“Marvin’s real fond of him,” Gray Beard said, “so he’d help you dig the grave extra deep.”
“All right,” David said. He reached into his pocket, came out with an envelope. “For our friend’s rent.”
Gray Beard counted the bills. “You’re too generous,” Gray Beard said.
David opened the door, got out, but didn’t close it right away. He had a long night ahead of him. Now that he knew where things stood. “He leave yet?” If Matthew was good for his word, he’d be in California putting a gun in Kirk Biglione’s mouth before the end of the week.
“This morning,” Gray Beard said. “Said he might be gone a week. Ten days if things got sideways. Marvin rented him a car. I gave him some supplies. So. Something happens, we’ll know.”
“Supplies?”
“Can’t tell you,” he said. “You could testify against me.”
David said, “He’s back, send a signal. Meantime, let me work on your parachute.”
“I told you,” Gray Beard said. “Not your problem.”
“And I told you,” David said.
“Well then,” Gray Beard said. “There’s something else you should know.”
“What?”
“Bennie asked me about a cocktail for his father-in-law.”
“Rabbi Kales?”
Gray Beard nodded. “Told him I’d need a week’s notice to get it all and that it wouldn’t be the sort of thing he could administer himself, that I’d need to be there to do it, which isn’t actually true. But I figured you’d want some notice.”
“Yeah,” David said.
“He called yesterday.”
Shit.
“Could be,” Gray Beard said, “I delay shipment for a few days. Wait too long, he’s gonna be suspicious.” Gray Beard looked at David for a long moment, then laughed a funny little laugh, put his van into drive, even though the door was still open.
“What?” David said.
“You look about as Jewish as me, Rabbi,” he said.
AFTER GRAY BEARD LEFT, DAVID WALKED TO THE SHOPPING CENTER, WAITED for someone to pull up in either a Toyota Tercel or Honda Accord from the 1990s, got lucky with a couple in a red 1994 Toyota Tercel, the easiest mass-produced car to steal.
Took the butt of his gun to break the driver’s side window, one tap, muffled the sound with his hoodie.
Knife into the ignition.
Butt of the gun to hammer it.
Twist.
Fifteen minutes later, he was parked down the block from the rear entrance to the Temple cemetery. Twenty and he was over the cemetery’s northwest wall, which was secured by desert and a few rows of full-growth acacias, because in pleasant society, people didn’t break into cemeteries. If you wanted to pinch from the dead, you typically weren’t in the physical shape to spend four hours digging holes, hoping you got the right one, the average motherfucker with no sense how coffins were staggered, sure everything was at six feet. In the years David worked at Temple Beth Israel, the only people who’d broken into the cemetery after hours were either heartsick or sixteen-year-old Goths wanting to drink in peace. There hadn’t even been any anti-Semitic graffiti, which was good, because David would have chased those motherfuckers down to the edges of the earth.
David walked out toward the cemetery’s final phase: acres of steadily grading man-made rolling bluffs, Rabbi Kales telling him early on that the goal was to sell the plots at street level on Hillpointe for one price and then slowly improve the view as the cemetery expanded north and west. “This will be like Beverly Hills,” Rabbi Kales told him, a place neither man had ever visited, but which Rabbi Kales presumed had wonderful views. At the cemetery, at least, this was true: at its highest point, there were clear sightlines all the way to the lights of the Strip in one direction, a glorious view of the Red Rocks in the other, and then blooming foliage surrounded them year-round, the Temple rotating heirloom, Iceberg, and JFK roses along the base of the walls, filling the air all year long.
Still, when he was selling plots out this direction, Rabbi Cohen was prone to calling it “the penthouse at the Bellagio” to prospective buyers. Jews didn’t want to be stuck somewhere that turned into a shitty subdivision for eternity, or however long it took for them to be hit with the dew of resurrection upon the Moshiach’s return, before making the long-ass trip to the Mount of Olives in Israel. They wanted a first-class afterlife. They wanted an afterlife that was not available to everyone.
So the plots at the Bellagio started at $10,000. Or $50,000. It just depended on who David was talking to.
It was all just grass and dirt and blind faith. You still went into the ground in a simple pine box and with nothing to preserve you but your finest outfit. And a life well lived.
David stopped when he came upon the graves for Clark and Zadie Zarkin and the plot Kristy Levine had purchased last year. Levine was supposed to be dead by now—she’d come to him last year around this time, a diagnosis for an aggressive cancer in hand—but she’d survived. She was even thoughtful enough to send a get-well card to David after his “fall”: Snoopy holding a balloon and then, in Kristy’s scrawl, a simple sentence: We’re both hard to kill! It momentarily gave David a feeling of joy—one person who understood how hard it is just to live—and then he remembered Kristy’s most salient facts: she’d moved to Las Vegas to work for the FBI, which wasn’t a huge surprise—the Las Vegas field office was one of the largest in the nation. Made sense they had some Jews in their ranks. It was just . . . well, David didn’t like coincidences. And now she was scoping out Matthew Drew.
Still, when it came time to hide Melanie Moss’s body, he’d picked a spot directly between the Zarkin and Levine plots. No one would be disinterring the Zarkins. No one would be disinterring a dead FBI agent, either. Even if you unearthed every body in the cemetery, it would be years before someone found Melanie Moss.
David fired up one of the three backhoes the Home of Peace kept lined up next to the groundskeeper’s shed, rolled slowly over to Melanie’s plot, and began digging.
Thirty minutes and he was standing on top of the casket with a crowbar.
Melanie Moss was standing at the edge of her grave, looking in.
David just needed a bone. Something easy to run DNA off of. He needed Melanie Moss to be identified.
All he needed was a bone.
Melanie watched him put her head into a canvas gym bag he’d stolen from the Tercel.
“Gotta make a bold statement,” David said. “Put all this to rest.”
