Gangsterland: A Novel (34 page)

Of course Jeff knew that. This was all for the public—and private—record, Biglione likely coming to the same realization Jeff had in making the phone call in the first place. Asses needed to be covered.

“See, that’s the problem, Kirk,” Jeff said. “You’re not looking for Sal Cupertine. No one is. Or was. But I have been. And do you want to know what I’ve found out? Or do you just want to read about it in the paper?” Biglione didn’t respond, but Jeff’s call waiting beeped. He pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the display—it was Biglione’s cell phone. Jeff didn’t bother to click over and instead just hung up. He’d expressed what needed to be expressed. They both knew he wasn’t going to call the
Tribune.
At least not yet.

It was 4:42 in the morning, sunrise not for another two hours at least, when Jeff got into his Explorer and headed along the snow-packed streets of Chicago toward Matthew Drew’s apartment building. It was one of the first times having a four-wheel drive SUV in the city actually made any practical sense, one of the few things that morning that did. As he drove, he tried to take stock of where the last several months had taken him. Had he committed any crimes? No, he had not. Had he done anything morally reprehensible?

He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. He was sure he had. He’d caused another human being to kill himself. It didn’t matter that Fat Monte was a criminal. Jeff had to hope Fat Monte hadn’t shot his wife. He slammed his hand again. What was he thinking? What
the fuck
was he thinking? An innocent woman was probably dead because he got it in his
mind that he was going to do the right thing, that he was going to catch Sal Cupertine, who murdered four innocent men.

But, no. That wasn’t true. Those four men weren’t innocent. Those four men had taken part in a sting. For three of them, it was their job to be put in that situation. For the fourth, it was a result of getting caught being a criminal. No one was exactly innocent in that situation. It was a point Jeff had started to believe—an implied risk of doing this business was that they might very well die. The fault didn’t rest with Jeff for leaving his name on the bill. And the fault hardly even rested with Sal Cupertine, when you really thought about it. No, he’d tried to convince himself, the fault resided in the implicit rules of the game. People die doing illegal things.

It took Jeff nearly thirty minutes to make the ten-minute drive to Matthew’s building, and by the time he got there, he realized what a bad idea it would be for all involved if he was found on the apartment’s closed-circuit security cameras, so he continued up the street to the White Palace and called Matthew’s cell from the pay phone inside.

“What time is it?” Matthew asked when he answered.

“A little after five,” Jeff said. “Do you know who this is?”

“No one calls me but you,” he said, already catching on and not saying Jeff’s name. Not that Jeff thought Matthew’s cell phone was tapped, but you never knew. Matthew cleared his throat. “What’s the problem?”

“Fat Monte is dead,” Jeff said.

“Did you kill him?”

It was a reasonable question. “No,” Jeff said.

“Did I?”

“Not unless you forced him to shoot himself in the head.”

Matthew didn’t respond for a long while, and then, when he did, all he said was, “Where are you?”

“The White Palace.”

“I’ll need to get a cab. My car is under three feet of snow.”

“No,” Jeff said, “wait, listen. You need to pack some clothes and get out of town for a few weeks. Your sister, too.”

“That’s not going to work,” he said. “My sister can’t just leave school. Do you hear what you’re saying? Jesus. What’s going on?”

Jeff told him what Fat Monte had said, told him about the phone call Jeff made to Biglione, told him that maybe Fat Monte’s wife was gone, too. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Jeff said. “We could all be in danger if the Family decides to make a move.”

“Give me thirty minutes to get my sister up and fill her in,” Matthew said. “Order me a shake.” Before Jeff could protest again, the phone was dead. Jeff made his way to a table and sat down. When the waitress came by, he asked her for a chocolate shake and if she might have a piece of paper and a manila envelope somewhere in the place that he could borrow. The waitress looked at him strangely, but it couldn’t have been the most outrageous request anyone had made of her, particularly since she had a tattoo on her throat that said
Robert
and one on the back of her hand that said
Fuck All Men
.

The waitress came back a few moments later with the shake, a padded mailer, and a piece of college-ruled paper. “The manager says I have to charge you for the envelope,” she said.

“Okay,” Jeff said.

“You look familiar to me.”

“I used to come here a lot,” Jeff said.

She cocked her head. “Are you a cop?”

“FBI,” he said, for what would be the last time in his life.

“Are you allowed to say that? Isn’t that supposed to be a secret?”

“Nope,” Jeff said. “That’s the CIA.”

“You all look alike, I guess,” she said. “Enjoy your envelope.”

Jeff took his car keys and cell phone out of his pocket and shoved them into the envelope, then scrawled a note to Matthew:

My truck is parked behind the restaurant. Take it. Pack your stuff up and be out of town before the morning news, if at all possible. Only use my phone. The charger is in the glove box. I’ll call you tonight. Get out of Illinois. Tell your sister I’m sorry and that she’ll be home in a week.

Jeff looked over the note, tried to decide if it was absurd or cautionary or just honest. It didn’t matter in the long run, Jeff supposed, since what was most important here was that Matthew and Nina be safe, but also that the FBI had no ability to scapegoat Matthew. This was weight Jeff was willing to carry, and he had a plan.

He gathered up his heavy winter coat and gloves and walked to the cash register, where he waved the waitress over and handed her the envelope. “In a couple of minutes, another FBI agent is going to walk in here with a young woman. Give him this envelope,” he said. “And the shake, too. That’s for him.”

“Am I on some hidden camera show?” the waitress asked.

Jeff looked around the White Palace. There was a camera above the register, another over the door, most likely a few around the outside of the building, too, everyone and everything captured, just in case anyone wanted to take a look. “Probably,” Jeff said.

He walked out of the White Palace then and stood on the corner of Canal Street and Roosevelt. The FBI’s offices were just two miles away down Roosevelt, a good twenty-minute walk in perfect weather, probably an hour through the snow-drifts that lined the street. Just enough time to get everything straight, so that when he stepped foot back inside the bureau, he’d know exactly what kind of deal he was willing to take.

It occurred to Jeff now, in the backseat of Biglione’s Suburban, that he probably should have held out for a better deal. One that didn’t involve him spending time with Biglione. As it was, agreeing to be fired—he didn’t agree to be excoriated in the press, though he should have expected it—and hired back as an independent consultant with the proviso that the bureau would investigate the leads he’d found into Sal Cupertine’s disappearance was probably more than he could have hoped for, but that was the agreement he made in exchange for not going to the press with any of the information he’d gleaned while on leave. Biglione didn’t even mention Matthew while they negotiated the terms. In fact, it wasn’t until three days later, when Biglione was going over the report Jeff had typed up on the information he’d learned (or, rather, the information he decided to share; Jeff had made a promise to Dennis Tryon regarding Neto Espinoza and he intended to keep it) that Matthew was brought up.

“So, where was Agent Drew in all of this?” Biglione asked. He had his glasses on and was still looking at the report, though Jeff could see he wasn’t really reading it. Jeff knew that Biglione couldn’t afford to find Sal Cupertine yet, which meant unless Cupertine showed up on their doorstep, they weren’t going to
go above and beyond to get him into custody. They’d follow the leads they had, because they had to. Fat Monte’s wife was sitting in a hospital with a bullet wedged into her head. Alive, but only barely. Her eyes were open, she was breathing, but there wasn’t much else going on. Just enough for her family to keep her alive and to keep the pressure on the FBI about Fat Monte’s last hours alive.

“I’m not sure I get what you mean,” Jeff said, though he was certain he knew exactly what he meant. The bureau had likely combed through all his affairs from the last few months, and it wouldn’t have taken them long to see that he’d written Matthew checks every month.

“I got a witness at the Four Treys who says he overheard Agent Drew threaten to kill Fat Monte,” Biglione said. “You care to explain that?”

“You line up every person in Chicago who threatened to kill Fat Monte,” Jeff said, “you’d need to rent out Wrigley for the occasion.”

“Let’s not bullshit, okay?” Biglione said. “I know he was working with you.”

“So what?”

“The Family might like him dead,” Biglione said. “And I’m frankly not exactly comfortable with him threatening to kill people while in the company of an FBI agent.”

“Well, that’s been rectified.”

Biglione put the report down on the table and rubbed at his eyes. “I know he was impersonating an FBI agent,” he said. “I could get proof if need be.”

“What would the need be?”

“Newspapers are starting to pile up in front of his door, and his sister is about to miss an important test in her Western
civilizations class. She gets below 3.0, could be a problem with her
federal
student loan,” Biglione said.

“He’s safe,” Jeff said. “He and his sister are on a road trip.”

“Is he looking for Cupertine on this road trip?”

“No,” Jeff said. In fact, Matthew and Nina were already safely at the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla, the one town in America Jeff was reasonably sure did not have a tendril of the Family in operation.

“I can’t protect them if I don’t know where they are,” Biglione said. “The Family decides to send a blackout team for them, they’re on their own.”

“Matthew can handle himself,” Jeff said.

“How do you handle yourself when ten guys shoot automatic weapons into your house?”

It was a good question, but the larger issue was that Biglione seemed to know what was becoming more and more evident: The Family had a way to get the names of the FBI players. Jeff doubted there was mole in the bureau. That was some cloak-and-dagger shit that frankly was above the Family’s general purview. Nevertheless, Jeff was sure that there were CIs playing both sides, along with guys doing deep cover who would shovel a bit of helpful information to the Family if it meant keeping their own asses covered. And as it related to Matthew, his association with Jeff was enough to make him the sort of target they’d be willing to go a bit soft on if they didn’t think there was a good chance of him getting hurt. Give up the name of someone inconsequential, basically, just to have the act of giving up information. The same cat and mouse the bureau and the Family had been playing since Capone and Ness.

“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.