Gangsterland: A Novel (8 page)

“Your husband,” Jeff said, “is a hit man for the Family.”

“He’s never been arrested, do you know that?”

“Of course,” Jeff said.

“You know these people you call the ‘Family’ threw his father off of a building? So why would he work for people who did that to him?” Jennifer began to tear up, and Jeff wondered how hard it would be to live her life for one day. He didn’t try to empathize with the people he investigated, generally speaking, but then Jennifer wasn’t someone he was investigating.

“I’m not here to harass you,” Jeff said.

“The cops keep showing up whenever I go out. They don’t come here, because they probably know you guys are listening to everything, but they’ll roll up behind me when I’m out getting groceries. William, he loves it. But you know Chicago cops. They aren’t investigating anymore. The ones that stop me now, they think Sal is off somewhere going state’s evidence, so they’re here making sure I’m doing okay, asking me if I need anything, offering me money or whatever. Last guy? He came up to me at Tino’s pizza down the street, asked me what I needed, so I told him the best thing he could do would be to pay my electric bill. I was just joking, though I wonder if he did it, you know? Maybe next time I’ll ask him to get my cleaning.”

“Is that what you think?” Jeff asked. “That he turned state’s?”

“I think if I sit out here and talk to you, Ronnie will send his wife over to talk to me again.”

“Would that be why you didn’t hold a funeral?” Matthew asked.

Jennifer cocked her head and regarded Matthew with a look that Jeff thought was a mix between amusement and utter sadness. “Look at you,” she said. “Have you ever wanted for anything in your life?”

“Everyone wants something,” Matthew said, the young agent composed, cool, maybe a touch condescending, which was okay; he was FBI, after all. Then Jeff saw for the first time that Matthew had a wedding ring on his finger, and it all made some sense. He might have been a young agent, but he still had a life, still had more shit going on than Jeff, really. “It boils down to how they go about getting what they want, doesn’t it? For me, anyway.”

“Aren’t you smart, with your Brooks Brothers suit and your class ring. You think that gives you the right to talk to me like that? You’re not even old enough to valet my car.”

“Let’s take it easy,” Jeff said.

“No, to answer your question,” she said. “I didn’t have a funeral because I don’t want to believe he’s dead. Don’t want his son to believe he’s dead, either. Maybe he did turn state’s and he’s living out in Springfield or something, eating steak every night and telling you everything he knows about his cousin Ronnie’s used-car business.”

“Is that what you want?” Jeff asked.

“It’s what I hope,” she said. “It’s the best-case scenario. Otherwise I have to believe the shoe box of ashes in my hall closet is my husband, and I can’t handle that.” William came around the front of the house again on his Big Wheel, his legs pumping away on the pedals. Jennifer stood upright and watched as he spun around the car again before heading toward the backyard. “William, be careful,” she said, though it wasn’t loud enough for him to hear. It seemed almost reflexive.

“Your son has a lot of energy,” Matthew said. “My son is about his age. Never gets tired. My wife, Nina, is always looking for new ways to wear him out.”

“Get him a puppy,” Jennifer said absently. “Or a brother.”

“He’s adorable,” Matthew said.

“Right now he is,” Jennifer said. She shook her head just slightly, and then her pinkie went back into her mouth. She was only thirty-five, still a young woman, but Jeff wondered how much pressure she could take. Jeff took off his seat belt and got out of the car then, not bothering to put on his suit coat. He didn’t imagine she had a lot of allies in this world. He wanted
to put an arm around her, let her know it was going to be okay, though of course he knew it never would be. So, instead, he handed her his business card. She looked at it briefly and then stuck it in her back pocket.

“Your husband,” Jeff said, “is not in state custody, and that body? That’s not him, either.”

“You have his DNA or something?”

“No,” he said. “But I don’t need it. I know the truth.”

“What’s that?” Jennifer said.

“We’ll get a court order and DNA your son at some point, compare it to the samples we have, and then it will be a big deal in the newspapers and such. It wouldn’t be good PR to do it now. Might not even be good PR for another year.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Jennifer said. “I don’t care if you believe me.”

“I believe you,” Jeff said.

“You do?”

“You’ve got no reason to lie,” he said, though of course she did. Everyone Jeff had ever known had a good reason to lie; it’s just that those reasons rarely panned out in the long run.

Jennifer Cupertine nodded twice and then took a deep breath through her nose and let it back out slowly through her mouth, then did it again. It occurred to Jeff Hopper that he shouldn’t have come here. Not because he didn’t appreciate the small amount of information he’d received, but because he was sure that this was another bad day Jennifer Cupertine would remember for the rest of her life. Another in a series of shitty days, this one featuring Special Agent Jeff Hopper and Kid Agent Matthew Drew, the lacrosse superstar who was now in the middle of his own career suicide, or would be once he got
back to the office and was quizzed by the senior agents about what the fuck he was doing out at Sal Cupertine’s house when he was supposed to be running boxes.

“Why are you here?” Jennifer asked.

“I wanted you to know your husband was alive,” Jeff said. “And to tell you to keep away from Ronnie Cupertine and his people. They don’t have your son’s best interests, Mrs. Cupertine. This is a chance for you, for him. Make a different life. Get out of Chicago. This is your opportunity to get away from this gangster bullshit, Mrs. Cupertine.”

“No,” she said. “This house is paid for, and I’m going to stay in it until Sal comes back.”

“Sal comes back, he’s going to prison,” Jeff said. “If he’s lucky.”

“That’s fine,” she said, “but he’ll come here first, and I will be here, no matter when that is.”

“Fair enough,” Jeff said. He extended his hand toward Jennifer, and, surprisingly, she took it. “You hear from your husband, call me. I can help him.”

This made Jennifer laugh. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll be sure to do that.”

Jeff watched as Jennifer Cupertine gathered up the stray dinosaurs on her front lawn and then called for her son to put his Big Wheel away and come back inside. A simple domestic scene. And maybe what Jennifer Cupertine said was true—maybe Sal Cupertine was the most loving man on earth. It didn’t change the fact that he was also a murderer.

Something else Jennifer Cupertine said started to bother Jeff, so before she went inside, he said, “Mrs. Cupertine, just one more question.”

“What’s that, Agent Hopper?”

“How did you pay off your house?”

Jennifer Cupertine smiled. “Don’t you know?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”

“Cousin Ronnie paid it off,” she said. “An early birthday present for William.”

CHAPTER THREE

F
or the first week, Rabbi David Cohen still couldn’t open his mouth more than half an inch, just enough room to shove in a fork and do some good chewing. Soft foods mostly. Potato salad, pasta. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, as he brushed his teeth with the fancy electric toothbrush he’d picked up after Gray Beard had finished his wire excavation, David realized his mouth had regained nearly full mobility.

His jaw still hurt at the joints, which made long conversations somewhat painful, not that he and Slim Joe were having long and involved chats. David had learned that Slim Joe’s main job was working the door at the Wild Horse, a job he’d gone back to after David was allowed out the front door, and that he was nominally in charge of shaking down the pimps who brought their girls in to work the club. It was a small percentage of the two hundred or so girls who worked on a weekend night, enough to keep him in Nike tracksuits and gold chains. His other job, David had gleaned, was to provide a bit of de facto security for David. The closed-circuit TVs were in
Slim Joe’s closet, along with an armory to put up a good long siege if that came to pass.

David had also learned that Slim Joe had two big ambitions: He wanted to open up a cart on the Strip serving all kinds of different hot dogs, as well as slices of homemade pies that he envisioned his mother would be in charge of fixing. It would be open from midnight to 5 a.m. when all the drunks and tweaks were fiending and when the dancers got off shift. “I’d do it real classy,” Slim Joe told him. “None of that taco truck shit where you don’t know what kind of cheese you’re getting. I’d be cutting fresh cheeses, too, deli-style. It’ll be off the hook.”

“You need a permit for that,” David said. “You really want the state looking into you?”

“On the real?”

“What’s your other idea?”

“Bennie had me take some classes over at CCSN,” Slim Joe said. “Computers and shit. I had this idea of making a website where people would just, like, put up their thoughts every day. Like two sentences about what was on their mind. Call it Expressions, but with a
z
.”

“Why don’t you just call it Snitches?”

“Don’t be a bitch,” Slim Joe said, like they were friends.

David told Slim Joe that if he ever called him a bitch again, he and his mother would be selling hot dogs and pies in the middle of the desert from the trunk of a burnt-out Cadillac. It was the first time he’d threatened Slim Joe, the first time in six months he’d threatened anyone, and it made him feel great.

Like he was back in the game.

But all the books he’d been reading were having some kind
of residual effect on David, because his elation was short-circuited by the honest look of hurt on Slim Joe’s face. And then he thought about something he read in the Talmud:
Hold no man responsible for what he says in his grief.
Because the truth was, he didn’t give a shit if Slim Joe called him a bitch or anything else. Those were just words, and it’s not as if Slim Joe even knew what he was saying; the kid was practically illiterate. David was just mad about . . . everything. The whole nut of his life had been cracked open.

“Look,” David told him, “there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone else’s dreams, right? But these are good ideas. You should save some money and do it.”

“Really?” Slim Joe perked right back up, like a dog that’s chased a ball into the street, only to get hit, but still wants to get that fucking ball. “I ain’t told no one about this shit because I don’t want no one biting my game. So you think, on the real, that it could work?”

“On the real,” David said, and then he went back upstairs for the rest of the night. He just couldn’t listen to anything more about anything.

David spit out his toothpaste, wiped off his face, and went into his closet to pick out a suit. He was supposed to meet Bennie in thirty minutes at something called the Bagel Café. “Bring all of your fancy Jew books with you,” Bennie told him. “You’re gonna meet someone important.”

David had no idea who that might be, though the idea of bringing all his books with him set up a bit of a practical dilemma. The nice thing about Christians is that they had just one book, the Bible, and inside of it were all the secrets of life. The Jews, however, had the Bible, and the Torah, which was
really just the five books of Moses from the Bible, and the Talmud, which ran six thousand pages, or what David thought of as his sleeping pill.

And then there was the Midrash, which was like someone went through the Bible, Torah, and Talmud and filled in the empty parts, or explained what everything meant, or what they thought everything meant, since some of it was pretty clear to David and, yet, there was an explanation that was completely contrary to his understanding. Finally, there were the stacks and stacks of books on “Jewish thought” that had been dumped off at the house over the weeks, which were like reading a combination of someone’s diary filled with their thoughts on all of the other books combined.

All this for a fucking cover? David thought it would have been a lot easier to say he was a butcher.

David picked out a gray Hugo Boss suit and put it on with a white shirt and a blue tie and those five-hundred-dollar black Cole Haan dress shoes, found a handkerchief and put it in his breast pocket, and then called downstairs to Slim Joe to help him with his books.

“You look like a pimp, dog,” Slim Joe said when he saw David, and then, quickly, he added, “that’s a good thing, yo. Just on the real.”

All this time, Slim Joe had treated him like nothing. Didn’t fear him. Didn’t respect him. Didn’t
dis
respect him, either, but generally regarded him as nothing but a warm body he was tasked to bring food to and help change bandages for early on in the process. But since David threatened him twelve hours earlier, the kid was now acting deferential, maybe even a bit scared, which struck David as funny since he looked less
menacing than he ever had. His words, though, still carried weight. He liked that.

“You think so?” David said. “I don’t look like a pussy?”

“Never, dog,” he said. He examined all the books stacked up on David’s dresser. “You need to take all these?”