Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

That was the problem. Sal Cupertine was consistent. By acting inconsistent, by being reckless, he’d thrown everything off. Jeff couldn’t figure out what his next move might have been, couldn’t even figure out where he was. Once they got the records, the FBI had pinged his cell phone off towers close to Ronnie Cupertine’s and then, hours later, it looked like he was driving in circles around southern Illinois. And then. . nothing. He surely ditched his phone, but that there was no chatter at all about him, that the Family all spoke of him in the past tense, and that Jennifer Cupertine was alone and not exactly prospering made it all clear enough.

“What about the body in the dump?” Jeff asked.

“Not him,” Bruno said. “My opinion? That body was a kid called Chema, real name Jose Espinoza. Half Mexican on his dad’s side. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three.”

Jeff hadn’t heard of any half-Mexican members of the Family, though he supposed it wasn’t beyond possible. The Gangster 2–6 street gang ran a lot of the cocaine and heroin in the city for the Family, so it reasoned that they might occasionally find an able body there. Still, that Bruno had a specific idea on who had been murdered and then dumped was curious. “How do you know him?” Jeff said.

“He used to come up to Milwaukee to hit the rainbow clubs,” Bruno said. “So I recognized him. His brother Neto used to courier H for the Family before he got sent up to Stateville. I’d check and see if he’s dead, too. My guess is he is. Family is good about that sort of thing. If Neto is dead, then for sure that’s Chema they dumped.”

Bruno fell silent for a moment, and Jeff realized he needed to ask a question he really didn’t want to ask, had to ask the question he was hoping Bruno would explain on his own. “So,” Jeff said, “you two were a couple?”

“Not in the traditional sense,” Bruno said. “You know, we had fun, but he was a dumb, confused kid. Had a girlfriend, was Catholic, also, which fucked him up. Plus, he thought he was going to rise up in the Family, even though he saw what happened to Neto.”

“You know who he was working for?” Jeff asked.

“He just got on Fat Monte’s crew,” Bruno said. “Day your boys got hit, he called me to say he couldn’t drive up to see me. He had an errand to do for Monte. I never heard from him again.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s the body,” Matthew said. “Maybe he just didn’t want to see you anymore. Maybe he decided to make it work with his girl. Could be a hundred different things.”

“Could be, could be,” Bruno said. “What’s it been now? Seven months? How many people stay on Fat Monte’s crew for seven months and don’t end up getting pinched for some stupid gangster shit?”

Bruno let his last statement hang there.

“If Neto is dead,” Jeff said, “then I’d advise you to get a new address. Maybe a new name. You still have chits in the bureau.”

“Fat Monte don’t scare me,” he said.

“You’re not a gangster, Paul,” Jeff said. He used his first name on purpose, to remind him that he was a guy named Paul, not Bruno the Butcher, the name people on the street knew him by. Maybe he’d been a tough guy at one point, but he wasn’t on the level of a Fat Monte. Not now, anyway. “You don’t need this shit.”

“I see that motherfucker,” Bruno said, “I’ll roll over his ass with my Hummer, drag him out here, and have my guys put him in the foundation of a nice three-bedroom. Give him a view of the pool and everything.” Paul Bruno turned away from Jeff and Matthew then and started shaking his head. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this,” he said quietly, and then he abruptly jumped out of the Hummer.

“What was that?” Matthew said.

“I think he’s finally realizing his boyfriend is dead,” Jeff said.

Jeff Hopper recognized two essential truths, as well, as he watched Paul Bruno walking off into the distance, his hands clutching at his scalp, his gait slow and deliberate: The first was that there was only one way for Paul Bruno to die, and it wasn’t from breaking into some old lady’s house to steal her furs and diamonds. Eventually, just as he’d told Jeff all this information, someone, somewhere, would give information to Ronnie Cupertine about Paul Bruno’s activities in Milwaukee, how he had this nice new legit business going and didn’t Ronnie think Paul owed him something for all their years of friendship? And did you know he was a queer? And then one day, Paul Bruno would wake up and find Fat Monte, or someone a lot like him, holding a gun on him. Diming out Fat Monte wasn’t something he had to do. It was something he wanted to do.

The second truth was that Paul Bruno had been in love.

“Wait here,” Jeff said to Matthew, and then he got out of the Hummer, too. It was cold outside, and Jeff immediately wondered just where Bruno hoped to find the seniors who would want to move here to live out their golden years.

Bruno walked over to the construction trailer and sat down on the second of three stairs that led to the door. There were no lights on inside, so Jeff made his way over, too, and sat down beside him, and the two of them waited there for a few minutes without speaking, the only sound Bruno’s periodic sniffling and the chirping of birds.

“I’m sorry,” Bruno said eventually. “I think I’m going through menopause or some shit.”

“It’s all right,” Jeff said.

“He was just a dumb kid,” Bruno said. “We never even did it. He was working out his shit and trying to figure out where it all went, and that was cool. I mean, who was I to pressure anyone? But to be done ugly like that?”

“Look,” Jeff said, “I need your help on Cupertine. I find him, I can put a lid on this whole Family. Get all of them what they deserve.”

That got Bruno to laugh. “You even hear yourself? This shit will just keep going on. You might find Cupertine, but don’t think it’s gonna change shit. You think Eliot Ness thought he’d solved it all? Poor motherfucker didn’t even make sixty, you know that? Dead at fifty-four. True story. And he didn’t stop shit. You find Sal Cupertine, just be content with that.”

“You got any ideas?” Jeff said.

“Where was the last place you spotted him?”

“His cell phone had him in south Illinois, near the border to Missouri,” Jeff said. “Last solid hit was outside Divernon.”

“Nothing but farmland out there,” Bruno said. “Slaughterhouses, too. Could be we’re both wrong and you ate Sal Cupertine last time you had a Big Mac.”

That thought had occurred to Jeff, too, when he’d seen the map. “You think of any safe houses the Family has outside of Chicago? Any other families they’re close enough with to have them harbor Cupertine?”

“No one is gonna take that weight without a return,” Bruno said. “You wanna look for a syndicate that can use him for something, someone who’d buy him from Ronnie, not the other way around.”

It was an idea so simple, so reasonable, and so fundamentally in line with Ronnie Cupertine’s way of doing business — selling people the things he didn’t want to hold on to for more than a month at a time was the very basis of his used-car business; the reason the feds had so much trouble making any case against him on his cars was that they were out the door before they could even be tracked — that it made Jeff feel foolish. It was also something Jeff had never heard of — the trading of assets between crime families. “That happens?” Jeff asked.

“I worked for a lot of people,” Bruno said. “They all seemed to know how to find me. I assume they paid Ronnie for that information.”

What Jeff couldn’t understand was what another syndicate would want with Sal Cupertine. Yeah, he was an efficient killer, but there were plenty of efficient killers working in all the families. “Who middled for Ronnie?” Jeff asked.