Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“Wait,” Poremba said, and Tina did. He lifted his chin at Jeff. “He has a few other questions for you.”

How could Tina Kochel have any connection to Fat Monte? Jeff had about two minutes to figure this out before it became obvious he was fishing.

“Where do you work?” Jeff asked.

“Why?”

“Because I’m asking you. I know you’re a student at the university in Springfield. Now I just need to know where you work. You can either tell me, or I can just run your social. It’s up to you how much you want to cooperate. What kind of example you want to set.”

Tina looked down at her son and sighed. “The Kitten Club,” she said.

“That a strip joint?” Jeff said.

“I’ve been trying to pay for school, okay? I don’t want to be a farmer, so here I am.”

“What are you majoring in?”

“Social work,” she said.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “Who watches your son when you’re dancing?”

“I bring him here some nights,” she said. “Some nights a girlfriend watches him. Are we done?”

“Your family know about the dancing?” Jeff asked.

“No,” she said. “They think I’m bartending. I’d like to keep it that way, okay?”

“Sure.” He smiled at her. “Your son is very sweet. You must be very proud of him.”

“Are we done?” she said again.

“Sure.” Jeff reached over and opened the front door, and Tina and Nicholas started back inside, where the marshals and Agent Biglione were going through the house, room to room, looking for evidence Jeff was pretty sure they weren’t going to find.

Special Agent Lee Poremba stood beside Jeff and watched Tina and Nicholas disappear as the door closed.

“Who runs the Kitten Club?” Poremba asked.

“Last I knew, a guy named Timo Floccari,” Jeff said. “If he’s not dead, he’s in prison by now and will soon be dead. If he’s alive, you might want to get him into protective custody, wherever he is.”

“Soldier?”

“Yep,” Jeff said. “Moved oxycodone for Fat Monte.”

Poremba looked at his watch. “Why don’t you get a ride back in the paddy wagon. We’re going to be here a while.”

“Okay,” Jeff said.

They were both silent for a few moments, Jeff working out the math of it all, trying to figure out what Poremba’s move would be.

“I can give you a week. Ten days at the longest,” Poremba said. “And then I’m going to need to act on this. What do you need from me?”

“A shipping manifest for all the trucks that left here the night of the killings,” Jeff said. “And then any payload transitions those trucks made. I want to know where every single piece of meat this farm shipped out that day ended up. Someone saw something.”

“What else?”

“That kid,” Jeff said, “doesn’t need to know his father was a gangster.”

“That’s out of my hands,” Poremba said.

“His birth certificate is probably clean,” Jeff said. “It can stay that way.” Poremba didn’t say anything, so Jeff continued. “Get a deal for the girl,” Jeff said. “You can do that.”

“I’ll try,” Poremba said. “You get Cupertine, you can probably dictate all the terms.”

“Then I guess that’s what I’ll do,” Jeff said. He measured his next words out in his head before he said them, certain he needed to know the answer. “Why are you doing this for me?”

“What happened with those men at the Parker House,” Poremba said, “that could have happened to any of us. It was a clerical error.”

“It was my error,” Jeff said.

“Are you in charge of the accounts payable section of the FBI now? Come on.”

“As soon as I knew it was Sal Cupertine they were meeting with, I should have known to call it off. The only reason the Family would send Sal Cupertine anywhere, in broad daylight, would be to have him blow up. That’s on me. That will always be on me.”

“You can’t think like that,” Poremba said.

“Yeah,” Jeff said, “my therapists have said the same thing.”

This made Special Agent Lee Poremba laugh. Jeff was pretty sure it was the first time he’d ever seen the man show any emotion other than basic placidity and occasional irritation. “Did I catch a plural there?” he asked.

“It’s been a hell of a year.”

“A week,” Poremba said. They shook hands, and Poremba went back inside, an agreement sealed.

It took Jeff another hour, sitting in the back of the paddy wagon, before he had reliable enough cell service to call Matthew in Walla Walla. “Pack your bag,” Jeff said after filling him in on the details.

“Where am I going?” Matthew asked.

Jeff looked out the window of the paddy wagon. To the east, he could see nothing but fields of white, to the west, the same thing. Where would they ship Sal Cupertine? Where could a man like him, the most proficient killer the Family had ever employed, be comfortable? Where would they send him where they knew he couldn’t just come back, kill them all, grab his wife and kid, and run away? Somewhere they had a connection, where they weren’t competing for the same dollars. Far enough away that he’d need to fly home, most likely, since the Family wouldn’t risk the idea that Sal Cupertine might decide to sneak out of wherever he was living at midnight and show up on their doorstep at 6 a.m. with a pipe bomb. That ruled out Detroit, Cleveland, and Nashville.

If the Family had really sold Sal Cupertine, as Bruno had suggested, the only likely trading partners were families who had the capital to spend and the ability to keep Cupertine either confined or busy or both. Where did the Chicago Family still have pull? They were getting pushed out of Miami by the New York families, none of whom needed help. They still had connections in Las Vegas and Reno, for sure, and in Los Angeles, where they had tendrils in pornography, strip clubs, and some of the entertainment unions, as well as in the burgeoning Indian casinos that dotted the desert outside Palm Springs, where regulation was difficult to manage in light of the Indians’ sovereign status. Nothing to speak of in San Francisco, where the organized crime element had shifted to the Russians and Asians.

Palm Springs was a possibility, but Jeff didn’t see that sticking for long, not with the corporations taking over all the golf courses and resorts, leaving the Italians with the restaurants and clubs, but that was little more than skim money, and the gambling money was a split, if that, with the Indians. The cartels and Mexican Mafia coming up with the cheap cocaine and weed had pretty much everything from the border up into L.A. locked down, drug-wise.

The Family’s union juice in L.A. couldn’t last much longer, either. Their best shot for long-term survival was in their bankrolling of skin flicks, provided they could keep AIDS under control, not that Jeff thought the Family was likely to run a clean shop.

Las Vegas was an open city, but they still had some historical allegiances to Chicago, even with Splitoro dead and Angelini doing time. But on the whole, Las Vegas was weak, unconnected guys working the streets and talking like they were big guns but who were really just idiots at cell phone stores trying to act tough. All the big business in Las Vegas was being run through the strip clubs, though Jeff didn’t see that as a place Sal Cupertine could exist in. What was he doing? Working as a DJ? Chatting up the drunks? Working the door in a tuxedo, shaking down bachelor parties? That wasn’t Cupertine’s scene. There hadn’t been a significant mob hit in Las Vegas since Herbie Blitzstein got his in 1997, and it took four guys from Buffalo and L.A. to do the job. Cupertine wouldn’t work like that. It had to be a small outfit, not too flashy. The sort that needed a middle manager who could also do some contract work. Someone who knew about the Rain Man and saw the potential he possessed.