Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  “Safe enough,” Sal said.

  “You in Chicago?”

  “You’d know if I was in Chicago,” Sal said.

  Ronnie laughed. “I suppose I would.”

  “You fucked up,” Sal said.

  “You think so?” Ronnie said, and then Sal heard a toilet flush.

  “I had to clean up your mess, again,” Sal said.

  “I knew you would,” Ronnie said. “It’s what you’ve always been best at. It’s why you’ve always been so valuable to me. To everyone.”

  “I don’t work for you anymore,” Sal said. “Let’s make that clear. I work for Bennie Savone.”

  “See, I heard someone dimed him out to the feds,” Ronnie said. “Seems like that strip club of his is doing some very shady things. Real shame.”

  “He’ll be out in thirty days,” Sal said, though he didn’t believe that. “Maybe less.”

  “Could be someone dimes him out again,” Ronnie said. “Could be every few months, the feds learn something else about your boss. Could be they eventually start looking into that Jew business, too, because I know I’ve been looking at my business model, and while cars and drugs are lucrative, they’re nothing compared to God and death. Now that’s a long-range business. Could be you need some protection out there now that fed charges are sitting on your boss. Could be I make sure the fed’s phone doesn’t ring for a while.”

  “Snitching on yourself,” Sal said. “Where’d you learn that?”

  “You don’t stay in this business for as long as I have without learning a few tricks,” Ronnie said. “Sometimes, it’s just easier to have the feds take care of my problems. Could be you’ve learned that yourself these last couple days.”

  “Could be,” Sal said, “you get into your car one morning and I’m in the backseat.”

  “And then what? I’m dead. So what? I’m dead. Your best-case scenario still involves the gas chamber, if you’re lucky. We might as well enjoy our time together, you and me.”

  “How much?” Sal said.

  “Your boss, he’s got quite the scam out there,” he said. “Do you know what he charges just to bury a body? I can get some Mexican to dig a hole for a whole lot less.”

  “How much?” Sal said again.

  “I can’t tell you how much until I get a look at your books,” Ronnie said, “and I’m not planning on making a trip to Las Vegas anytime soon. Probably wouldn’t look good, you know? So why don’t we just agree that I’m in on this now. Full partner. You’re my guy in Las Vegas.”

  There it was. He’d known it already, of course, but he wanted to hear it, wanted Ronnie to admit it.

  “I’m not your guy,” Sal said. “I’m your cousin. We’re family.”

  “Of course we are,” Ronnie said.

  “Just like you and my father, right?” Sal said.

  “That what this is? You want to talk about your daddy? Fine. But I charge a copay for that.” Ronnie laughed. “Isn’t this what you always wanted, Sal? You’re the big man now.”

  “No,” Sal said, “I’m a dead man. But you know something? I’m not gonna be dead for long. And when the FBI realizes that, and they will, Ronnie, and soon, you’re gonna wish you were, too. As long as they know I’m alive, you belong to me. Because you know what, Ronnie? I know where all the bodies are. Every single one of them. And they all belong to you.”

  Sal hung up before Ronnie could respond, took a few sips of his Johnnie Walker, and made his second and final call of the evening, this time to the Chicago Tribune. He’d need to make it quick, since he still needed to get a cab to the airport, boost a car from the long-term parking lot, and then drive back to Las Vegas in time for his 2 p.m. meeting with Barbara Altman, Camille Lawerence, and Phyllis Gabler to talk about the teen fashion show they wanted to do at the temple come spring. Maybe, in a month or two, he’d see about getting an assistant rabbi, someone he could train, since the temple really needed two rabbis if they wanted to get business done. There was the book fair coming up, the opening of the new school, the never-ending brisses, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs . . . and then there was the business Sal knew Rabbi Cohen would need to make sure didn’t lag while Bennie was away . . . and maybe he’d need to get creative with that, too, maybe periodically make some business locally . . . could be the other six temples in town could face some tragedies in the coming year. Who could say when Temple Beth Zion might have an electrical fire? Or when one of the conservative shuls might lose a rabbi to some kind of blood poisoning? And who was to say that the cemetery needed to remain Jewish only? Yes, those were all possibilities to consider, and like that, as the phone began to ring, Sal Cupertine could see miles and miles of empty desert turning into roads paved toward his wife, Jennifer, and his son, William. Ronnie would remain a problem, so he’d need to keep Jennifer and William safe, somehow, but that was the next step. For now, he just had to set the ball rolling.

  “Tribune City Desk, this is Tom.”

  “Tom,” Sal said, “my name is Jeff Hopper, and I have some information concerning the murders that took place last year at the Parker House that I need to discuss with someone.”

  EPILOGUE

  March 1999

  Jennifer Cupertine sat outside the Artists Café on Michigan Avenue and tried to make sense of the front page of the Chicago Tribune. She’d stopped in for lunch after spending the last three hours down the block at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, where she’d been employed part-time for the last two months, combing through a huge box of photos taken in the early 1900s in France that consisted mostly of people not looking at the camera, still lifes of various breads, and very little else of artistic or historical merit. It was like that sometimes, which was fine. It was solitary yet concentrated work, which kept her from drifting too far in her mind to other, more upsetting things. Like her missing husband—who the FBI had helpfully informed her recently was probably still dead, but was not the ashes they’d given her the year previous, which apparently belonged to someone named Chema Espinoza, a fact every local news station was having an absolute field day with—but also the more pressing issues like the light bill, like the price of new clothes for William, or that she didn’t know what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

  But it was hard to avoid the headline that screamed from the bottom of the front page of the paper she’d purchased to keep her and her chicken salad sandwich company:

  REMAINS CONFIRMED TO BE EX-FBI AGENT

  The badly decomposed severed head discovered last week in a trash bin along Ontario St. has been identified through dental records as Jeffrey Hopper, 45, the former senior special agent in charge of the city’s FBI Organized Crime Task Force. Hopper was first reported missing shortly after contacting this paper in February regarding the federal cover-up concerning the murder of three federal agents and a suspected confidential informant allegedly perpetrated last April by Family associate Sal “the Rain Main” Cupertine. Hopper alleged that the FBI, under the direction of Senior Special Agent Kirk Biglione, had willingly led authorities (and family members) to believe Mr. Cupertine had been found dead in the Poyter Landfill on or about April 17, 1998, when, in fact, the body discovered in the landfill belonged to Jose Maria “Chema” Espinoza, a reputed foot soldier in the Gangster 2-6. Cupertine has subsequently been at large despite direct evidence linking him to the April 1998 murders, as well as possibly two dozen additional murders dating back as far as the mid-1980s . . .

  It was easier on Jennifer to think there was a good chance Sal was dead, even if she didn’t choose to believe it was true. She could fool herself that way, could entertain the idea of moving on with her life, but now that wasn’t possible, not with Special Agent Hopper dead. Because if that man was dead, it surely meant her husband was alive.

  Jennifer felt sorry for Special Agent Hopper. He seemed like a nice man. That he was dead now didn’t give Jennifer any joy, though she did wonder what had become of his partner . . . was he decomposing somewhere, too? Or
was he still out there, looking for her husband? Had Sal done it? Was Sal in Chicago? It didn’t seem plausible to her, not with the amount of pressure the authorities had been putting on Ronnie and the rest of the boys since Hopper’s story had hit the front page the month previous. It all sounded absurd, the stories she’d heard . . . that Sal had been smuggled out in a frozen meat truck . . . that Ronnie had gotten rid of anyone who knew anything . . . and now it wasn’t so much about whatever the Family’s role in this had been as much as it was the FBI’s cover-up, and just what they were hiding besides the identification of bodies they’d turned up. But wasn’t that what Special Agent Hopper told her all those months ago? That it was bad PR?

  Jennifer set the paper down and looked out to the street. It was sunny for the first time in weeks, and though the air was still cool, the people walking along Michigan Avenue had taken off their heavy coats in favor of light sweaters. It would be overcast again tomorrow, she knew, would probably snow again sometime before April, but today was one of those afternoons when Chicago was perfect, the kind of day she and Sal would spend in the backyard with William, doing yard work, raking leaves, tinkering with the sprinklers, complaining about how crappy their rain gutters were, neither of them ever really willing to climb up on a ladder to clean them out, much easier just to bitch about it. William hardly even talked about his father anymore, and maybe that was better, too.

  What frightened Jennifer, however, was how much the child had begun to remind her of Sal. It was just little things—the way he tended to curl his thumb into his fist when he felt nervous or worried, the bits of green that were showing up in his eyes, how sensitive he was, how meticulous, how singular his focus could be—but Jennifer knew she needed to find him role models that weren’t criminals. Maybe that would mean she’d need to start dating. Maybe that would mean she’d need to sell the house and move, just like Special Agent Hopper had suggested. Maybe it meant she needed to watch William more closely, make sure he knew that his father was not a good man but was a good husband and father, a distinction that she’d only just started to make herself, but which she wouldn’t allow to happen to her son.

  She could not lose them both.

  Jennifer finished her sandwich, paid her bill, and headed back toward the museum. Yes, she would make some changes, she had to, that’s all there was to it. But she would stay in Chicago, if for no other reason than days like today, when everything seemed to remind her of how good it used to be, how even the wind blowing through her hair reminded her of Sal, reminded her of how he used to tuck her hair behind her ear when they were facing each other in bed, which she hated, but which she wished she could feel just one more time.

  Jennifer Cupertine was headed up Michigan Avenue, back toward the museum, when she came across a large, black-and-gold RV parked near the corner of Harrison, taking up three parking meters. Two black men sat outside in folding chairs right in the middle of the sidewalk, like they were having a picnic. As she got closer, she noticed they had a little portable grill out with them too, which one of the men was trying to ignite, no easy task with the wind.

  “Beautiful day,” one of the men said when Jennifer got close. He was the older of the two, with a long gray beard, glasses, nice shoes. The other man was too busy with the grill to even look up.

  “Yes,” Jennifer said. She didn’t know why she responded to the man. She never spoke to strangers on the street, or anywhere, for that matter, and she immediately regretted it when Gray Beard stood up and blocked her path. She stuck her hand inside her purse, where she kept one of Sal’s old guns now, because she didn’t know who might come for her some day, too. Not that she knew how to use it. And not that she’d probably need it at this moment, considering there were hundreds of people walking around her, though Jennifer tended to always feel alone in crowds these days, as if she were the one person no one could see.

  Gray Beard smiled at her, though, and for some reason that put her at ease. “It’s polite to stand up when a pretty woman walks into your house,” he said, and then he stepped out of her way. “You have a nice day, now,” he said.

  “I will,” she said, and she conjured her own smile. It came hard, but there was something oddly comforting about common kindness.

  Jennifer made her way across the street and into the museum. Her little cubicle—which she shared with a graduate student from Columbia College named Stacy, whom she never actually saw, since they worked opposite days—was up the stairs from the first-floor exhibit hall, inside a tiny administrative space that also included a broken photocopier and a minifridge. She set her purse down and then noticed a thick manila envelope on her chair, her name printed on it in thick block letters. There was no postage on the envelope, no note indicating who it was from, no “handle with care” stamp, which was pretty much what every package sent to her attention at the museum came affixed with.

  Odd.

  The envelope was sealed with so much duct tape that it took Jennifer a good thirty seconds to cut across the top with her crappy scissors—the museum made a point of stocking dull scissors, in Jennifer’s opinion, to avoid the accidental cutting of precious items—and dumped the contents on her desk.

  Or at least attempted to, since the banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills inside the envelope wouldn’t budge through the little opening she’d made.

  “Jesus,” she said. She reached into the envelope and started pulling the stacks out. One, two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven in all. “Jesus,” she said again. At the bottom of the envelope was a single piece of paper, folded once, lengthwise. And there, in her husband’s precise cursive, was a note:

  I will send more when I can. I love you and William. I always have and I always will.

  Jennifer shoved the money into her purse, grabbed the manila envelope, and then ran out to the information desk at the front of the exhibition hall, where another graduate student—this one named Chad—sat reading a textbook.

  “Did you put this envelope on my desk?” Jennifer asked. She tried her best to sound calm, but waving the envelope like a crazy person probably wasn’t helping.

  “No,” Chad said, “I put it on your chair. The guy who dropped it off said he wanted to make sure you didn’t miss it.”

  “Right,” Jennifer said, “right.” She tried to breathe. Tried to feel her fingers. Tried to concentrate on not drawing any attention to herself, in case anyone was watching. “The man. What did he look like?”

  “Just some delivery guy,” Chad said with a shrug. “Black guy with a gray ZZ Top beard.”

  “When?”

  “Right after you went to lunch. Are you okay? You look sick.”

  “Chicken salad,” Jennifer said, already pushing her way through the museum’s double doors back out onto Michigan Avenue. She ran halfway down the block toward Harrison, though she could plainly see the RV was already gone. She knew it would be, knew her husband wasn’t sitting inside watching her walk by, knew that the man with the gray beard was just a messenger, but she wanted to be near someone Sal had been near, wanted to tell that man with the gray beard to deliver a message back to her husband: that she would wait, that she would be right here waiting, for as long as it took . . . and to never send money, ever again. That she didn’t want it. That she would rather be destitute than take one more dime that came with another man’s blood on it.

  Never again, Jennifer Cupertine thought as she turned and walked slowly back to the museum, aware suddenly of the weight seventy thousand dollars and a gun made in her purse, after this one time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’ve been blessed by the help of so many people during the years I wrote this book: Dan Smetanka, editor extraordinaire, should have received hazard pay for the work he did on this novel—I am so grateful for his careful, inspired, and insightful notes, thoughts, deletions, additions, strong-arm tactics, and hour-long phone calls to keep me off the ledge. Likewise, I’m so thankful for the steady hands of my agents Jennie Du
nham, who has been by my side since the start and who always provides wise counsel, firm editorial advice, and just the right amount of forceful intervention, and Judi Farkas, who has navigated so many rough seas for me she should probably have her own boat by now.

  This novel came out of a short story entitled “Mitzvah” that I wrote for Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce. I owe both Jarret and Todd a huge amount of gratitude for knowing that I could come up with something dark and violent about Summerlin. I don’t know if any of these characters would exist if I hadn’t been asked to write that story, so I thank you both for including me in your book. And thank you to Stacy Bierlein for her astute editing of the story when it appeared in Other Resort Cities, a line change that opened up an entire novel in its wake.

  Mark Haskell Smith, for his great notes and his continued moral and ethical support; Gina Frangello, for her help with all things Chicago and life; Daniel Krugman, for answering all of my odd questions about funerals and undertaking; Geoff Schumacher, my former editor at a variety of defunct Las Vegas newspapers, for his excellent book Sun, Sin, and Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas, which was an invaluable resource; Vitaly Sigal for his insight into Russian Jews, criminals, and criminal defense; the poor rabbis who responded to my tortured metaphorical and existential queries on AskMoses.com in the middle of the night (really, they are there all night long); Ross Angelella, for his middle-of-the-night support and wisdom, and for giving me a better title; Carl Beverly and Sarah Timberman for believing in the idea long before it became a novel; my siblings, Lee Goldberg, Karen Dinino, and Linda Woods, who travel this same path as I do, and whose unending support means the world to me; Agam Patel, my partner in crime at the University of California, Riverside, who everyone thinks knows how to bury a body, but who actually knows how to keep one upright; all my talented and smart colleagues at UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA, whose tremendous work inspires me, and all my students, whose promise and dedication embolden my spirit; Rider Strong and Julia Pistell, my Literary Disco partners and dear friends, who are also my de facto literary therapists twice a month; Mechtild Dunofsky, for sanity, and her insight into the motivations of people. Mikayla Butchart, for catching all my mistakes—there are few things more valuable on the planet than a copyeditor.