“Not enough,” Peaches said. “FBI could be on those cameras in five minutes. Take a sixteen-year-old probably half that time.”
“No one knows I’m down here,” Ronnie said. Peaches handed Ronnie one of the mailers. He opened it up, looked inside. It was filled with papers. “What’s this?”
“Every piece of property you own and every piece of property you’ve hidden in the last three decades. Including that one that burned down the other day.”
“The fuck you talking about?”
“In Florida.”
“Donte,” Ronnie said, though he kept his eyes on Peaches.
The door opened up and there was that big motherfucker with the Kevlar, gun in his hand, and then behind him two other guys now. So here it was.
“Tell the boys upstairs to give me three minutes off camera,” Ronnie said.
“Okay,” Donte said. He looked at Peaches, then back at Ronnie. “You all right alone?”
Ronnie stared at Peaches for a few seconds. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m fine.” When Donte left, Ronnie put a finger up. “Don’t speak,” he said. He looked up at the cameras. When the red light went off on all of them, he said, “All right. You’ve got three minutes. I don’t like what I hear, you’re leaving in a bag.”
“I had a problem solved for you,” Peaches said. “An impediment to us having any kind of fruitful association.”
“For me? An entire fucking block of residential properties burned down,” Ronnie said. Peaches hadn’t seen that. Mike really had a sheet now.
“That wasn’t the intention.”
“I got cops picking bones out of the ashes down there. It’s gonna cost me all the insurance money just to keep people quiet. So tell me, what fucking problem did you solve?”
“A transportation problem,” Peaches said. He tore open the second mailer, dumped out Frank Fishmann’s eyes, ears, tongue, and the skin that once covered his face. “Let’s have a conversation about Sal Cupertine.”
1
August 2001
That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly thought of it anymore. Not when he was at the Bagel Café grabbing a nosh with Phyllis Rosencrantz to go over the Teen Fashion Show for the Homeless, not when he was shaking Abe Seigel down for a donation to the Tikvah scholarship over a bucket of balls at the TPC driving range, nor even when he was doing Shabbat services on a Saturday morning at Temple Beth Israel.
It didn’t cross his mind when he was burying some motherfucker shipped in from Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle, like the low-level Chinese Triad gangsters they’d been getting lately. The last one—David thought he was maybe nineteen—went into eternity under the gravestone of Howard Katz, loving husband of Jill. Or at least some of him went into eternity. Katz didn’t have much of a face left and David had his long bones extracted for transplant, then disposed of his organs, so basically he performed a service over metacarpals and phalanges in a bag of skin. Same day, David also put Morris Brinkman down, and that was fine, too. Eighty-seven years old, always crinkling butterscotch wrappers during minyan, the kind of man who still called black guys schvartzes? His time was up. Long up.
Hell, not even brises really got to David. That was all the mohel’s show, anyway, and a RICO-level scam in its own right. Schlomo Meir did the cuttings at every synagogue in town, a fucking monopoly on the foreskin business, but David didn’t see any way to move in on that. There were training courses and accreditations involved, most Reform mohels these days were nurses or EMTs, no one really wanting some shaky-hand from the Old Country wielding the knife on their son. Since David was about the only person in the room who wasn’t queasy around a blade and a little blood, it was actually a fairly pleasant affair. He could zone out for a few minutes, not worry about a tactical team kicking down the door.
No, the only time the Jewish thing crept up on David was on a day like today, the last Sunday of August, presiding over the quickie wedding of Michael Solomon to Naomi Rosen. They were too young, in David’s opinion, Naomi only twenty-two, Michael a few months younger, both just out of UNLV with degrees in golf resort management, which was a thing, apparently. The rub was that Naomi was three months pregnant and that wasn’t going to fly, at least not with her father. Jordan Rosen came to David a few weeks earlier to get a spiritual opinion on the matter, wanting to know where abortion fell among the irredeemable sins.
They were sitting in David’s office at Temple Beth Israel. He’d rearranged it since taking over from Rabbi Cy Kales, moving out the two sofas that faced each other in favor of four uncomfortable chairs surrounding a narrow coffee table. He didn’t want people staying longer than they had to.
“Talmud says it is acceptable,” David told him, “if the baby isn’t viable, or if it’s making your daughter want to harm herself.” This was, admittedly, a pretty modern interpretation. “In either case, it’s not a choice you get to make for her.”
“What if she’s not in her right mind?”
“Is that the situation?”
“Seems like it,” Jordan said. “When I was her age, you know what I was doing?” he asked. “Nothing. I was doing nothing. That’s how it should be. Make no important life decisions until you’re at least twenty-five. That’s what my father told me. Makes sense to me now. At the time, it was just a free pass to screw up without any real ramifications. It was liberating.” Jordan squeezed his thumb and index finger over his slim mustache, thinking. Then: “What about killing the kid who knocked her up? What’s the ruling on that?”
“Is he threatening your life?”
“In a way.”
Jordan Rosen was in his late fifties and had amassed a decent fortune developing gas station mini-marts around the city, all of them called Manic Al’s. His latest venture was a carwash over on Fort Apache and Sahara that catered to the Summerlin country club set. Leather sofas. Recessed lighting. A wine bar. A cigar lounge. Seven pretty girls in knock-off Chanel suits running the front of the house like they were FBI, everything handled via earpieces, cuff mics, and disinterested stares.
Friday afternoons, Rosen brought out minor Las Vegas celebrities for meet and greets, so guys coming to pick up their Bentleys might run into Danny Gans or Charo or even Ralph Lamb, the cowboy sheriff who supposedly roughed up Johnny Roselli back in the day. It was one of those famous stories David heard growing up in Chicago, but which, when he thought about it now, seemed like it was probably made up. Good for tourism, shitty for reality. Because it turned out, what the fuck did it matter? Mob was still in Las Vegas and Ralph Lamb was still swinging his dick, fifty years later, eating free lunches for maybe smacking a guy who spent his days producing movies and counting cards. Real tough guys, both of them.
Jordan calling the car wash Manic Al’s wouldn’t fly in Summerlin, so he opted for the Millionaire Detail Club, started running commercials on KNPR, pulling in those sensitive types who listened to classical music and shopped organic but still wanted to feel like a boss, then priced everything at a markup: The most basic wash was $35.99. The Platinum Care Package ran five bills and included a blacked-out, supposedly bulletproof Suburban that would shuttle you back and forth to your home or office while your ride was getting cleaned. The Diamond Experience? Rosen didn’t bother to advertise a price on that, nor explain what it entailed. You felt the need to ask, it wasn’t for you.
David didn’t get it. It was all just water and soap. And yet there was always a line of cars waiting to get washed.
“What does your wife think?” David asked.
“Sarah’s losing her mind with glee. She’s been preparing to be called Nana her entire life. Throw in planning a wedding and she might combust.” Jordan stopped rubbing his mustache, but left his thumb