Earlier, from a phone booth at the Interstate 80 truck stop, Michael had called the number Accardo gave him, and Accardo himself called back in two minutes — better service than the WITSEC panic button.
“Edgar’s kids’ve been watching the place,” Accardo’s rough baritone had informed him, meaning the FBI had an ongoing surveillance of Giancana’s residence. “Kind of trading off with the neighborhood kids.”
Indicating the Chicago PD’s organized crime unit was also keeping an eye on the house. Though using a supposedly “secure” line, the ganglord was speaking somewhat elliptically, so Michael followed suit.
“Hmmm,” Michael said. “Well, I might make some noise.”
“When you thinking?”
“Tonight.”
“Any special time?”
“Around Johnny Carson.”
“...Okay. You been to the guy’s house before?”
Meaning Giancana.
“Couple times,” Michael said. “Wasn’t exactly on a recon, though.”
“A garage back there, on the alley. You’ll see some garbage cans. People throw the damnedest things away these days. Perfectly good items.”
“Yeah, it’s a real waste.”
“Backyard’s fenced in — I hear there’s been trouble with the lock on the gate in the fence, lately.”
“Too bad. Risky with all the vandalism.”
“Sure is. Garden back there, head of the house likes to putter, but never at night. Sometimes he forgets and leaves the house open in back.”
“Isn’t that the door we spoke about?”
The steel door with the Joe-sent-me peephole. Joe Batters, in this case.
“Yeah,” Accardo said. “That door.”
“Okay. Will he have any friends over?”
Bodyguards or security staff?
“No. I have on good authority, a couple guys who usually keep him company won’t be around. They work hard. Deserve a night off.”
“What about his housekeeper and his wife?”
That was the DiPersios, Giancana’s longtime seventy-something caretaker and his housekeeper wife, who were live-in.
“Their apartment’s upstairs, on the second floor. They go to bed early.”
“Probably early risers, too, then,” Michael said. “Do they set the alarm, d’you suppose?”
Giancana was known to have an electric-eye burglar alarm.
“Not tonight,” Accardo said darkly. “...Anything else I can help you with, son?”
“No, sir. Thank you.”
But now as Michael strolled down the tree-lined street toward the alley beside the bungalow, he noted with surprise no suspicious cars. Several vehicles were parked along nearby curbs, but not the unimaginative standard-issue black sedans both the feds and Chicago PD were noted for — in fact, right across from 1147 South Wenonah were a red Mustang convertible and a white Pontiac Trans Am with a blue racing stripe.
No surveillance here, not at this moment — of course, the feds and cops liked to eat, and everybody had to piss now and then.
In the alley he found the garbage cans, three of them, nestled next to the yellow-brick garage. The first lid he lifted revealed a .22 target pistol perched cherry-on-the-sundae atop a fat filled garbage bag.
With a black-leather-gloved hand, Michael lifted the target pistol out — a High Standard Duromatic whose four-inch barrel had been tooled down to receive a six-inch homemade noise suppressor, a threaded tube drilled diagonally with countless holes. Fairly standard Outfit whack weapon, these days — a .22, not unlike the ones the two DeStefano hitters brought to the Cal-Neva, before Michael killed them. He checked the clip — full. The ammo looked fine.
If Accardo’s people had left him a sabotaged gun, he still had his .45 in a shoulder holster. But with the chance of cops or feds returning, within easy hearing range of gunfire, this silenced .22 would do the trick nicely. He stuck the somewhat bulky weapon in the waistband of his slacks, leaving his sport coat unbuttoned.
As promised, the gate in the stockade-type fence was unlocked. Michael opened and closed it with little sound, entering a backyard with no security lights, though the moon gave an ivory glow to this immaculately tended little world of putting green, clipped hedges, and colorful flower beds. A circular stone patio hugged the house, but Michael’s crepe soles made no sound as he crossed to descend the cement steps to the steel door, which stood slightly ajar. A pleasant, spicy cooking odor wafted out.
That was not surprising. Michael had been at the Giancana home several times, and had been in the elaborately “finished” basement, with the spacious paneled den where the little gangster loved to spend his private time, and sometimes hold court. What lay beyond the steel door was a fully equipped modern kitchen.
One hand on the butt of the .22 target pistol in his belt, Michael pushed the door open — it creaked just a little, but the voice of Frank Sinatra covered for him: “Softly, As I Leave You” was playing, not loud, just background music, a nearby radio or distant hi-fi. Michael recognized the album — it was one of the four-tracks he’d tossed in Walker Lake.
He stepped inside to air-conditioned coolness, shutting the door behind him, as the pleasant cooking smell tweaked his nostrils. The counters and appliances were white, the paneling and cupboards a blond oak, the overhead lighting fluorescent. At the stove a swarthy, skinny little man — bald but for a friar’s fringe of gray — in a blue-and-white-checked untucked sport shirt, baggy brown slacks, and slippers with socks was tending two pans, frying sausage in olive oil in one and boiling up spinach and ceci beans in the other.
Both Mama and Papa Satariano had been magicians in the kitchen, so Michael knew exactly what the basement chef was up to — the sausage would be removed, and the spinach (or was that escarole?) and beans would eventually be transferred to the other pan to sauté in the sausage grease, with pinches of garlic no doubt, while the sausage would be added back in, for a killer of an Old Country snack.
The man at the frying pan sensed the presence of another, and before turning, said, “Butch — is that you? Forget something?”
“No,” Michael said, and withdrew the .22.
Sam Giancana — deep melancholy grooves in his stubble-bearded face, his nose a lumpy knob, his eyes at sad slants, an effect echoed by white bushy eyebrows — looked at the gun first. Then up at Michael.
“So it’s a Saint they send.” Giancana laughed hollowly. He nodded toward the sizzling pans. “You want some of this?”
“Step away from the stove, Momo. I don’t want grease in my face.”
Giancana — looking a decade older than just a few months ago, when he’d slipped into Michael’s Cal-Neva office and started all this — shrugged and did as he was told. He even held his hands away from himself, a little, and up. “Those need to cook awhile, anyway. You want some wine? Beer? Wait... Coca fucking Cola, right? You’re the Saint, after all.”
“No thanks. Nothing for me.”
Giancana sighed, nodded, offered a chagrined grin. “Guess we kinda underestimated each other, didn’t we, Mike?”
“I guess.”
Giancana’s head tilted to one side. “Why didn’t you shoot me, standing at the stove? Wanted to see my face, first?”
“Frankly, Momo, your face doesn’t do jack shit for me.”
The little gangster frowned, more confused than angry. “Then why ain’t you shot t my ass? Ain’t that why Joe Batters sent you around?” He sneered. “Funny! I ask you to knock off that head job Mad Sam, and you go all righteous on me. But Accardo you play torpedo for, no problem... I told you, Mike, told you you’re the same bad-ass today who shot Frank Abatte back in—”