No Man's Dog

No Man’s Dog

Also by Jon A. Jackson

The Diehard

The Blind Pig

Grootka

Hit on the House

Deadman

Dead Folks

Man with an Axe

La Donna Detroit

Badger Games

No man’s Dog

A Detective Sergeant Mulheisen Mystery

Jon A. Jackson

Copyright © 2004 by Jon. A. Jackson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed, in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jackson, Jon A.

No man’s dog : a Detective Sergeant Mulheisen mystery / Jon A. Jackson.

    p. cm.

ISBN 0-87113-920-0

eISBN 978-0-8021-9120-5

1. Mulheisen, Detective Sergeant (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 3. Government investigators—Fiction. 4. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. 5. Drug traffic—Fiction. 6. Terrorism—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3560.A216N6 2004
2003069500

Cover design by
mjcdesign.com

Photographs from Nonstock: Running dog, Lomo; Growling dog, Steven Puetzer; Man facing away, Stock 4B; Man facing forward, Untitled.

Atlantic Monthly Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

04   05   06   07   08      10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

For Fritz, a man of inspiring character

No Man’s Dog

Save the Sparrow

C
ora Mulheisen was much older than she looked, a birdlike woman. It was the tightness of the deeply tanned skin on her face, which hardly seemed wrinkled, until you looked closely. Then you could see a very fine network of tiny cross-hatchings, as if drawn with a superfine nib using a faint sepia-tone ink.

She was eighty if she was a day, but she was very agile, with hardly a trace of creakiness in her gait, and she dressed as if she were a younger woman, in well-tailored slacks, an oxford cloth shirt, and a navy blue cashmere blazer. She wore cordovan walking shoes, the kind of oddly formal shoes that one might see at English hunt weekends—waxed and brushed to a dull sheen.

The hands always give it away. Hers looked too large and knotty, mottled with pale blotches and bony, the nails too thick. She fumbled for her reading glasses, which reposed in the breast pocket of the blazer.

Interestingly, her eyesight had improved remarkably with age. When she was sixteen she had begun to have trouble in school because of her eyes. Her mother had been reluctant to send her to the optometrist. In those days, a girl wearing spectacles was
considered doomed to spinsterhood. But Cora laughed at her mother’s fears. She loved her new glasses. She thought the tortoiseshell frames made her look sophisticated and intelligent. And the doctor had told her that, if nothing else went wrong with her eyesight, when she got older her myopia would be countered by a natural astigmatism. “You’ll trade in your specs for reading glasses,” he said. And so it proved.

She had largely given up regular glasses nearly thirty years ago, not long after she had belatedly discovered the joys of bird-watching. She had struggled with binoculars initially. They were clumsy and she couldn’t focus fast enough to spot the bird. It was the glasses—they got in the way and one was too conscious of them. But as her distance vision improved she found that she could dispense with the glasses and now she was able to see birds and their distinguishing features even without binoculars, except of course at great distances. And, naturally, as one becomes more and more familiar with the birds, one learns to recognize them by a whole host of signs, such as shape or form, size, posture, general behavior, and so on; one “knows” instinctively what species a bird is, to a degree. In fact, she was the one to whom her fellow birders invariably looked for verification of a bird’s identity. They would peer at a bird and say, tentatively, “Marsh wren . . . I think?” Then wait for her to say, “I think you’ll find it’s a sedge wren.”

But the other part of the doctor’s prediction also proved true: her close vision declined. Now, she held the reading glasses up to the light to see if the lenses were too murky, then perched them on her beaky nose. She looked around her seat for the bag in which she carried her papers.

Before her was a low dais on which several men sat, behind microphones. One of them was reading from a sheaf of papers. An American flag stood off to one side. Cora ignored what the man was saying, searching for her bag. After a moment, however, it was
obvious that it was not with her. She leaned over to her neighbor, a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket, and whispered, “I’ve forgotten my questions.”

He frowned. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Are you sure? Perhaps you left them in the bus.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said, nodding. “I left them in the bus. I’ll just run out and get them. Won’t be a minute.”

The man nodded and Cora eased out of her row, one of several rows of folding chairs in this public room, most of them occupied by people who were listening to the droning speaker, or themselves rummaging through papers.

When Cora exited the room she realized right away that the first thing she ought to do was go to the bathroom. A policeman was standing in the hallway, evidently assigned to this municipal building, the site of the mayor’s office, the council chambers, as well as courtrooms and hearing rooms. Cora asked the policeman where the public toilets were and he escorted her down the hallway a few feet and pointed toward the sign for
LADIES.

She turned to thank him and, at the same time, noticed a young man being brought along the corridor, evidently a prisoner, dressed in an orange coverall, his hands behind him as if in restraints. He was guided by two uniformed policemen, accompanied by a couple of men in sport coats who she was sure were detectives. Cora’s son was a detective, though not in this suburb of Detroit. The group stopped outside a door, before which was a sign on a stand describing it as the courtroom of a Judge Ed DePeau.

The policeman who had assisted her also watched the men outside the courtroom and lifted his hand to acknowledge the other officers, who nodded at him. Cora smiled at this but paid no further attention and turned back toward the restroom.

She was abruptly confronted with a man who issued from the
MEN.

“Oops, pardon me, ma’am,” he said. He held her by the arms to avoid crashing into her. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine, thank you,” Cora said.

The man looked over her shoulder intently, staring down the corridor toward the courtroom. He was a tall, nice-looking man wearing a Filson hat, one of those rakish waterproof canvas affairs that were popular with outdoorsmen. He seemed to her to be a youthful sixty, with the weathered face of a bird-watcher. She supposed he was with her group, or some related group, protesting the proposed draining of the Wards Lake marsh, but she had never seen him before.

He glanced down at her, still holding her stick-thin upper arms, in fact gripping them more tightly, as he suddenly blurted, in a low but intense voice, “Get out of this! Now!” Then he released her and hurried away with long strides.

Cora stared after his back, astonished, then called after him, indignantly, “But what about
Ammodramus nelsoni?
”

But the man was gone, around a corner. Cora took a deep breath, recovered her composure, and strolled on to the
LADIES
. Whatever this agitated gentleman was about, she refused to hurry. She knew the men on the dais would be talking for many more minutes before they allowed questions from the floor. She had plenty of time. She would protest the destruction of the habitat of Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow, and no snippy antienvironmentalist could stop her.

Still, the encounter had startled her. She retained a vivid impression of the man’s face, his dark eyebrows, the strong nose and firm chin, the glow of his eyes.

What was his problem? she wondered. Well, she’d no doubt hear from him when she got back. She attended to her needs quickly and then went out. The group by the courtroom had evidently gone in.

She walked out the front door of the municipal building and down the broad walkway toward the street. There was a drive that ran closely along the front of the building, separated from the not very busy street by a broad grassy median that was bounded by curbs. This drive was no longer accessible to the automobiles of the general public, being blocked at either end by heavy steel barriers, manned by police, a consequence of the new and heightened security that the public now endured, ostensibly because of terrorism.

Cora thought: This is the world we have to live in now.

The municipal building, a rather modern structure with tall expanses of tinted glass and immense wooden posts and beams, stood at the end of a broad avenue. A cross street passed in front of the building. As a further safety measure, a series of heavy precast concrete traffic dividers, tapered from broad bases to narrow tops, about four feet high and six feet long, had been arranged along the median between the drive and the cross street. This was not part of the original design to protect pedestrians from errant drivers—some iron posts had been sunk into the concrete of the walk to accomplish this purpose—but was supposed to prevent a motorized attack from the avenue. Cora, like most of the citizenry in this area, thought it was ridiculous and unnecessary. This suburban government building was hardly a terrorist target. This was just public officials going through the motions of being security conscious or, perhaps, taking themselves rather too seriously.

She spent no time on this thought, instead looking about for the bus. It had been granted a special permit to enter the drive, for the convenience of debarking passengers, and it had been allowed to park and wait there. It stood close by the entry to the building, at the head of a line of other vehicles, which appeared to be police vehicles, including the van from the county jail, which she noticed. Presumably, that was how the prisoner she’d seen had been transported.

Usually, her group traveled to these meetings in a yellow school bus that they rented from a company in her town, which was a different suburb of Detroit, miles away on the eastern edge of the vast Detroit metropolitan region. But for some reason, this morning the bus company had provided them with a much larger and fancier bus, which was welcomed because it was a warm day and this bus was air-conditioned. It was more of an inter-city bus, suitable for the highway, with comfortable seats.

There was another line of the waist-high precast concrete dividers between the drive and sidewalk that ran along the front of the building, but the bus had been drawn up next to the barriers. The old woman went up to the very front of the bus and rapped on the glass to get the attention of the driver, who was watching the activity of a large industrial machine, a noisy piece of heavy equipment. It was a front-end loader, she thought, and it nosed around the segments of concrete barriers next to the street like a monstrous yellow elephant, shoving them this way and that. It wasn’t clear just what the operator was up to, and she supposed that was what was occupying the attention of the bus driver.

The driver turned at last, saw her, and opened the door with a hiss of hydraulics. He was a pleasant, heavyset black man wearing a nice black suit with a white shirt and red tie that could almost be a uniform, but wasn’t, quite. He had introduced himself to the group when they had boarded as John Larribee. He had a neatly trimmed black mustache, which the old woman liked, and he wore dark aviator glasses. He was bald, which she also liked.

“Mr. Larribee,” Cora said, speaking up to where he sat at the wheel of the bus. Cool air wafted out to her. He had arisen from his seat and taken a step down to help her up. “Thank you. I just need to find my bag. I’m afraid I left it in my seat.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Larribee said. “Can I help you look for it?”

“No thanks. I’m sure I can find it.” She went past him toward
the back of the bus. She found her bag, checked it quickly, finding her papers within, and returned to the front.

“Now what the devil is he up to?” Larribee said, looking out at the street.

“What is it?” Cora asked, peering around him.

“That guy’s flattened all them posts and he’s shifting them barriers,” Larribee said. “And he ain’t doing a very neat job of it. They must be gonna put some permanent barrier in there.”

Then, as they both watched, the loader roared and lunged forward, shoving the barriers completely aside, one of them actually tumbling sideways into the street. The machine ran on down the sidewalk at an unusually fast pace.

“Holy shit!” Larribee yelled. He turned to the old woman and shouted, “Get off! Get off! Get away!” He actually pushed at her.

The old woman stumbled down the steps of the bus, missed her footing, and fell to one side, actually tumbling over and behind the barrier. She landed in an awkward and painful bump on her shoulder. In her amazement, the only thing she noticed was that the bus suddenly lurched ahead, blocking the entrance to the municipal building. A moment later, the bus was struck with a tremendous crash by something heavy and it leaned precipitously over toward the fallen woman. It hung there for a moment, then toppled sideways, crashing against the concrete barriers behind which the old woman was sprawled. Then there was a brilliant flash and a roaring noise even louder than the smashing and breaking tumult of the bus. She lost consciousness.