“They couldn’t get your money for you, and they couldn’t put the brakes on the Senate committee... but they could give me up.”
“Fucking exactly!”
“Fine. Who ‘exactly’ is ‘they’?”
An elaborate shrug. “I met dozens of these spooks over the years, gray assholes in gray suits, and I could give you names, but you think they’re real names? You think I got an address book so I can send you and your vengeance hard-on to the homes of every government spy in Washington? Get real, Saint.”
“Maybe. But you sent those three Outfit goombahs to my house, Momo. And Inoglia murdered my wife. Explain that away — I’m listening.”
“Wait, wait, wait the fuck! I was in the goddamn hospital, in Houston, getting my gallbladder filleted! I gave that... that voice Inoglia’s name and contact crap. Do you think I woulda had them dress up like hippies? If I was gonna kill you, Saint, I’d want the world to know. You’da been an example. Whose fucking interests did it serve havin’ that hit look like Charlie Manson?”
Very softly Michael said, “The Witness Protection Program.”
Giancana was nodding. “Right, Mike, right. If it’s some whacko drugged-out flower people who butchered an innocent family, the government’s not to blame. But an Outfit hit, on a protected witness and his family? They’d be over. Done. WITSEC’d never have another player for their new-name-fresh-start game show.”
Sinatra was singing “The Look of Love.”
Feeling a little numb, Michael asked, “Who killed Mad Sam DeStefano?”
A small shrug, this time. “Just who you think — the Ant and Mario, Mad Sam’s own damn brother. Hey, I don’t deny framing you for that. Shit runs downhill — I gave you a direct order, and you thumbed your nose at me. What did you fucking expect me to do? Who twisted your arm to be part of Our Thing? Did you or did you not go down this road of your own free will?”
“I did,” Michael admitted.
“Well, then. I rest my fucking case.” He stood, scooching his chair back, making a tiny chalk-on-the-blackboard screech. “My offer is sincere. Why don’t you and your daughter just... take a vacation for a while. Mexico went south on me, so to speak, but I still have friends in very nice places — Bahamas, Jamaica — where you and your kid can relax... Let me get my house in order, recuperate a little from this damn surgery — and I’ll deal with this Senate thing, and in the meantime, Butch and Chuckie and me’ll gather my forces, and if it means taking Aiuppa out, so be it.”
“You mean, just watch from afar,” Michael said, “and you’ll call me in, when the time is right.”
A big grin split Giancana’s grooved, dark face. “Works for me!... I better get back to my sausage and beans. Be a goddamn shame to waste ingredients like them... My daughter Francine brought ’em over today.”
Sinatra had stopped singing, the album over.
Some cockiness in his step now, Giancana headed through the dining room and back into the kitchen, Michael right behind him, the .22 at his side.
Giancana returned to the two pans and began stirring the sausage. “A little too brown on the one side, but it’s still gonna be nice... You know, Michael, what our problem is? We’re too much alike, you and I. Pity we got off to such a bad start.”
“It really is,” Michael said, and shot him in the back of the head, the silenced pistol’s report like a cough.
Giancana jerked, then crumpled to the floor, sprawling on his back. Life flickered in the dark shark eyes, and he was still breathing, so Michael stuck the snout of the silenced weapon in the man’s mouth, and the pistol coughed again.
No more life in the eyes now, but Michael, lips peeled back over his teeth in something that was not at all a smile, shoved the gun under the gangster’s chin and fired again and again and again and again and again.
Giancana, quite dead now, lay on his back with his ankles crossed, right arm crooked at his side, his left hand above his head as if doing a native folk dance. Dark red streamed from the gaping throat wounds, and trails trickled from his nostrils and began to pool beside him on the linoleum.
Michael turned off the stove and slipped out into the garden, shutting the door behind him. He stood under a sky that flashed with heat lightning while the moon painted pale ivory the lovely landscaping, muting the color splashes of flowers.
He should have fled quickly, but he froze there, a voice in his mind — belonging to, of all people, his wife’s sister, Betty — saying, What good would it do? Nothing will bring her back.
Sam Giancana, the man responsible for Patricia’s death, was dead. And nothing had changed. Michael felt only an emptiness. No satisfaction. What had his father felt, when Connor Looney died?? Heat lightning flashed, as if a coded answer, daring him to figure it out, and he suddenly sensed something.
He looked up at wispy gray clouds and spasms of lightning and a strangely accusatory moon, and he could feel God watching.
And in Sam Giancana’s garden, with the dead gangster still bleeding onto a kitchen floor but a few yards away, Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., knelt on the stone patio and prayed, clasping gloved hands, one of which still held the murder gun.
“Forgive me, Father,” he said quietly, but out loud, head unbowed, beseeching the electricity-pulsating sky, “for I have sinned.”
Confession over, he got to his feet, and the hell out of there.
And he didn’t even realize he was crying until he was back to the car and his daughter said something.
“Are you all right, Daddy?”
“Fine, sweetheart. Fine. Drive. Normal speed.”
She drove them through the shady lanes of the residential suburb. The pistol was not in the car with them — he had tossed it in the sewer walking back.
“You’re crying, Daddy. Why?”
“Just... your mother. Thinking of your mother.”
“...Is he dead, Daddy? The man... the man who killed Mom?”
“He is. I killed him, baby.”
She was about a block from the residential hotel when she asked, “Do you feel better about it? With him dead?... Should I feel better?”
That was when he noticed she was crying, too.
Thirteen
At first glance, the stone-gray monolith — somehow simultaneously squat and towering — might have been a government building, an art deco courthouse from New Deal days, perhaps. On closer look, the wildly contradictory geometric overhangs and vaguely Egyptian columns of the washed-pebble, poured-concrete study in cubism suggested something more ethereal than tax money might buy, even under the WPA.
This was Unity Temple, the most famous of Oak Park’s many churches, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1906 study in cantilevered concrete, built to replace the former temple, which had been hit by lightning in 1905 and burned to the ground, a heavenly hint the church leaders hadn’t taken. Perhaps that explained the lack of a spire, though Wright claimed to be avoiding cliché when lightning rod was more like it.
An architectural landmark and tourist attraction, the cement church at Lake Street and Kenilworth gave daily informal tours — nothing too structured from a denomination that defined itself as nondenominational. The last one, on this sunny afternoon in June, had ended at five p.m., fifteen minutes ago — Michael had instructed Associate Director Harold Shore of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section to take that final tour.
On returning last night from Giancana’s house, Michael had called the panic-button number, and said he was ready to come in from the cold — and wanted to meet with Shore, ASAP.