by Dan Flanigan
“So Carter Kendall quietly unloads his former wonder boy Ullman on another unsuspecting bank. A tiny bank, and Ullman’s no less than the president of that tiny bank. And, after a year or so, all of a sudden Ullman’s in the middle of a couple of bust-outs again. So Ullman resigns and moves out of town. All very quiet. Nothing left of him but ugly rumors. Because the little bank has done the same thing that Carter Kendall did to the little bank, unloaded Ullman on another unsuspecting bank, an even smaller bank down in the lake country. Where he is now. And there you have it. The Pilgrim’s Progress, late twentieth-century style.”
Later O’Keefe called Ullman’s bank down in the lake country, but they said he had left, didn’t even give any notice, just up and left—didn’t just leave the bank, left town too, no forwarding address. When O’Keefe hung up the telephone, he reached for the local phone book, looking for a restaurant or a bar whose name began with the letter A.
HE WONDERED HOW the place had escaped his notice all these years. Not that it was the kind of place that would attract any attention—a decrepit little building at the bottom of a bluff in the bottoms area of town between the railroad tracks and the river. It looked like someone had rolled it down the hill and left it where it happened to land. Yet two black Cadillacs were parked in the back of the place and a Lincoln Town Car and a couple of sports cars out front.
The food was awful, bad American-Italian mainly. O’Keefe tried to eat a few bites of spaghetti and meatballs topped with a gloopy sauce that must have come out of a can. Another customer examined with suspicion a greasy-looking plate of sausage and peppers; another surprisingly seemed to be relishing a microwaved pizza. There was a bar, a few tables and booths, and a pool table in the center where slick, young men drank Seven & Seven and gambled at eight-ball in tight-fitting pants and shirts open to show the gold chains on their tanned and hairy chests. When O’Keefe came in, they stopped talking and talked no more until he left. At one point a little man, nearly as broad as he was tall, appeared from somewhere in the rear of the place and gestured to one of the pool players, who followed the man back to wherever he had come from.
O’Keefe pushed back his chair and casually asked the bartender the location of the john, which, as he had hoped, turned out to be in the general direction from which the fat man had emerged. On his way he passed through a large room with an old bowling machine and an old shuffleboard. He guessed the machines were only for show as the room looked unused.
At the far end of the room, barely visible in the darkness, was a door, from under which a gleam of murky, yellow light oozed into the room. Standing there in the big dark room, looking at the door and the sinister shaft of yellow light, O’Keefe fought the impulse to flee from that place and not look back until he had covered a great deal of intervening ground. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that one of the pool players was watching him like a housecat studying a mouse.
He returned to his table, tossed down the remains of his drink, left too much money on the table to pay for his dinner and drinks, and left. He walked quickly to his van, looking back over his shoulder in the darkness a couple of times. When he got into the van, he locked the doors, something he could not remember ever having done before, and he kept the doors locked until he reached his apartment, for his city seemed changed, full of menace, a menace that emanated, it seemed to him, from a crack beneath a shabby door at the far end of a dark back room at a nondescript place in the bottoms called Angie’s.
HARRIGAN TOLD JULIA to hold his calls, took a drink of his coffee, lit a cigarette, looked across the table at O’Keefe, and said, “Okay, what’s the deal?”
“You ever heard of a place called ‘Angie’s’?”
Harrigan shook his head.
“There was a note scribbled on one of the deposit slips down at the mink farm. It just said ‘Angie’s.’ Nothing else. Well, Angie’s turns out to be a dump of a bar and restaurant down in the bottoms, but where you’d expect winos to be lying around, there’s black Cadillacs parked instead.”
“You went there?”
“Sure did. Even ate dinner there. The food was conclusive evidence of the banality of evil.”
Harrigan laughed.
“Then I go check on the ownership of the liquor license, and guess who owns it?”
Harrigan shook his head, refusing to guess, and waited for the answer.
“Donald Praeger.”
“The lawyer?”
“None other.”
“Oh, shit.”
“And Donald Praeger means . . .
“Carmine Jagoda,” said Harrigan, very softly.
“None other. I think that’s who ‘Mr. Canada’ is.”
Harrigan stood up and walked around the desk to the window and looked down at the city. The smoke from his cigarette curled back over his shoulder.
“It didn’t seem so scary until now,” said O’Keefe. “Until it ended up right in my own backyard.”
“How about now, Pete?” Harrigan said.
“Meaning?”
Harrigan whirled around, and the ash from his cigarette dropped and splattered on the carpet at his feet. This time he was unable to disguise his fear with his anger. “Meaning how about now you stop this shit? There isn’t a more vicious sonuvabitch in this country than Jagoda. He likes to have people carved up into chunks and stuffed in the trunks of their cars.”
Harrigan turned and looked out the window again. For several seconds they remained silent.
“How the hell does Jagoda get hooked up with a weenie like Lenny Parker?” Harrigan said to the window.
“I think Ullman was the link,” said O’Keefe. “Ullman was ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.’ And guess what? Ullman’s disappeared. Off the face of the earth, it seems.”
“Disappeared into the earth probably. Have you told this to the Sheriff down there?”
“Yes, I have. I called him today. And he’s still not interested. He seems to think I’m making all this stuff up so I can get myself off the hook.”
“You’ve got to go to the cops here then.”
“Okay, I’ll go to the cops. Call ’em up right now, Mike. But what are they gonna do? Not a damn thing, that’s what. They’ve never been able to touch Jagoda. And what do I have to give them? A name on a slip of paper, and the slip of paper doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“We’ll go to the strike force then.”
“And about a year from now they might indict him for tax evasion or something.”
“What’re you gonna do then? Play vigilante? Track him down yourself?”
O’Keefe shook his head. “The truth is I have no idea what I’m gonna do.”
CHAPTER 21
ALL SOUL’S DAY. The festival of the dead.
“Let me do it, Mom,” Kelly said.
They stood on the front porch in the gathering dark. Her mom struck the blue-tipped, wooden match against the side of the box and quickly handed it to Kelly. Kelly stuck the burning match into the skull of the jack o’ lantern that she and her mom had carved out a few hours earlier. The match almost burned her hand before the wick of the candle caught fire, and she had to drop the match inside the pumpkin. She pulled up the long skirt of the white dress her mom had given her for her costume and maneuvered awkwardly down the front porch stairs to gain a head-on look at the jack o’ lantern.
“Be careful, you’ll trip,” her mom said.
The flame danced behind the jagged eyes and the yawning mouth.
“Geez, it’s really spooky!”
“Okay, come on in, and get the rest of your costume on,” her mom said as she put the top of the jack o’ lantern’s head back on. “Your dad’ll be here any minute. That is, if he’s on time for once.”
“I wonder if it’s going to rain again,” said Kelly, looking up at the sky. It had rained most of the afternoon and had cleared up only an hour ago.
Her mom had a date that night, so her dad would take her out trick-or-treating and she would stay al
l night at his place. She put on the halo that she had fashioned out of white coat hangers, and her mom pinned on the wings they had created from metal rods, rubber foam, and white cloth. Her treats bag was a white pillow case, shining bright from the washer, dryer, and hot iron. Her mom’s old white dress and a pair of white ballerina shoes completed her outfit. She marveled at how inventive her mom could be. Her dad could not have accomplished anything like her mom had so effortlessly managed. He had no skill with his hands. He would have just gone out and rented her a costume.
“What did they think of your costume at school today?”
Kelly shook her head as if to shake off the memory, and her mom thought for a moment that her daughter was going to cry.
“They didn’t like it. They thought it was dumb to dress up like an angel for Halloween.”
“Well, what do they know anyway?”
“Nothin’. That’s what they know. Nothin’.”
The doorbell rang.
“Okay,” said her mom. “Here’s your goodies bag. See you tomorrow.”
The doorbell rang again as she stepped carefully down the stairway. Her mom had forgotten to turn on any lights downstairs. She had to hold on to her halo to keep it from falling off. Her mom hadn’t turned on the porch light either. She reached for the light switch as she opened the door. Something was wrong. A hulking, rounded shape lurked there in the darkness, and when she reached to turn the light on, the thing lunged to grab her. She screamed as loud as she could. Then all kinds of things seemed to happen at once. A light turned on overhead, her mom came running down the stairs, the thing grabbed her arm and kept saying “Kelly, it’s me. It’s me! Kelly!”—and although she realized after a few seconds that it was her dad’s voice coming out of the thing, she still couldn’t stop wailing.
“Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Her mom grabbed her and hugged her tight.
“The hell you didn’t,” her mom said to him over Kelly’s shoulder. “You always thought that scaring people was so cute.”
“I really didn’t!”
But he had meant to surprise her, and maybe even scare her too, just a little bit, not the way it happened. Another bad idea.
“God, Dad! You scared me to death!” Kelly said, turning around. She knew she had to get out of there with him fast or there would be an even uglier scene. “Bye, Mom. See you tomorrow.”
She took his hand and pulled him after her out the door.
“Jerk!” she heard her mom hiss as the door closed between them.
Once she got over the scare, Kelly was delighted with her dad’s costume.
“That’s neat, Dad. Where’d you get it?”
“I rented it. I always wanted to be a gorilla.”
She laughed and put her angel’s hand in his gorilla’s paw, and they walked off down the sidewalk, she pulling him along eagerly toward the next-door neighbor’s house where three little devils were knocking at the door.
Kelly’s mom watched them through the front window as they moved off down the sidewalk, shaking her head angrily at the way Kelly had forgiven him so quickly and easily, as quickly and easily as she herself had forgiven him so many times over the years.
“Don’t stay too close, Dad,” Kelly said. “I don’t want them to think I’m a little girl.”
When she walked up to the front doors of the houses, he stood off in the darkness, as she had sternly instructed him to do, so the people could not see that she was chaperoned.
A fog had descended on the misty night. They could not see more than half a block.
“Geez!” she said. “It’s really spooky now.”
It was like a ballet in a dream, half full of foreboding, half full of wonder. The yellow street lamps emitted only a wan and distant light, vague and blurred and ebbing. All about them, up and down the sidewalks and crossing the streets and standing on porches with their treat bags, the little graveyard people moved through the night amid the mist and the fog. A witch, a vampire, and a bloody corpse walked up to them.
“Hey, Kelly,” said the witch.
“Who’s that?”
The witch cackled. “Guess who? Trick or treat.”
Kelly watched them walk past and off down the street, trying to figure out who it was.
“I don’t know who that was. Next year I wanna go out trick-or-treating with my friends. Can I do that? Will I be old enough then?”
“We’ll see next year. That’s a long way off.”
He supposed this would be the last time he would trick-or-treat with her. Another letting go. Letting go, and letting go, and letting go again. That seemed to be what being a parent was mainly about sometimes. He remembered that he had begun to go trick or treating without his parents by age eight or nine. But everything was so different now. Brownies laced with strychnine. Razor blades in caramel apples. Real goblins and demons stalked the night these days, and the wolves had emerged from the forest and were hunting in the streets.
They had entered a cul de sac of only a few houses. She had forged ahead of him about ten yards. “Look, Dad,” she said, pointing across the street. An executioner, much taller than the other trick-or-treaters, in black hood and cape and brandishing a bloody ax, marched slowly, portentously across the street toward her. O’Keefe started to laugh, but the laugh caught in his throat when he saw the executioner bearing down on her with what seemed like harmful intent. The blade of the ax looked so real. Something in his body told him to move very fast.
He had covered half the distance between him and Kelly when the executioner saw the gorilla running toward him, stopped, abruptly dropped his ax, and yelled. “Hey, Kelly, it’s me. It’s just me, Kelly,” as if she were the only court of appeal from the galloping gorilla. Then he turned and ran away.
Kelly was laughing. “I know who you are!” she yelled at the running figure. “That was Stevie. Caroline’s brother. I guess we showed him.”
“Hey, Stevie,” she yelled at him again. “You better watch out, or I’ll sic my gorilla on ya.”
“What an idiot,” O’Keefe muttered, his heart still racing. I’m getting scared of my own shadow.
As they walked farther on, she said, “I don’t think they ought to allow big kids to trick or treat.”
Her sack was soon almost full.
“What kind of stuff do you have in there?”
“Mostly just those little miniature candy bars. It seems like everybody gives you the same thing.”
“You had enough yet?”
“Just about. Can we just finish this block?”
The elderly Ryans’ house, the spookiest house in the neighborhood sat far back off the street, surrounded by hedgerows. The Ryans couldn’t afford to keep the place up anymore, so the paint on the wood trim was nearly peeled off and the yard was more weeds than grass and always needed mowing. The only yard work old Mr. Ryan ever managed to accomplish was to hack futilely at his hedgerows with an ancient pair of shears. One of the shutters hung crazily down from one of the upstairs windows, half on and half off. It had been hanging that way for years, and the kids always wondered what kept it from falling all the way off. An old wooden swing on the front porch often moved slowly back and forth by itself even on hot and windless summer nights.
The kids in the neighborhood had made a mutual dare at school that each one of them would walk alone up to the Ryan house and ring the doorbell and wait in the darkness for old Mrs. Ryan to shuffle slowly to the door, creak the door open, and reach out her gnarled, claw-like, liver-spotted hand so she could drop two measly, little candy kisses into your bag. Anyone who didn’t have the courage to do it had to pay each of the other kids a dollar, and Chris Larkin claimed he had a way to know if anyone cheated.
“I’d skip that place if I were you,” said O’Keefe.
But she apparently meant to go up there.
“You want me to go up with you?” he asked.
“No,” she said sternly. “You have to stay right here.” She
disappeared between the hedgerows.
Walking along the narrow path with the bushes scraping at her on either side, she imagined a hand reaching out from the thicket of branches. She kept looking straight ahead, never to the side, for fear of seeing a pair of red eyes peering at her. One of her wings caught on a branch and wouldn’t let go. She pulled away hard and heard the wing tear.
“You’d better not be there, Stevie,” she muttered. “You’d better not try to scare me.”
It seemed to take forever to get to the porch. She rang the doorbell and tried not to look toward the shape in the darkness to the left of her, the old wooden swing, the scariest thing about that scariest of places. Mrs. Ryan was not answering the door. Maybe the doorbell didn’t work anymore. Maybe the Ryans couldn’t hear it ring. Maybe they had died in there and wouldn’t be coming to the door at all. She reached out to knock when the door opened and she almost fell forward into the house.
“Trick or treat,” she whispered, hardly able to get the words out. “Well, aren’t you the sweetest thing!” said Mrs. Ryan. “Herbert!” she screeched. “Come here and see what the Good Lord’s put on our doorstep tonight. You don’t mind if Herbert comes to see you, do you?”
Kelly shook her head. No, she didn’t mind. Yet she couldn’t help but think of Hansel and Gretel and the old witch who lived in the forest and fattened up little children so she could roast them in her oven and eat them up. But she could also tell that these were kindly old eyes she was looking into. A fierce-looking old man came shuffling up behind the old woman, but he brightened as soon as he saw the angel on his doorstep.
“Well, well, Katherine,” he said to the old woman. “Ain’t she the very picture of heaven?”