Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“What made them wrong?”

“They were feds.”

“Oh, yes,” Rabbi Kale said. “I read about this. In Chicago?”

“You read about this?”

“Harvey B. Curran wrote about it in the R-J ,” Rabbi Kales said. “I think he said you were found dead. Dismembered and burnt, as I recall.”

That sounded about right. Poor Chema or that retard Neal, maybe both of them, dead just for knowing his name, knowing where he was last seen. Jennifer, she’d know it wasn’t true. Maybe Ronnie would give her some kind of hint, nothing concrete, because nothing was ever concrete anymore; everything was about conditions and consensus, everything done to protect the brand, the Family now like a McDonald’s franchise. “What else did that cocksucker have to say?”

This brought a smile to Rabbi Kales. He was an odd man. Holy, sure, but whatever he was mixed up in with Bennie was another side of his game that didn’t add up yet; no matter what his “mistakes” were, whatever skin they were cutting, he had to have some take in it beyond the spectral. “Only that it was the sort of screw-up that would have all the families watching their backs for the next decade or so.”

“I made a mistake,” David said. “I snapped.”

“How does a professional killer snap?” Rabbi Kales asked. Again with the calmness. The man was like a glass of warm milk.

It was a good question, David had to admit. “It’s like anything else,” David said. “Bad day, I guess.” Though, of course, it was much more than that, but he needed to get Jennifer out of his head. He needed to get William out of his head. He’d been so sharp on this for the last several months, and then he meets this rabbi and all he can think about is what’s been left behind. “Fact is, Rabbi, one day, something bad was going to happen one way or the other. This mess probably saved my life. Too high profile to actually kill me for it, you know?”

Rabbi Kales processed this information for a few moments and then said, “You cost Benjamin quite a bit.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what I said,” Rabbi Kales said. “He paid a great deal of money for you.”

“He bought me?”

“There was some understanding that you had special skills,” the rabbi said. “The amount of reading you’ve done, the amount you recall, is astonishing. Do you know that?”

“I have a lot of free time,” David said.

“You’re smart,” Rabbi Kales said again. “If you actually believed anything you were reading, I have every faith you could be an excellent rabbi.”

“Why don’t you think I believe?”

“If you did,” he said, “you wouldn’t have threatened to kill me in the Bagel Café.”

David turned left from Alta onto Palmer Lane and came through the ornate front entrance to his neighborhood, the Lakes at Summerlin Greens. Normally — or at least for the last week, since he’d been given freedom to drive himself — David went back and forth through the rear gate, since there was never anyone there, no gardeners, no kids on their bikes, no old ladies in terry cloth walking their golden retrievers, still feeling like he needed to keep a low profile. Now, David decided to bring Rabbi Kales in through the front door, show him how he was living, suddenly feeling like he needed to let the rabbi know he wasn’t some kind of beast who went around threatening to kill people over breakfast. Not every day, anyway.

The front entrance had a blooming fountain surrounded by five-foot-tall white rose bushes in the middle of a half circle paved with replica Spanish brick, which was like driving over a dry creek bed. Ingenious. It was the one thing David and Slim Joe really agreed on: that if given the chance, they’d find the guy who designed the entrance and drag him over the bricks a few times, let him know that what looked nice wasn’t user-friendly.

He turned right on Trevino Way, then left on Nicklaus Street, then turned onto his own street, Snead Place.

David pulled through his own front gate and up his driveway. “I’m just going to run in, take my pill, and then I’ll be right out,” David said after he’d parked, not that he needed a pill for the pain, though he now thought about finding one of the Xanax he’d been given a few months ago. “Unless you want to come in.”

“No,” Rabbi Kales said. “It’s bad enough seeing you in Rabbi Gottlieb’s car. I step foot in his house, and I’m morally complicit in his death.”

“This is his house?”

“It was, yes,” Rabbi Kales said.

“I’m sleeping in his bed? Using his bathroom?”

“And living with the man who killed him,” Rabbi Kales said. “I don’t suppose Benjamin mentioned these details to you?”

“No, he skipped all that,” David said. Slim Joe didn’t seem like the killing type. Plus, Bennie said Rabbi Gottlieb had gone into Lake Mead. Guess he was pushed. “Truth is, I don’t need a pill. I just had to get out of that deli. That place was making me nuts. But now I come to find out I’m sleeping in a dead man’s bed. Next thing you’re gonna tell me I’m wearing his clothes.”

“He wasn’t quite as flashy as you. He dressed for the people, not himself. You’ll do the same.”

David didn’t know about that. What he did know was that he wasn’t going to spend another night in Rabbi Gottlieb’s bed. You sleep in a murdered man’s bed, that’s inviting doom. David didn’t believe in much, even Rabbi Kales could tell that, though what he did believe in was that you didn’t go around courting cosmic reparations. David didn’t even bother turning the car around — he just backed up all the way down the driveway.

“Tell me how to get to the temple,” David said.

Temple Beth Israel was only a few miles away, just on the other side of the Summerlin Parkway, on a mostly barren stretch of Hillpointe Road. . which meant it was a few blocks away from hundreds of houses and gated colonies that looked suspiciously like the very one David lived in. For a people that spent forty years lost in a desert, David found it more than a little dubious that they’d parked themselves in a place where it could happen just as easily, the replication of precisely manicured lawns, pastel and cream homes, and gold Lexuses a desert in itself.

The temple took up an entire square block and was abutted on either side by expanses of open field that, at that very moment, were being graded and watered. On one side was a sign that read FUTURE HOME OF THE NEW BARER ACADEMY: NOW ENROLLING K–12! and on the other was a sign that proclaimed it the FUTURE HOME OF THE TEMPLE BETH ISRAEL COMMUNITY PARK & LEARNING CENTER. Across the street was the Temple Beth Israel Cemetery and the Kales Mortuary & Home of Peace, which gave David his first bit of understanding regarding where the good Rabbi’s shake was coming from.

David pulled into the temple’s parking lot and saw that Bennie was already there, pacing back and forth in front of a playground filled with young children — they couldn’t have been more than five years old — while he talked on his cell phone. Though David could tell that the temple was fairly expansive just from its width on the street, he wasn’t expecting to see that the place was more like a campus of buildings in the back. There was a sign pointing to the DOROTHY COPELAND CHILDREN’S CENTER, which was a one-story building just adjacent to the playground, and another sign pointing toward the TIKVAH PRESCHOOL. Both were modern glass-and-steel buildings that looked to David more like the FBI office in Chicago than any place he ever went to school. The playground itself was like something from the model-home signs he saw all over Summerlin: a jungle gym that resembled a Navy SEAL training regiment, complete with rope jumps, tunnels, pools of percolating water, monkey bars over a padded blacktop, and a pegboard for climbing.