Las Vegas Noir (8 page)

But she was there. He could see her. She existed. He checked the archives of the
Tribune
and
Sun-Times
to see if her name had been in any marriage announcements but came up empty. David knew that didn’t mean anything concrete, but he also thought that if she had remarried, William wouldn’t have turned into such a fucking putz.

Over the last several months, he’d started looking at Google satellite photos of his old house (where, according to a simple public record search, Jennifer and William still lived). Though all he could really see was the roof and the general outline of the house, he could make out bits of himself too: the pool, which he’d purchased after he got paid for his first substantial hit (a guy he ran track with in high school—Gil Williams—whose father was a city councilman); the towering blue ash tree in the front yard, where he hung a tire swing for William; the brick driveway, Jennifer’s dream, which he laid brick by brick over the course of a long weekend. Before he understood that the photos were static and not updated regularly, David would return each day to refresh the image, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife, who he was sure he could recognize even from outer space.

Did she know he was still alive? Did she spend nights searching for him too? Did she know he’d also turned gray, but that he’d stayed in shape all of these years, working out, still hitting the heavy bag at the gym when he could, keeping himself ready, just in case, knowing, waiting, thinking that eventually, if he had to, he could kill someone with his hands again, just like back in the day. Happy with the thought. Thinking, yesterday:
You think I’m soft? I could shove that attaché case up your ass, Bennie.
And now. Now. When would things ever be tenable if they weren’t now? Life, David realized, had reached a terminal point. Years ago, Rabbi Kales explained to David that when the end of days came, the Jews would be resurrected into a perfect state and the whole of the world would take on the status of Israel, and the Jews, he told him, would live in peace there. What about me? David had asked then, and Rabbi Kales just shook his head and said that he’d likely just rot in the ground, right beside him probably, in light of the experience they were embroiled in. He laughed when he said it, but David was pretty sure he meant it. Well, fuck that, David thought now. It was time to get tenable.

David purchased a small bindle of sweet-smelling incense from a hippie-looking girl with a barbell through her tongue. He’d seen this girl before—maybe fifty times, actually, since he was pretty sure she’d been there every single time he’d visited the farmer’s market—but had never bothered to really notice her apart from the fact that she always stood there placidly, selling fucking incense. What kind of life was that? Selling smell. She smiled sweetly at him and David wondered how much kids today knew about the fucking world, about how things really
were
, how it wasn’t all just iPods and MySpace and throwing gang signs on the Internet, that there was something permanent about the decisions being made around them. Ramifications. Spiritual and physical. If kids wanted to know what it meant to be tough, they’d take a look at the Torah, see how the Jews rolled, see how revenge and power were really exerted. David liked thinking about the Jews as Chosen People, liked thinking that maybe, after all these years, he’d been chosen too. You wander the desert for forty years—or just fifteen—you begin to change your perspective on things, begin to appreciate what you had before you got lost, begin to see signs, warnings, omens. Not everything is so obvious. Not everything has to be digitized to be real. Sometimes, man, you have to look inside of things.

“Let me ask you a question,” David said to the girl with the pierced tongue. “Do you know me?”

“Am I supposed to?”

When he was young, he liked a girl with a little sass, but now it just annoyed him. “You see me here every week.”

She shrugged. “If you say so.”

“What do you think I do for a living?”

“Is this some sort of market research bullshit?”

Rabbi David Cohen—who for thirty-five years had been a guy named Sal Cupetine, who used to like to hurt people just for the hell of it, who killed three cops and really didn’t think about that at all, never even really considered it, not even after they did an episode of
Cold Case
about it that he caught one night as he was drifting off to sleep after a long wedding at Temple Beth Israel—leaned across the small table and stared into the girl’s face. “I look like a market researcher to you?”

“Everyone in Vegas is so tough,” she said, and now she was laughing at him, tears filling up her eyes, and he could tell that she wasn’t a girl at all, was closer to thirty, had pinched lines at the corner of her right eye, smelled like baby powder and cigarettes and dried sweat. “I’ll say you sell cell phones at the Meadows Mall. Am I close?”

Thursdays were always busy for David. The children at the Barer Academy—the elementary school on the temple’s campus—visited the main synagogue every Thursday for lunch and it was David’s job to come by and smile at the children, say a few words to each, make them feel like God had just strolled in for a bite, and thus ensure that their parents wrote out a big fat check at the end of the month for no other reason than that their children were happy.

In truth, it was David’s favorite time of the week. It wasn’t that he loved children all that much—he didn’t, especially, not other people’s kids anyway—but that for the hour he spent going kid to kid, he didn’t have to pretend. He just sat down next to them and asked them about their day, their life, how things were
going
and never how things
had been
, which was different from what he dealt with normally. With the people of parenting age, it was always about their childhood, how someone had fucked them up and only God or, if he wasn’t available, David could help them deal with the past, like it was some constant growling beast that lived next door that only needed to be fed and watered and everything would be okay. The senior citizens all wanted to bitch about how things were better back then, whenever the fuck that was, and then wanted assurances that they were right, that the world had turned to shit but that they, of course, weren’t to blame.

Today, though, David had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to find the focus to deal with the kids, not with what he saw on the embalmer’s table down at the temple mortuary. At 3 o’clock he was supposed to bury someone named Vincent Castiglione, whose tombstone would read
Vincent Castleberg
, since Bennie liked to keep things simple. Bennie told David that morning that it was a Chicago guy so they didn’t need to worry about putting on too much of a show. “I rounded up a couple old-timers to throw dirt,” he told David, “so just keep it short and sweet on the last-words crap. Believe me, this guy doesn’t deserve what we’re giving him.”

David went down to the temple’s mortuary at 11:30 to check on the stiff, like he always did with the Chicago guys if they came in whole, so that way he wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone he grew up with on the off chance the casket opened. Since it was a Jewish cemetery, it was always closed casket, but in the years David had been tending to the funerals, particularly those embalmed and entombed by employees of Bennie’s, he noticed slightly less attention to detail when it concerned enemies of the state. Nonetheless, when he got down to the mortuary and found Vincent Castiglione belly-up on the embalming table still fully dressed in his police uniform, right down to his holster and gun, even though Vincent’s head was sitting on the counter inside a plastic bag, the ligature marks on his neck bright purple, it took David a bit by surprise.

“Sorry, rabbi,” the kid working the table said. “Mr. Savone said this is how he asked to be buried and so we, uh, we just, uh …”

David put a hand up to stop the kid from speaking. He could never remember this dumb fuck’s name. He was a Mexican, some gangbanger Bennie rescued from the pound a few years back and set up in mortuary science classes out in Arizona. Two years later he was wearing a shirt and tie and was cleaning the dead for the Family. A good job, probably. Ruben Something or Other. He’d done a nice job on Rabbi Kales, David remembered that.

“Shut the fuck up,” David said, and Ruben’s eyes opened wide. David couldn’t remember the last time he swore out loud in public, but from the look on Ruben’s face, it had the desired effect. “Strip this motherfucker clean, you hear me?”

“Yes, rabbi.”

“You get his clothes, personal effects, all that shit on his belt, including the gun, put it in a bag, something heavy. You got something canvas here?”

“Yes, rabbi.” Ruben reached under a cupboard and came up with a large black canvas bag marked with hazardous waste symbols on either side. “We use these for our uniform cleaning.”

David paused, tried to think, looked at Ruben, saw that the kid had a jade pinkie ring, two-carat diamond earrings, a thick platinum bracelet. Fucking thief was probably making six figures and he was still pinching from the dead. “You keep anything?”

“Like his organs?”

“No, you stupid wetback motherfucker,” David said, feeling it now, finding the parlance again, how easy it was to hear Sal’s voice in his mouth after so many years, though he felt a little sorry for calling the kid a wetback, particularly since he was probably born in Las Vegas. “You steal a clip? Maybe his badge? Something to show the boys later?”

Ruben exhaled deeply, walked back to a small desk in the corner of the embalming room, and pulled open a drawer, rifled around a bit, like he couldn’t find what he was looking for, though David knew better so he kept his glare on the kid, and eventually came out with a wallet. “I think Bennie told me I could hold onto this,” Ruben said, though he handed it to David like it was contagious.

“From now on,” David said, because it just felt so good to be on this train again, “you don’t think. Got it?”

“Yes, rabbi.”

David watched as Ruben removed all the clothes from the body. Aware that Ruben was probably coming to conclusions of his own today, David tried to remain nonchalant with the process, absently thumbing through the officer’s wallet. There was over three grand in folded hundreds in the wallet, along with a handful of gold credit cards. Fucking Chicago cops. When he was younger, David thought of them as the enemy even though half of them were more crooked than he was, but now he understood they were just guys with shitty jobs trying, like he had, to make the grass green. You earned it, partner.

When Ruben was finished stripping the body, he stuffed everything into the bag and then sealed it up with medical tape and set it down in front of David. “That’s all of it,” he said.

David hefted the bag up and bounced it a little, making sure he could feel the weight of the gun, probably a Glock. Ruben was still standing in front of him, though he didn’t look too terribly respectful. He had this sneer on his face that David thought made the kid look like he’d eaten some bad clams, but which probably scared a lot of people not used to seeing how guys really looked when they were angry. The one thing about being a thug and a rabbi, David had learned, was that it was nice always feeling vaguely feared and respected at the same time. Now, though, he’d have to do a little bridge building, as Rabbi Kales used to say, if he wanted to make sure things didn’t get beyond his control.

“I’m sorry I called you a wetback,” David said, and handed Ruben the cash from the wallet. Ruben nodded and pocketed the money. “I got a little caught up in the moment.” Ruben nodded again. Didn’t anyone know how to accept an apology anymore? David took one last look around, figuring that the next time he saw a room like this, he’d be the one on the table, and then realized he’d forgotten something important. “Tell me something, Ruben,” he added, back in the voice of Rabbi David Cohen, “what do you intend to do with the head?”

Ruben just shrugged. “I dunno, rabbi, what are you going to do with the uniform and gun?”

David thought about this, figured the truth would serve him here, figured that was where he was now, toward a path of more obvious truth. “I’m going to take them home, wash both, and then go from there.”

As far as exit strategies went, David had to admit that his was a little hastily drawn, but when it’s go time, it’s go time. It was 3:15, and though he didn’t need to do it, he’d gone full bore with his eulogy of the newly minted Vincent Castleberg, which didn’t seem to bother the five octogenarians Bennie had assembled for the funeral. He recognized a couple of the men from other funerals, but now couldn’t remember if they were for real ceremonies or fake ones. It didn’t really matter, since these guys were so old and so mobbed up that even if he’d pulled out his dick and jerked off onto the casket, they’d keep quiet about it. Bennie always plied the old wise guys with lunch and a couple bucks for their time and then had his boys chauffer them back to their houses in Sun City.

But since David had decided that today was his last fucking day cutting dicks and burying pricks and listening to the world’s problems while completely ignoring his own issues—the Hasidic rabbis always talked about this, David realized, saying that if you had proper remorse for your sin, you actually got closer to God, actually became a better person, whereas depression made you a sad, violent, insolent fuck, or, well, something a lot like that—he figured he ought to put things in proper perspective for the late Vincent Castiglione, née Castleberg. So he eulogized himself, instead.

He told the five men about his family life, about his father working as a union millwright, dying young from smoking and drinking (though he’d actually been thrown off a building), about how he ended up running with some guys from the neighborhood who taught him which joints broke the easiest (this got a knowing nod from the guys), how his mom ended up remarrying and moving to Florida after he graduated from high school, how he fell in love with this sweet girl named Jennifer who made him happy, how he ended up getting into the business and made some poor choices with regard to an important contract and ended up “retiring” to Las Vegas, finding God … and the rest was history. David changed a few important details, naturally, but found that the more he told his story, the better he felt about the choice he was about to make.