Max Collins: Mourn The Living

She shook her head and waddled off the bus, boarding almost immediately a touring bus bound for Tom Sawyer Cave.

Nolan fell asleep for a while and woke up as the bus was passing a sign which should have read “Hello! Welcome to Illinois!” but somebody had removed the O in hello.

He closed his eyes and leaned back and rolled his past around in his mind for a few minutes.

Nolan had begun as a bouncer in a night club on Rush Street in Chicago. In a few years he climbed to manager. He was, of course, working for the Family; and the Family was grooming Nolan for bigger and better things.

At the head of the Family were “the Boys”: Charlie Franco, Sam Franco and Lou Goldstein. Charlie and Sam were president and vice, while Lou held down the treasurer post. Their “outfit” was a multi-million dollar enterprise dealing in gambling, prostitution, unionizing and narcotics, among other consumer services, tied in with but largely independent of the New York mob families.

Nolan reached behind him and got his cigarettes out of the pocket of his parka. He lit one up and glanced out the bus window. He saw some crows picking at a scarecrow in a field and he thought of Sam Franco.

Sam Franco had been largely responsible for Nolan’s promising future in the organization. Nolan hated the man on sight, which was natural since even Sam’s brother Charlie referred to Sam as “the skinny little bastard” more often than not. But Sam was one of the Boys, so Nolan didn’t advertise his feelings. And Sam, who tended to like young men more than young women, kept his admiration for Nolan platonic, because Nolan wasn’t the type of man you made passes at, even if you were one of the Boys.

So for the next year and a half things ran smoothly. Nolan moved up in the organization, thanks to Sam, and Nolan kept on hating Sam’s guts in silence, and everybody got along fine until Nolan met the girl.

The Illinois cornfields, already patched with snow, flashed in the bus window by Nolan’s seat. He stared out the window and tried not to think about her. He didn’t like thinking about her.

She was a nice girl, a very nice girl in spite of the fact that Nolan convinced her to spend the night with him during the first week of their acquaintance. She spent the night with him for two months. She had reddish blond hair, the high-cheekboned beauty of a model, an excellent body and was extremely quiet. All in all, she was everything Nolan wanted in a woman.

But she was something else, too, something Nolan didn’t want: she was a cop.

Sam Franco called Nolan in for a special meeting the day after it became known that the girl was jane law. Sam informed Nolan that the girl would have to be removed. Nolan informed Sam that he had already told her to pack her things. What he did not tell Sam was that he too was packing his things, and would take off with her as soon as this blew over.

Sam said, “You’re going to have to ice her.”

“I can’t do that, Mr. Franco.”

“I’ll tell you what you can and can’t do! Now, this is your fucking mess, clean it up!”

“No.”

“Ice the bitch, Nolan. That’s my final word.”

But Nolan’s final word had been no, and he meant no. He didn’t kill the girl.

Someone else did.

Nolan found her the next day, in his apartment, floating face up in his tub. The tub was overflowing with water turned pink from blood.

She’d been beaten first, to near-death, then drowned. Little of her beauty in life had been retained in death.

The emotional outlet Nolan knew best was violence, and he spent the next twenty minutes demolishing the apartment. He reduced all the furniture to rubble and smashed his fists through its plasterboard walls. When he had calmed down enough to think, he went down to the lobby of the apartment building to use the pay phone, since he had torn his own phone from the wall.

“This is Nolan, Mr. Franco.”

“Yes, Nolan.” Franco’s voice exuded fatherly patience.

“Mr. Franco,” he said, his voice even, his hand white around the receiver, “you were right about the girl. I want to thank you for... letting me avoid the dirty work.”

“That’s quite all right, Nolan,” said Sam. “Come on over and we’ll talk business.”

Nolan went to Sam’s penthouse office on Lake Shore Drive where he found Sam at his desk, enjoying the view of Lake Michigan out the picture window.

“Nice view,” Nolan said.

Sam turned in his swivel chair, said, “Oh hello, Nolan. Yes, it is a nice view, particularly in May, when...” Sam had begun to get up.

“Don’t get up, Mr. Franco,” Nolan said, and Mr. Franco sat back down, two bullets from Nolan’s .38 in his chest.

The first man through the door caught a bullet in the stomach, the next one through got his in the head. The odds were good that Nolan had gotten the girl’s killer because the two men he had shot were Sam’s personal bodyguards and had taken care of most of Sam’s unpleasant chores.

Nolan waited for everyone to die, watching the doorway to see if anyone else wanted to join the party. When no one did, Nolan turned to the wall-safe opposite Sam’s desk. His mouth etched a faint line of a smile as he twisted the dial to the proper combination: a few weeks before he’d been in the office for a conference and had watched carefully as Sam opened the safe. As Nolan had been storing away the combination for possible future use, Sam had boasted its being too complicated for anyone but a Franco to master.

Nolan emptied the safe’s contents into a briefcase and walked out into the outer office, where Sam’s secretary was crouching in the corner, waiting for death. Hauling her up by the arm, Nolan used her as a shield to get safely out of the building and into a cab, the .38 in her back making her a willing if not eager accomplice.

The police noted that the incident marked Chicago’s fourth, fifth and sixth gangland slayings of the month, and promptly added them onto the city’s impressive list. The Boys kept Nolan’s name out of it (the secretary Nolan had used as an escort ended up describing him as short, fat, balding and Puerto Rican) because of the pains Nolan could cause them if he ever chose to reveal his knowledge of their organization’s inner workings to the authorities. The Boys’ benevolence, however, ended there.

Charlie and Lou, shocked to see bloodshed come so close to their personal lives, placed the quarter million on Nolan’s head before Sam’s body had even cooled.

Nolan had taken his twenty-thousand dollar bankroll, compliments of Sam’s wall-safe, and headed for a friend’s place, where he holed up two weeks, waiting for the heat to lift off Chicago. The friend who hid him out was named Sid Tisor.

Nolan looked out the bus window and watched the sun go down. He closed his eyes and waited for Peoria.

Tisor was waiting for Nolan at the bus station, asleep behind the wheel of his Pontiac, a blue year-old Tempest. Nolan peeped in at him. Tisor was a small man, completely bald, with unwrinkled pink skin and a kind face. His appearance hardly suited his role of ex-gangster. Nolan opened the car door, tossed his suitcases in the back, hung up his clothes-bags and slid in next to Tisor. He placed his .38 to Tisor’s temple and nudged him awake.

“Nolan... what the hell...” Though the .38 barrel was cold against Tisor’s skin, he began to sweat.

“Sid, we been friends a long time. Maybe too long. I’m worth a quarter million dead and you’re still on good terms with the Boys. If you’re part of a set-up to get rid of me, tell me now and you got your life and no hard feelings. If I find out later you’re fingering me, I think you know what you’ll get.”

Tisor swallowed hard. He’d never heard Nolan give a speech like that before — he’d never heard more than a clipped sentence or two from Nolan at a time. Never in the ten years he’d known the man.