Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

So, that frozen night, after Fat Monte blew his head off, Jeff made two calls. The first was to 911, to report a likely suicide, maybe a murder-suicide, all of which put Jeff on the public record. The next call was to Kirk Biglione at his home in Barrington. He could have called Biglione’s cell, but Jeff wanted to make sure his number showed up on Biglione’s home phone records, something easily subpoenaed, and wanted to make sure it showed up within minutes of Fat Monte’s death. Plus, there was a good chance Biglione’s phone calls were monitored, if not actively, at least passively, just like everyone else’s in the FBI. It was a fucked-up thing to do, Jeff realized even as he was dialing Biglione’s number, but if there was one thing Jeff Hopper knew, it was that the FBI would happily bury him alive. He needed to make sure he had a way to breathe underground.

“Who is this?” Biglione asked when he came to the phone.

“It’s Jeff Hopper,” Jeff said. “I wanted you to know that Fat Monte Moretti just killed himself.”

“What? How do you know this?” Biglione was just coming awake, and Jeff could hear the slow dawning of recognition in his voice. “Who is this?”

“It’s Special Agent Jeff Hopper,” Jeff said, “reporting to you that I was just speaking with Fat Monte Moretti on the telephone when he shot himself. It sounded like a.357, but I could be wrong. You’ll need to check ballistics. I suspect he killed his wife, too.” Jeff could hear Biglione’s breathing. It sounded somewhat labored, so Jeff continued. “I was with him earlier this evening, at a bar called the Four Treys in Roscoe Village, where he essentially admitted to killing Paul Bruno, not that I expect you care about someone as insignificant as him, not with Sal Cupertine allowed to run free. About that, incidentally. Fat Monte confirmed for me Sal Cupertine’s body was not disposed of in the landfill, and that, in fact, there were two bodies placed there, namely, uh, let me see here, one Neal Moretti and one Chema Espinoza. Seems like we found Espinoza but not Neal. Somewhere at the bottom of the landfill is another body.”

“Hopper,” Biglione said, “I’m going to hang up.”

“Also,” Jeff said, “I might have beat this information out of him. When you get his body, if there’s not a hole in the middle of his face, you’ll probably want to know how his nose got broken. That was me. I did that.”

“Hopper,” Biglione said again. This time it sounded more like a plea. “I’m hanging up. Do you understand? I’m hanging up.”

“One more thing then,” Jeff said. “Fat Monte indicated to me that Kochel Farms is somehow related to Sal Cupertine’s disappearance and that we should begin investigating them in earnest.”

“You’re fired,” Biglione said.

“I know,” Jeff said, “so I’m going to go ahead and call some friends at the Tribune and see if they might like this information.”

“We have an investigation, Agent Hopper,” Biglione said. His voice was oddly calm now, and then Jeff remembered he used to do hostage negotiation back in the day, that he’d risen up in the ranks quickly after managing to get some lunatic in a Memphis bank to let twenty-two hostages go without anyone getting hurt. “If the Family finds out we’re still investigating Sal Cupertine, it has the potential to ruin nearly a decade of work. You know that. And if the Family knows we’re looking for Sal Cupertine, it will make it that much harder to find him. You know that.”

Of course Jeff knew that. This was all for the public — and private — record, Biglione likely coming to the same realization Jeff had in making the phone call in the first place. Asses needed to be covered.

“See, that’s the problem, Kirk,” Jeff said. “You’re not looking for Sal Cupertine. No one is. Or was. But I have been. And do you want to know what I’ve found out? Or do you just want to read about it in the paper?” Biglione didn’t respond, but Jeff’s call waiting beeped. He pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the display — it was Biglione’s cell phone. Jeff didn’t bother to click over and instead just hung up. He’d expressed what needed to be expressed. They both knew he wasn’t going to call the Tribune. At least not yet.

It was 4:42 in the morning, sunrise not for another two hours at least, when Jeff got into his Explorer and headed along the snow-packed streets of Chicago toward Matthew Drew’s apartment building. It was one of the first times having a four-wheel drive SUV in the city actually made any practical sense, one of the few things that morning that did. As he drove, he tried to take stock of where the last several months had taken him. Had he committed any crimes? No, he had not. Had he done anything morally reprehensible?

He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. He was sure he had. He’d caused another human being to kill himself. It didn’t matter that Fat Monte was a criminal. Jeff had to hope Fat Monte hadn’t shot his wife. He slammed his hand again. What was he thinking? What the fuck was he thinking? An innocent woman was probably dead because he got it in his mind that he was going to do the right thing, that he was going to catch Sal Cupertine, who murdered four innocent men.

But, no. That wasn’t true. Those four men weren’t innocent. Those four men had taken part in a sting. For three of them, it was their job to be put in that situation. For the fourth, it was a result of getting caught being a criminal. No one was exactly innocent in that situation. It was a point Jeff had started to believe — an implied risk of doing this business was that they might very well die. The fault didn’t rest with Jeff for leaving his name on the bill. And the fault hardly even rested with Sal Cupertine, when you really thought about it. No, he’d tried to convince himself, the fault resided in the implicit rules of the game. People die doing illegal things.

It took Jeff nearly thirty minutes to make the ten-minute drive to Matthew’s building, and by the time he got there, he realized what a bad idea it would be for all involved if he was found on the apartment’s closed-circuit security cameras, so he continued up the street to the White Palace and called Matthew’s cell from the pay phone inside.

“What time is it?” Matthew asked when he answered.

“A little after five,” Jeff said. “Do you know who this is?”

“No one calls me but you,” he said, already catching on and not saying Jeff’s name. Not that Jeff thought Matthew’s cell phone was tapped, but you never knew. Matthew cleared his throat. “What’s the problem?”

“Fat Monte is dead,” Jeff said.

“Did you kill him?”

It was a reasonable question. “No,” Jeff said.

“Did I?”

“Not unless you forced him to shoot himself in the head.”

Matthew didn’t respond for a long while, and then, when he did, all he said was, “Where are you?”

“The White Palace.”

“I’ll need to get a cab. My car is under three feet of snow.”

“No,” Jeff said, “wait, listen. You need to pack some clothes and get out of town for a few weeks. Your sister, too.”

“That’s not going to work,” he said. “My sister can’t just leave school. Do you hear what you’re saying? Jesus. What’s going on?”

Jeff told him what Fat Monte had said, told him about the phone call Jeff made to Biglione, told him that maybe Fat Monte’s wife was gone, too. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Jeff said. “We could all be in danger if the Family decides to make a move.”

“Give me thirty minutes to get my sister up and fill her in,” Matthew said. “Order me a shake.” Before Jeff could protest again, the phone was dead. Jeff made his way to a table and sat down. When the waitress came by, he asked her for a chocolate shake and if she might have a piece of paper and a manila envelope somewhere in the place that he could borrow. The waitress looked at him strangely, but it couldn’t have been the most outrageous request anyone had made of her, particularly since she had a tattoo on her throat that said Robert and one on the back of her hand that said Fuck All Men .