Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “What?”

  “She’s an inspector,” Ruben said. He shook his head, like he was clearing something out. “Melanie.” He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, snapped them on, tipped her body on one side, then the other. “She’s wet. She shot?”

  “No,” David said.

  Ruben put her back down, manipulated her head and neck. “Man, she’s still warm.” He looked up at David then. “What happened to her?”

  “She stopped breathing,” David said. “Then her heart stopped. Then she died.”

  “Her neck is broke.” He held her chin between his thumb and index finger, like Dr. Melnikoff had done to David, moved her head back and forth. “Who dumped her off?”

  “No one.”

  “She drove herself?” Ruben looking at him again, talking to him like he was a fucking dupe.

  “That’s right.”

  Ruben shook his head again, like he didn’t understand what David was saying, went back to the body. “There’s some ligature shit on her throat. Fuck, man.” He sniffled. “Gotta find someone to torch this car,” he said, more to himself than to David. “She’s leaving material everywhere.”

  “What kind of inspector is she?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said she was an inspector. She a sheriff?”

  “No. From the state.”

  “Gang enforcement?”

  “No, man. Funeral homes,” Ruben said. “Mortuaries. She comes through every couple months, makes sure everything is up to code. Been on the job, shit, five years?”

  Five years. And David had never seen her. How had he missed this? “Like a health inspector?”

  “Yeah,” Ruben said, “but for the dead.”

  “What was she doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruben said. “Inspectors show up when they show up. They don’t make appointments. That’s the whole thing.”

  “She was looking for me. Do you know why?”

  “You saw her before this happened?”

  “That’s right,” David said. Ruben was maybe in a little bit of shock this morning, maybe wasn’t computing all the numbers, was leaving remainders all around, trying not to get it all right, because Ruben, he was not a guy who wanted to know everything.

  “I don’t know,” Ruben said again, but he didn’t sound convinced of that, but then something else clicked and Ruben cocked his head, took the measure of David again, maybe really saw him, his face, his body, his suit, the way he was standing, how he wasn’t scared, and that wasn’t normal, for a person not to be scared in a situation where there was a dead body in a trunk, a man with

  a gun, and then everything that was stretching out on the other side of those things, all the possible endings.

  A simple motherfucker would be scared.

  “I really couldn’t say,” Ruben said.

  “I need you to know,” David said. “It’s important. So think for a second. Why would she be looking for me?”

  “Last time, maybe,” Ruben said, still thinking, putting together his strategy. “She said we had to get Rabbi Kales off of some of the paperwork and get you on.”

  “Did you?”

  Ruben took a step back. He didn’t look like the killing type, David thinking that when he got those tattoos and bought that gun, he probably thought he could be the killing type, could be the kind of guy who would drive up on you and put a bullet into your house or your car. Today? If he was the killing type, he’d have pulled out that gun already. Because he was realizing he’d fucked something up, was trying to walk it back in his mind, because this dupe had murdered a girl and stuffed her in a trunk and was calmly standing in front of him.

  “I thought I did that,” Ruben said finally. “I thought I submitted everything.”

  “You think so because you did it,” David said, “or because you had someone in the office do it for you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ruben said. “It was my job. If it didn’t get done, that’s on me. I take responsibility for my actions.”

  Huh.

  “Okay,” David said, momentarily content for the first time all day. “I respect that attention to duty.”

  Ruben looked at the body, spit on the ground. “Man, this is out of pocket. This is not how we do business.”

  It wasn’t. David had fucked up. He recognized that. What the fuck was in his head?

  The politics and territorial grudges of Temple Beth Israel. No one stabbing anyone in the back, everyone going straight for the face. Messy, ill-considered, hoodlum shit, that exposed everyone for who they really were. No one looking big picture.

  David had let it distract him. Living in this ecosystem, David was angrier at Roberta Leeb than at the fact his plastic surgery was collapsing. Mad at Al Roker for talking shit on TV, not at Bennie for being too lenient with other families in town, this open-city bullshit allowing for one dumb fuck to cast everyone in a bad light. Mad at Casey Berkowitz for being a shitty father and husband, not mad at himself for being worse. At Sal Cupertine, for being dead, or missing, or on the news.

  And now Ruben, standing there with his diamond earrings, the absurd topaz pinky ring he wore, tacky as fuck, but probably two Gs out the door. The boat. The Sea-Doos. The truck. Even the minivan was nice. Chrome rims. Professional tint job. Motherfucker wasn’t getting rich, but he was comfortable enough to not give a shit about whatever detail this Agent Moss needed him to fix. Bennie had given Ruben such a long leash, it had turned into a noose around David’s neck.

  At least Ruben was taking responsibility. David appreciated that.

  “This is how we do business now, Ruben,” David said.

  “This girl,” Ruben said, “people know her here. I can’t have her up on the table or in the refrigerator. Her picture is gonna be in the paper. People are gonna miss her. She’s got a kid, man. You hear what I’m saying?”

  David did, though he had a feeling nothing was going to be in the paper for a while, in light of what he saw on the TV. “She lives in Carson City?”

  “Yeah, I mean, that’s home base. She makes a circuit. Comes down here, goes out to Boulder City. Goes all the way up to Winnemucca.” Ruben closed the trunk, but not all the way, just so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “She comes down for the convention? In May? She’s just a real nice person.”

  “She married?”

  “No,” Ruben said. But then he stopped himself. “I don’t know. I guess maybe she was. I don’t know.”

  David inched the trunk open, looked at Agent Moss’s hands. She had a silver ring on her right thumb, which David should have noticed. No FBI agent was going into the field with a thumb ring. An antique ruby number on her left middle finger. No flashy diamonds, two small understated studs in her ears. Ruben’s were nicer.

  “How old is the kid?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruben said. “Six? Seven? She already had her when I met her.”

  “So it’s a daughter?”

  “Yeah,” Ruben said. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Okay.” David thought for a moment. He couldn’t just let this woman disappear, make this kid think her mother ran off and left her. That would be worse than knowing your mother had been murdered. You grow up thinking your mother went ghost on you? There was a generational guilt attached to that. Die tragically, it’s a fucking shame, but a kid isn’t gonna grow up blaming themselves for that. He’d killed a lot of motherfuckers in his time and yeah, they had kids. But part of how David reckoned with it was by picturing how much better those kids lives were without their scumbag fathers. And most of the time, it wasn’t like these assholes just disappeared—their bodies were left right in the open. That was all part of the mythology. The Rain Man would walk right up and shoot you in the back of the head, didn’t matter where you were standing. Kid found out about that, they started to ask questions, started t
o figure out the truth, understood it wasn’t some random occurrence.

  That wasn’t the case here. He fucked up. He owed a debt. Physical and spiritual.

  But by the same token, David wasn’t gonna drop her body off at her house, dressed for church.

  “I need you to get this body into the ground,” he said eventually. “We got any holes dug?”

  “No,” Ruben said. “We didn’t have anything on the books.”

  “Okay,” David said again, still thinking. And then another thought: “You tell your wife I called you?”

  “No,” Ruben said.

  Too fast.

  “Think hard,” David said, “because you’ve got that gun on you, which makes me think you left the house worried. Maybe told her there was a problem and you were gonna take care of it. Something like that didn’t happen?”

  “You said Rabbi Kales was putting me and my family in a trunk,” Ruben said.

  “If you were worried about them,” David said, “you should have stayed home.”

  “My girl,” Ruben said, “she’s not one of these do-nothing cha­valas. She needs to handle business, she handles business.”

  “What about your kids? They handle their business? Your five-year-old handle business? They know how to duck a sniper round? Your baby know what that red laser light is on his chest?” Ruben didn’t say anything. “Something goes upside down with me? Those kids, your wife? They’re already dead. Nothing you can do about that.”

  David watched Ruben figure out what it meant, or what it could mean: that there were people outside his house right now, baby and wife killers, waiting on some word from David. In real life that was some pussy shit, David did his own work, but Ruben, he’d grown up watching movies, this was a situation he’d envisioned before, so the scenario seemed more likely, since he’d probably seen it fifty times on Cinemax.

  “So here’s what happened,” David continued. “Start getting it right in your head. I called you, told you the inspector was here. You came in, by the time you got here, she’d heard the news on the radio and she was worried, told you she was going to go home, be with her kid. And then she got in her car and drove away. You understand?”

  Ruben stood up straight. Looked around. “Yeah,” he said, this making sense to him. Wiped his nose and eyes with his forearm. Shit. Was this fucker crying? “So, I saw her?”

  “You did. You can even describe what she was wearing. She waved at you as she drove by. Put you on a lie detector, you’d pass. But it’s not going to come to that. Maybe a cop comes out here, maybe not. But if one does, tell the truth. You saw her, she was in her car. That’s the truth.”

  “Man, this isn’t some shit I know how to deal with, okay?” Ruben said. “Like mentally. She has a kid. I got kids. You know, I put myself in her place.”

  “You’re going to take her inside,” David said, and he was in full rabbi mode now. He was in charge. It was God talking. And God, He knew how to solve your problems. “You’re going to clean her, every inch, from scalp to toe, then you’re gonna black light her. Then you’re gonna get a nice coffin ready. One of those fifteen-thousand-dollar numbers, okay? I’m going to go back to the temple, go through the clothes donations, find a nice outfit for her. You’re gonna strip her, put all her effects in a medical waste bag, cinch it up tight.” A plan coming into place. He’d done something like this before. A freelance job in St. Louis, a city councilman, except it ended up being an unsolved murder in Milwaukee. “Then we’re going to put her down near a good family. There someone out there you like? Someone you admire?”

  “Like personally?”

  “Like personally.”

  Ruben wiped at his face again. “I guess I liked Mr. and Mrs. Zarkin.”

  Clark and Zadie. Zadie went first, Clark followed her a week later. Both in their eighties. No kids, but half the city had turned out for their funerals. Clark owned United Discount Mattress over on Spring Mountain. Everyone conceived in Las Vegas in the last four decades had him to thank.

  “Good choice,” David said. “You’ll go out there with the backhoe and dig her a spot with them. You’ll go home, be with your family, and this is over.” David looked at his watch. “You move quickly, you can be home by nine thirty. You can move quickly, can’t you, Ruben?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruben began to say, but David put a hand up to stop him.

  “Ruben,” he said. “You know. You know everything. So if you say you don’t know, that tells me I need to worry about you. I need to worry about the way you’re feeling. I need to worry about who you’re talking to, what you’re saying to your wife, what you might say when you get home. And if I’m worried about it, Rabbi Kales is going to be worried about it, and Mr. Savone is going to be worried about it.” David opened the trunk wide again. “Take a good look, Ruben, and then decide whether you know or you don’t know.”

  Ruben stayed quiet for a few seconds. He reached into the trunk, adjusted Agent Moss’s pant leg, which had ridden up a few inches, her calf showing. “Man,” Ruben said, “I didn’t show up for no senseless murder.”

  “You think those guys we’ve been burying cut their own faces off?”

  “That’s different,” Ruben said.

  “Not to their loved ones,” David said. “You think grandma sleeps well with her grandson gone missing? There is no different. There is only alive and dead.” He paused. “And whatever comes next, that’s for God to know.”

  Here was this guy, trying to make moral equivalencies. Here was this guy, trying to figure out where he fit into all of this. Here was this guy, with his big truck, his boat, his van, his diamonds, his gun, his ink, his past, his present, his future, all tied up in the game, no way out now, probably never was. Born into a Mexican gang in the shadow of the Stratosphere, now an indentured servant to the Mafia, if Bennie was even really that. He was in a crime family, all right.

  “I got a line, Rabbi,” Ruben said. “I just try to keep it. Everybody got a line.”

  “When you’re getting shanked in the prison showers for all you’ve done? All the bad motherfuckers you’ve crossed just by coming in here every day and doing your job?” David said. “Well, you tell them about that line. They’ll get it. I promise. Meantime, my advice is get this shit done.”

  He let his words sit there, let Ruben hear his old voice in full, then began to walk toward the temple. David wasn’t scared of getting shot in the back, because Ruben Topaz wasn’t prepared to give up everything for that dead girl.

  Which is what it came down to these days. What you were prepared to give it up for. David, he was prepared to give it up, every day, to see his wife and kid again.

  It was a little after seven now. He needed to get this Cutlass back to Carson City. It was a seven-hour drive. Eight if you stopped for lunch, David thinking he’d need to check a map, figure out a midpoint, make it authentic on the GPS. People knew where Agent Moss was, she was a person with a schedule, which meant after she disappeared, cops would backtrack on her, get her on camera checking out of the Courtyard Inn, getting gas, maybe even ask to check the cameras at the temple or the funeral home, which was fine, they didn’t record anything. They’d play it step by step. GPS on her phone was pinging right now, which meant Agent Melanie Moss was still alive, digitally, so they’d be able to ping her way home, too. Which worked out perfectly.

  David was thirty feet away now, about to unlock the gate leading to the front of the funeral home, when Ruben called after him. “Or what?”

  David turned back slowly, half expecting Ruben would have his gun out, frankly surprised to find Ruben where he left him, not running up on him, or in a crouch, or back in his van. Just standing there covered in shitty ink, beside a dead girl in a car trunk.

  “Or try to quit,” David said.

  •

  When David came back to the mortuary half an hour later, Melanie Moss was n
aked on the table and Ruben was cleaning the right side of her body. Her face and neck were already clean, all her makeup gone, and David could see that she had acne scars high up on her cheeks, as well as a C-section scar running under her belly, a tan line on her right pinkie toe from a ring. Ruben had changed into his scrubs, wore glasses and a surgical mask, was using a sponge that fit comfortably in the palm of his hand to scrub her. Ruben would work down to her feet, then start over on her left side, turn her over, clean her backside, right to left. Doing his job, as per Jewish law.

  Well, except for the radio on the floor, news coming out in a steady hum.

  “Put the clothes in the coffin, please,” Ruben said, not looking up from his work. The coffin was already in the corner. Cherrywood. Platinum fixtures. The kind they sold to the goyim with real cash. The kind who wanted their bodies preserved, just in case all their sins were eventually forgiven and they got to come back. They normally put the Jews and war dead in unsealed pine boxes, which accelerated the dust-to-dust aspect.

  “Don’t worry,” Ruben said, as if he’d read David’s mind, “I cut slits into the bottom. Decomp will be the same.”

  “Good,” David said. He set the clothes he’d found flat into the box. He’d picked out a nice St. John sweater set and black slacks that he vaguely remembered seeing on Helen Kellerman. “That’s good thinking.”

  “Your bag is in the corner by the cold storage,” Ruben said.

  David found the bag, opened it up, looked inside. Shook it. Looked over at the body. Something wasn’t right.

  “Where’s her jewelry?” David asked calmly. Ruben looked up, confused. “Her rings.” Nothing. “Her earrings.” Nothing. “Her fucking jewelry, Ruben,” David said, not so calmly anymore. “Where the fuck is her jewelry?”

  Ruben pulled down his mask, snapped off his gloves, dumped them in the garbage, walked back to the small metal desk where they kept forms and a manual typewriter, slid open a drawer, rifled around a bit, like he couldn’t find what he was looking for, though David knew better, so he kept his eye on him, and eventually came out with a Ziploc bag containing Agent Moss’s two rings, two diamond earrings, a toe ring, and an ankle bracelet. “Mr. Savone lets me keep what I find,” Ruben said, though he handed the bag to David like it was contagious.