“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.