Road to Perdition

by Max Allan Collins

  Michael sat and prayed for his mother and his brother, and finally his father came out, having unburdened his soul. The priest came out, too—Michael knew that God had made Irishmen pale, but not as pale as that priest looked.

  Of the ninety-five acres of Chippiannock Cemetery, five were reserved for Catholic families. The Indians had called the place Manitou Ridge, and Sauk wives had raised corn on the fertile, gently sloping summit, to feed the men, encamped for war. The white people who turned it into a cemetery called it Chippiannock—an Indian word for “village of the dead.”

  A statue of a dog lay faithfully at the grave of a boy, five, and girl, three, who back in pioneer days had died of typhoid fever. An elaborate monument with a soldier on either side and an eagle atop cannon balls saluted the local fallen of American wars. Colonel George Davenport, the man for whom the city across the river was named, lay here, not in Iowa. And stone cherubs and angels guarded the gray gravestones without complaint, under-dressed though they were for the winter afternoon.

  All of these made for good color, Maguire knew; he’d arrived an hour prior to the graveside services, and a sawbuck bought a nickel tour from a groundskeeper, with a few tidbits thrown in for free by a pair of gravediggers. The factual detective story magazines ate this stuff up almost as much as they did sex and slaughter.

  As distant church bells tolled on cue, Maguire kept his distance, at the back of the gathering of mourners—perhaps two dozen—attending the burial of Anne Louise O’Sullivan and Peter David O’Sullivan. There had been no church service, no mass. The circumstances were too strained, and strange, for that.

  He didn’t expect O’Sullivan to show—but you never knew. Some of these tough men had sentimental streaks a yard wide. So he kept watch, noting the armed bodyguards grouped around John Looney, who was weeping, the goddamn hypocrite. No sign of his loony son Connor.

  After the two flower-draped caskets were lowered, various mourners came up to a pleasant-looking, white-haired woman in her late forties, dressed in dignified black; they would introduce themselves and then express their condolences. This would be the surviving relative, clearly from out of town, to whom these sad arrangements and duties had fallen.

  He followed several cars—including the funeral-home limousine—to the house in Rock Island that matched the address Nitti had given him. The O’Sullivan family had lived in this fairly large two-story home—old Looney had treated his top gunman well, up to the point where the guy’s wife and kid got bumped off, anyway.

  Cars pulled into the driveway, and drew up along the street in front, as various mourners paid their respects, going up to the door in little informal groups. Maguire fell in with one of these mournful clusters.

  With the bereaved relative occupied with her guests—food in the kitchen had been provided by neighbors—Maguire prowled the residence inconspicuously, taking in details like a hungry man took in a meal. He looked at old photos, family portraits of Annie and her kids together; O’Sullivan always seemed to stand to one side, vaguely detached.

  Maguire understood that. Standing outside of yourself was necessary, when your profession was death. He had seen the same expression on the face of the mortician who’d been running the show at the graveyard that afternoon.

  Some of the portraits had John Looney in them—arms around the boys, at age four and five he’d guess…so very grandfatherly. How goddamn touching, Maguire thought. A middle-aged woman—Looney’s wife—was in some of the pictures, always standing next to the old man. She hadn’t been at the services today. Dead, probably.

  He asked where the bathroom was and someone pointed him upstairs. Glass of punch in hand, Maguire moved casually down the second-floor corridor; but once he was in the room that had been the boys’ bedroom, he probed with surgical precision. In a drawer next to one of the boy’s beds—the older boy?—he found a stash of Big Little Books, westerns mostly. Beneath the mattress he discovered a pouch of Bugler tobacco…definitely the older boy, he thought with a smile.

  In the master bedroom he found little of note, except perhaps the Catholic trappings—a crucifix, devotional paintings, Christ revealing His sacred heart. Tasteful, traditional nonsense. Maguire wondered if these beliefs were the dead wife’s alone—if O’Sullivan had a religious streak, that might prove an Achilles’s heel.

  Sentimental—these killers could be so goddamn sentimental. Was O’Sullivan one of those clowns who thought he could put the killing in one compartment, and his family in another? That was a weak mental outlook—the fabled Angel of Death was just a man after all, a flawed man…

  Yet even as these thoughts flowed through his mind, Maguire knew he was trying to rationalize the intimidation he felt. He’d never had this big a challenge—and it was daunting.

  And thrilling.

  In the room at the Starr Motel, on his side of the nightstand, Michael placed a small plaster Madonna that he’d picked out from a basket of them back at that church; on his father’s side of the nightstand, the .45 Colt rested.

  The Madonna made Michael think of something he’d meant to ask his father earlier.

  “Why did you light an extra candle, Papa?”

  His father—washing one of the boy’s shirts in the sink—didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “That was for the man I killed, the night we left.”

  So that had been a shot, outside the hotel the other night…

  “Papa?”

  “What?”

  “Do I have to go to Aunt Sarah’s?”

  “Yes. We had this conversation.”

  “I know, but…are you coming back for me?”

  Hanging the damp shirt over a towel rack, Papa said, “Yes! Of course I am.”

  “When?”

  Now his father was getting irritated. “Michael, I don’t know. I’m doing this to protect you.”

  “If you want to protect me,” the boy insisted, “you have to stay with me!”

  Papa almost shouted: “Not until I deal with Connor Looney!”

  The outburst surprised both of them.

  Quietly, almost embarrassed, Papa said, “You won’t be safe… not until I deal with him.”

  Michael knew what “deal with him” meant: one day, Papa would be lighting another candle.

  Papa was drying off his hands. His voice gentle now, he said, “I have to make another call, son. You know what to do.”

  “You won’t be gone long, will you?”

  Papa was putting on his suit jacket; the .45 was under his shoulder. “No.”

  In the motel office, O’Sullivan handed the clerk another fivespot and made the trunk call. Telling the operator the telephone number—that familiar number—gave O’Sullivan a twinge. He half expected Annie to answer, and the voice that did answer—”Hello, O’Sullivan residence”—had some of Annie in it.

  Her sister Sarah and Annie were much alike, after all.

  “Sarah?”

  “Mike. Thank God…”

  “We’re okay. Michael and I.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the road. We’re heading to your place, if that’s all right.”

  Relief colored the voice. “Of course. Have you spoken to Bob?”

  “Yes. I thought perhaps you two had talked.”

  “No. I’ve been busy since I got here…with the arrangements. I kept it simple. I hope you don’t mind…I know Annie would have preferred a full mass…”

  “She would have preferred a long life. Merciful thing was to set her to rest.”

  “Oh, Mike…That man was there, the one you worked for.”

  “…Looney. Was his son with him?” He quickly described Connor.

  “I don’t think so. He did have two big men at his side, though.”

  Jimmy and Sean, probably, O’Sullivan thought. Bodyguards at a funeral—hell of a thing.

  “How…how was it?”

  “Dignified. Such lovely flowers. She had so many friends. Peter’s class at the Villa sent a beautiful wreath. The ceme
tery, Chippiannock, is breathtaking…a bit austere, perhaps, but…oh, Mike…are you still there, Mike?”

  “We’ll see you soon,” he said. He put the receiver in the hook.

  And across the miles, in the house that had been O’Sullivan’s, on the hallway phone that not long ago Connor Looney had taken off the hook, the mourner who was actually Harlen Maguire quietly hung up the phone, as well.

  TEN

  My memories of traveling with my father are something of a blur—when I think back, I see him behind the wheel, sometimes unshaven, sometimes not. When things between us were strained—as when I was pouting over him dragging me to Aunt Sarah and Uncle Bob’s—I would ride in back, the whole seat to myself (me and the black tommy gun case, anyway), getting as far away from him as I could, in our little world that was the inside of the Ford.

  My other memory is the heartland—middle America in all its vastness, sometimes rolling landscape, like a Grant Wood painting; other times flatness stretching to the horizon, winter barren, whites and browns and tans and grays. For every field there was a forest; for every ten barns, one church. The ribbons of concrete and gravel and dirt seemed to extend to eternity, endless sentences punctuated by the exclamation points of telephone poles—reminders that this pioneer country had been settled, that it was civilized now…even if I was sharing the backseat of a Ford with a Thompson submachine gun in a hard-shell case.

  I can only speculate on what must have been going through Harlen Maguire’s mind as he tracked us. Surely his photographer’s eye had to have been struck by the abstract beauty of America’s richest soil masquerading, in winter slumber, as wasteland. Or was he too consumed with the mission at hand—was he focused hard on the empty road, a pistol and camera on the seat beside him?

  In later years, when Maguire’s photographic gallery came to light, and researchers had access to the grisly photos he’d shot over his grim career, images of our room at the Starr Motel in McGregor, Iowa, were part of the inventory. They were published in a section of the book designed to show Maguire’s interests extended to studies beyond the newly dead.

  How odd it was, so many years later, to open up an oversized art book, with its slick pages, and find an introduction that noted, “Maguire’s fascination with murder victims is perhaps as controversial as the Diane Arbus predilection for posing the retarded.” How strange seeing Ansel Adams-ish midwestern landscapes in a section that included stark photographs of that empty motel room, with an emphasis on a plaster Madonna on the nightstand, “left behind by some nameless traveler” (the caption writer said).

  Particularly odd, particularly strange, when that nameless traveler—me—knew full well that these were not abstract art studies at all, but evidence of the man who had tracked my father and myself, down lonely heartland highways.

  Father and son were in Missouri now, traversing rolling prairie land, cutting down State Highway 13, where at a town called Collins they would take the road into Perdition, near Fall River Lake. O’Sullivan stopped at a roadside diner outside Bethany, a boxcar whose “We Never Close” neon made a ghostly glow at dusk.

  They had driven all day, and said little to each other. O’Sullivan was lost in thought, working out a plan to force Nitti and Capone to abandon their support of the Looneys and turn Connor over to him. But he could not make it work, a man alone, and no matter how he mentally rearranged the cards, the hand he’d been dealt did not seem a winning one.

  He knew his son was sulking, but that only made the boy less trouble, so he let it go. They’d eaten lunch at a small-town café, and the boy had again snookered the help into making him a breakfast. O’Sullivan’s own appetite remained stunted, and he’d picked at his Salisbury steak.

  Now, many hours of driving later, the man was ready to give eating a try again; and his son should have some food.

  In the boxcar diner’s parking lot, O’Sullivan pulled into a stall adjacent to the window on an empty booth. He turned to his boy, in the backseat. “Hungry?”

  Michael was reading one of the little comic-strip books. He didn’t look at his father when he grunted, “No.”

  “Might not be another diner for a while,” O’Sullivan said.

  The boy shrugged. “I’m still not hungry.”

  “You should eat something.”

  “I’m reading.”

  That was all the effort O’Sullivan was prepared to give it, and he got out of the car, leaving the boy to his book and his brooding. Inside the brightly lit green-and-brown diner, business was slow for this close to suppertime—a farm couple in a booth having a meal, a farmer drinking coffee at the counter.

  Leaving his topcoat and fedora on, he took the booth next to his car, where he could see Michael’s head in the backseat, looking down at his book; he could also see the diner’s door, from here. A waitress came over, a blowsy brunette with plenty of lipstick and just as much personality. “Ruby” was stitched on her uniform blouse. She brought water and coffee.

  “You look like a hundred miles of bad road, sweetie,” she said.

  “That’s a low estimate,” he said. Hunger was finally stirring, and he also thought he might be able to stir his son into eating by making a show of a meal. “I want a T-bone, rare.”

  “How rare, sugar?”

  “When I stick in the knife, if it doesn’t moo, it goes back.”

  “Okay, Dracula. Mashed or fries?”

  “Mashed…Pay phone?”

  “No public phone. I’d let you use ours, but the manager ain’t here.”

  “I really need to use the phone.” He held up a sawbuck. “I’ll make it quick.”

  She snatched the ten-dollar bill out of his hands before he could change his mind. “It’s by the register.”

  O’Sullivan was already heading toward the phone. “Okay—watch my booth for me?”

  “Sure, honey.” She eyeballed the nearly deserted diner. “I’ll see if I can hold back the crowd.”

  He made the trunk call to Uncle Bob, who said, “No, Mike—not a crow on the fence. No strangers in Perdition, neither.”

  “Good. You should see us tomorrow, late.”

  “Fine. Sarah’ll be home by midafternoon. We’ll have ourselves a reunion.”

  “I won’t be staying long.”

  “All things considered, that’s probably wise. Meaning no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  He was saying his good-byes when the bell over the door dinged, and, just as the farm couple was leaving, a cop came in—a man in his forties who’d never missed a meal. The blue uniform indicated a town cop, not a sheriff’s man or state policeman. The cop nodded and smiled to O’Sullivan, who nodded and smiled back, hanging up the phone.

  The cop settled on a stool near, but not next to, the farmer, who was having a piece of apple pie.

  O’Sullivan considered leaving, but Ruby was on her way with his T-bone, smelling very good indeed (the steak—Ruby’s perfume was another matter), and his instincts said the cop’s presence was innocent. So he sat in the booth and dug in, using a steak knife on the nicely rare piece of corn-fed Missouri beef. He glanced out the window, to see if this was tempting Michael, but the boy’s head was no longer visible.

  Knowing the boy was probably stretched out sleeping, O’Sullivan nonetheless wondered if he should go out there and check on him. Night had smothered dusk, and that was just enough to make O’Sullivan edgy. He was sipping his coffee, looking out the window at the Michael-less backseat window when the bright sweep of headlights, a vehicle coming into the diner parking lot, made him wince.

  The driver parked, got out—O’Sullivan noted the uptown topcoat and bowler as atypical for this rural area—and glanced at O’Sullivan’s car. Something about the glance was less casual than it tried to be. In his booth by the window, O’Sullivan craned his neck, trying to see the front license plate, couldn’t, and as the bell over the door dinged, he returned to his meal.

  O’Sullivan seemed to be looking at nothing in particul
ar, but he noted the way the newcomer was registering the farmer at the counter…and especially the cop. Right now O’Sullivan was the only other patron. Dark-haired but pale, the guy had a narrow, angular face—youthful, though O’Sullivan made him as around thirty.

  But the oddest thing about him was the camera: he had a camera in his hands, as if he’d come to photograph this mundane diner. That was no tourist camera, either—O’Sullivan recognized it as one of those reflex-and-view cameras the news photogs used. Those babies went for over a hundred bucks…

  The man with the camera took the booth next to O’Sullivan’s, but sat opposite him, the two men facing—and right now both were going out of their way not to look at each other.

  Water and coffee in hand, Ruby approached the new customer, who said to her, “Pretty dead in here, huh?”

  “You kiddin’? This is a stampede. Who has money for luxuries like eating, in these hard times.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “You look like it, handsome. What can I do you for?”

  “What’s tonight’s special?”

  “Honey, everything’s special.”

  “Really?”

  “Everything but the food.”

  The guy laughed at that—giving the remark a little more reaction than it deserved. “Ruby, you oughta be on the radio.”

  “Don’t I know it. I wrote to Amos and Andy, but they didn’t write back.”

  Still chuckling, glancing at the menu, the man said, “Didn’t write back…Well, give me some of that honey-dipped fried chicken.”

  “Duck soup. Need any sugar or cream for that coffee?”

  “No. Black is fine.”

  The cheerful waitress sauntered off, and the customer reached into his topcoat pocket and withdrew a roll of film. He began to load the camera, O’Sullivan noting all this, without seeming to.

  Reaching in his own topcoat pocket, O’Sullivan withdrew his small silver flask. Putting a little weave into his actions, he poured whiskey into his coffee cup.