“Yes,” David said.
“L’chaim,” Jerry said, and then he got back in his truck and was gone. It occurred to David then that there was a pretty good chance Jerry Ford wasn’t really a Jew. Not that it mattered.
Rabbi David Cohen locked up the funeral home and mortuary and then, for a long time, he stood in front of the entrance to the cemetery and stared up at the sky. Most of the time, it was impossible to see any stars, the light pollution from the Strip giving everything a strange green glow at night. In Summerlin, though, there were still ordinances about that sort of thing, and this close to the Red Rocks, if you faced away from the Strip, you could actually imagine you were somewhere else.
It wouldn’t always be this way, David knew. The newspaper had stories every other day about new casino developments getting approved on this end of town, along with huge shopping centers, to satisfy the needs of the one hundred thousand people who were supposed to eventually inhabit Summerlin.
It wasn’t a bad place to live. In the last nine months, David had grown warm to the convenience of the villages of Summerlin. He had his coffee place. He had a pizza joint he liked — a Detroit pizza, of all things — called Northside Nathan’s. He’d come to depend on the Bagel Café for decent corned beef and a pretty fair bagel. He even had a few places he liked to knock around in: a pub called the Outside Inn that had cheap whiskey and salty prime rib and no Jews (owing primarily to their hunting motif, David thought); a shopping center called Best in the West a few streets down, off of Rainbow, that had an ice cream shop where some angry kid mixed flavors on a slab of marble. He’d go into that store sometimes and imagine what flavors Jennifer and William would choose.
The idea that she was struggling to pay the bills made David sick. He wasn’t sure if Rabbi Kales had said that to make him feel that way. Once David got the money from Gray Beard, he’d get her some cash, and she’d be okay for a bit. A little breathing room was all she’d need while he figured out the plan.
And maybe the plan was changing. Maybe it wasn’t about getting back to Chicago anymore. Maybe it was about getting Jennifer and William to Las Vegas, where he could protect them. Get William into the Tikvah Preschool here. Keep him in all the way through high school. Get him into a good college. Maybe he’d become a doctor or a lawyer, or just the kind of guy people weren’t afraid to strike up a conversation with at a bar. What must that be like?
What would Jennifer make of this new life? It dawned on David then that in just nine months he’d been able to set up an entirely new life, here in the desert, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was a life and it had room for his wife and kid, for sure. And for the first time in his life, he was on top. Bennie was in jail, at least for a while. And then, who knew? Maybe he’d end up doing a year or two or ten, or just six months. Whatever. He wasn’t physically present, which meant that the only person who knew the truth about David was Rabbi Kales, and he was soon to be out of the picture, too. The day-to-day operations of two legit businesses — the temple and the funeral home and attached cemetery — would be under his control.
There would be so much money: all the donations, and the tuition, and the general operating budget of the temple, and then the money moved through the funeral home. The real business alone was lucrative. The murder business was a windfall, and they hadn’t even gone outside the Italian families. If they started talking to the Chinese or the Russians or even the Mexicans and blacks. . well, there were a lot of potential markets that weren’t being tapped, mostly because Bennie didn’t like dealing with anyone outside the traditional families. He just wasn’t thinking forward. The Bloods and Crips were killing each other at a pretty remarkable clip just a few miles away.
In Chicago, the Family farmed out a lot of their drug trade to the Mexican gang — the Gangster 2–6—and that had worked out well enough, so at least there was a working template. . though it wouldn’t exactly be easy to explain the sudden influx of dead Jews who were also Chinese or Mexican or black, David supposed. So that could wait.
Maybe what he’d do, David thought, was just kill Bennie Savone and keep it all for himself and. .
He’d been set up to succeed. And tonight, after nine months, he had done just that. Wasn’t that all he ever wanted?
“No,” he said aloud.
And there it was.
There was only one person alive who could predict how Sal Cupertine might react to this new life, one person who might benefit from knowing that Sal Cupertine wasn’t just efficient, wasn’t just ruthless, but was also adaptable, who could be taught to have a new life.
Only one person who might, after all this, figure out how to profit from sending Sal Cupertine to Las Vegas to become Rabbi David Cohen.
Only one person who knew where he was.
Cousin Ronnie.
It all made so much sense now.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jeff Hopper loved Las Vegas. When he was still living in Walla Walla, he’d drive out to Pasco and pick up a flight to Las Vegas on a Friday afternoon and be playing blackjack at the Sahara by dinnertime. Sometimes he’d go with friends, but Jeff mostly preferred to go by himself. Once he settled in Chicago, his trips became less frequent, but he still managed to get out at least once a year. . except for this last year, which had been completely lost to him.
He had a whole system: He never stayed at a casino — which meant he ended up staying at some shitty hotels over the years, invariably called the Royal Plaza Inn — so that once he went off to bed, there was no temptation to play just one more hand. He always had a cheap steak dinner at the Barbary Coast’s Victorian Room. And, without fail, he always played a couple of hands at the Frontier, just to see if the Culinary Union was still on strike there, as they’d been since the early 1990s.
The hotel was a microcosm for just how terminally screwed up the city really was: Howard Hughes had purchased it, the Desert Inn, the Sands, and a handful of other casinos in the 1960s as part of his quest to clean the Mafia out of Las Vegas, only to turn those places into his own strange fiefdom. And then a few years after his death, the Frontier was sold to the Elardi family, who promptly gutted the casino, tried to bust the unions, and ended up with picketers for the better part of a decade. And no one even got killed in the process.
Now, though, four days after the Super Bowl Sunday raid on Kochel Farms, as he drove away from the Strip toward the tony suburb of Summerlin — a place built by the Howard Hughes Corporation, too, in the ultimate coup de grace for old Las Vegas — Jeff couldn’t help thinking it was better back then because the Mafia would never have put a Gilley’s in the Frontier. The idea of a mechanical bull on the Strip as absurd as the giant sword of Excalibur jutting into the sky, or the laser beam from the top of the Luxor. Hard to imagine Frank, Dean, and Sammy doing their show in a glowing pyramid. Of course, the Mafia was still operating out here, they just couldn’t afford to run the casinos anymore.
Not the big ones, anyway. There were a few silent partners still involved with the sportsbooks, though the FBI was content to keep their eyes averted since they weren’t breaking tourists’ legs or getting involved in point shaving (at least not as obviously as they used to), and there was some decent grift going on with the prevalence of video poker machines in every bar and restaurant in town. All victimless crimes. No one seemed to be running to the FBI to complain they’d lost at video poker.
The Mafia in Las Vegas these days was all about secondary markets: the booming construction business that had spoked out in every direction from the Strip; the warehouse-size strip clubs that promised huge cash hauls on a nightly basis; the resort drug trade of ecstasy, coke, and pills. They didn’t bother with the hard stuff or the easy stuff, leaving the heroin, crack, and weed to the Bloods and Crips, who mostly operated out of the slums of North Las Vegas.