Gangsterland: A Novel (15 page)

Matthew ate another fry and finished off his shake. “This is insane,” he said.

Jeff agreed.

“We do this, we get him,” Matthew said, “do you think I have any chance of getting picked back up?”

“No,” Jeff said. “Not by the bureau. Maybe NSA will like the self-determination angle, but who knows. I’ve got some contacts in private security, guys doing paramilitary and intelligence jobs on contract, things like that. That’s where the real money is.”

“It wasn’t about the money for me,” Matthew said.

“I wanted to be a superhero, too,” Jeff said, “and here we are.”

Matthew shook his head. Jeff couldn’t tell if it was in disgust or resignation or just simple frustration. Maybe it was something else all together. Either way, he followed it
up with a brusque laugh and said, “What time do we leave for Milwaukee?”

The first time Jeff Hopper met Paul Bruno was in late 1995. Bruno had just been released from county—in fine Chicago form, he’d done two months after getting picked up for assault after trying to collect on a gambling debt, and then pled down to a minor racketeering charge, a term that didn’t even exist until 1927, when the Employers’ Association of Greater Chicago coined it in response to the constant shakedowns from organized crime figures in the Teamsters—and came sniffing around the bureau for opportunities to snitch once he realized a jail cell was not a place he ever wanted to visit again.

He wasn’t a made guy in the classic sense—as in, he’d never been made part of the Family—but he had a foot in their business interests in that he was good with numbers. He helped run a couple of books by setting spreads and the like, and since he worked with his father, Dennis, at the family butcher business—Bruno’s Fine Meats—he knew his way around dead bodies.

Paul Bruno had two problems, however: The first was that he was a closeted homosexual, which wasn’t exactly a great secret to have while trying to be a tough guy. Not that he wasn’t tough, but it opened him to blackmail by other syndicates or anyone else who might want to hurt him or his business interests, which was primarily with the Family. Paul was smart enough to realize this himself, which is why he kept himself outside the lines as much as possible. Sure, he’d aid and abet, provide a few key services, even; he just wouldn’t saddle up all the way. That made him even more valuable, since he’d been
able to befriend guys up and down the chain of command. It helped that he’d grown up with them.

The second problem was far less pronounced, or at least was until Bruno landed in a jail cell: He had claustrophobia, which led to anxiety, which led to panic attacks, which led to crying, which led, every time, to vomiting. Jeff knew of Bruno’s first problem long before Bruno landed in county and revealed his second issue, though that revelation was the impetus for putting a CI into the cell with him for the last few weeks of his sentence to put some ideas into his head.

For the next year, in exchange for getting his record expunged and for financial help with tuition toward his real estate license, Paul Bruno provided information to the FBI, though because his operational knowledge was slight—he’d helped teach some Family members the art of cutting up bodies and knew the Family had cut up some bodies but didn’t know who those bodies actually were—what he knew about the books was practically common knowledge, so that was largely worthless. So Jeff tended to use Bruno for insight on the men themselves, find out their peccadilloes, their habits, interesting things about who they were outside the crimes they’d perpetrated. Bruno became a good CI because he was so secretive and low-key in his normal life that becoming a snitch was easy work for him.

Now, as Jeff and Matthew pulled up to a new model home tract located just outside of Milwaukee in the lake country town of Oconomowoc, it was impossible not to notice how things had changed. First, there was the series of billboards featuring Bruno and his “gold pro team” of real estate agents that lined Silver Lake, the long street that wound through Oconomowoc toward a subdivision called Pleasant Farms Lakes, that pronounced Bruno the “king of lake country home deals!” Then
there was the yellow Hummer Jeff saw in front of a half-built two-story house at the entrance of the tract. It had a picture of Bruno and his “Gold Pro Team” emblazoned over the whole driver’s side of the vehicle.

“I thought you said he was a quiet guy,” Matthew said.

“He was,” Jeff said. When they spoke on the phone, Bruno suggested they meet at the development since it was a good place to do business—good guys wouldn’t bug a house that’s being built, and bad guys wouldn’t be smart enough to do it in the first place—which made Jeff think Bruno was still doing a bit of crooked work on the side. Which was fine. As long as he wasn’t piling up bodies, Jeff didn’t really care anymore about a little white-collar stupidity—in the larger scheme of things, everyone was at some point getting robbed.

Jeff parked down the street at the sales office—which was actually the garage of the Saddle Rock model home, a modification that would be changed once the development was built out—and waited outside, near a blue minivan and a ten-foot-wide map of the proposed community. Pleasant Farms Lakes boasted that space had been carved out for over two hundred homes; a multihole putting green; a dog park; a day care center; three man-made lakes, each one stocked with different kinds of fish; and, the map noted, “several lots scaled for Devotional Worship development.”

“Nice place,” Matthew said.

“It has the same basic layout of a federal prison,” Jeff said. “Minus the dog park.”

“I could see myself living in a place like this one day,” Matthew said. “Once I’d lost all hope.” He pointed three fingers at the map. “I’m trying to figure out the wisdom behind man-made lakes in lake country.”

“Easier to dump pesticides into a lake you own,” Jeff said.

Bruno’s yellow Hummer came down the street then and stopped a few feet from Jeff. The doors opened, and a family of four came tumbling out, followed by Bruno himself. The family looked happy, or at least normal: The father was maybe thirty-five, dressed head to toe in L.L.Bean, while the mother looked like she’d robbed J.Crew, as did their two small children, both girls. Bruno, however, looked completely different from how Jeff remembered him. He was the kind of guy who had a sweat suit for every occasion, but now he was in tan chinos, a black cashmere sweater over a white collared shirt. He had a Movado on his wrist, leather band, black face, classy. He’d grown a beard recently—or at least since the photos that appeared everywhere had been taken—and had a suntan, which meant he was spending his free time in a tanning bed, since it was already in the low forties and thirties in town and the skies had been gray for a good two months.

The father thanked Bruno for showing them around, and then the entire family systematically climbed into the blue minivan and drove off. Bruno waved at them as they meandered down the road, his face all smiles, his eyes wide and bright and filled with the kind of bottomless optimism all real estate agents seem to have when they stare at you from the calendars left on your doorstep. Jeff couldn’t help but wonder about the intersection in Bruno’s mind between cutting up bodies for the mob and showing nuclear American families real estate they probably couldn’t afford.

When the van finally turned the corner, Jeff got his answer.

“Fucking maggots,” Bruno said. He pulled his cashmere sweater off, balled it up, and tossed it into the Hummer, then walked inside the sales office and came back out with a bottle
of Windex and some paper towels. He opened the back passenger door and started scrubbing at the seats. Jeff walked over and peered in. Brown leather, built-in TV monitors. State of the art. Matthew stayed a few feet back, probably trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“Fucking kids spilled a full Coke on my backseat,” Bruno said, not that Jeff had asked. “Splashed it up on the back of my fucking sweater, too. Two-hundred-dollar sweater and now it’s sticky as shit. They don’t make sippy cups anymore? You gotta give your kids a full can of soda?” He stopped his rant for a moment, appeared to notice Jeff and Matthew for the first time, and said, “I thought you were coming alone.”

“Good to see you, too, Bruno,” Jeff said.

He regarded Jeff with a look of exasperation, like they’d been together on some kind of horrific experience, then he just got back to scrubbing. “Two hours I spend with that family. And what do they tell me? They’re just looking. You know, look on your own time.”

“This is Matthew,” Jeff said. “He’s working with me.”

“And one more thing,” Bruno said, “if you got a problem with two-story houses, then move to the Saharan desert and get a tent, okay? What is wrong with people these days? A two-story house
is
America. It’s the dream. Am I right?”

“I live in an apartment,” Jeff said.

“You don’t count. You work for the government.” Bruno finally paused and gave Matthew the once-over. “What about you, Encyclopedia Brown? You want a two-story house? Basement, wet room, big yard. You want that, right?”

“I’d just be happy not to have any more student loans,” Matthew said.

“When I was a kid, you know what I wanted?” Bruno said.

“To be an adult?” Jeff said.

“That’s right, that’s right,” Bruno said. “I just wanted to be bigger. You know? These kids, they kept telling their parents what they needed in a house, like they were gonna bust their asses on the mortgage. The gumption. That’s what gets to me.”

“This doesn’t sound like the sort of talk that made you the King of Lake Country Home Deals,” Jeff said. “Hardly what one would expect from a person who has his own Gold Pro Team.”

“You wanna know the truth?” Bruno said.

“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “Do I?”

This got Paul Bruno to laugh. “There is no Gold Pro Team. I’m it. These other people? I just found them in some clip art book. They don’t exist.”

“I believe they call that a racket,” Jeff said.

“Just false advertising,” Bruno said. “Anyway, I’ve sold more houses in this shit hole than anyone. This is my baby out here. You know more people move to Wisconsin than any other state in America?”

“That can’t be true,” Jeff said.

“It isn’t,” Bruno said. “So I always say it like that. Make it a question. People, they’ll hear what they want to hear, right?” He looked at his watch. “I got another client in an hour. Come on, get in the Hummer. I’ll drive you down to this development I’m buying into. We can talk in the car.”

Jeff slid in the front seat, left the sticky backseat for Matthew, who didn’t seem to mind. Bruno got behind the wheel and fired up the engine. It sounded like a bomb going off. Jeff couldn’t figure out one good reason for anyone to own a Hummer unless
they had designs on attacking Baghdad. He knew several agents who drove them, but they were always ex-military types who wanted you to know just how comfortable they’d been riding in armored vehicles, so much so that they bought them to drive around the South Loop, too.

Bruno drove them through Pleasant Farms Lakes, pointed out where all the amenities were going to be, all of which were just mounds of dirt, and then pulled out of the development and headed down a road that had only recently been paved. Up ahead was a gate and a sign that proclaimed the development, called Legacy at the Lake Country, was Oconomowoc’s first “over 55 luxury retirement destination.” Jeff saw only dirt and gravel behind the gate. Bruno hit a button on a remote control, and the gate opened, and the Hummer pulled through and then came to a stop a hundred yards in, near a construction trailer. In the distance Jeff could make out two land graders moving back and forth near a low outcropping of tamarack and shagbark.

“This place,” Bruno said, “is my secret nest egg.”

“How secret is it if you’re showing it to us?” Jeff said.

Bruno considered this. “You got the can, right? For the Cupertine shit?”

“Paid leave,” Jeff said.

“Same shit. What about you, Encyclopedia Brown?”

“Fired,” Matthew said. “Just for knowing Agent Hopper.”

“So neither of you is officially FBI right now, right?”

“Correct,” Jeff said, though officially he was.

Bruno turned in his seat to face Jeff and Matthew. “So I tell you the plan, you tell me what kind of legal trouble I’m looking at, okay?”

“Fine,” Jeff said. He’d had conversations with Bruno like this before. He always had a scheme of some kind.

“So the builders? They’re friends of mine, plus, you know, I’ve got cash in the deal. Whatever. It’s a good deal, right? So they’re gonna put in these windows and sliders with locks. Everyone afraid of the world, they all want locks. Every single house is going to be Fort Knox, because these old motherfuckers will be moving in here with all their worldly goods, waiting for the Rapture and all that. Thing is, I’m going to have a master set of duplicates to every house. I fall on hard times, need a quick score to get me out of the city, on a boat to Hawaii, or I just want some extra cash to buy my groceries, whatever, I got my own mall right here. All I can steal. What do you think of that?”