term investigation into the Family, there was a good chance Roosevelt Road would be filled with people carrying torches. Worse were the families of the dead men, all of whom had been led to believe that justice had been served, even if it had been meted out on the streets. You couldn’t ask for more than having the man who killed your husband or brother or son found disemboweled and burnt . . . particularly since Jeff was certain Special Agent Biglione had intimated to the families that it was more like vigilante justice that caused the body to be found versus the Family trying to smooth out a bit of salve. Let the families believe the FBI took care of the problem Old West–style, and everyone goes home feeling a little better. It was the sort of thing Biglione would do. Hell, it was the sort of thing Jeff would have done, too.
So, that frozen night, after Fat Monte blew his head off, Jeff made two calls. The first was to 911, to report a likely suicide, maybe a murder-suicide, all of which put Jeff on the public record. The next call was to Kirk Biglione at his home in Barrington. He could have called Biglione’s cell, but Jeff wanted to make sure his number showed up on Biglione’s home phone records,
something easily subpoenaed, and wanted to make sure it showed up within minutes of Fat Monte’s death. Plus, there was a good chance Biglione’s phone calls were monitored, if not actively, at least passively, just like everyone else’s in the FBI. It was a fucked-up thing to do, Jeff realized even as he was dialing Biglione’s number, but if there was one thing Jeff Hopper knew, it was that the FBI would happily bury him alive. He needed to make sure he had a way to breathe underground.
“Who is this?” Biglione asked when he came to the phone.
“It’s Jeff Hopper,” Jeff said. “I wanted you to know that Fat Monte Moretti just killed himself.”
“What? How do you know this?” Biglione was just coming awake, and Jeff could hear the slow dawning of recognition in his voice. “Who is this?”
“It’s Special Agent Jeff Hopper,” Jeff said, “reporting to you that I was just speaking with Fat Monte Moretti on the telephone when he shot himself. It sounded like a .357, but I could be wrong. You’ll need to check ballistics. I suspect he killed his wife, too.” Jeff could hear Biglione’s breathing. It sounded somewhat labored, so Jeff continued. “I was with him earlier this evening, at a bar called the Four Treys in Roscoe Village, where he essentially admitted to killing Paul Bruno, not that I expect you care about someone as insignificant as him, not with Sal Cupertine allowed to run free. About that, incidentally. Fat Monte confirmed for me Sal Cupertine’s body was not disposed of in the landfill, and that, in fact, there were two bodies placed there, namely, uh, let me see here, one Neal Moretti and one Chema Espinoza. Seems like we found Espinoza but not Neal. Somewhere at the bottom of the landfill is another body.”
“Hopper,” Biglione said, “I’m going to hang up.”
“Also,” Jeff said, “I might have beat this information out of him. When you get his body, if there’s not a hole in the middle of his face, you’ll probably want to know how his nose got broken. That was me. I did that.”
“Hopper,” Biglione said again. This time it sounded more like a plea. “I’m hanging up. Do you understand? I’m hanging up.”
“One more thing then,” Jeff said. “Fat Monte indicated to me that Kochel Farms is somehow related to Sal Cupertine’s disappearance and that we should begin investigating them in earnest.”
“You’re fired,” Biglione said.
“I know,” Jeff said, “so I’m going to go ahead and call some friends at the Tribune and see if they might like this information.”
“We have an investigation, Agent Hopper,” Biglione said. His voice was oddly calm now, and then Jeff remembered he used to do hostage negotiation back in the day, that he’d risen up in the ranks quickly after managing to get some lunatic in a Memphis bank to let twenty-two hostages go without anyone getting hurt. “If the Family finds out we’re still investigating Sal Cupertine, it has the potential to ruin nearly a decade of work. You know that. And if the Family knows we’re looking for Sal Cupertine, it will make it that much harder to find him. You know that.”
Of course Jeff knew that. This was all for the public—and private—record, Biglione likely coming to the same realization Jeff had in making the phone call in the first place. Asses needed to be covered.
“See, that’s the problem, Kirk,” Jeff said. “You’re not looking for Sal Cupertine. No one is. Or was. But I have been. And do you want to know what I’ve found out? Or do you just want to read about it in the paper?” Biglione didn’t respond, but Jeff’s call waiting beeped. He pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the display—it was Biglione’s cell phone. Jeff didn’t bother to click over and instead just hung up. He’d expressed what needed to be expressed. They both knew he wasn’t going to call the Tribune. At least not yet.
It was 4:42 in the morning, sunrise not for another two hours at least, when Jeff got into his Explorer and headed along the snow-packed streets of Chicago toward Matthew Drew’s apartment building. It was one of the first times having a four-wheel drive SUV in the city actually made any practical sense, one of the few things that morning that did. As he drove, he tried to take stock of where the last several months had taken him. Had he committed any crimes? No, he had not. Had he done anything morally reprehensible?
He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. He was sure he had. He’d caused another human being to kill himself. It didn’t matter that Fat Monte was a criminal. Jeff had to hope Fat Monte hadn’t shot his wife. He slammed his hand again. What was he thinking? What the fuck was he thinking? An innocent woman was probably dead because he got it in his mind that he was going to do the right thing, that he was going to catch Sal Cupertine, who murdered four innocent men.
But, no. That wasn’t true. Those four men weren’t innocent. Those four men had taken part in a sting. For three of them, it was their job to be put in that situation. For the fourth, it was a result of getting caught being a criminal. No one was exactly innocent in that situation. It was a point Jeff had started to believe—an implied risk of doing this business was that they might very well die. The fault didn’t rest with Jeff for leaving his name on the bill. And the fault hardly even rested with Sal Cupertine, when you really thought about it. No, he’d tried to convince himself, the fault resided in the implicit rules of the game. People die doing illegal things.
It took Jeff nearly thirty minutes to make the ten-minute drive to Matthew’s building, and by the time he got there, he realized what a bad idea it would be for all involved if he was found on the apartment’s closed-circuit security cameras, so he continued up the street to the White Palace and called Matthew’s cell from the pay phone inside.
“What time is it?” Matthew asked when he answered.
“A little after five,” Jeff said. “Do you know who this is?”
“No one calls me but you,” he said, already catching on and not saying Jeff’s name. Not that Jeff thought Matthew’s cell phone was tapped, but you never knew. Matthew cleared his throat. “What’s the problem?”
“Fat Monte is dead,” Jeff said.
“Did you kill him?”
It was a reasonable question. “No,” Jeff said.
“Did I?”
“Not unless you forced him to shoot himself in the head.”
Matthew didn’t respond for a long while, and then, when he did, all he said was, “Where are you?”
“The White Palace.”
“I’ll need to get a cab. My car is under three feet of snow.”
“No,” Jeff said, “wait, listen. You need to pack some clothes and get out of town for a few weeks. Your sister, too.”
“That’s not going to work,” he said. “My sister can’t just leave school. Do you hear what you’re saying? Jesus. What’s going on?”
Jeff told him what Fat Monte had said, told him about the phone call Jeff made to Biglione, told him that maybe Fat Monte’s wife was gone, too. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Jeff said. “We could all be in danger if the Family decides to make a move.”
“Give me thirty minutes to get my sister up and fill her in,” Matthew said. “Order me a shake.” Before Jeff could protest again, the phone was dead. Jeff made his way to a table and sat down. When the waitress came by, he asked her for a chocolate shake and if she might have a piece of paper and a manila envelope somewhere in the place that he could borrow. The waitress looked at him strangely, but it couldn’t have been the most outrageous request anyone had made of her, particularly since she had a tattoo on her throat that said Robert and one on the back of her hand that said Fuck All Men.
The waitress came back a few moments later with the shake, a padded mailer, and a piece of college-ruled paper. “The manager says I have to charge you for the envelope,” she said.
“Okay,” Jeff said.
“You look familiar to me.”
“I used to come here a lot,” Jeff said.
She cocked her head. “Are you a cop?”
“FBI,” he said, for what would be the last time in his life.
“Are you
allowed to say that? Isn’t that supposed to be a secret?”
“Nope,” Jeff said. “That’s the CIA.”
“You all look alike, I guess,” she said. “Enjoy your envelope.”
Jeff took his car keys and cell phone out of his pocket and shoved them into the envelope, then scrawled a note to Matthew:
My truck is parked behind the restaurant. Take it. Pack your stuff up and be out of town before the morning news, if at all possible. Only use my phone. The charger is in the glove box. I’ll call you tonight. Get out of Illinois. Tell your sister I’m sorry and that she’ll be home in a week.
Jeff looked over the note, tried to decide if it was absurd or cautionary or just honest. It didn’t matter in the long run, Jeff supposed, since what was most important here was that Matthew and Nina be safe, but also that the FBI had no ability to scapegoat Matthew. This was weight Jeff was willing to carry, and he had a plan.
He gathered up his heavy winter coat and gloves and walked to the cash register, where he waved the waitress over and handed her the envelope. “In a couple of minutes, another FBI agent is going to walk in here with a young woman. Give him this envelope,” he said. “And the shake, too. That’s for him.”
“Am I on some hidden camera show?” the waitress asked.
Jeff looked around the White Palace. There was a camera above the register, another over the door, most likely a few around the outside of the building, too, everyone and everything captured, just in case anyone wanted to take a look. “Probably,” Jeff said.
He walked out of the White Palace then and stood on the corner of Canal Street and Roosevelt. The FBI’s offices were just two miles away down Roosevelt, a good twenty-minute walk in perfect weather, probably an hour through the snow-drifts that lined the street. Just enough time to get everything straight, so that when he stepped foot back inside the bureau, he’d know exactly what kind of deal he was willing to take.