On the Day I Died (19 page)

The following evening just before closing, the phone in the florist shop rings.

Pete Winters answers.

“I’d like to place an order for a funeral tomorrow,” says the man on the other end, who claims his name is Mr. Brown. “Am I too late?”

“Not at all, not at all,” says Pete.

“Okay,” says Mr. Brown. “I want a wreath of red roses. A real big one. Say five hundred dollars’ worth?”

“Fine,” says Pete. “We can do that.”

“I’ll come in and pick it up tomorrow, around noon,” says Mr. Brown.

“We can deliver it if you want,” says Pete.

“No, this is something I want to do for myself,” says Mr. Brown.

“Of course,” says Pete. “Glad to oblige.” He thanks Mr. Brown for his business, checks the cooler to make sure there are enough roses to fill the order, then goes out to dinner with Viola.

At noon the next day, Pete and another employee
named Jim Holloway are bent over the worktable in the florist shop, wiring the last of the roses together, when a blue touring car rolls up to the curb. Three men climb out; the driver stays where he is, motor running. A boy playing on the sidewalk notices that the man in the middle has a scar on his face. “Get lost, kid,” says the man. The kid scampers away. The men push open the florist’s door. The bell jangles. Holloway looks up. Uh-oh, he thinks. I recognize
that
face. He ducks into the back room.

“Hello, gentlemen,” says Pete. “Here for the flowers?” He steps forward, shears in one hand, the other held out for a handshake.

The man with the scar takes it. “I’m Mr. Brown,” he says.

Pete smiles and nods.

Holloway makes it to the back room and shuts the door.

A few minutes go by. From his hiding place in back, Holloway hears chitchat. A couple of laughs. Then—
bang!

The first shot goes wild. But not the next ones. They’re fired at such close range that they leave powder burns on Pete’s wool suit. The last shot is a head shot—the coup de grâce, is what the Mob likes to call it. Holloway waits until the men are gone before creeping back out. Pete is on his back in a puddle of blood and rose petals. He never knows he’s been arranging flowers for his own funeral.

The
True Crime
story ended there. Eager to know more, I turned the page of the scrapbook and found a batch of clippings from some old newspaper called the
Chicago Daily News
. I read slowly, piecing together the rest of Aunt Viola’s story.

She obviously spared no expense when it came to Pete’s funeral. His silver and gold coffin cost ten thousand dollars; its makers had it sent from Philadelphia by express train in a private baggage car. Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra played “Ave Maria,” and the city’s cardinal delivered the eulogy.

There was a picture of Viola on the front page. She was, like, two hundred pounds skinnier, wearing black satin and a full-length mink coat. From behind her black veil, a reporter overheard her say, “It’s time to get back into the florist business.”

In no time flat, Viola had gunned down the leaders of two rival South Side gangs and seized control of their bootleg operations. She tracked down Mr. Brown’s accomplices and allegedly killed them by shoving a rose stem into their brains through their left nostrils while they begged for mercy. Then, with her Thompson submachine gun blazing, she shot up the Lexington Hotel, Capone’s headquarters down on Michigan and Cermak. Capone escaped through one of his secret tunnels. But that didn’t stop Viola from taking a sledgehammer to his Tiffany lamps, his gold-plated bathroom fixtures, his beloved lavender-tiled tub. She stormed his basement
vault, too, emptying it of more than a million dollars in gold coins. Then she just disappeared. Most people figured Capone caught up with her, gave her a pair of cement shoes and tossed her into the Chicago River. But a few speculated she had gotten away.

The last article in Aunt Viola’s scrapbook was still white-paper new, printed just a little over a year ago on the forty-fifth anniversary of the Lexington shoot-out. “Where is the Doll-Faced Moll now?” the article asked.

“Right here,” I muttered to myself. “She’s right here.”

Was I scared?

Sort of.

But I was even more curious. What if Aunt Viola really
did
get away with Al Capone’s gold? What did she do with it all? I looked around the grody, overstuffed living room. She sure as heck hadn’t spent it here, right? Like, this wasn’t exactly Millionaires’ Row. So where was it?

I remembered reading once about this loony old lady who stashed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of loot in crazy places all over her house. Like, she froze her emerald rings into ice trays and hid her diamond necklace in a cracker box. Maybe Aunt Viola had done something like that, too. I mean, she was nuts enough. But where would she have hidden it? I sat there on the sofa with the scrapbook, wondering.

I must have fallen asleep, because I woke with a start.
Someone was trying to tiptoe down the pathway without making a sound—a pretty impossible task if that someone was the size of a baby hippo. Floorboards groaned. Mountains of stuff rattled and shook. I heard the telltale creak of a door, then the heaving, straining, panting sounds of Aunt Viola climbing a flight of stairs. Her heavy footfalls caused the whole house to shudder and shed trickles of plaster.

Off-limits, huh?

I got up and waded through the books and papers until I found the pathway that led from the living room to the hall. The door to the attic was open a crack. A key on a red satin ribbon, like the kind florists tie around bouquets of roses, still dangled from the now-sprung lock. I touched it, causing the ribbon to sway back and forth.

What was up there?

And as soon as I asked the question, I
knew
. I
knew
what was up there. It was obvious, wasn’t it? It was Al Capone’s gold. Aunt Viola had stashed it in the attic. I bet she was up there counting the coins that very minute.

I thought about charging up the stairs, bursting in on her, shouting, “Caught ya, you fat, lying mobster!”

But a better idea was already wiggling its way into my brain. Why not help myself to a little of that loot? I wouldn’t take much, just enough to say so long forever to Aunt Viola and her weird, stinking house; and to my useless mother and her long police record; and to the ESC, which could never, ever be a real home.

I grinned. Oh, yeah, by tomorrow morning I’d be hitching west on Interstate 80, free and easy, my pockets bulging with Scarface’s gold.

I went back to the sofa, pulled the ancient lap robe up to my chin, traced the cracks in the ceiling and waited.

Time crept by.

Finally, Aunt Viola dragged herself down the stairs. The house shook, and I couldn’t help wondering if the steps would hold. But they did. Minutes later I heard her mattress springs groan. Minutes after that, I heard her snore.

It was my turn now.

It was easy to sneak into her bedroom. Easier still to swipe the key off her nightstand. Aunt Viola snored louder than a Harley without a muffler, drowning out any giveaway noises, like the crunch of plaster beneath my shoes and the
ting
sound the key on its ribbon made when it accidentally bumped into a half-empty bottle of soda.

I had the attic door unlocked and open in less time than it took to say “mobster.” Behind it was a flight of narrow, sagging stairs. There was no light switch, but a window at the very top let in a shaft of moonlight. I began to climb, quietly, quietly. The attic stank of dirty scalp. It wasn’t until I reached the top landing that I realized the stairs were clutter free. For the first time since I’d arrived at Aunt Viola’s house, I hadn’t had to wind, wade or pick my way through junk.

I came to another door. It was partway open, revealing nothing but darkness.

Why was I hesitating? Because all of a sudden, I felt a little scared—those narrow stairs, the moonlight, an
attic
. Suddenly, I remembered all the late-night horror movies I’d watched where some dimwitted girl walks into a slimy cellar or cobwebby attic and the whole time I’m yelling at the TV screen, going, “What are you, stupid or something?”

But that was the movies, and this was real life. There weren’t any zombies or chain-saw-wielding serial killers hiding behind that door. What there was—I knew it—was gold.

I gave the door a push and it swung open, the moonlight piercing the blackness. And it was hard to tell, but I thought … yes, there in front of me was … a bunch of
dummies
. You know, like store mannequins, and they were arranged around a long table. Six dummies, actually, three on one side, three on the other. They were sitting in chairs and dressed in old-time clothes—fedora hats and overcoats—all neat and tidy as well-loved dolls. As a matter of fact, everything about this room was neat and tidy. There was no junk. No clutter. No dust or plaster grit.

And no safe or pile of gold, either.

I crept into the room for a closer look, and the stench hit me so hard I thought I was going to puke. It was totally gross, like if you scrape the surface of your
tongue in the morning and then smell it. You know, sort of moist and decayed. Breathing through my mouth, I looked around.

There was a bottle of whiskey and six shot glasses in the middle of the table, and in front of each of the dummies sat a crazy object, like a violin case or a box of cigars. There were name plates, too, and I bent down for a closer look.
BUGS MORAN
, read one name plate.
JOHN DILLINGER
, read another. The dummy closest to me was labeled
AL CAPONE
.

Now we were getting somewhere. “Where’s the loot, buster?” I said, goofing around. Even with my nostrils pinched shut, it was a pretty good mobster imitation. I looked directly into the dummy’s face.

Except it wasn’t a dummy face. It was a … a
real
face. Withered. Dried. Horrible. Its leathery lips were drawn back over yellowing teeth in an eternal sneer. There was a gaping black hole where the nose should have been, and the eyes, wrinkled like raisins, were sunken in the eye sockets. In the green-tinged skin stretched tight across the cheekbones, I could just make out the shadow of a scar. And now—
now!
—I knew what that smell was, that smell that stank up every crevice of the groaning, sagging house. It wasn’t dirty scalp or tongue scrapings. It was death. The smell of rotting human head.

I looked around the table. Correction:
six
rotting heads!

Six rotting heads mounted on six mannequin bodies!

I fell back, and a weird sound came out of my throat, not a scream but a croak. I wheeled, ready to run.

Her bulk filling the entire door, there stood Aunt Viola, blocking the way.

She looked sullen, her lower lip pushed out as if her feelings were hurt. “You have no right. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I agree,” I said. “I shouldn’t be here.” I took a step toward the door.

But Aunt Viola just waddled into the room, the floorboards complaining. She took a kerosene lamp from a nearby shelf, lit it, then shut the door behind her.

“It was easy for me,” she said, and her voice sounded faraway, you know? “I was a florist. I had a paneled truck. When I drove through the cemetery gates, nobody—not the groundskeepers or the gravediggers—ever questioned why I was there. So easy. I dug them up and simply plucked off their heads.”

“Heads?” I repeated stupidly.

“It’s just like flowers,” she went on. “You don’t take the whole plant, you just take the blossom.” She brought her sausage-sized thumb and index finger together when she said this, as if delicately pinching off a bloom.

“Now I run the whole show. I’m the boss. I tell the boys what to do, and they obey.” She stroked the back of Bugs Moran’s head, opened the box of cigars and stuck one between Capone’s yellow teeth. “I take good care of my boys. I make sure they have everything they want.”

“That’s … that’s sick!” It was out of my mouth before I could stop it.

She turned those cold blue eyes on me, and I could actually see them harden. They glinted like two marbles that had been pressed into her doughy face. “That’s what everyone seems to think,” she said, and that angry wasp voice was back. “And that’s why I can’t let you leave here … ever.”

Moving quicker than I’d ever thought possible, Aunt Viola lunged. She wrapped her huge hands around my neck and began to squeeze.

I clawed at her face, but that just made her grip tighten.

“I told you to stay out of the attic,” she hissed in my ear. “I told you.”

She squeezed tighter with each word, until the room spun. I clawed at my own neck, at her fingers—so strong for such an old woman. My hands slapped the wooden table, grasping for anything. I felt a sleeve and I pulled. I pulled hard.

John Dillinger seemed to leap out of his chair, and out of the corner of my eye I saw his head go straight up in the air, then drop and roll across the table, knocking over the shot glasses before bouncing over the edge. It hit the wooden floor with the exact sound a jack-o’-lantern makes when it’s smashed on the sidewalk.

“Nooooo!”
wailed Aunt Viola. She dropped me like a used tissue.

I lay there, stunned, for a heartbeat. But I wasn’t going to die in this attic. No way.

Aunt Viola was trying to get down on her hands and knees, not an easy thing for her. Dillinger’s head had rolled under the table, just out of reach, and she swiped at it with a fat, clumsy paw.

Pulling myself to my feet, I staggered out the door and tripped down the stairs, my legs all wobbly and jellylike.

Behind me I heard Aunt Viola bellowing. She pounded after me. The very timbers of the house shook.

I stumbled down the pathway, knocking over boxes, bouncing and bumping into bicycles and rusty sinks. I couldn’t walk straight. I couldn’t think straight. It was like I was drunk, you know? Like Aunt Viola had squeezed out all my juice. The house, with its crazy canyons and winding trails, had become a maze. I went in circles. I kept coming to dead ends. Finally, I got to a door.

“Don’t open that!” shouted Aunt Viola. She was in the middle of the staircase, her eyes blazing at me.