Road to Paradise

by Max Allan Collins

  Tomorrow was May first, and the casino resort would be open for business, so many of his staff were here, not just maintenance but kitchen and bartending and…well, everybody. Word had gotten around about Mike, and one by one they’d stopped to speak respectfully to their boss. Many of them knew Mike, and these comments were particularly appreciated if painful.

  One disappointment was the last-minute cancellation of Bobby Darin, who was having health problems, it seemed; but Keely Smith had been available to take the singer’s place in the Sinatra Celebrity Showroom, and she had a long history with Cal-Neva.

  The beautiful Smith had even dated Sam Giancana, after her divorce from Louis Prima, though she’d never been an item like Phyllis McGuire. This reminder of Giancana was an unsettling one, however: Michael’s confrontation with Momo had taken place just minutes before he’d been called home to deal with the crisis of the notification about Mike being MIA.

  He had not forgotten or ignored the Giancana situation—he had even taken certain precautions here and at home, including picking up two handguns belonging to his son and daughter at the gun club shooting range, and bringing the weapons to the house.

  Not that he really expected any retaliation from Giancana: Sam was out of power, if possibly contemplating a return to it, and any overt attempt to muscle Michael—who was responsible only to Tony Accardo himself, now that Paul Ricca was gone—could have severe ramifications for the man they called Mooney.

  But here, in the context of work, away from the tragedy of recent days, Michael wondered if he’d been negligent about contacting Accardo. He had once worked for the so-called Big Tuna, and although direct meetings between them over the past several decades had been infrequent, Michael felt certain a mutual respect remained.

  If Giancana was contemplating the killing of Mad Sam, Accardo should probably be told. But Michael was so far out of the Outfit loop these days, he didn’t really know where to turn—all his contacts were with the late Ricca’s people. Accardo was mostly living at his ritzy Palm Springs–area estate, these days.…

  And Michael barely knew the current Chicago boss, Aiuppa. But was there any reason to think Giancana was up to anything more than just trying to silence that crazy fuck DeStefano, before the madman spilled to the feds?

  This Michael was pondering when he heard the sound of stone grating on stone.

  He glanced to his right, toward the fireplace, and saw the left stony pillar moving—just a little, as if being tested.…

  Quickly he was out from behind the desk and, moving silently on crepe soles, went to the fireplace and reached up and plucked the Garand rifle from its perch over the mantel, above the citation from General Wainwright.

  His back to the stone of the other fireplace pillar, Michael stood poised like a soldier on a patriotic postage stamp.…

  Then the pillar swung out, the grinding of stone on stone making a soft unearthly scream, and a heavyset gray-haired black-mustached man in a black raincoat sprang out like a guest at a surprise party, and aimed a .22 automatic with a silver cylindrical silencer at the empty desk.

  As his visitor burst in, Michael lunged and, as if wielding a bayonet, thrust the Garand rifle’s nose deep into the man’s stomach, burying it there.

  The would-be assassin, surprised, did manage to swing the .22 toward Michael, who squeezed the trigger on the rifle; loading it had been one of those precautions he had taken after Giancana came calling.

  Fabric and fat served as Michael’s own homemade silencer as the bullet bore into the belly, and the sound of the shot was no louder than the .22 clunking onto the floor, unfired.

  Then Michael swung the rifle stock up and, with a swift short hammering with the butt of the weapon, smashed the man’s nose, jamming bone into brain, killing him quickly, so that no cry would emanate from his guest to bring others in from beyond the office—whether Cal-Neva staff, or an accomplice through the secret passage.

  Michael grabbed the man by the arm and—before the literal deadweight could fall to the floor and mess up the carpet with blood and shit (the smell told Michael evacuation had occurred)—dragged him into the passageway, and let him lie there, his stomach leeching blood onto cement to pool.

  Then Michael returned to his office just long enough to pick the silenced .22 automatic up off the floor, and paused to see if anyone had heard anything and come checking—it was midafternoon, and some of the staff was already gone.

  Nothing.

  He stepped back into the passageway. His guest had moved through darkness, but Michael found the wall switch just beyond the fireplace, turning on the sporadic caged yellow ceiling lights, and pulled the rope handle on the pillar, shutting himself within the hidden corridor with his dead visitor.

  Rifle in his left and .22 in his right, Michael made his way through the hidden hallway. At first the walls were pine and the floor cement, as he traveled through the recesses of the Cal-Neva Lodge itself; shortly the route became a kind of tunnel with cement-brick walls, indoor-outdoor carpeting, the yellowish overhead bulbs providing what struck Michael as a coal-mine effect. A fairly steep descent followed the slope of the hill.

  Sinatra had put this underground tunnel in connecting the office with Mooney Giancana’s favorite cabin (number 50) as well as various other passageways, including one that led from the star dressing room of the Celebrity Showroom to Sinatra’s favorite cabin (number 52).

  As for Michael’s late guest, the Cal-Neva manager had at once recognized the guy as a longtime lieutenant of Mad Sam DeStefano’s, Tommy Aiello, who’d had a spot in the Outfit since the ’40s, despite being the cousin of an old Capone enemy. The fifty-something hood had probably iced a dozen victims for Mad Sam, sitting in on countless torture sessions under the ice-pick maestro.

  Michael knew how these hit teams (whether Outfit or freelance) operated—almost always in twos, the designated hitter and a backup who also served as driver. He fully expected the second man to be waiting either inside cabin 50—which was now the resort’s on-site beauty shop, no staff present, day before the lodge opened—or parked somewhere nearby.

  At the end of the tunnel, the passageway straightened out, walls becoming pine again, and led to a nondescript white door, the kind that waits atop many a front stoop.

  Padding up quietly, Michael propped his rifle soundlessly against the wall, and—the silenced .22 automatic in hand—leaned against the door as he carefully, slowly turned the knob, opening it just a crack, the weapon poised to fire.

  A competent second man would have been primed for his comrade’s return; if something went wrong, anyone or anything might come bursting through that door—so a good man would either be facing the entry, or outside, behind the wheel of his car, motor running.

  But the cracked door, through which the nastily pungent chemical beauty-shop odors immediately made Michael’s nostrils twitch, revealed something else entirely: another member of Mad Sam’s crew, Jackie Buccieri, not ready for anything, except maybe a manicure.

  Jackie’s late brother, Fifi, had been Mad Sam’s right-hand man and hitter of choice, so valuable a player that nepotism granted a third-rate goofus like Jackie a slot on the crew, too.

  Right now, Jackie—a skinny, pop-eyed, black-haired, mustached forty-some-year-old in a brown leather jacket, Levi’s, and Italian loafers—was sitting in one of the beauty-shop chairs. He was slouched, to avoid the dryer cone, and his grin was as yellow as the passageway as he lip-smackingly took in various scantily dressed fashion models in Vogue, thumbing through the magazine, chuckling to himself, as if it were a catalogue from which he could select any item. The twin of the noise-suppressed .22 automatic rested next to him on a small table, amid hair spray canisters, scissors, and more magazines.

  Michael came through the door quickly, and was on top of Jackie in an instant, sweeping his free arm across the table and knocking the gun and scissors and some of the cans and magazines clatteringly onto the floor.

  Jackie’s pop eyes popped some
more as he tried to stand, only to collide with a clunk up inside the dryer’s spaceman-like plastic helmet, which went well with his fallen .22 and its ray gun–like metal-tubing silencer.

  Grabbing him by the front of the zipped-up leather jacket, Michael jerked Jackie higher, smacking his head hard against the interior of the plastic dome.

  The man was barely conscious when he flopped back down into the chair, and his eyes fluttered, then popped again, as the snout of the silenced .22 in Michael’s hand jammed itself uncomfortably in Jackie’s throat, under an active Adam’s apple.

  “Who else, Jackie?”

  Jackie’s voice was high-pitched and whiny. “Just me! And Tommy!”

  So many of these Outfit guys were just overgrown immature kids—Tommy and Jackie, Jesus. What kind of names were those for a guy in his fifties and another in his forties?

  “No, Jackie,” Michael said through tight teeth, “just you—Tommy’s dead.”

  “Fuck. Ah, fuck. Fuck me.”

  “Yeah. Fuck you. What’s this about? Who sent you?”

  Jackie swallowed. “Come on, Saint! You know what it’s about!”

  Michael reached his left hand over and plucked one of the remaining hair spray cans from the tray-like table; he shook the cap off and then—never removing the snout of the silenced gun from the man’s neck—sprayed the stuff into Jackie’s eyes, like he was trying to kill cockroaches.

  “Shit! Fuck! Hell!…That shit burns!”

  “What’s this about? Who sent you?”

  “We sent ourselves! You fuckin’ killed Mad Sam!”

  That stopped Michael.

  Cold.

  “I what?” he asked.

  “You killed Sam, Saturday! Blew his fuckin’ arm off and splattered his ass! You don’t think his crew’s gonna do something about it?”

  So—Giancana had arranged to have Mad Sam killed by someone else, but got even with Michael by laying the hit on his doorstep.

  “I didn’t kill your boss.”

  “Fuck you didn’t! Fuck you didn’t!”

  Was there any way to cleanse this? Could he dump Tommy’s body, and send Jackie packing with the straight story?

  “It’s a frame, Jackie. Giancana came to me for the hit, but I turned him down.”

  “Yeah, right! You was seen! You was fuckin’ seen!”

  Fuck a damn duck—Giancana had made the frame fit tight.

  “Did Accardo approve this?”

  “Shit yes!”

  Not what Michael wanted to hear; not what Michael wanted to hear.…

  He removed the gun from the man’s neck.

  “Give me your car keys, Jackie.”

  Jackie sat up in the chair, brushing himself off though nothing was there, just trying to regain his dignity and his manhood. He had, after all, pissed himself. When he dug the keys from his jeans, though, and dropped them in Michael’s open left palm, no moisture made the trip.

  “What are you driving, Jackie? Where is it?”

  “What do you want with my car?”

  “What, Jackie? Where, Jackie?”

  “It’s a dark green Mustang. Around the side of this place.” He pointed.

  “Thank you, Jackie.”

  “You can kill me, Satariano,” Jackie said, sticking his chin out, eyes popping, “but it won’t do you a goddamn bit of good!”

  “It might,” Michael said, and stuck the snout of the weapon in Jackie’s left eye and squeezed the trigger.

  The silencer was aided and abetted by the eyeball, and the squish was louder than the report, death so immediate, nothing registered in the right eye as blood and brain and bone splattered the back of the beauty-shop chair, some of it splashing up inside the plastic dome.

  Fortunately the chair wasn’t fastened to the floor, and Michael shoved it across the tile floor, Jackie riding along limply in it, and pushed it through the door into the passageway. The blood-spattered hair dryer, on its separate stand, he wheeled through there, too. For the time being he left the door open, as he found a small rag with which he rubbed his prints off anywhere, anything, he might have touched.

  This was for the sake of the police. Though his prints might be expected to be found all sorts of places at the resort, the beauty shop wasn’t one of them.

  The notion of using Jackie’s car to get rid of both bodies had occurred to him, but he knew such an exercise would be futile. The Cal-Neva was dead to him now; he couldn’t even return up through that passageway into his office and leave with his own car. He would be seen, and possibly the place would be under surveillance—Outfit guys or even the FBI.

  He retrieved his rifle, shut the tunnel door on the corpse, and went to the phone at the stand by the door where the cash register and appointment book resided. Impossibly beautiful women with impossibly beautiful manes smiled fetchingly at him from framed color photos hanging here and there, but empty chairs with hovering hair dryers stared accusingly.

  “Satariano residence,” his wife’s voice said.

  “Pat,” he said, gently, “is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine. I know you’re worried about me, Michael, but—”

  “Take the station wagon and meet me at the bank. Inside the bank—bring the safe-deposit key.”

  “I’m not even dressed.…”

  “Get dressed. Don’t talk to anyone. Anyone comes to the door before you have a chance to leave, don’t open it. Car’s in the garage?”

  “Yes,” she said, alarm in her voice. “What is it, Michael?”

  “What we’ve talked about. What we hoped would never come. Just use the garage door opener and drive straight out.”

  “Oh my God…after all these years…?”

  “It may blow over. See you soon.”

  They said ’bye and hung up.

  Perhaps he should not have been so frank over the phone. Perhaps the Outfit had the line tapped; but he didn’t think so. This was the doing of that evil troll, Giancana, who was operating out of Mexico, for Christ’s sake. And Mad Sam was freshly dead, so today’s assault was all they’d likely had time to mount, so far.

  And it would be assumed he’d be out of shape, so long out of harness, the hit would go down like ducks in a barrel; hell, the backup might feel comfortable enough to just sit in a chair and look at magazine babes in their scanties.…

  If he’d had more time, perhaps Michael could have savored a certain irony that this shop—where women now tried so hard to achieve beauty—had once played host to Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana, tossing back cocktails and dallying with women so beautiful trying wasn’t necessary. But the former Cal-Neva boss had more important things on his mind.

  Rifle in one hand, .22 automatic in the other, looking in every direction including up, Michael Satariano stepped out of number 50 into cold late-morning sunshine.

  But it was Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., who got into Jackie’s car and took off in a scattering of gravel.

  FOUR

  Patricia Satariano took her daily dosage as religiously as Communion, the little yellow pill her host. Dulled as she was by the Valium, she nonetheless felt the panic boiling in her belly, in response to Michael’s phone call.

  The odd thing was, the medication did not allow that terror to spill over—she had a strange distance from it, just as (over the past week) she had developed an almost serene acceptance of her son’s MIA status.

  The calming effect of the drug, and the sure and certain hope (as the Bible said) that Mike would return to them one day soon, had given her a state of mind that seemed to her peaceful (and to others lethargic). Thanks to Mother’s little helper, she’d heard the alarm bell Michael sounded, but at a safe remove.

  Still, enough anxiety made it through to inspire her to guide the Ford Country Squire—canary yellow with wood-grain side panels—in record time to the First National Bank of Crystal Bay, less than five minutes. An advantage of living in such a small town was the ability to get anywhere fast, particularly in off-season, and she act
ually beat Michael.

  Shortly before noon, Pat Satariano—an apparently calm, remarkably attractive middle-aged blonde in an avocado pants suit and matching clogs—selected a seat in a small waiting area between the loan officers and a circular central teller’s area, over which wooden ceiling spokes emanated like sun rays. For a bank, the surroundings were warm—cherry-wood paneling, cream-color tile floor, wood-patterned desktops, tweedy-paneled cubicles, and the orange Naugahyde cushions of the waiting area’s chrome furniture. At shortly before noon, the lobby not quite crowded, Pat sat—leaning on her darker green handbag—and reflected.

  In the station wagon, she had been consumed by making good time and chanting in her mind a mantra whose hysteria was reflected only in the words themselves: oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit.…

  When she had married Michael, over thirty years ago, she had known that this day might come—that despite the more or less legitimate line of work her husband had been in, the men he worked for remained criminals. And not just criminals—dangerous men.

  Killers.

  “We have to be ready,” he would say—fairly often, in the early years, perhaps once a year this past decade or so. “If it ever became known that I was born Michael O’Sullivan, life could change for us. Or if I somehow wound up on the wrong side of a power play, we might have to run.”

  This was as close to a speech as Michael ever made, and the wording varied little over the years. She had long since stopped asking him what exactly they would do—had not in several decades asked him to define how they might “run”—because Michael’s answer would be a mere shrug.

  She had come to think of this as just some residual paranoia on Michael’s part—he had after all lost his parents and his brother, Peter, to the violence of that world. Americans sought security, and yet no such thing existed: accidents could happen, illnesses might come, jobs could be lost, and death waited for everyone. So Pat, long before her medication, had learned to shrug off Michael’s concerns much as he had her queries.