Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  It wasn’t that Jennifer was paranoid. It was that she knew she was being followed.

  “I’ll be right back,” Heather said.

  “Take your time,” Jennifer said. She ran the liner around her lips, found a mirror. It did look nice. Not that Jennifer was in the market for a new lip liner. No. She was on a job. She looked up, into the camera above her, then over her shoulder, to make sure she knew where the escalator was, so she’d know exactly where they’d be coming from. Then she dropped the liner into her purse, casually, like she knew what she was doing, because she did, and then took the sample, slid it into the empty box, waited for Heather to come back. It took a few minutes. Jennifer wanted Heather to remember her, be able to pick her out of a photo lineup, all that, just in case. She wasn’t trying to be forgettable. Too many people had walked into police stations in Chicago never to be seen again. So she wasn’t going out like that. Real people needed to see her. People who didn’t know enough to be afraid of the Mafia, the crooked cops, or feds on the take. She knew Jeff Hopper hadn’t been any of those things. She assumed whoever took his place was the same.

  But still.

  Doing this here? There’d be a record. She would be remembered.

  “So?” Heather asked.

  “I don’t think it’s quite my color,” Jennifer said and slid the box back across the counter. “But thanks for going to the trouble.”

  “No worries!” Heather said, and Jennifer thought, yes, this is a person with no worries. How old was she? Twenty, maybe. She should be in school. Getting a degree in something useful so that she doesn’t end up depending on someone else for her well-being. “And you can keep the ball,” Heather said to William.

  “I’m not allowed to take gifts from strangers,” he said, and began to hand it back to Heather, but Jennifer stopped him.

  “It’s all right this time,” Jennifer said.

  Heather gave Jennifer one of those looks young women often gave her when they met William. That “He’s such a little man!” face, not knowing that having a little man in your house meant that you also had an alien being in your family room, a silent, brooding, carefully constructed tool of destruction. One minute he was sweet and quiet, the next he was running into walls, pretending to play football, both offense and defense at once. He needs to live where he can have friends.

  Jennifer and William wandered around the floor for a few more minutes, letting all the cameras pick them up, letting everyone who wanted to see Jennifer see her, and in case they didn’t, she paused by a display of scarves, found a nice black one with a prominent security tag—it was Hermès, after all—and wrapped it over her shoulders, grabbed a pink one, wrapped it around William, a big game, grabbed a nice angora twinset, too, stuffed it into her purse, right on top of her gun.

  Well, not her gun.

  Sal’s gun.

  Had he killed people with it? Probably. It was a Glock, one of a dozen left in the carpeted-over crawl space inside the hall closet; it’s not that she didn’t know they were there. When the cops and feds searched the house after Sal killed those four men, she assumed they’d find them, like they found everything else they’d carted from her home and never returned, not that she gave a shit about most of it, except her old photo albums. But they hadn’t. Maybe they didn’t want to find them.

  Jennifer grasped William’s hand. “Now, when I say run, I want you to run,” she said, “like when you play football at home, okay? And then hide.”

  “You’ll come find me? You won’t make me look for you, will you?”

  “Never,” Jennifer said. “And listen, if we get separated, it will just be for a few minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And you have grandma’s phone number in your pocket, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show it to me.”

  William reached into his pocket, pulled out a crinkled piece of paper that had Sal’s mother’s Arizona phone number on it. Jennifer had called 411 and was surprised to find her listed, just outside Phoenix. She called the number yesterday from the pay phone in front of the new Quiznos that had gone into the space where Tino’s Pizza had been for twenty years. Voice mail picked up, and there was Arlene’s voice, the Chicago so thick in it, she imagined people in Arizona must have found it amusing. It meant she was really there, not hiding, and that was good. If somehow Jennifer misjudged this situation, William wouldn’t end up in some Social Services nightmare. He still had family. Real family. Not that he’d ever met the woman.

  “I’ve memorized it, too,” William said.

  “Of course you have,” Jennifer said.

  She took a deep breath, double-checked that Jeff Hopper’s card was in her pocket, and headed for the emergency exit next to women’s shoes, the one marked alarm will sound if door is opened.

  She spotted the security guards right away—matching cheap blue suits, bad haircuts, nine bucks an hour to bust heads not going too far, she supposed—converging on her from every side of the store. The crime of the century had been perpetrated. Colored wax and fabric were about to be stolen.

  What she didn’t expect, however, was to see Sugar Lopiparno and a guy with a tattoo on his neck step off the escalator.

  Or maybe she did. She didn’t bring that gun for nothing.

  “Hey, little Jennie Frangello,” he said.

  “Run,” Jennifer said, and they took off. She even managed to push open the alarmed door before two security guards were on top of her, another was grabbing at William, shoving them both to the ground. One asshole put his knee into Jennifer’s back, then slammed her face into the tile. Jennifer’s nose exploded beneath her and she felt a tooth slice into her tongue, and everything went white, and then her mouth filled with blood, and she knew, right away, that this had turned upside down. That she’d fucked up, that this wasn’t good at all.

  The fire alarm blared, emergency lights flashed. Jennifer managed to turn her head slightly to the left, her face slipping across the floor, her own blood greasing the way. The other asshole told her to stop resisting, though she wasn’t, she wanted to be arrested, that was the whole plan. But she couldn’t say that out loud, couldn’t open her mouth wide enough to speak. Where was Sugar? Where was her son?

  And then William was screaming and pulling at her arm, pulling at her purse strap, trying to get her up, and another asshole was telling him to let her go, let it go, Stop fucking around, kid, and then her purse was gone and she knew what was happening before it even happened, as if everything in her life had been leading up to the inevitable moment when William Cupertine, son of Sal Cupertine, grandson of Dark Billy Cupertine, pulled his father’s Glock out from his mother’s purse and shot one of the security guards in the back of the head.

  8

  Whoever did this to you was a quack,” Dr. Melnikoff said.

  He held an X-ray up to the light, like doctors always did, as if you knew what the hell you were looking at. It was Thursday afternoon, a few days after David had lunch with Rabbi Kales, and David was in Melnikoff’s office in Summerlin. It was just down the street from David’s house, in the Village Center Medical Plaza, which meant it was crawling with Temple Beth Israel people, so David got an appointment first thing in the morning. He didn’t realize he’d be there all goddamn day, but Dr. Melnikoff ordered a battery of X-rays and blood and urine tests once David told him of all his complaints, and once Melnikoff started pressing his fingers into David’s soft tissue.

  “This part here? The expander across your nasal cavity? That’s what we’d do for someone while they waited for extensive surgery, to stabilize their face, not to go about their life with.” Dr. Melnikoff shook his head. “Here, along your jaw, the rods have not been placed with the idea that you might gain or lose weight, or that you might ever have dental work, or that you’re an animal that chews.” He shook his head again, muttered, “Butcher, r
eally.”

  He pulled out another X-ray, held it up. “Here, by your right eye? I’m going to guess you have nerve damage. Possibly irreparable. We’ll see. I’m not optimistic.” Melnikoff set down the X-ray, pulled a printout from a manila folder, read it, then took off his glasses, folded them into the pocket of his lab coat, sat down on a stool, the kind with wheels. “You have an infection. Probably have had it for a while. I’d guess three to six months, judging from your blood work. You’re taking Cipro?”

  “Yes,” David said.

  “Who gave that to you?”

  “I had it,” David said and left it at that.

  “Fine,” Dr. Melnikoff said. “It’s the wrong antibiotic. Stop taking it unless you’re afraid you’ll be poisoned by anthrax in the near future. I’m going to put you on a heavy dose of both probiotics and sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim. It’s going to mess up your stomach. Not that you probably feel much like eating anyway.”

  David did not.

  He wheeled over. Took David’s chin in his hand, moved David’s head back and forth. “You have any pain when I do that?”

  “No.”

  “Good, good,” he said. “The chin implant looks pretty standard, so that’s a plus.” He sat back. “The beard is doing you some favors. A few months from now, you could very well look like a basset hound without it. You have scarring underneath?”

  “Some,” David said.

  “Figured. Well, we’ll see if we can do a little cosmetic work, too.” He touched David’s hairline, across from his left eye, where it didn’t grow right. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I can take a look if you’re worried about it. Once we put you under, may as well fix what needs to be fixed.”

  “Put me under? For what?”

  “You need surgery, Rabbi Cohen,” Dr. Melnikoff said. “Your nose and cheekbones are collapsing. The rods in your jaw need to be replaced, but that’s not as pressing a matter at the moment.” He reached up and put his index finger and thumb on David’s cheekbones. He flexed his fingers and David almost threw up from the pain. “If you got into a car accident, or if you tripped and fell, you could have a real problem, Rabbi.” He reached back and grabbed an X-ray again. “You see your orbital bones here? Beneath them, you’re basically held together by Pixy Stix right now. You get a blunt-force trauma to your face, or you sneeze real hard for all I know, you could be in a dire situation. I’d be inclined to replace what you have here with cadaver bones. It’s more natural-looking. Certainly more stable.”

  “From where?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The bones. Where do you get them?”

  “Oh,” Dr. Melnikoff said. “No one has ever asked me that. I suppose you’re concerned about getting materials from non-Jews? Is that the case?”

  It wasn’t. “Yes.”

  “I’ll look into that. We typically work with a local tissue bank.”

  “LifeCore?”

  “Yes. Why do you know that?”

  “Jerry Ford supports the temple’s programs. And he happens to be my neighbor.”

  “Oh, right, right,” he said. “Of course. He doesn’t actually come to temple that often, does he?”

  “No,” David said. “He’s a casual member.” He thought for a moment. “When would this need to be done?”

  “We need to get this infection under control first,” he said. “Six weeks for that, would be my guess. That gets us to the middle of October. I’d like you to gain a little weight, because we’re going to wire you back up for a month after the surgery, since I’m going to need to rebuild your palate. Realistically, I think that puts us into December.”

  “Hanukkah is the ninth,” David said.

  “Fine,” Dr. Melnikoff said. “We’ll schedule you for the eighteenth. That fit into your schedule?”

  “I have the Berkowitz bar mitzvah on the twenty-second,” David said. “Will I be ready for that?”

  “No,” Dr. Melnikoff said, “unless you want to do it lying down and bleeding from your eyes.” Dr. Melnikoff pressed a spot below David’s right eye. “Does that hurt?”

  “Yes.” In fact, it was all David could do not to grab the doctor by his throat and choke him until he bit off his own fucking tongue.

  “We wait too long, it will become an emergency, not an elective. So we’ll do it on the twenty-third. Will that work for you?”

  “I guess it will.”

  “You’re going to need someone to care for you,” he said. “You have a relative or someone that can come stay with you for a few weeks?”

  “I’ll work it out,” David said. He didn’t know how.

  Dr. Melnikoff exhaled. “Now we come to the uncomfortable part,” he said.

  “You’ve been wonderful,” David said. “Tell me the price.”

  “This is just my cost,” he said. “I want you to understand that.” He rolled a few inches away. “Rabbi Kales explained the situation and I understand completely. Completely. This is my honor and you can depend on me for total confidentiality.”

  “The Hippocratic is a fine oath.”

  “Right, right,” Dr. Melnikoff said. “That, too. The other thing. I’ll have nurses working on this, of course, and an anesthesiologist, but they won’t have access to any of your extensive records or, for that matter, lack of records.”

  “Dr. Melnikoff,” David said, “man comes naked into this world, naked he must leave it. I appreciate the sensitivity and I trust you.”

  He did, actually. Because yesterday, David broke into his house. He was old-school Las Vegas, so he didn’t live behind a gate. Instead he had a mid-century modern home on Alta Drive, the kind that still had all of its original furnishings but had been augmented with nonperiod items over the years: thick white shag carpeting in the living room, a hot tub in the master bathroom, wood paneling in his home office, a stainless-steel refrigerator in the kitchen, which David saw was filled with corned beef, mustard, sweet onions, challah bread, orange juice, and pickles. In his freezer he kept five bottles of Stoli, a stack of frozen dinners, and about twenty steaks, which immediately made David want to throw up. Melnikoff lived alone, his wife, Connie, dead now for five years—her headstone at the cemetery always had fresh daisies on it, a delivery coming twice a week—and his children, Pam and Julie, lived in Los Angeles, came up for the holidays, so David saw them at temple periodically, though he’d never spoken to them. He was dating Lydia Penzler these days, the two of them showing up to events at the temple once or twice a month, now that her husband had finally croaked from Alzheimer’s last winter, but she lived over at TPC. There weren’t any photos of her in the house, which David thought was maybe a bad sign for the longevity of the relationship. Not that David came looking for that. No, what David was looking for was something small: a carbon monoxide monitor. He didn’t think he’d find one in house like this, but he had to be sure, not leave that shit up to chance. Because if anything went wrong with Dr. Melnikoff, his plan was to either suffocate him with carbon monoxide or simply blow him up. Old man, living alone? That’s how shit happened sometimes.

  “Please,” David said, “don’t worry.”

  Dr. Melnikoff exhaled from what seemed to be the bottom of his feet and his whole demeanor changed. “If everything is as I expect once I get inside, I think we’re looking at fifty thousand.”

  David didn’t respond. Dr. Melnikoff was now just a guy named Irving who needed some cash. And David didn’t just give up cash to guys named Irving because they asked for it. He’d looked into Irving’s gambling problem, made sure he wasn’t in deep with some Gambino fucker running games, and it turned out that, in fact, it was worse: He owed the Mirage, the Rio, and the Palace Station $400,000 on markers and was paying $7,000 a month on them, which he’d pay until he defaulted or died, since he was still gambling. A marker was like an interest-free loan or an IOU, depending upon how the
casinos were feeling about your ability to pay. They thought Irving would keep giving them cash, it was a loan, but soon as he missed a payment, it was an IOU. And if you defaulted on an IOU over $250 in Nevada, you were looking at a felony, like you’d written a bad check. But at $400,000, he was looking at jail time for major theft. He’d lose his medical practice, his house, everything. Problem was, casinos knew that, too. Knew that if you were doing time, you weren’t earning any money to pay off the debt, so first they’d go after you in a civil manner—attach liens on your property, try to garnish your wages, blacklist you, take you to court, compel you to pay by talking to the press, the Review-Journal and the Sun happy to do favors for the casinos, which propped them up with ad revenue every month, by writing stories about motherfuckers who’d defrauded them. A little public shaming went a long way toward getting paid. A guy like Irving, though, he’d rather pay a lawyer to negotiate his bill, pay pennies on the dollar if he could on the debt, while paying his lawyer five hundred an hour.

  Back in the day, when the Mob ran the casinos, Irving would be dead and his daughters, Pam and Julie, would owe his debt, and then they would be dead, and their kids would owe the debt, and eventually, they’d either be dead or they’d figure out a way to get the debt paid. They could go to the cops, of course, but it was still illegal to default on the IOU, even back then; the debt would still be real, the crime would still be real. So if you went to the cops, they’d arrest you.

  When people talked about Las Vegas being better when the Mob was in charge, that’s really what they meant: Some motherfucker named Irving took out a marker, he was marked.