Hit on the House (18 page)

Mulheisen shook his head wearily. “It's a government-funded project,” he said; “I suppose they'd have to take you. But let's face it, Yvonne—you don't want to live in any trailer court, especially not out in the suburbs. You're an urban woman. Hell, you should be out there with Ma, fighting these sleazy developers. It doesn't do any good to junk up another place for the benefit of the poor. Are they going to love it? I doubt they will for long.”

Surprised to find that Yvonne did not rebut this statement, he was encouraged to go on. “There is a reason, presumably, that all these people are here.” He waved his hand vaguely at the city beyond the walls of the pleasant living room. “Maybe it was never a good reason-industry, with all that that implies—but for a long time nobody paid much attention. Everybody seemed to like it . . . jobs, prosperity. But somewhere along the line—the sixties? earlier?—they started not liking it. The problems were always there—racism, crime, poverty, you name it—but they used to seem manageable. Or at least approachable. Now . . . I don't know.”

The three of them sat in silence for a moment, each recollecting a time, perhaps not too distant, when Detroit had seemed a much better place. Of course, they'd all been younger, more enthusiastic, more optimistic. Perhaps most generations have this feeling, but somehow it seemed more pressing these days.

“just about every city in the country has problems like Detroit's, to some extent,” Mulheisen said. “You know, Detroit has had longer
to deal with these problems. No doubt I'm just a fool, but I suspect that if anyone in the country comes up with any answers to these problems, it'll probably be in Detroit.”

“You are a fool,” Yvonne said.

“So, what's your answer?” Mulheisen asked, annoyed.

“I'm thinking I might get me a gun,” she snapped back. “Anymore of these punks come into this neighborhood, I'm just liable to blow them away.”

“Whoa!” Jimmy cried.

“No, no,” Mulheisen pleaded. “You can't think like that. That doesn't get us anywhere.”

Yvonne laughed, sitting back triumphantly in her easy chair. “Look at you two! My, oh my. Mama say she gon’ get her a gun, and two big ol’ mens—both of whom are packing—say ‘Whoa!’ “

“Actually, Yvonne has a different idea,” Jimmy said, sitting forward. “Tell him, hon.”

Her idea was simple, perhaps simplistic. She was one of the organizers of a group that was planning to push for a new form of urban government, one that would not just oversee the city of Detroit but would embrace all the outlying suburbs and towns.

“You white folks have run out on Detroit,” she said, “but you still need it, to make money out of it. We'll have something called the Greater Detroit Urban Zone. Reorganize all the services, realign the taxes, and cut through all this bull crap of all these little towns that ring the city—Warren, Harper Woods, the Grosse Pointes (why in hell should there be five Grosse Pointes?), Royal Oak, Ferndale, Hamtramck, Center Line (Center Line!). . . Why there's dozens of them. Already the police have so much bureaucratic red tape to get through when someone robs a store on Eight Mile Road—it's just crazy. The zone will take in Wayne County, Oakland County, Washtenaw . . . and we'll have a CEO instead of a mayor, . . . a zone commission instead of a city council . . .”

She went on for a considerable time, quite excited and exhilarated. Mulheisen listened, fascinated but skeptical. Schemes of this sort had been bandied about for decades. She was right, of course; the present system was insane and part of the problem itself. It would have to change, and it was in transition now, but Yvonne was working for
radical, abrupt change—go to bed in Royal Oak and wake up in the zone. And finally, it appeared that Yvonne herself was planning to be the CEO.

When at last Yvonne tore herself away to prepare for her next day's classes (she taught at Macomb County Community College), the two men went down to the basement, to Jimmy's den. This was a room that the previous owner had partitioned off from the conventional part of the basement (washer, drier, clothesline, laundry tubs, hot-water heater, furnace, heating ducts) but had never really finished. Jimmy had paneled the walls with sheets of pressed composition board that was patterned to look like expensive wood—rosewood, perhaps, or something more exotic. It did look like wood, except for a much too slick, plastic finish. He had a thick carpet on the floor, and he'd furnished the room with an old, but passable couch and a couple of easy chairs. The lighting was recessed into an acoustic-tiled ceiling. It was almost cozy, except for an ineradicable dampness and a certain faint odor of detergents.

Jimmy kept his computer down here, on a desk in one corner, but the main feature of the room was an elaborate stereo system and floor-to-ceiling racks of jazz recordings, mostly old LP's but now more and more CD's. He was a complete jazz buff, one of his most attractive traits in Mulheisen's eyes. Jimmy liked just about any kind of jazz, but particularly the small groups that had flourished throughout and after the swing era, groups that were led by Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry—the powerful, smooth, and fluent players who could break your heart with the blues or a ballad and then swing you silly. He also possessed a clarinet, on which he sporadically practiced, and he could play a pretty decent low-register imitation of Benny Carter on “Just a Mood.”

Jimmy corresponded with several jazz record shops across the country, and now he eagerly put on a recently obtained recording of some forgotten armed forces “Jubilee” broadcasts from the forties, featuring singers like Savannah Churchill and Helen Humes with the Carter band and others. Mulheisen would normally have been delighted with this record, but he was distracted and troubled, not just by Yvonne's extended rap, but by the cumulative effect of an investigation
gone sour and, probably more important, although he was not yet openly admitting it, the news of Bonny's illness. He also longed for a cigar, but that was not something that could be seriously contemplated in Yvonne Marshall's house, even in her husband's basement den.

The fact was Mulheisen was very close to depression, a state he greatly feared. From early youth he had fought depression, not frequently, but memorably. In his adult life he'd had at least two episodes of profound depression. They were devastating. He had learned from experience that alcohol was not a good idea in this premonitory state; he surprised Jimmy by refusing a drink from a carefully sequestered bottle of Jameson whiskey.

“Jimmy,” he said, “I told you before that I'd screwed up this investigation. Well, it's gone even further than I told you then.”

“What do you mean, Mul?” Jimmy was alarmed. Mulheisen didn't look well. He had grown accustomed to his mentor's occasional withdrawals into distraction and uncommunicative rumination, but this seemed more serious. “Are you all right?”

“I'm OK,” Mulheisen said, “but I've got to get this straightened out. It's Lande. There is starting to be just a lot of little things popping up that seem to point to a connection between Lande and the Sedlacek killing and the Tupman killing.” And with that he began to pour out the whole business—Lande's name in Tupman's book, his acquaintance with Germaine Kouras, his strange offer at the dinner party, Bonny's mention of a woman named Germaine—all of it, including Mulheisen's own connection with Bonny.

“The thing is, Jimmy, every time I get around Bonny and Lande, I seem to get kind of confused. I can't focus on what I'm supposed to be doing. It's as if my judgment were clouded or something . . . I can't put a finger on it. I mean to ask certain questions, push for answers, but I don't. I get distracted. I'm sure it has something to do with Bonny. I think I can work through it, but I need your help. I should have confided in you from the start, but I didn't, and then it was easier to just keep it to myself. Under the circumstances, I'd just as soon keep it between us—after all, it may be nothing, and if certain people got the idea that I coddled this Lande because of an interest in his wife . . . well, it'll just complicate things.”

Jimmy understood completely. In fact, he hastened to assure Mulheisen that he was probably making too much of it. He was confident, he said, that the personal side of it needn't be revealed. “The fact is, Mul, any other detective would simply have written Lande out of the picture long before this. But you've kept at it, I guess because you must have unconsciously suspected something. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“You don't think so?” Mulheisen felt relieved. He felt much better. “Why don't you put on that old Artie Shaw record,” he suggested, “the one with ‘Summit Ridge Drive'?” This piece never failed to cheer Mulheisen up.

“You realize, Mul,” Jimmy said when the mood had lightened sufficiently, “that we really don't have a ghost of a fart on Lande? What's really bugging you about this guy . . . I mean, apart from Bonny?”

Mulheisen thought about it for a moment. “There's a couple of things,” he said finally. “There's the money. Every time I talk to someone, the amount has grown . . . a couple million, five, ten . . . soon it'll be fifty. Then I saw some boxes at Lande's shop, computer equipment presumably, labeled for the Cayman Islands. I didn't think anything of it, but then there's this stuff about Big Sid maybe going to South America, possibly with a stop en route. Now the Kouras woman has split, also for the south. And then there's Lande babbling something at that dinner about how money isn't just a fifty-dollar bill. Frankly, I don't know what he meant by it, but I took his point—nowadays it isn't really necessary to ever actually see money, in currency, as long as the crucial people and—probably most important—the machines are convinced it exists.”

“Sort of like that Wettling case,” Jimmy said, referring to a murder case Mulheisen had got drawn into through a now-retired partner, a strange character named Grootka. Wettling, a bank official who had been an auditor, had invaded his bank's computer system with his own program, which made minute withdrawals and deposits in the customers’ accounts at whirlwind speed, an essentially undetectable act that provided a more-or-less constant balance of thousands of dollars in an account to which Wettling had routine access. The account was never
enormous, but it was like a magical pitcher—no matter how much you poured out, it remained full.

“I hadn't thought of that,” Mulheisen said, “and I guess that isn't really what I have in mind, but the idea is similar. I really don't have any notion of how it would apply here. It probably doesn't. The trouble is Lande. He's supposed to be a computer genius, but when you talk to him, it's hard to believe it. Well, you saw him. He's rough, crude ... he hardly seems literate. But evidently he's done very well for himself.” He told Jimmy about the golf course.

“If he's rebuilding a golf course, some kind of development project,” Jimmy pointed out, “that would be an ideal way to make money disappear.”

“Washing money?” Mulheisen was skeptical. “This is sort of washing money in reverse. Presumably Sid and Tupman, and maybe others, were skimming extensively, collecting actual cash that now has to be got out of the country so that whoever has inherited Sid and Tupman's scam can make use of it in South America. It's bound to be complicated. It seems almost easier just to smuggle the damned cash out of the country.”

“No,” said Jimmy, “it's really not that difficult with computers. I've been working on programming, and it's amazing what you can do if you just take the trouble to devise a program.”

“If they're washing money, we have to go to the feds,” Mulheisen pointed out. They both knew what that meant—inevitably the case would be taken out of their hands. And like all local cops they had no confidence whatever in the federal agencies’ ability to accomplish anything without totally screwing it up.

Jimmy came up with an interesting thought: “How do we know that the mob hasn't already found the money?”

“Andy Deane assures me that the word is still out on the street. Anybody who can come up with a lead to the money can make big bucks from the bosses. And, they say, Carmine seems to be throwing a lot of weight around. Andy hasn't seen it—nobody is filing a complaint—but apparently people are being roughed up. They want answers.”

“Which I guess is why they blasted Tupman,” Jimmy said.

Mulheisen shook his head. “No, there's something weird about that. Nobody tossed Tupman's apartment, you notice. If the mob thought Tupman had something to tell them, wouldn't they have shaken the place down? And I still don't buy the idea of sending a single hit man to take down five guys. No, it doesn't compute, as you would say.”

They talked for a little while longer and mutually admired Jimmy's treasured recording of “Down the Road a Piece” by Freddie Slack-Jimmy never played the actual recording anymore, just a well-filtered and cleaned tape (he used videotape rather than the common cassette stuff—it seemed to offer more possibilities). And Mulheisen went home feeling infinitely better, the dark beast at least temporarily at bay.

Fifteen

B
onny looked pale and weak in the hospital bed, a third smaller somehow. Her face had bones that Mulheisen couldn't remember. The doctor was just leaving and Lande went with him. Bonny beckoned Mulheisen to the bedside and took his hand.

“How have you been, Mul?”

“Me? I'm fine. How are you doing?”

“'I guess I'm doing as well as expected,” she said, “but I feel wrecked.”

“You look pretty good,” he lied. Actually, he was appalled. It hadn't been long since he'd seen her, and although he hadn't known she was ill and thus had not been looking for signs of illness, now she looked radically changed. It didn't seem possible.

“How's our investigation going?” she asked.

Mulheisen sighed. “Not too good, I'm afraid. I can't find Germaine Kouras. She seems to have flown the country.”

“Well, that's good news.”

“I think she's flown, Bonny; I don't know it. The airlines have no record of her leaving. Of course, she might have left under another name, but if she was actually leaving the country, as she told everybody she was, she'd have had to use her passport. She could have flown to, say, Miami, and then used her passport, but I really don't have the facilities to check that extensively.”

Bonny frowned. “As long as she's gone, that's good enough for me,” she said. “Why are you so concerned?”

“There's more to it, Bonny. We think she was involved in some kind of scam with Sid Sedlacek.” He pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed. “Bonny, . . . I have to know . . . how much do you and Lande know about Sid and Carmine?”

She gazed at him for a long moment, then said, “Forget Germaine, Mul. She's not important.” She looked away, at the rain on the window, then said, “I've always loved you, Mul.”

“Bonny, . . . don't.”

“I always thought you were just terrific, even when you were a skinny kid. You weren't a big jock or anything, like Jack Street and those guys, or the class president, . . . but you were just this terrific guy. Everybody knew it. You weren't even a brain.” She uttered a whispery little flutter that was a kind of laugh, and she patted his hand. “Oh, you were smart enough, Mul. But the point was everybody in the school respected you, even the teachers. You had character.”

Mulheisen was embarrassed. He shook his head.

“I know you never loved me,” she said. “You liked me, though, didn't you?”

“Oh, yes, I liked you.”

“I knew you did. Maybe you lusted after me. But I think sometimes that you're one of the few people who have any idea who I am. That's a kind of love, I think. Now don't . . . oh, come on, don't get so damn embarrassed.”

Mulheisen's eyes blurred. “Oh yeah,” he said, in a husky voice, “I like you, Bonny. I always liked you, more than you know.”

He held her slender little hand, which gripped his passionately. She had to close her eyes, and her face became tight, but after a moment it relaxed, and she looked at him and managed a wan smile. “Love is very different from like, Mul. Like has reasons and logic, . . . it makes sense.”

Mulheisen nodded agreement, but Bonny stared at him until he dropped his eyes. The whispery flutter of her laugh made him look up. She said, “Maybe you're stupid after all.”

Stung, Mulheisen looked at her indignantly.

“. . . As the rest of them—men, I mean,” she said, modifying the accusation. “Maybe men can't help being stupid. Maybe it's a trade-off in evolution for being larger and stronger, more powerful . . .” She glanced away at the gray skies outside her window, the black, wet limbs of a tree on which there were tiny leaf buds. Half a dozen miserable starlings hunched along the branches, their beaks startlingly yellow against their bedraggled feathers. Suddenly they all flew. “This has been the wettest spring,” she said. “I wish . . .” Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked and one ran down her cheek. Mulheisen wiped it away.

“Birds learned how to fly,” she said, speculatively. “That was a very great trick, learning to fly. But they ended up with tiny brains and hollow bones.” She glanced slyly at Mulheisen. “You're pretty smart, Mul, but you can't overcome gender stupidity.”

Mulheisen decided to take this jocularly. “At least I don't have hollow bones. Anyway, if women are so smart, how come they marry men?”

Bonny's face darkened instantly, and she snapped, “You know nothing!”

Mulheisen was mortified by his gaffe, and he immediately tried to mollify her with assurances that he was just kidding. She impatiently pulled her hand free from his. Then Lande returned, evidently from conferring with the doctor.

Lande was quite changed. He was friendly and cheerful. “Well, the doc says it looks pretty good,” he told both of them. “Doc says you'll be up in no time, Bon. Looks like they got it all. A coupla weeks of therapy, and you'll be good as new.”

“That's great,” Mulheisen said. He hoped it was true. Lande seemed to believe it.

Lande nodded and said, “Yup, looks like they got it in time. Boy, the things they can do these days!” He turned to Mulheisen. “So, . . . how's the cop business, Mul? Say, don't Bon look great?”

“She looks fine,” Mulheisen agreed, but Bonny had turned her head away and was staring out the window. It was raining again. Mulheisen gestured with his head toward the door, and Lande nodded. “I've got to run, Bonny,” Mulheisen said. “I'll try to stop in later.” She smiled and he left.

Lande caught up with him in the lounge. The cheerful look had entirely vanished.

“No hope,” Mulheisen said, not even questioning, and Lande only nodded, chewing on a thumbnail.

“They want to do chemo,” Lande said. “But what's the point? Maybe she gets to stick around a few more weeks.”

“How long otherwise?” Mulheisen asked. His heart felt like it was bursting. He couldn't breathe very well. He had to sit down.

Lande stared at him, stricken. Perhaps he had only just now let himself look the horror in its face. “A month,” he said, in disbelief.

“A month! But, my god, man, . . . they only just . . .”

“It's too far gone.” Lande could barely utter the words.

“A month?” Mulheisen couldn't believe it either.

“Maybe less.”

Mulheisen struggled to his feet. He felt panicky. He had to get out of there.

“Mul, don't go,” Lande pleaded. “I gotta talk to you. I gotta talk to somebody.”

“I've got things to do,” Mulheisen said brusquely. “I've got a murder . . . Hell, I've got a dozen murder cases. And a couple of them have your little footprints all around them.”

“Mine? I don't know what you're talking about,” Lande said, shaking his head. “Listen. Forget that shit. This is more important. I don't have nobody to talk to about this . . . I . . . and you're . . . well, you're my on'y frien’.”

This was a sobering thought for Mulheisen. He looked down at Lande, with his bristly mustache and watery eyes. He had to fight an urge to laugh, to inform this absurd little creep once and for all that he wasn't his friend, . . . that he chose his own friends with great care and he would never, never, choose to be a friend to any little crack-brained schemer and . . . and . . . He bared his long teeth in the semblance of a smile. Then it became a real smile, and he clapped the man on the shoulder. “Later, Gene. Later. I really have to run.”

* * *

“J
im,” Mulheisen said, “I want a look at that shipment in Lande's back room.”

“What makes you think it'd still be there?” Marshall wanted to know.

“If it's just an ordinary shipment, it'll probably be gone,” Mulheisen said, “but if it's something illicit, I'm thinking that Lande will want to take care of it himself, and lately his hands have been full.”

“Something illicit,” Marshall said. “Like money?”

“Like a lot of money. Stashed in, say, computer terminals or whatchacallum . . .”

“Drives? Stashed in the drives of computers?”

“Well, they're just boxes aren't they? Plastic boxes that are pretty heavy anyway and not easily opened. I think it would be a rare customs agent who decided to pry open a lot of computers.”

Jimmy nodded. “So what do we do? I hate to say this Mul, but no judge is going to give you a search warrant on that information. Do you want to just run out there and take a look, see if they're still in the back room?”

“No. Miss Bommarito will certainly tell Lande, and it could scare him off. There's really not much to it, Jim. All I need is a quick look. The boxes are either there or they aren't. But listen, Jim, I'm the one who screwed this detail up. It's not your problem. Believe me, if you want to steer clear of this, just say so.”

Marshall laughed. “Don't be silly, Mul. You know I'm with you. What do they say, ‘In for a dollar, in for a dime.’ What do you think? Is this a job for the telephone company or Detroit Edison?”

Mulheisen considered. “Computer people are always nervous about their power supply, aren't they? Better make it Detroit Edison.”

An hour and a half later a Detroit Edison van pulled into the parking lot at Nine Mile Plaza, home of Doc Byte and other fine businesses. Jimmy Marshall, in overalls, started at the first shop, inquiring about the report of a drop in line voltage, and he continued around the U even after he had been into the back room at Doc Byte. He was happy to report to Mulheisen that a full pallet of cartons was still there, all with shipping labels for Grand Cayman Island.

“What do you think, Mul? Should we go back tonight and have a peek?”

“What?” Mulheisen was shocked. “Certainly not. If we don't have sufficient grounds for a warrant, we have no business there. No, ... if it's what we think it is, . . . it'll sit. We ought to keep an eye on the place, though. It'd be too much to ask for a stakeout, but get the word out to the blue men and the cruisers and the detective staff—if anyone's in the neighborhood, just take a swing by there. Tell them to check the alley. They can call me anytime if anything's going on. I'll be spending a lot of time at Bon Secours, . . . which is where Lande will be, too.”

“A
lot of things are clear to me now, Mul,” Bonny said later that evening. She looked a little better, actually, a little more color in the face, a little stronger. Evidently she'd had a discussion with the doctor about chemotherapy, and Mulheisen suspected that she had learned all she needed to know about her chances. He sat by the bed, holding her hand. Every little once in a while she squeezed it.

“Nothing is worth anything but love,” she said. “I know it sounds trite, but I can't find any other words. There's a lot to say—too much—but no way to say it. The pain . . . it makes it hard to focus at times, but I have things to say.”

“Don't worry about it,” Mulheisen said.

“This is not a worry, Mul—it's important.” She stared into his face for a long moment, and then she smiled. “Well, you know what I'm talking about. You always knew, I guess.”

Mulheisen had no idea what she was talking about.

“I'm worried about Gene. He doesn't have anyone but me, and I'm . . .”

“Hush,” Mulheisen said.

“No, I won't hush. It's all right. I can deal with it, . . . though it makes me so sad.” Her eyes glittered. “I would have thought I'd have longer. It's so . . . disappointing. What an inadequate word,” she said,
as if to herself. “But Gene, . . . who will look after Gene? He's so stupid sometimes.”

Warily Mulheisen remarked, “He's only a man.”

“Oh, don't be so sensitive,” Bonny said. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have jumped on you about that. I don't think you're stupid, not really . . . well, not like most men, anyway. Oh, now I've done it again.”

She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it. Her lips were dry as paper. Mulheisen let her do it, even helped her, but he couldn't help wondering where Lande was.

“Gene's gone out to get something to eat,” she said. She released his hand and resumed the conversation with “Well, he is stupid, at times. And he's in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I don't know exactly. I'm not sure I should tell you if I knew. He sure wouldn't want me to.”

“Gene is a big boy,” Mulheisen said; “he can take care of himself.”

“Most of the time,” she agreed. “But this time . . . he's in something deep. It has something to do with Sid, of course.”

“So, he did know Sid,” Mulheisen said.

Bonny made a feint at shrugging, but it must have hurt. After a moment she said, “Not all that well . . . not that I ever knew about. But I think he had some kind of deal with Sid.”

“What kind of deal, Bonny?”

“Sid was going to bankroll a golf resort, in the islands, and Gene was to be a partner. Gene was setting it up. Well, that was the deal, as far as I knew. It was all legit, above board. Except there was something else to it, and that's what I don't know. If I'd known, I could have . . .”

“What? Oh, you mean you wouldn't have thought it had something to do with Germaine Kouras.”

“Well, that, of course. I don't know why I was so blind. I ought to have known that Gene wasn't the kind of guy to fool around. It was just jealousy. I heard that voice, . . . and she was so secretive, so . . . well, she sounded like one of those women. I feel so foolish, Mul. But when you told me that she'd gone and that she was involved in
some scam . . . I mean, I knew right away that my early suspicions were just . . . foolish. But, if I'd known that Gene's deal with Sid was . . . well, complicated, I could have helped.”