Road to Paradise

by Max Allan Collins

  Her eyes tensed; she was staring down through the glass table.

  “So you drove up and down the Strip, taking in all those bright lights, and you had some food, drive-in maybe, and maybe shopped a little. Couple nice new malls, there. Did Anna and Gary spend the night in Vegas?”

  She said nothing; but she swallowed.

  “And then you kids fooled around Sin City this morning, nice breakfast, maybe a little shopping—there’s a record shop Anna likes there, with lots of British releases.…”

  Her eyes flashed a little. He was obviously dead-on. Seemed to frighten her that he had Anna pegged like that.

  “I’m not psychic, Cindy. Our family’s spent a lot of time in Vegas, over the years, is all—I’ve even worked there. So the two of them headed out for Tahoe today, about midafternoon maybe? Three or four? Some more nasty desert driving ahead for ’em. But they ought to be there, by now. Like you’re here.”

  She leaned an elbow on the glass table, rested her head against a hand.

  “Where are they staying, Cindy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cindy, how much did she tell you?”

  “What do you mean? About what?”

  “You know what I mean. And about what.”

  She swallowed again; she was trembling. “Everything, I guess. That, that you…you ran casinos and stuff. And you’re testifying against these Corleone-type guys, so you’re, like…hiding here? In Tucson?”

  “Right. And now Anna’s actions…and your actions…have put her and Gary, and me and Anna’s mother, and even you and your parents, at terrible risk.”

  “What? That’s crazy.”

  “It is crazy. These people are ruthless. They take a human life like you might swat a mosquito. Means nothing to them.”

  She covered her face with a hand whose hot-pink nails were chipped a little. “I…I really don’t know where they’re staying.…I just know they…they’re in Tahoe. I just know…just know Anna wanted to go to her prom.” She looked up with eyes soaked with tears, the mascara streaming in dark ribbons. “Why is that so wrong? Who’s gonna care about that, but her stupid parents?…S-sorry.”

  “Anna told you not to tell anybody about us—about my being a witness, didn’t she?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Well, that includes your parents, Cindy. Do you understand? That includes your parents.”

  The girl nodded a bunch of times, then rose to get some Kleenex from a dispenser on the kitchen counter. He rose and went to her, put a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  She was still crying, but not hard.

  “I know you were just trying to be Anna’s friend.”

  “I…I am Anna’s friend.”

  “And that’s why you’ll keep everything we talked about between us—just you and me, Cindy.” He took her face in a hand, gently. “Just you and me? Friends?”

  She swallowed and nodded. “Friends.”

  He was going off to join her parents when her voice called out, “Mr. Smith!…I’m sorry. Didn’t you ever do anything stupid, when you were a kid?”

  “No,” he said, and smiled at her.

  She laughed a little, choked on snot, blew her nose, and was crying at the glass table again as he stepped into the living room.

  Molly, reading House Beautiful magazine, was seated on a squat low-backed red-and-black sofa that was like a massive unhealed wound against the pale-pink walls. A squat ugly cactus decorated an end table, and a pop-art print of a crying comic-book woman was framed on one wall next to shelves of stereo gear and LPs, opposite another wall of silvered panels reflecting the room back at itself, distortedly.

  Sid was at the front picture window, the dark-pink drapes drawn, peeking around an edge. “Goddamned hippies,” he was saying.

  Michael stood beside him. “Cindy gave me the information I needed. She was very helpful.…What’s wrong, Sid?”

  He nodded toward the street. “I noticed this pothead scum earlier today, driving around the neighborhood.”

  Leaning in next to his neighbor, Michael looked out and saw a van parked just down the block, almost directly under the burned-out streetlamp, straddling where the Smith property ended and their next-door neighbor’s began…an old faded red panel truck with flowers and peace symbols and the KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ guy painted on it, badly.

  Sid’s upper teeth were showing, and he wasn’t smiling. “What are they doing, coming around a respectable neighborhood like this for, anyway? Making their goddamn drug deals.…”

  The back of Michael’s neck was tingling, but he said, “Don’t worry about it,” and patted Parham on the shoulder. “I’ll check it out.”

  “Would you, pal? You, uh…want me to go with you?”

  Michael smiled and shook his head. “No. I’ll just run over and tell ’em to go peddle their papers someplace else.”

  “Rolling papers, you mean!”

  He managed a polite laugh, and said, “Why don’t you two check on your daughter? She’s a little upset.”

  Parham nodded, and he and Molly went off in their unisex uniforms, toward the kitchen.

  Michael turned off the front stoop light before slipping out of the house.

  That van had not been here when he’d crossed the street half an hour or so before. Head lowered, he walked down the sidewalk on the Parhams’ side of the block, away from his house. When he came up from behind, along the driver’s side of the battered van, he stayed down, hoping not to be picked up noticeably in the side mirror.

  Like a carhop with a gun, Michael thrust the .45 through the window into the chest of the driver and without even getting a good look at the hippie behind the wheel, harshly whispered, “What the hell is this about?”

  But the hippie behind the wheel was not a hippie.

  He was a hood in his forties from Chicago in a bad Beatle wig and an old paisley shirt and tie-dye jeans and a fur vest Sonny Bono might have considered cool in 1966.

  Jimmy Nappi was Giancana’s man, a driver on scores mostly, with tiny eyes, a long nose, a wide mouth, and plenty of pockmarks. He was not known as a tough guy, not somebody generally enlisted for killings, though he was a made man, so had killed at least once.

  But if Nappi was here—parked just down the street from the “Smith” house, with his hands on the wheel of a van that tried much too hard to look like it belonged to hippies—it could only be for one reason.

  No time for discussion; no reason to give Nappi a chance to go for the .38 on the rider’s seat beside him.

  Michael buried the snout of the .45 in the hair vest and fired, and all that Sonny Bono fur served well as an impromptu silencer.

  Heading around back of the house, Michael again stayed low, .45 in hand. With the Lincoln in the driveway, they would have figured he’d be home. He prayed he was not too late. He climbed over the fence and lowered himself to the cement patio by the pool. The sliding-glass doors onto the kitchen were locked, he knew, but another conventional door was down off the laundry room, and he used his key on it as silently as possible, easing the door open, making only the slightest creak.

  Laundry room was empty.

  Kitchen, too—just as he’d left it, right down to the dishes in the sink.

  Padding through on his crepe soles, he could faintly hear Ed McMahon saying, “Heeeeere’s Johnny,” the audience responding with the usual applause; he’d left the TV on in the rec room, when he left. That might actually help—it would cover him.…

  In the trashed living room, standing next to the slashed, stuffing-spilling Chesterfield sofa, using a can of red spray paint on the wall, was another Giancana hood playing hippie (in a wig and jeans and Hendrix T-shirt)—Guido Caruso, a big fat-faced fuck who took pleasure in beating on deadbeat welshers, when they were smaller than him, anyway.

  Sprayed across one of the abstract green-and-black-and-red-and-white geometric paintings, Guido had written: off the pigs! On the wall over the couch, he had alread
y written heltar [sic] and had just gotten to skel when Michael blew the top of his head off and made another abstract painting on the wall, albeit lacking a frame and heavy on the red.

  Michael barreled into the hallway and almost ran into the third “hippie,” this one with a fake beard to go with his Beatle wig and faded striped red-and-blue jeans and an American flag T-shirt—Frankie Inoglia, a sadistic enforcer in the Mad Sam mode. As skinny and wild-eyed as Manson himself, Inoglia had just exited the bedroom where Michael had left Pat not long ago.

  Inoglia had a blood-dripping butcher knife in his Playtex-gloved fist, and when he saw Michael coming, he raised the blade high, a pearl of blood flicking off the poised-to-stab point onto Michael’s cheek like a single tear as he shot the intruder in the right kneecap, and—as Inoglia was going down—Michael shot him in the left kneecap, too, then kicked the knife out of the fallen, screaming man’s hand as he passed, heading into the bedroom.

  Michael would relive this waking nightmare many times, but it would never be as vivid as in this moment.

  The nightstand lamp was switched on, its shade spattered and streaked with red. kill the pigs was fingertip-scrawled in blood on the wall just over the headboard of their four-poster, and Pat, on her back, was slashed to ribbons on the bed itself, the sheets soaked, her black silk pajamas shimmering with the life that had been spilled. He stood beside her and looked down and saw that her throat had been cut, slashed ear to ear. The other wounds—save one, over her heart—were not so deep. They were window dressing, part of the hippie masquerade. The chest stab had killed her, and—judging by the placid expression on her lovely untouched face, eyes closed—in her sleep.

  This small saving grace would be for Michael the only thing, in days ahead, that would stave off madness.

  He kissed her forehead.

  “Goodbye, baby,” he said.

  In the hallway, he knelt beside Inoglia, who was still screaming in pain, the faux hippie an overgrown fetus now, grabbing first one ruined kneecap, then another, a process he kept repeating, mixing his own blood with what had already been on the dishwashing gloves he wore.

  “She was asleep when you killed her?”

  “Fuck you, rat! Fuck you!”

  Johnny Carson was getting big laughs in the rec room.

  “She was asleep?”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “That’s why I’m doing you this favor,” he said, and shot his wife’s assassin through the left temple, the bullet smacking into the wall on the other side, its kiss puckering the plaster.

  The shots and the screams—on the heels of Sid Parham’s paranoia about hippies in the neighborhood—would have the police here soon.

  Never looking at his dead wife, he returned to the bloody bedroom and transferred the contents of the overnight bag into a larger suitcase, threw in more clothes, and made room for the briefcase with half a million dollars in it, which he retrieved from under the floorboards in the closet of his study.

  From the same hiding place he took his Garand rifle—a souvenir the feds didn’t know he’d hung on to—which was field-stripped into barrel, buttstock, and trigger group, also tucked away were four boxes of .30 ammunition, twenty cartridges each. The parts of the rifle and the small white ammo boxes he wrapped up in various articles of clothing within the suitcase.

  In the kitchen he grabbed the rest of his wife’s pill bottle, figuring the sedatives would come in handy. In the bathroom he peed, then checked to see if he had any blood on himself or his clothes, and didn’t. Finally he took a .38 long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver off the corpse of Inoglia, and left this house, and the woman he had loved for over thirty years, behind.

  A white-faced Parham was in the window across the way when Michael pulled out in the Lincoln, suitcase in the backseat, and four cop cars siren-screamed past him on US 89 on his way to the airport.

  He had a red-eye to catch.

  NINE

  Under vaguely yellow lighting, Michael—in the black Banlon sport shirt and gray slacks with a dark blue windbreaker—parked the Lincoln Continental in the Tucson International lot, and got his suitcase out of the trunk.

  Six weeks ago, the ’72 Mark IV had been deeded over to “Michael Smith” by WITSEC associate director Shore—a confiscated, luxury, low-mileage number poised to go on a federal auction block, where it would likely now end up again.

  Just in case anyone was watching, Michael made a show of locking the automobile, although he would be walking away from what had once been a nine-thousand-dollar ride.

  Michael did not relish entering the airport, and taking his red-eye flight, unarmed; but with the rash of skyjackings the last couple years, airport security had been beefed up. With these new metal detectors, and search of carry-on bags, he dared not tote his .45. The gun was in his Samsonite suitcase, along with his field-stripped Garand rifle, various boxes of ammunition, and a briefcase filled with half a million in cash.

  This was a bag he hoped the airline could manage not to lose.

  Michael checked it with an attractive blonde in stewardess mufti at the American Airlines counter in the outer terminal, who set it down with another half-dozen bags. Then he headed for the nearby bank of telephone booths—he had a long-distance call to make.

  This time not even a dime was required, much less an elaborate handful of change; he closed himself in, sat, and dialed O, asked for the charges to be reversed.…

  …and gave the operator the “panic button” number.

  “Yes?” a male voice answered.

  “A Mr. Michael Smith calling,” the operator said, “station to station—will you accept the charges?”

  “Yes.”

  Michael said, “I need to talk to Associate Director Shore immediately.”

  “Where can you be reached?”

  Michael read the number off the phone.

  “He’ll be with you in five minutes.”

  “Make it sooner.”

  It was—about three.

  “What’s wrong, Michael?”

  Anxiety undercut the pleasant business-like surface of the WITSEC director’s tone.

  “You haven’t had any reports?”

  “No. What’s wrong, man?”

  Michael gave Shore a brief dispassionate description of what had gone down at the Smith residence.

  “Oh my God,” Shore said, sounding not just shaken but genuinely saddened over Pat’s murder.

  After completing the story—the only details he skipped were such private matters as packing guns, money, and sedatives—Michael said, “Don’t ask me where I am. You probably already know.”

  “I don’t, but of course it would be easy enough to find out. Let’s agree to work together in this dark hour. You stay put, and—”

  “No. I don’t like your level of protection.”

  “Michael…I can understand that.…Jesus Christ, I can understand that, but nothing like this has ever happened before in the program! I swear to you!”

  “Imagine how comforting that is to hear.”

  “I…I can’t imagine what you’re going through. How’s… how’s your daughter taking it?”

  Unless Shore’s acting rivaled George C. Scott’s, the fed was honestly unaware of the girl’s disappearance, a state Michael was not about to spoil by sharing information.

  “Her name is Anna, Harry, and how do you think she’s doing? Her mother was butchered.”

  “Michael…I guarantee your safety. Yours and Anna’s.”

  “I thought you already had.”

  The words came in a fevered rush: “I don’t know what you have in mind, but you can’t make it alone out there. You need us. You…need…us.”

  “No. You need me, maybe. This is just a courtesy call, so you can clean up out at Paradise Estates, if you want. And to, you know, say so long and fuck you.”

  A sigh breathed through the receiver, then: “Michael, you have to come in from the cold, you just have to.…”

  “I like the cold
. Getting colder.”

  Shore tried another tack. “You said these were Giancana’s men? Not DeStefano crew, like before?”

  “All Giancana insiders. Hard asses. Formerly.”

  Shore’s words continued to leap desperately out of the receiver: “Michael, since last week, Giancana is back in the United States—our intelligence indicates he’s trying to position himself for a return to power. That’s why he’s done this—he thinks you’re a threat to him.”

  “He’s right.”

  “I meant in court.”

  “Don’t worry, Harry—he’ll be judged.”

  “Michael, no. What happened at your home was self-defense. Anything you initiate now—”

  “Do we know how Accardo feels about this? Would he have sanctioned this hit?”

  “…Not likely. Accardo rules from the sidelines, through weaker men he can control. He’s probably telling his people that Giancana’s time is over, but—”

  “But what he’s thinking is, Mooney’s too strong.”

  “That, and the Big Tuna probably doesn’t like having somebody as high-profile as Mooney Giancana back in the press.”

  “Since when is Giancana making headlines?”

  A brief pause in the fed’s fast flow of words indicated, perhaps, that Shore had to consider whether or not to share what he said next: “Mooney’ll be a media darling again, within days—he’s set to testify at a committee meeting in Washington next week.”

  “What committee meeting?”

  “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It’s that old rumor about the CIA working with the mob to assassinate Castro.”

  “Not to mention Jack Kennedy,” Michael said.

  Shore ignored that, and blurted, “We have a golden opportunity here, Michael! Giancana is no Mad Sam DeStefano—he’ll be testifying under oath, selling out the CIA, but revealing nothing at all about the Outfit. Omertà runs deep in an old made guy like Giancana.”

  “So, Harry, you see my wife’s murder as a golden opportunity?”

  “No, no, no.…It’s just, Giancana is full of himself, thinks he’s smart and clever; but he will perjure himself in the process… and with you on our side, Michael, with your knowledge, your testimony, we’ll take him down.”