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Purgatory Gardens

A Novel

Skyhorse Publishing

SAMMY

The thought of having the African whacked first occurred to Sammy Dee (née Salvatore Didziocomo) at a homeowners' meeting to discuss the mold problem in the laundry room at the Paradise Gardens condominium community in Palm Springs. The man was wearing a brightly colored native robe with a hat that made him look like a cross between a sushi chef and a kamikaze pilot, and he was hovering over the onion dip, putting the make on Marcy Gray, the former actress — territory that Sammy considered his own.

The African was at least six-three and dripping sweat into the dip. And, if that wasn't bad enough, he was speaking French. The onion dip was beyond help, but the affections of Marcy Gray were another matter. The woman had given Sammy reason to hope that he wouldn't have to pack it in for the duration.

She was an attractive (if slightly reconstructed) woman of an indeterminate age. Sammy put her in her sixties, but these days you could never be sure. They were getting better and better with the knife. Nine o'clock every morning she did a couple of miles on the treadmill in the exercise room and, though you could never tell with Spandex, it looked to him like she was holding up decently well.

They'd had mochaccinos at Starbucks, for openers; a few days later, lunch at Dennys; and the following week, dinner at the Olive Garden with a bottle of Valpolicella. She had been chatty and flirtatious and had led him to believe, over the spumoni, that had she not been suffering from some undisclosed female ailment at the moment, he might have gotten lucky that night. So, as far as Sammy Dee was concerned, Marcy Gray was low-hanging fruit. His low-hanging fruit. Not a French-speaking Africans, in native robes with tribal scars on his cheek, and, Sammy suspected, a machete in his pants.

Sammy walked across the room to insert himself into the scene. He was wearing hand-tailored gabardine trousers, a cashmere sweater he'd paid two hundred bucks for at a Nordstrom outlet store in Palm Desert, and a pair of Italian loafers that were so soft he had bruised his toe on a table leg.

"Sammy Dee," Marcy Gray smiled, revealing some very expensive dental implants.

"How're you doing?"

"Do you know Didier Onyekachukwu?"

"Haven't had the pleasure," Sammy said, sticking out an indifferent hand to the big African, who crushed it in his meaty grip.

"Didier is from Ivory Coast. And he speaks French."

"No kidding?" Sammy said, trying to communicate just how fucking unimpressed he was by this fact.

"Didier is going to give me French lessons," Marcy went on.

"Dee Dee Yay," the African corrected the pronunciation of his name.

"My French could use some brushing up. Mind if I join you?" Sammy volunteered. He would do it in self-defense — to keep Marcy Gray from too much one-on-one time with Diddly Shit.

"It will be easy for you, Mr. Dee. French is very much like Italian."

As far as Sammy was concerned, he didn't look Italian. Well, not terribly Italian. Dee was supposed to be a swing name — some perversion of a Jewish or Russian name — suggested by the WITSEC people to widen the scope of the identity they were trying to conceal. You were encouraged to use the same initials, and possibly the same first name, but Sal was a little too Italian for a guy trying to hide from the mob.

"I don't speak Italian," he protested, as if maintaining that he wasn't a pedophile.

"Sammy's Jewish," Marcy said, repeating the fiction that he had told her over dinner the night he didn't get laid.

"Half. On my father's side. He got his name changed on Ellis Island."

"Intéressant," Didier Onyekachukwu said, dropping French into the onion dip along with his perspiration.

Sammy was thinking about cold-cocking the guy when Ethel Esmitz, the president of the PGHOA (Paradise Gardens Homeowners' Association), banged a spoon against a coffee mug and called the meeting to order.

Sammy and the African flanked Marcy Gray — each attempting a possessory posture — as the pros and cons of spending money to obliterate the laundry room mold were debated. It came down to those who were willing to increase their assessments to spiff up the place pitched against those who had better things to do with their money.

Sammy wasn't planning on spending the rest of his life, such that it was, in this middle-market condo community on the outskirts of Palm Springs, a home he was occupying very much as a matter of convenience. He had chosen it over similar arrangements in Ypsilanti, Jacksonville, and Tempe because he wanted to be in driving distance of a major city in the event that he felt like doing something besides play golf or get skin cancer growing tomatoes in his yard.

But he was there until the DOJ in Washington approved a new place for him to live — or washed their hands of him. Fuck mold in the laundry room. As it was, he never set foot in the place. His cleaning lady shoved his washables into a machine once a week and sat with the other wetbacks jabbering in Spanish while his jockeys shrunk from the hot water he kept telling her not to use.

The Finnish dykes across the hall — Tuuli and Majda, or vice versa — led the faction supporting bringing in the Mold Busters: "Vee mussed kill de mold."

This from two women whose unit smelled of cat piss. When he'd told them that the odor drifted across the hall, they accused him of being a cat hater. He was a cat hater, and he wasn't particularly fond of Scandinavians or lesbians either, for that matter. Sammy wouldn't mind having them whacked along with the African. Maybe he'd get a package deal and do his WITSEC handler, Marshal Dillon, as well.

Ernest Dylan was a United States marshal and Sammy Dee's conduit to the outside world. He was the only person in the state of California who knew that Sammy Dee's real name was Salvatore Didziocomo, and that he had been — until eighteen months ago, when his testimony led to a sentence of twelve to fifteen for Phil "Three Balls" Finoccio on charges of extortion, tax evasion, and receiving stolen property — a member of the Finoccio crime family on Long Island.

He had been drifting for years as a semi-retired made guy, overseeing a bunch of younger button men carrying out the dwindling mob business in Nassau County. Just as he had been contemplating pulling out and moving to Tucson, using his asthma as a pretext and getting by on the stash of krugerrands he had been putting aside for this moment, they nailed him. The fucking IRS.

His longtime accountant and laundryman, Lennie "The Kike" Baumberg, gave him the bad news.

"They got you six ways to Shavuos, Sal. It's not just deductions. Deductions we could live with. It's failure to report. They audited that housing project in Wantagh where you been washing your laundry. You're looking at seven to ten, if you luck out with the prosecutor. They could go for ten to fifteen, and sell it to a jury."

Salvatore Didziocomo took a long, hard look at his options. Seven to ten would have taken him into his mid-seventies, probably in Otisville or Butner, where he could hang out with Bernie Madoff and get gang-raped by felons who had lost money in the market. Or he could commit the worst act that a made man could commit. He could sing.

That was, if he actually could sing. They were getting pickier in witness protection. You had to deliver the goods before they set you up with a new life. It wouldn't be enough to tell them that Phil Finoccio's nickname came from a third testicle that he had been born with, or so he claimed. Jimmy Bassio said he'd been in a steam room with Phil and that the guy had the smallest dick this side of Tokyo.

In his early days, Sal had seen his share of shit. He had been on the janitors' squad — guys whose job it was to clean up messes and dispose of bodies. There were things he had seen that he was still trying to forget — basements and garages with blood-splattered cement. Theyd had to go in there with bleach, scrub out the DNA traces, and then drop the body from a boat twenty miles off of Freeport.

It had been some time since that stuff went down, but when it had gone down, it had gone down with canaries. Breaking omertà. There was no mercy for guys who blew the whistle. You were lucky if they just killed you.

Over the years, he had heard people talk about approaching the feds. There was an office in Washington you contacted to set up an interview. You met them in a restaurant, and you told them what you would be willing to testify about in court, and they told you whether or not what you had was worth their protecting you.

His meeting had been in a McDonalds in Silver Springs, Maryland. The guy was wearing a Washington Redskins windbreaker and sipping a milkshake through a straw. He told Sammy his name was Gary, no last name, suggested he order something, and said they would continue the conversation in his car.

For the next hour and a half, they sat in the guys immaculate Chevy Malibu and negotiated. Gary told him that the bar was high, since the agency's budget was being slashed by Congress. They weren't going to spend the two hundred grand it took to set a guy and his family up for years unless he could deliver a really big fish.

Sal told him he had stuff on several high-ranking lieutenants in the Finoccio family. Gary shook his head. "It's going to have to be the man himself. And we're talking major felony. I'm not interested in tax evasion or securities fraud. I'm going to need murder one or two, conspiracy to commit, or extortion with bodily harm. And it's going to have to be firsthand testimony, no hearsay."

Sal chewed his Big Mac thoroughly, trying to remember exactly what he had seen with his own eyes and what he had heard about. He could give places and dates, and who was going to contradict him in court by saying that they were actually there and that it didn't happen the way Sal said it had?

"I can put Finoccio in a room where people were killed. I can give you dates and locations."

"Okay," Gary said, like a poker player calling the bet and then raising. "Did you participate in any of these acts?"

"What difference does that make?"

"I need to know if I'm going to have to get the Justice Department to sign off on not prosecuting you. That's a whole different deal. That deal is we put you in prison, in a protected situation, for two, three years, whatever we can get you reduced to, and then relocate you when you get out."

"Why the fuck would I agree to do that?"

"It's a way out."

"Once I testify, what's to keep you from reneging?"

"We'll sign a contract guaranteeing you a new identity, social security number, employment resume, a certain amount of cash, and suggestions for several locations to relocate. You'll have someone from the Marshals Service as your liaison in one of these locations. It will be well handled."

"How do I know that?"

"We've been doing this for a while."

"You never lost anybody?"

"Not if they followed the rules."

Then he explained the rules. No one, absolutely no one, from his old life could know where he was or his new name. They were prepared to relocate a wife and minor children with him, but no one else. He would have to break ties with everyone and everything from his past. Mail could be exchanged through a letter drop that the Marshals Service administered, but everything would be subject to inspection and redaction.

He was divorced, with a grown daughter and two grandsons living outside of Philadelphia. As far as his ex-wife, Joyce, was concerned, if he never saw her again, it would be too soon. The divorce had been ugly, to the point that Phil Finoccio had offered to have Joyce's lawyer's kneecaps adjusted. Sal had declined, not wanting to give her the satisfaction. He wrote a big check and walked away clean.

The WITSEC deal could be his best, if not only, shot to live the remaining ten to fifteen years of his life in relative comfort. He could circle the wagons and drift away without having to worry about what he was going to tell the IRS when they called him in for the audit. I bought the house, put my daughter through Penn, and paid off my ex-wife on tips I got working in a bar on Northern Boulevard. Even if they had him only one way to Shavuos, it was enough to put him behind bars for serious time.

It came down to only one real regret. His daughter, Sharon, and her sons, Mikey and Jeffy. His son-in-law, Howard, was an asshole. The guy taught junior high school gym, jogged four miles a day, ate like a fucking rabbit, and told Sal, every time he saw him, that he was a heart attack waiting to happen. You gotta lose the carbs, Sal. Or else they're going to lose you. On Thanksgiving they would have vegetable stuffing and turkey with the skin peeled.

Was Thanksgiving dinner, a couple of Sundays in between, and the occasional phone conversation enough to make it a deal-breaker? He could write to her, find out how she was doing, get photos and news of Mikey and Jeffy. At this point, wasn't that really what this relationship amounted to? Nostalgia for a family life that, to tell the truth, was marked mostly by his absence?

He concluded that it was mostly the idea of not seeing them that was bothering him. So he made the deal. Six months later, after a series of clandestine interviews with Justice Department lawyers, he was shuttled in a windowless van into federal court in Manhattan and, avoiding eye contact with Finoccio, recited a carefully rehearsed chapter and verse of the capo's sins. And when it was over Sal Didziocomo was relocated to the Paradise Gardens Condominium Community in Palm Springs, California, with a new name, new social security card, sixty grand a year living allowance, and a phone number he could call when he needed something.

So as far as Sammy Dee was concerned, he had bigger problems in his life than mold in the laundry room. He was about to express this opinion when Marcy Gray declared that she was joining the Mold Busters faction, along with the African. Sammy found his hand shooting up when Ethel Esmitz asked for a show of hands to support the dues assessment to deal with the mold.

There went a couple of hundred dollars he'd never see again. He'd try to think of it as a bad bet on a horse, and forget about it.

But Marcy Gray he couldn't forget about. She had gotten his dormant juices flowing. Even before he was relocated, when he was living alone in the house in Roslyn and had the money and the inclination, he hadn't bothered much with women. The business of taking them out to dinner, telling them their hair looked good or that they had a nice smile, just to get laid, didn't seem to be worth it.

He had just turned sixty when he and Joyce split up. It got easier to do without as he got older. By sixty-five, his testosterone was down a quart and his blood vessels were constricting. Performance had become an issue.

"Relax, Sal, it's normal," his doctor told him. "If God wanted guys your age to be having kids, he would have done something about the vascular system in the penis. You're lucky we got things to treat it now. Our fathers and grandfathers were shit out of luck."

He gave Sal a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication. He hated the term: it sounded like an abstract problem, like mold. Sal didn't like the flushed feeling and the sense that he was artificially dilating his blood vessels, and he used it grudgingly, hoping that someday, miraculously, it would all start working again without it.

There had been the occasional $500 hooker in Vegas, or the tipsy divorcée he'd pick up late at night at a bar out on Sunrise Highway. He could spot them as soon as he walked in, perched precariously on a bar stool, too much eye makeup, wearing a skirt a size too small, and smoking lipstick-stained cigarettes. All he had to do was buy them a drink and avoid taking them to his place, so he could leave afterward when they were out cold snoring.

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Excerpted from Purgatory Gardens by Peter Lefcourt. Copyright © 2015 Peter Lefcourt. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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