by Tod Goldberg
“Nintendo,” Nicholas said, “and G.I. Joe and five games and popcorn.”
“Was that the last time you saw him?”
Nicholas nodded once.
“Can you tell me what your daddy looks like?”
“He’s big!” Nicholas said.
“Bigger than me?”
“Bigger than everybody!”
“Taller than me and bigger than Santa?” Jeff said, and he stood up and pushed out his belly.
“Bigger than Santa!” Nicholas said.
“Is your daddy’s name . . .” Jeff paused, tried to decide if this was what he really wanted to do to this kid, if this was what he wanted to do to Tina Kochel, if this was what he wanted to give the FBI. Could Fat Monte be this kid’s father?
“Lucy is in heaven, too,” Nicholas said before Jeff could finish his sentence.
“Who is Lucy?”
“My cat,” Nicholas said.
Poremba tapped Jeff on the shoulder once. Jeff turned and saw that Tina was only about thirty feet away now. She was smoking a cigarette and had a small backpack shaped like a tiger slung over one arm. She was pretty, Jeff decided, but not overly so. Her hair was blonde—a dye job, Jeff guessed, since her kid had reddish-brown hair—and she was skinny, with long legs. What did Jeff know about Tina? Nothing, really. Just that she lived and went to college in Springfield. But she was twenty-five. Shouldn’t she have been out of school by now?
“Were you good?” Tina asked Nicholas when she got to the porch.
“He was,” Jeff said. “He told us all about his father.”
Jeff watched the color drain from Tina’s cheeks, which was quite a feat, since it was freezing outside, and her face was flushed red from the wind. “He doesn’t know his father,” she said.
“No?” Jeff said.
“I don’t know who his father is, either, if you have to know,” she said. “And I’m sorry, how is this any of your business?”
“He volunteered the information,” Poremba said. There was nonchalance in his voice that Jeff found oddly comforting. He liked that Poremba understood what was at stake here, too, without anything being spoken.
“He said his father was dead,” Jeff said. “That seems like a strange thing for a kid to say, don’t you think?”
“That’s what I’ve told him,” she said. She reached down and took Nicholas’s hand and started to make her way inside.
“Wait,” Poremba said, and Tina did. He lifted his chin at Jeff. “He has a few other questions for you.”
How could Tina Kochel have any connection to Fat Monte? Jeff had about two minutes to figure this out before it became obvious he was fishing.
“Where do you work?” Jeff asked.
“Why?”
“Because I’m asking you. I know you’re a student at the university in Springfield. Now I just need to know where you work. You can either tell me, or I can just run your social. It’s up to you how much you want to cooperate. What kind of example you want to set.”
Tina looked down at her son and sighed. “The Kitten Club,” she said.
“That a strip joint?” Jeff said.
“I’ve been trying to pay for school, okay? I don’t want to be a farmer, so here I am.”
“What are you majoring in?”
“Social work,” she said.
“Okay,” Jeff said. “Who watches your son when you’re dancing?”
“I bring him here some nights,” she said. “Some nights a girlfriend watches him. Are we done?”
“Your family know about the dancing?” Jeff asked.
“No,” she said. “They think I’m bartending. I’d like to keep it that way, okay?”
“Sure.” He smiled at her. “Your son is very sweet. You must be very proud of him.”
“Are we done?” she said again.
“Sure.” Jeff reached over and opened the front door, and Tina and Nicholas started back inside, where the marshals and Agent Biglione were going through the house, room to room, looking for evidence Jeff was pretty sure they weren’t going to find.
Special Agent Lee Poremba stood beside Jeff and watched Tina and Nicholas disappear as the door closed.
“Who runs the Kitten Club?” Poremba asked.
“Last I knew, a guy named Timo Floccari,” Jeff said. “If he’s not dead, he’s in prison by now and will soon be dead. If he’s alive, you might want to get him into protective custody, wherever he is.”
“Soldier?”
“Yep,” Jeff said. “Moved oxycodone for Fat Monte.”
Poremba looked at his watch. “Why don’t you get a ride back in the paddy wagon. We’re going to be here a while.”
“Okay,” Jeff said.
They were both silent for a few moments, Jeff working out the math of it all, trying to figure out what Poremba’s move would be.
“I can give you a week. Ten days at the longest,” Poremba said. “And then I’m going to need to act on this. What do you need from me?”
“A shipping manifest for all the trucks that left here the night of the killings,” Jeff said. “And then any payload transitions those trucks made. I want to know where every single piece of meat this farm shipped out that day ended up. Someone saw something.”
“What else?”
“That kid,” Jeff said, “doesn’t need to know his father was a gangster.”
“That’s out of my hands,” Poremba said.
“His birth certificate is probably clean,” Jeff said. “It can stay that way.” Poremba didn’t say anything, so Jeff continued. “Get a deal for the girl,” Jeff said. “You can do that.”
“I’ll try,” Poremba said. “You get Cupertine, you can probably dictate all the terms.”
“Then I guess that’s what I’ll do,” Jeff said. He measured his next words out in his head before he said them, certain he needed to know the answer. “Why are you doing this for me?”
“What happened with those men at the Parker House,” Poremba said, “that could have happened to any of us. It was a clerical error.”
“It was my error,” Jeff said.
“Are you in charge of the accounts payable section of the FBI now? Come on.”
“As soon as I knew it was Sal Cupertine they were meeting with, I should have known to call it off. The only reason the Family would send Sal Cupertine anywhere, in broad daylight, would be to have him blow up. That’s on me. That will always be on me.”
“You can’t think like that,” Poremba said.
“Yeah,” Jeff said, “my therapists have said the same thing.”
This made Special Agent Lee Poremba laugh. Jeff was pretty sure it was the first time he’d ever seen the man show any emotion other than basic placidity and occasional irritation. “Did I catch a plural there?” he asked.
“It’s been a hell of a year.”
“A week,” Poremba said. They shook hands, and Poremba went back inside, an agreement sealed.
It took Jeff another hour, sitting in the back of the paddy wagon, before he had reliable enough cell service to call Matthew in Walla Walla. “Pack your bag,” Jeff said after filling him in on the details.
“Where am I going?” Matthew asked.
Jeff looked out the window of the paddy wagon. To the east, he could see nothing but fields of white, to the west, the same thing. Where would they ship Sal Cupertine? Where could a man like him, the most proficient killer the Family had ever employed, be comfortable? Where would they send him where they knew he couldn’t just come back, kill them all, grab his wife and kid, and run away? Somewhere they had a connection, where they weren’t competing for the same dollars. Far enough away that he’d need to fly home, most likely, since the Family wouldn’t risk the idea that Sal Cupertine might decide to sneak out of wherever he was living at midnight and show up on their doorstep at 6 a.m. with a pipe bomb. That ruled out Detroit, Cleveland, and Nashville.
If the Family had really sold Sal Cupertine, as Bruno had suggested, the only likely trading p
artners were families who had the capital to spend and the ability to keep Cupertine either confined or busy or both. Where did the Chicago Family still have pull? They were getting pushed out of Miami by the New York families, none of whom needed help. They still had connections in Las Vegas and Reno, for sure, and in Los Angeles, where they had tendrils in pornography, strip clubs, and some of the entertainment unions, as well as in the burgeoning Indian casinos that dotted the desert outside Palm Springs, where regulation was difficult to manage in light of the Indians’ sovereign status. Nothing to speak of in San Francisco, where the organized crime element had shifted to the Russians and Asians.
Palm Springs was a possibility, but Jeff didn’t see that sticking for long, not with the corporations taking over all the golf courses and resorts, leaving the Italians with the restaurants and clubs, but that was little more than skim money, and the gambling money was a split, if that, with the Indians. The cartels and Mexican Mafia coming up with the cheap cocaine and weed had pretty much everything from the border up into L.A. locked down, drug-wise.
The Family’s union juice in L.A. couldn’t last much longer, either. Their best shot for long-term survival was in their bankrolling of skin flicks, provided they could keep AIDS under control, not that Jeff thought the Family was likely to run a clean shop.
Las Vegas was an open city, but they still had some historical allegiances to Chicago, even with Splitoro dead and Angelini doing time. But on the whole, Las Vegas was weak, unconnected guys working the streets and talking like they were big guns but who were really just idiots at cell phone stores trying to act tough. All the big business in Las Vegas was being run through the strip clubs, though Jeff didn’t see that as a place Sal Cupertine could exist in. What was he doing? Working as a DJ? Chatting up the drunks? Working the door in a tuxedo, shaking down bachelor parties? That wasn’t Cupertine’s scene. There hadn’t been a significant mob hit in Las Vegas since Herbie Blitzstein got his in 1997, and it took four guys from Buffalo and L.A. to do the job. Cupertine wouldn’t work like that. It had to be a small outfit, not too flashy. The sort that needed a middle manager who could also do some contract work. Someone who knew about the Rain Man and saw the potential he possessed.
An outfit, too, that just so happened to need a lot of frozen meat. The manifests would be key. This was going to take some finessing, and they didn’t have much time. He wanted Sal Cupertine alive.
“Somewhere warm,” Jeff said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dr. Larry Kirsch kept a busy schedule. First thing in the morning, he’d leave the Meadows at Sahara, his exclusive guard-gated McMansion development in Summerlin, and get to his practice on the corner of Harmon and Eastern twenty minutes later, do a couple boob jobs before lunch, maybe work on a tummy tuck or a rhinoplasty, and then he’d usually head over to Piero’s for a bite. Some days he’d follow up Piero’s with a beer at Champagnes, the kind of bar where no one knew your name, and then he’d make a round up the street at Desert Springs Hospital to see any of his surgical patients. He’d come back to his office around three, do some Botox and chemical peels, close the day with a face-lift, followed by a lap dance at the Olympic Gardens or Cheetahs, never the Wild Horse.
Sometimes he paid a girl to go out to his car and jerk him off in the parking lot, sometimes he’d just do it himself.
Then he’d spend an hour or two at his ex-wife’s house helping his eleven-year-old son with his homework, grab a burger from Sonic, and then head back to the Meadows at Sahara. Kirsch’s ex and kid had a house in the Scotch 80s, an old Las Vegas neighborhood where mobsters and city officials used to live next door to one another without the need for any kind of gates. If someone was going to kill you, they’d just drag you outside, shoot you in the face, and then bury you in your own backyard.
It wasn’t that easy anymore, unfortunately. David watched the doctor for almost two weeks trying to figure out the best time and place to kill him, but the asshole was never alone. Plus, everywhere he went had cameras and people, and David, for the first time in his life, needed to leave a little bit of a mess.
So, on the morning of the Super Bowl, David called Dr. Kirsch’s cell.
“This is a friend of Bennie Savone’s,” David said when Kirsch answered.
“Oh, okay,” Dr. Kirsch said. “Any friend of Bennie’s is a friend of mine.”
“Right,” David said. “We need some work done tonight.”
“This work,” Dr. Kirsch said, “does it require immediate medical attention?” He lowered his voice. “Is it a bullet wound?”
“Minor procedure,” David said. “No nurses or anything.”
“Of course, of course, I understand,” Dr. Kirsch said. “It’s just that I have plans tonight. It’s the Super Bowl, as I’m sure you’re aware, and . . .”
“You’re either at your office at 7 p.m.,” David said, “or the Review-Journal gets a stack of pictures of you whacking off in public.”
Silence.
“When all of your security cameras are off,” David said, “pop your office door open, the one facing Harmon. Any questions?”
“No,” Dr. Kirsch said.
“If you’re even two minutes late,” David said, “your ex-wife gets the pictures, too.”
“This isn’t how Mr. Savone usually speaks to me,” Dr. Kirsch said.
“This isn’t Mr. Savone,” David said, then he dumped his burner cell into his portable foundry—an expense that was already paying for itself—and took an inventory, made sure he was prepared.
Rubber gloves.
Wet-Naps.
Knife.
He’d even made himself a silencer for this job, something he was generally adverse to, since it spoke to a kind of weakness. But the difference between killing someone in Chicago and killing someone in Las Vegas came down to simple acoustics: Chicago was loud, between the L and all the traffic and the howling wind and the sound of about three million people going about their daily lives. In Las Vegas, though, once you got off the Strip, everything fell quiet, the desert surrounding the city a valley of echoes.
He didn’t have much choice about guns, so he’d taken a nine from the cache in Slim Joe’s closet, filed off the serial number, and cleaned it meticulously, though he didn’t bother to wrap the handle with duct tape, since that just made it more likely he’d trap a finger print. And he was going to melt the gun anyway. He’d have a cab take him to Desert Springs and then he’d walk the mile to Kirsch’s office and wait for him.
If everything went according to plan, he’d be home in time to prepare sufficiently for the Monday morning minyan. If it turned upside down, someone else would be making prayers.
At sixty forty-five, David watched from across the street as Dr. Kirsch parked his green Jaguar in his personalized space—there was no bigger honor in Las Vegas than having your name painted on pavement; even the temple sold spaces for seven hundred and fifty bucks a month—and headed inside through his private office door. Fifteen minutes later, he stepped outside, looked both ways, and then propped his door open.
When David walked in, Dr. Kirsch was sitting behind the desk in his office, a wall-to-wall mahogany affair lined with bookshelves filled with framed photos of the doctor with various celebrities. Danny Gans. Wayne Newton. The captain of The Love Boat. The guy who played Dan Tanna on Vega$. A white tiger. That one was signed.
Dr. Kirsch didn’t seem surprised to see David, even though he said, “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”
“You’ve never seen me,” David said.
“Right, you’re right, no,” Dr. Kirsch said. He looked over David’s shoulder. “Is Mr. Savone here?”
“No,” David said. “I’m alone. You want to close your blinds?”
“Yes, right,” Dr. Kirsch got up from behind his desk and closed the matchstick bamboo blinds behind him, though David could still make out the passing lights of traffic. Didn’t anyone have decent curtains anymore? “The man who called said there was something
minor to be done,” Dr. Kirsch said. “Are you having some issue with your skin? That area around your ears was difficult.”
“Yes,” David said. “My cheeks don’t move right. And I’ve got a lot of jaw pain.” Which was true. If he clenched his teeth too hard, it was like getting a nail through the eye.
“Any bleeding?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” David said. “But I can taste blood in the back of my mouth sometimes.”
“Okay then,” Dr. Kirsch said, “let’s check it out.” He walked David out of his office and down a long hallway lined with photos of showgirls, models, and a lady who did the weather Saturday nights on Channel 8. He stopped and unlocked an exam room. “Lay down on the exam bed, and I’ll take a look, Rabbi.”
David saw the doctor give an inadvertent twitch, like he’d been shocked, which he probably had been at his own stupidity for addressing a man he’d supposedly never met. He began to turn around, which was a mistake, since he ended up getting half his face blown off when David shot him.
Dr. Kirsch dropped to the ground, his jaw and most of his nose completely gone, but he was still alive, twitching on the tile, half of his face splattered all around him.
The upside of this, David considered, was that now it really wouldn’t look like a professional job, which had been the point all along. He’d planned on shooting the doctor in the neck, the kind of thing people who aren’t used to killing ended up doing all the time, and if the doctor didn’t die instantly, he’d be dead soon enough and would never know the difference. But David had seen guys survive a face shot, even stay conscious. The human body, man, it wanted to live.
Not that it looked like Dr. Kirsch was long for this world.
David snapped on his rubber gloves and leaned over Dr. Kirsch, tried to figure out what exactly he was breathing from, since he didn’t have a mouth or much of a nose anymore, and decided just to cover what was left of his face with both hands until the twitching stopped. He could shoot him again, but he didn’t want to have to dig a slug out of his head. Thirty seconds, tops. If that. The guy was probably already comatose.
David pressed his hands over the gaping maw in the center of Dr. Kirsch’s face, but all that seemed to do was help staunch the flow of blood, which was the exact opposite of the point. The other problem was that Dr. Kirsch seemed to be coming to. His eyes fluttered open, and his arms started swinging wildly. David didn’t know if it was adrenaline or actual fight, if the doctor was even aware of what was happening. If he knew that he didn’t have a face.