“He deserves another shot,” Jeff said.
“You renegotiating your deal?”
“No,” Jeff said. “This Cupertine thing, that’s it for me. When he’s in custody, I’m done. But Matthew, he did good work. He’s a real agent.”
Biglione didn’t say anything then, and now, weeks later, as they headed to Kochel Farms, and Matthew was still in Walla Walla, his sister back in Chicago but with an FBI tail, just in case, Jeff wondered if maybe he should have made Matthew’s rehiring a condition of all this. Even though Matthew wouldn’t let him, telling him that the only leverage Jeff had anymore was that Matthew was out there. . somewhere. . with all the knowledge Jeff had, including everything he hadn’t shared with the bureau. Sadly, it was true.
“Here we go,” Biglione said. Up ahead, parked on the side of the freeway, about two hundred yards up from an exit, were three black Lincoln Navigators and a black Lincoln Town Car, the marshals always good about keeping the nice-seized vehicles for their own use. Biglione slowed down and flashed his brights twice and then pulled behind the marshals and followed them out toward Kochel Farms.
“What’s that smell?” Jeff asked.
“The cows,” Poremba said. He tapped on the window. “They’ve probably got most of them behind a windbreak or in a barn, because of the cold, but with thirty thousand head, it would be hard to keep them all inside, even now.”
Jeff could see a few cows now as they drove, grazing on what looked like freshly dropped bales of hay. In the spring months, though, the field would be a solid black mass of animals, constantly walking and grazing, shitting and pissing on everything, the ground churned over and over by 120,000 hooves a day. A pretty good place to leave a body, Jeff thought.
Jeff sat stewing in the Suburban for forty minutes while the marshals and Agents Biglione and Poremba cleared the house, which proved to be a bit of a task since the Kochels were having a Super Bowl party for about twenty-five people, most of whom came walking out of the house looking as though they’d been kicked in the stomach. The marshals hadn’t bothered knocking on the front door, opting instead to burst in using a door ram. That’s how it always was with them — always with the Wyatt Earp shit. Jeff was of the opinion that if you wanted to achieve anything with a suspect, you had to make sure you didn’t start off at an escalated emotional level. It’s what concerned him about Matthew, how quickly he’d gone from having a conversation with Fat Monte to beating him. How easy it was. How much he’d liked it.
Biglione left Jeff with a radio so he could hear everything that was going on — a nice concession on his part, since Jeff wasn’t allowed inside during the raid — and, after the chaos, they began going through every person at the party to determine who was who and if anyone happened to be Sal Cupertine, which, of course, none were. Most were business associates or employees of the farm — a meat distributer (and his wife) in town from Chicago, the operations manager of the slaughterhouse, the farm’s marketing director and her husband and newborn — or just friends of the family. Once the marshals and Biglione and Poremba managed to sort the players, letting all the guests go on their way, Agent Poremba walked outside and stood in front of the main house and took several deep breaths, his frozen exhalations rising up in plumes and disappearing into the air.
Poremba took a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and then absently waved Jeff out of the car. As Jeff made his way over, four marshals came strutting out of the house, one holding the ram, the other three holding shotguns, each wearing Kevlar vests that said U.S. MARSHAL across the chest and back.
By the time Jeff reached Poremba, the marshals were already in one of the Navigators and pulling away.
“They find Jimmy Hoffa in the guacamole?” Jeff asked Poremba.
“Not today,” Poremba said. He blew his nose again and pointed at the warehouse-size barn that stood about fifty yards away. “That’s where they keep the packaged meat. They move three, sometimes four truckloads a day, every day, except Super Bowl Sunday and Christmas.”
“What about Thanksgiving?” Jeff said.
“One shipment,” Poremba said, “to a local food bank.”
“You find that all out in forty minutes?”
“No,” he said. “I got all that before I came out from Kansas City. Meat industry in KC is just as corrupt as ever. This place is a model of efficiency.”
“Still the Sicilians out there?”
“Almost seventy years they’ve been running the meat business in Saint Louis and KC, running the unions, and here we are, freezing to death at a cattle farm on Super Bowl Sunday.” Poremba laughed in an unfunny way. “These are working people,” Poremba said, “and we just crashed into their house. This isn’t even a union farm, Jeff.”
“I know what Fat Monte told me,” Jeff said.
Poremba folded up his handkerchief and examined it for a few seconds. “Your father keep a handkerchief?”
“My dad was military,” Jeff said. “He blew his nose on his arm.”
“Mine didn’t either,” Poremba said. “It’s like something from antiquity, right?” In the distance, Jeff could see a white paddy wagon heading toward the farm. Poremba noticed it at the same time. “Wishful thinking on Special Agent Biglione’s part, no doubt.”
“You need to let me in to interview these people,” Jeff said. “I know I can get. . something. Fat Monte wouldn’t have spent his last breath telling me I needed to get out to this place for nothing.”
“If the Family were connected to this farm, that would mean war with the Missouri boys by now, don’t you see? These people, they’re too successful to be connected. Can you imagine Ronnie Cupertine standing out here in one of his mohair overcoats, filling his nostrils with this lovely aroma?”
Jeff couldn’t. It was true. But there was something in all this that kept worming in his mind, had been for weeks now. There was no evidence anywhere that the Family was in the meat business. They’d gotten out of it in the 1920s, when John Giannola moved down to Saint Louis to be with his brothers and started up the Green Ones, the only decent agriculture-based organized crime syndicate in the country, which is why the Missouri families still were in it, presumably, even in a minor way.
“If there’s so much money here,” Jeff said, “there’s no good reason the Sicilians in Missouri wouldn’t move up a few miles and at least get in on the trucking, right? We’re ninety minutes from their operation in Saint Louis. What reason would they have for not being in this place? This farm has been here since the 1950s, and you mean to tell me no one in Missouri has ever tried to get their hooks into it?”
Poremba started to say something, then stopped. It was a simple question. “Saint Louis is weak,” he said finally. “Lucky to hold on to what they have.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said, “but if they have the meat industry, and the Family doesn’t give a shit about it, wouldn’t they cut a deal? Isn’t that what they do now? All one big happy crime family?”