Макс Коллинз - Road to Perdition

“Michael,” he gasped, and he reached for the phone on the dead man’s desk.

The great unanswered question, after all these years, remains: Was the betrayal of Mike O’Sullivan the work of Connor Looney alone? What role, if any, did John Looney himself play in the treachery?

Strangely, my father never spoke of this — to me, at least. The controversy rages, among true-crime authors, with depictions ranging from the old man masterminding the deception — sending my father to Calvino’s with the orders for his own execution in hand — to Connor acting independently, out of jealousy and rage over his father’s love for the O’Sullivans, as much as the need to remove an eye witness to the McGovern murder .

The latter view was seemingly confirmed around a decade ago by one writer, who located an elderly woman who claimed to have been a singer with a jazz band on the Quinlan riverboat, and one of Connor Looney’s many girlfriends. The woman claimed she had been in Connor’s apartment at the Florence Hotel, on the night of the tragedy. She had been in the bedroom, sleeping off a drunken two-person orgy that had apparently followed the McGovern slaying .

The sound of the old man hammering on Connor’s apartment door had woken her, and she peeked out of the cracked bedroom door and witnessed a confrontation between the old man and his son, starting with Looney storming in, and hurling his son to the floor .

Oddly, Connor had not tried to defend himself, rather began to cry, as his father loomed over him, accusingly .

“I’m sorry, Pa,” Connor had said. “I’m sorry.”

“Why did you do this thing? Why?”

“That kid would’ve talked... he would’ve... ”

The old man exploded with rage, excoriating his son for his stupidity, and his cowardice, and then — apparently unable to verbalize his rage, much less satisfy it — the old man began to slap his son, striking him, forcing him to his knees .

“Goddamn you!” the old man raged. “Since the day you were born you have brought nothing into my life but disappointment and shame... I curse that day, I curse the goddamn day you were born! I should have drowned you like a fucking cat... I should have... should have... ”

And John Looney, exhausted, an emotional wreck himself, fell to his knees, beside his son, as if they were both praying. Connor was breathing hard, and blubbering like a baby .

And then the old man embraced his boy and soothed him, patting his back, there there, there there...

The alleged witness to this claims to have crept back to her bed and crawled beneath the covers. Within minutes, however, Connor burst in and threw her out of the apartment. He was leaving, he said, and didn’t want any company .

Given two dollars for a taxi cab, the singer was soon in her own bed, where she lay for hours, wondering what terrible thing Connor Looney had done .

Troubled as she’d been the last few days — as disturbed as she was about whatever her son Michael might have seen the night before — Annie O’Sullivan could still laugh. Or at least Peter could make her laugh.

Mother and son were in the bathroom upstairs. This was one of those ordinary yet precious moments that she did not take for granted: a year from now, if not sooner, her youngest son would be uncomfortable having his mother help him bathe. He was really already too old for it, she knew; but to her, Peter was still her baby, even though he’d turned ten.

The child liked a hot bath, and the room was steamy, the mirrors fogged. She had told him to get out, now, “you’re getting all pruney,” and he’d splashed water at her, and she’d leaned over the edge, splashing him back — but the boy wasn’t much dissuaded by that.

In fact, he seemed to find it very funny that his mother would be silly enough to splash somebody who was already dripping wet, and his childish laughter rang in the enclosed space. The little boy’s infectious glee had caught her, and as she held out a towel for him, and he stepped out over the high edge of the tub into the towel, and her drying embrace, they were both still giggling.

Despite their laughter, Annie heard something in the hall. “That must be your brother, back from his party — or could that be your father, home so early... ?”

“If it’s Michael, I’ll splash him,” Peter said.

“You better not.”

“If it’s Papa, I’ll splash him !”

“Don’t you dare.” She called out: “Which of my men is that?”

The door cracked open, giving them a glimpse of an adult male figure in a topcoat in the dark hall.

“Oh, it’s you, dear,” she said, toweling off her son.

But when the door opened wide, the figure there — in a dark topcoat and a knit stocking mask, balaclava-style — said, “No it’s not.”

Terrified, Annie drew Peter closer. The eyes in the knit mask were blinking — the intruder seemed almost as afraid as she felt. “What do you want?... Leave, please, leave now while you can. If you know who my husband is, you’ll leave.”

And the man in the knit mask raised his right arm, revealing the long-nosed revolver in his gloved hand. “I know who your husband is.”

Annie put herself in front of her child, but the gun in the trembling grasp of the intruder barked once, a terrible explosion in the small room that had not finished echoing in her ears when the bullet in her heart ended her life.

She couldn’t help falling away from her protective stance, exposing the towel-draped boy, who cried, “Mama!” staring down at his mother’s open empty eyes and the spreading blossom of red on her blouse, and Peter wasn’t looking when the intruder fired the second shot.

Naked as the day his mother had given birth to him, the late Peter O’Sullivan tumbled into his mother’s lifeless arms, and their blood ran together on the white tile floor, making crimson pools, the towel a puddle of white flecked red.

“So much for my little squealer,” Connor Looney said, with a bravado at odds with his trembling gun-in-hand, unaware that he had shot the wrong O’Sullivan boy.

After an evening of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and several plates of birthday cake, Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., was pedaling home from St. Pete’s. Tonight was clear and cold, and his breath was pluming as he tooled his bike down the street.

He’d had a long day, and kind of a lousy one — all the cake in the world couldn’t make up for what he’d been through at the Villa today. At lunch, out on the courtyard, an older boy had made a crack about Papa working for “that gangster Looney,” and Michael had lost control, punching, kicking, pummeling the kid. Neither boy had been the victor, and both stayed after school.

Michael’s hand was still sore from writing I WILL NOT FIGHT WITH OTHER BOYS on the blackboard, a hundred times.

He was nearly home, just gliding into the driveway, when he heard the harsh crack. At first he didn’t know what it was — a car backfiring maybe? But the noise had seemed to come from the house, and when he looked in that direction, a flash in the bathroom window, on the second floor, was accompanied by a second harsh crack...

... And he had heard similar sounds, last night, hadn’t he? Could those have been gunshots?

He abandoned his bike in the drive, and ran toward the house, with no thought of the danger, or what this might mean; all the eleven-year-old knew was that his mother and his brother were in that house! Was Papa home, too? He hadn’t noticed whether the car was in the garage...

These and a dozen other frantic thoughts tumbled through the boy’s brain as he ran up on the front porch, and he was about to rush inside when the figure of a man appeared in the glass of the front door.