Road to Paradise

by Max Allan Collins

  Accardo truly viewed the Outfit as an extended family, and those backyard barbecues he used to throw every summer indicated his good heart, even though it eventually got the real-life Godfather into trouble, attracting more unwanted guests than invited ones—the press hanging around taking pictures of the attendees, and the FBI showing up with their own clicking cameras.

  Still, while Michael could risk his own life, trusting Accardo, he would take extra precautions where Anna was concerned. Right now the motherless girl was a wreck—a newlywed who’d lost her husband on the honeymoon—and she had wept and slept in the backseat on the way from Tahoe to Palm Springs. At the Solona Court, she’d willingly taken the sedatives to help her sleep deeper, and he had not told her he was going out.

  What he had done was leave her that sealed envelope with a letter in it. On the back, he had penned in his small cramped precise handwriting:

  Anna—

  If you wake up and I am not here, do not worry. I will be back soon.

  If for some reason I am not back by morning, open this envelope. Please do not open this otherwise.

  Dad.

  And the letter inside said,

  Dear Anna,

  Take the briefcase from my bag. You will find half a million dollars inside, it is yours. Do not go to the police. Do not go to the FBI. Drive to DeKalb and go to your Aunt Betty’s.

  If you have not heard from me in a week, you must assume the worst, and start your life over.

  You are not known in DeKalb but Betty and Ralph are, and that is good. You will be able to go to a bank and get a checking account. Do so. Put ten thousand dollars in. Put the rest of the money in a safety deposit box and do NOT tell anyone about it, not even your aunt.

  Replenish the checking account from the safety deposit box as need be. When you are older and have an education, you may wish to invest the balance of the money.

  I cannot really tell you what to do, sweetheart. Not any more. If I am gone, I lose every right to influence you. But just the same I ask you to stay in DeKalb and attend Northern, where your mother went. The arts program is not bad, you will get the lead in every play they put on, I bet. I would very much like you to honor my request that you spend your college years in DeKalb where your aunt and uncle can provide moral support. I do not expect you to live with them and in fact think that would be a mistake, because they are much more conservative than we have ever been and would drive you nuts.

  Get an apartment or maybe pledge a sorority. Sorry. Trying to live your kid’s life for them is a hard habit to break, even though it never really worked in the first place.

  The things I have done should not come back to haunt you. I cannot think of any reason why anyone from my world would look for you or cause you harm. But you should be careful about the money. And you should use your married name.

  You are Anna Grace now. It is a good name for you. Your mom and I have always been proud of you and your talent. I hope some day you will forgive me for not stopping your brother from going to Vietnam, you were right, I was wrong.

  Please know that your mother loved you more than life itself. I love you more than life itself.

  Be strong. Take care.

  Dad

  The letter, written for tonight, would also serve later, when he went after Giancana. He’d designed it that way.

  He’d called his wife’s sister before heading to Accardo’s estate at Indian Wells Country Club. Anna was already asleep, but he had used a telephone booth outside the restaurant next door, not wanting to risk waking the girl.

  “Betty? It’s Michael.”

  “Michael! Is something wrong?”

  The response was appropriate: two months ago, Pat had made a supervised phone call, through the WITSEC switchboard, to inform her sister of their situation, to tell Betty that the family had been relocated by the Witness Protection Program, but not giving her their location or new names. He and Pat had the right and ability to make other such WITSEC-routed calls to Betty, their only close living relative, but hadn’t chosen to.

  Betty’s husband, Ralph, was a nice guy but a born-again preacher of some kind, spun off from the Baptists, who were just not Holy Roller enough. Pat and Betty had rarely talked in recent years, because their conversations always deteriorated into political arguments. Nonetheless, the O’Hara sisters had grown up together and had been close for decades, until wild girl Betty suddenly got saved, after her second divorce, and grew a stick up her ass.

  Carefully, he said, “You haven’t heard anything?”

  “Haven’t heard what? Michael, what is this about?”

  She sounded irritated, which was typical, but also frightened.

  “Betty, I have bad news.”

  “…Oh no. What is it? Should I sit down, Mike? I should be sitting down, shouldn’t I?…It’s Patsy Ann, isn’t it? Is she sick?”

  “We lost her, Betty.”

  Silence.

  “Do you understand, Betty?”

  The voice returned, with a tremor in it. “What…Mike, what happened?”

  “She was killed, Betty. Our house was attacked by the people I’m supposed to testify against, and they killed her.”

  “Oh my God.…Oh dear Jesus.” She wasn’t swearing; but she wasn’t exactly praying, either. “Anna! What about Anna?”

  He told his wife’s sister in almost no detail that Pat had been murdered in her sleep. That neither he nor Anna had been harmed, but that his daughter and he were on the road, and in danger.

  “You did this to her! You did this to her! You and those gangsters you work for. Gambling and drinking and debauchery… you did this!”

  He sighed. It would be unkind to point out that, in her time, Betty had indulged in far more gambling and drinking and debauchery than either Michael or Patricia.

  Then her voice changed. “…Michael, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m so sorry that I.…”

  “Blame me if you like, Betty,” he said without rancor. “I really don’t mind. If it helps you, blame me.”

  “What good d would it do? Nothing will bring her back. Was she…right with the Lord, Michael?”

  “She loved Jesus very much, Betty,” he lied. “We were talking about it just the night before she died.”

  “Thank God. Praise Jesus. What can I do to help, Michael? What can Ralph and I do?”

  “I need you to do right by your sister.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to give you a phone number and a name.”

  “I’ll get something to write with.…” Ten seconds later, she said, “Ready.”

  He gave her the number and said, “Talk to Harold Shore, he’s the associate director of the OCRS—the government agency we were dealing with.”

  “Were dealing with…? You’re not anymore?”

  “No. For obvious reasons, I don’t have a high opinion of their ability to protect me and what’s left of my family.”

  “Does that…include us?”

  “You and Ralph are in no danger. Anna won’t be, either, when I’m out of the picture.”

  “What does that mean, ‘out of the picture’?”

  “It means people are trying to kill me, and they may well succeed. But in the meantime, you call Director Shore and tell him you want to claim your sister’s body.”

  A sudden intake of breath leaped from the receiver. “Oh, Michael…I hadn’t even thought it through that far.…”

  “I’m sure the government can have Pat’s body sent to your local mortuary. I know they’ll do that much for us.”

  “Michael, oh…oh, Patsy.…”

  “I won’t be able to attend the funeral. Neither will Anna. That would be a high-risk proposition, our being there…but not for anyone else. Pat had a life in DeKalb. Friends. History. I’d like her to be buried next to her parents in the cemetery there.”

  “All right, Michael. All right.”

  “I’ll send you money for—”

  “I’d like you to let Ralph and me han
dle that, Michael.”

  “Well, actually, that’s generous. Kind. Loving, but I need you to buy a plot for me, too. I’ll want to be buried next to my wife—when the time comes.”

  “Oh, Michael.…” She was crying. “…Forgive me for being so…so darn terrible.”

  Yes, “darn” terrible. Betty wasn’t allowed to be “goddamn” terrible, anymore.…

  “There’s one other thing, Betty.…There’s a chance Anna may turn up on your doorstep one of these days.”

  “We’d love to have her,” she said, in a painfully forced, upbeat way. “Sheila’s only two years younger than Anna, and they could be like…like sisters.”

  Betty was crying again. He heard a male voice, Ralph’s, saying, “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

  Michael let her deal with her husband, then when she returned, told her, “I’m hoping, if something happens to me, that Anna will go to college there in DeKalb, and have you folks to fall back on. So she’s not…alone in the world. Would that be agreeable?”

  “Of course it would, Michael.”

  “She’ll have her own money.”

  “Well, Ralph and I would be glad—”

  “No. She’s a young woman, and she will be self-sufficient. What you don’t know, Betty, is that Anna was married recently.”

  “Married! At her age! Michael, that’s—”

  “Her young husband was murdered yesterday. He caught a bullet meant for me.”

  “Ooooh…oh God.…”

  Fear in her voice now. Finally. Good.

  “Betty, these are deep, dark waters. And treacherous. If she comes to you, treat Anna like a grown-up, because she is one, or anyway will need to be. And she won’t have time for…or, knowing her…patience with any sanctimonious bullshit. You just be a good loving aunt to her. I don’t mean to be unkind, but am I clear on that?”

  “You are,” she said, nothing irritated in her voice at all now. “I promise you that, Michael.”

  “Thank you, Betty,” he said, and hung up.

  In the morning, Anna woke before him. She had already showered and was in bell-bottom jeans and wedge sandals and a dark blue scoop-neck tank top, all that brown hair cascading down her back. She was brushing her teeth when he approached, still in his commando black.

  “What’s,” she said, and spit out toothpaste into the sink, “with the getup?”

  “Oh. I slipped out for a little while last night, after you went to sleep.”

  “Ninja convention in town?”

  “There’s a powerful man I had to see.”

  “What…one of your gangster friends?”

  “Sort of. I needed to make sure where we stood with him.”

  She rinsed, spat. “Where do we stand, Daddy?”

  “He’s with us. I think.”

  “Oh. Well, gee, that’s comforting. But other people still want us dead?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head, smirked humorlessly, said, “Bathroom’s yours,” and brushed past him.

  He shat, showered, shaved, changed into a fresh Banlon, rust-color, and tan trousers. He was brushing his teeth when Anna popped up in the bathroom doorway, as he had done with her.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “The plan,” he said, and spat into the sink, “is to keep us both alive.”

  “Okay. But with Mom dead, and Gary, being alive doesn’t quite have the…appeal like it used to, huh?” Her eyes were filled with tears that belied her flip manner. She’d had twelve hours of sleep to replenish her tear ducts.

  “Ask yourself if Mom would want us to give up,” he said. “Ask yourself if Gary would want anything to happen to you.”

  She nodded, numbly, and shuffled off.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, facing his, slumped, legs apart, hands laced together hanging between her knees. Staring at the floor. Her handbag—an off -white crocheted jute shoulder affair—was next to her.

  From the nightstand, he removed the .38 and handed it toward her.

  “I want you to carry that in your purse.”

  She didn’t argue. She took the gun and unsnapped the bag and slid the big weapon in among cosmetics and Kleenex.

  “Guess all those gun club years are finally comin’ in handy, huh, Pop?”

  He sat across from her. “Couple details. Couple realities… not any fun, I’m afraid.”

  She looked up with an eyebrow raised. “Oh—is the fun over already?”

  “Gary’s parents will’ve been called back from their Caribbean trip by now.”

  She hung her head again, shaking it. “Those poor people… poor, poor people.…”

  “I’m assuming they knew nothing about the marriage?”

  “Not any more than you and Mom did.”

  “…Is there anything in the house—marriage license, photos, anything that might come in the mail, that would tell them about you two…?”

  “Getting hitched?” she said archly. “No. I don’t think so.” She frowned at him, confused. “Why?”

  “I’m thinking…there’s no reason for them to know about it. I’m thinking it would just complicate things. All they know right now, from talking to people who were there, is that you sneaked back to go to the prom with Gary. And that he was an innocent bystander in some kind of gangland violence that broke out in the parking lot of a casino with that kind of history.”

  She was thinking. “Maybe…maybe it would be better this way. Just be harder on them, knowing…and they’d just be…madder at us.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “D’you suppose his funeral’s today?”

  He nodded. “Or tomorrow.”

  His father had led him to the bed where his mother’s body lay, where Papa had tucked her in. “Bid her Godspeed now, Michael—there’ll be no attending the services for us…no wake…no graveside goodbyes.”

  He said, “We could have flowers wired. Would you like that?”

  Looking at the floor, she swallowed. Sighed. Nodded. “What…what about Mom?”

  “I called Aunt Betty. They’re handling it.”

  “We won’t be going to her funeral, either, will we?”

  He shook his head.

  She grimaced. Then her face softened into a blank pretty mask. “Daddy, what is the plan?”

  “A safe place and a fresh start for both of us, but, first…I have to do something back in Chicago.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “Do you want me to tell you?”

  Her dark eyes flashed up from the floor. “I’m fucking asking, aren’t I?”

  He held those eyes with his. “The monster who did this to us—who caused your mother’s death, and your…your husband’s. He has to die.”

  “You have to kill him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to Chicago to kill him.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. Shrugged. Said, “Can I help?”

  At a Denny’s across from the motel, they both ate modest breakfasts, but at least they were able to eat. Michael checked the Los Angeles newspapers to see how much coverage the Cal-Neva incident was getting.

  Much as he’d outlined it to Anna, the papers reported that at Lake Tahoe, the Cal-Neva, “which had attracted headlines in the days when singer Frank Sinatra was an owner,” had been the scene of “mob-style” violence. Gary Grace, eighteen, had taken a bullet intended for the unidentified male target of two mob assassins who had been killed by said target. The names of the dead men were being withheld by federal authorities, although an unnamed source linked them to “notorious” Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, “recently returned from Mexico and said to be contemplating a comeback in organized crime circles.”

  No mention of Michael by name or even description, though the cops would surely know about the Lincoln. A small mention of Anna: “The young victim had been attending the prom with a teenaged girl who had moved away recently and returned for the e
vent.” His daughter’s name—and that she’d got in the car with the “unidentified target” prior to the bystander teenager’s killing—was not mentioned.

  Had the feds withheld that info, or didn’t they know? Maybe the eyewitnesses hadn’t seen Gary open the car door for Anna, and her get in, their attention not attracted until the gunfire began. In the midst of weapons blazing in the night, and the Lincoln screeching out of the Cal-Neva lot, perhaps no one noticed the girl in the front seat. Of course, she had been screaming.…

  They drove down a commercial strip toward Palm Springs and stopped at a florist, sending flowers to the funeral home in Incline Village for Gary. Then Michael trawled for just the right used-car lot, found it, and traded his Lincoln in on a three-year-earlier model Eldorado, a deep-blue vinyl-top number with sixty thousand miles, paying the guy eight thousand cash. In reality, the used-car salesman should have been paying Michael a couple grand, but this was a no-paperwork, off -the-books transaction.

  Father and daughter transferred their possessions to the big boat of a Caddy—everything from the rifle to their suitcases to the four-track tapes—and soon were heading up North 95 to connect with Interstate 40, east.

  As they sat in air-conditioned comfort, listening to Bobby Darin sing “The Good Life,” his daughter said, “These aren’t the most inconspicuous wheels I ever saw, Daddy.”

  “They’re less conspicuous,” he said, “than that Lincoln, considering I got it from the government…and we were seen in it at the Cal-Neva.”

  “Ah. But, still.…”

  “Baby, I hardly have the heart to tell you, but—”

  “Oh, bad news now?”

  He sighed. “We have three days of driving ahead of us, ten or twelve hours a day.”

  She frowned. “If we’re going that far, and were getting rid of our car, anyway, why didn’t we just fly? Or take the train or something?”

  “The G-men may be watching the airports and train stations for us.”

  She laughed. “Did you just say ‘G-men’?”

  He smiled, embarrassed. “I guess I did. Kinda dates me, huh?”

  “Only to around the turn of the century.”

  The first day took them home, in a way—Arizona, the turnpike cutting through endless stretches of mesas and buttes dotted with yucca and sagebrush. Heat and clouds conspired to turn the desert shades of yellow, pink, brown, and gray, overseen by ragged barren mountains.