Mulheisen and Jimmy Marshall stood on the street for a moment, neither of them feeling very cheerful under this gray but no doubt rainless sky. A little rain would have been better, Mulheisen thought. Rain was natural, it was something happening, falling out of the sky and collecting on sidewalks and washing some of this dirt down into the gutters. But it didn't rain as much as one always thought that it did, when one remembered the long parade of dull, gray, overcast skies.
The Big 4 cruiser was parked around the corner, a large sedan with wings painted on the doors and the words DETROIT POLICE. Dennis “The Menace” Noell leaned back against the hood of the cruiser, all six feet and eight inches of him, with his arms folded across his chest and a sour look on his handsome face. “Okay, Mul,” he said, “you got ten minutes, then we're coming in.”
By “we,” he meant the other three members of the team of special detectives, all of them over six-four, all of them white. They stood out in this neighborhood like statues on a mountain. The only black man in the whole group was Jimmy Marshall.
“Better make it fifteen,” Mulheisen said.
“It's my collar, Mul,” Dennis insisted. “I saw him first.”
“It's your collar,” Mulheisen conceded. “I just want to make sure he gets to jail alive.” He and Marshall set off around the corner.
The steps of the house were gritty with broken glass and dirt. The door in the center that led up to the second floor was gone. There was a tattered piece of paper that said PINCKNEY in a faded ballpoint script with an arrow pointing upward. They trudged up the stairs. It smelled pretty bad. Moldy plaster, Mulheisen thought, but the awful odor was compounded of many things: garbage, cat piss and cat shit, rotting clothes, beans cooked too long, cabbage cooked to perdition, vomit. Huge chunks of plaster were hacked or smashed out of the walls of the stairwell. There was scribbling all over the walls, idle obscenities in crayon or spray paint, an exhausted litany of rage and despair. The stairs themselves were littered with garbage and broken things. One couldn't always tell what the things had been—toys? Smashed pieces of plastic or pot metal. Things were actually jammed into the wall—curious pieces of wire, or the broken-off barrel of a cap pistol—as if someone had casually stabbed the house just in passing.
At the top of the stairs was a dirty sash window, the bottom pane knocked out. On either side were doors to the two opposing flats. On the right was the sibling of the note downstairs, saying PINCKNEY. Mulheisen stepped to one side of the door and pulled his raincoat back, laying his hand on the butt of the pistol in his hip grip. Jimmy Marshall actually took his gun out of his shoulder harness and held it in his left hand, then knocked on the door.
They were both good-sized men, Marshall a bit leaner and ten years younger, dark with a widow's peak on his closely cut black and curly hair. Mulheisen was older, fortyish, and his pale face had a much sadder look. It was the eyes, light blue and slightly protruding with the beginning of bags under them. When he smiled, or tried to, however, he revealed the long, somewhat spaced teeth that had given him the street name “Fang.”
The door opened and a young black girl looked out. She could see they were cops. She was only about fourteen but had unusually large breasts. She wore a too-small yellow sweater that didn't reach the waistband of her very short leather skirt. Her mouth was open, slack, and her thick lips were heavily smeared with dark red lipstick. Her eyes were sharp, however, and intelligent.
“What are you looking for?” she said, directing her question at the black detective.
Jimmy Marshall didn't answer her. He pushed the door open and stepped past her into the incredibly cluttered and filthy kitchen. The sink was full of dishes and scummy water with oily crust; rings surrounded the utensils and dishes that broke the cold but molten-looking surface.
“Hey!” the girl said, but not loudly, really a hoarse whisper, as if not to wake a sleeper. There was loud but muffled music coming from an interior room.
Mulheisen moved past her looking to the left, his gun out. Jimmy went directly for the front of the house, shoulder to the jamb of the entries, then slipping through, looking to either side, sweeping his pistol smoothly, carefully, not extending it so that a hidden person could strike at his hand.
Mulheisen had checked the back porch and came on behind and to the left of Jimmy. The house was very cluttered with furniture and clothing thrown here and there, trampled underfoot, and many cardboard boxes. It looked like someone was moving in or out. A cat lounged placidly, its fur matted and yellow. They moved swiftly through the dining room and into what had once been a parlor. Doors opened off to the left, into bedrooms. The first door was open, and inside appeared to be the girl's bedroom, for it was neat and orderly, the bed made and no clothes strewn about. Mulheisen caught glimpses of posters stapled to the walls: Whitney Houston, was it? Michael Jackson? He wasn't sure.
The second bedroom door was closed, however, and this was the room where the music was playing. Jimmy Marshall barreled through the door low, his shoulder at knob level. He dropped to his knees, gun ready.
This was a good thing, for a fusillade of nine-millimeter bullets rattled through the opening at about the chest level of a man. The boy on the bed, his back against the headboard, was shucking out the clip when Jimmy hit him, sprawling across him, pinning him to the far wall. The Cobray submachine gun flew, smacking against the wall and bouncing back on the bed. The boy cried out, but his cry was stifled as Jimmy rolled across him.
Mulheisen stayed in the doorway, looking into the other rooms as available to line of sight. A middle-aged woman, perhaps no older than himself, sat frozen on a couch in the front room, surrounded with junk and clothing, her head, wrapped in a colorful cloth, turned slightly, eyes staring.
When Mulheisen was sure that the boy was subdued and Jimmy was in control, he moved cautiously into the front room and looked about. The television was going. Oprah was raising an eyebrow sarcastically at some women who were gesticulating wildly and talking all at once. There was nobody else in the room. Mulheisen nodded and backed away, looking behind him. The girl was glowering in the doorway, her hands at her sides.
“David Pinckney,” Jimmy said, hauling the boy to his feet, “you're under arrest for the murder of Scott Willard. You have the right to remain silent, you have the right . . .” His voice recited precisely. The boy was slender and handsome, about sixteen years old, wearing sexy briefs and a tank top, his hair cut in topiary fashion. His eyes were large and expressive. He wore no other clothing. He said not a word as Jimmy cuffed his hands behind his back.
“You know what I like about the Cobray?” Jimmy said to Mulheisen as he brought the boy forward.
“It's not very accurate,” Mulheisen said.
“And it gets empty real fast, especially when you're excited and just hang on the trigger,” Jimmy said.
Mulheisen stepped back into the front room. “Mrs. Pinckney,” he said, “we're arresting your boy, David, for killing Scott Willard. You probably want to call a lawyer. We're taking him downtown, to Homicide. Thirteen hundred Beaubien. Jimmy,” he called into the room, “get some pants and shoes on him. A jacket.”
He looked back at the woman. She had that dull, resigned look he had come to dread. “You can't come in here like this,” she said, but with no great energy.
“Well, yes. Yes, I can,” Mulheisen told her. He waved a legal document. He looked around, taking in the disorder, smelling the decay, the disgrace of this wretched place.
“I'm sorry the house is a mess,” she said.
Mulheisen shrugged. “You didn't know I was coming.”
“We was gonna move soon,” she said. “Davey was gonna buy us a house. In Warren.”
“Well,” Mulheisen sighed. “It would have been a good idea, I guess.” He wanted to say that the girl, the daughter, had kept her room nice. She had tried to make a life for herself, something that wasn't just a hell. He looked at the girl. She looked grim, her arms folded under her extraordinary breasts. T
hen she went into her room and slammed the door.
Afterward, they stood on the street as the cruiser took the kid away. It was really awful out. Dreary, smelly—smoke in the air, as usual, but not something nice like burning leaves, an odor suitable to October and one which Mulheisen remembered well. . . . Nor was it wood smoke, romantic and intriguing. This was the usual wet, noxious smell of smoldering garbage, of wet mattresses and sodden auto wrecks. It pervaded the air of Detroit these days. Mulheisen lit a cigar to defeat it, and he paced slowly back to the car with Jimmy.
“Sixteen,” Jimmy was saying. “I don't know how you get to be a seasoned killer by sixteen.”
“It's not young,” Mulheisen said.
“Not young? Sixteen is not young? My Kirby is twelve, a child. He won't be grown up in four years.”
“Knights were probably only teenagers,” Mulheisen said. “In most North American Indian tribes you had to prove yourself a man by that age. An old man would be . . .” He paused, looking around at the wreckage of this venerable city, “. . . say, thirty. A sage, a very wise old man would be my age.”
Jimmy regarded him with good-humored sarcasm: “You feeling sage, old man?”
“No, but I knew a lot at sixteen. I knew a lot more than people—my parents—gave me credit for. They kept thinking I was only a child. But I was more than a child. We underrate kids. This guy has some growing up to do—too bad he'll be doing it in prison. He'll be pretty grown up when we see him again. But my point is, a hundred years ago he would have been considered a man at his age.”
“David Pinckney isn't a man,” Jimmy said. “I doubt they'll try him as a man. And Scott Willard wasn't a man. He was only fifteen. He wanted to join the gang, but David just used him for target practice.”
“Sometimes, you know, Jimmy, you just fall into your life. And sometimes . . .”
“Fall into your life?”
“Your life falls together,” Mulheisen amended. “But then it never holds together, does it? Every once in a while it kind of falls apart, or sags awry . . . and all at once you find you can walk through gaping holes. The fabric is torn.”
“You're not feeling sage,” Jimmy noted.
Mulheisen shook his head. “I feel strange. I'm thinking I should become a . . .” he hesitated, looking shyly at Jimmy.
“What?” Jimmy looked over the top of the car, unlocking the door.
“A disc jockey,” Mulheisen said.
They got in the car and drove, dodging in and out of spaces to let opposing cars by. “A disc jockey,” Jimmy said, thoughtfully. “Like on the back of a matchbook cover. ‘Big Money in Broadcasting.’ “
“I'd just play jazz. Older jazz,” Mulheisen said, “from the fifties and sixties. Coltrane . . . Cannonball . . . Horace Silver.”
“Forties, too,” Jimmy suggested. “Ben Webster, Benny Carter . . . maybe the John Kirby Sextet.”
“Or a pilot,” Mulheisen said. “I always wanted to fly.”
“You'd be a terrible deejay,” Jimmy said. “You don't have the personality for it.”
“I don't?”
“You're too . . . I don't know . . . quiet. Too thoughty.”
“Thoughty?” Mulheisen smiled.
“A deejay has to be more upbeat.”
“Believe me, Jimmy, if I had nothing to do but play jazz and talk about it, I'd be more upbeat.”
Mulheisen was in one of those periodic moods, not quite depression—no, no, not that—but still, a little gloomy, where he was wondering what the hell he was doing in the cop business. Most of the time he was quite happy in this business, engaged, intrigued, fascinated even. But often enough, more often lately, the sheer caseload had begun to wear him down. An endless task from the very beginning, it had become a monumental task, a job for mythic heroes.
He wasn't one of those who actually believed that cases are solved, but generally he expected to see an end to a case, a moment when there was little more to do. The murderer would be apprehended, the evidence gathered, the case gone to trial, the murderer locked away. In reality it rarely happened in just such a fashion, but occasionally it did. And anyway, he sort of expected it to happen pretty much along those lines. Sometimes a case would be shunted aside until a more favorable moment, but then he'd come across some interesting new lead and it would all spring back to life. Anymore, however, that didn't seem to be the usual way of it at all.
Instead, the new way was that he'd barely get started, and he'd be called away for something more pressing, some murder more bizarre, more spectacular, the victim more important, the press more interested. This had something to do with the burgeoning of violent crime in America's large cities, particularly in Detroit, where he was the mainstay of the Ninth Precinct, on the east side. For a long time, out of some peculiar sense of loyalty to his hometown, he had denied that Detroit was any worse than other large cities. Or at least he would insist that they were turning the corner, digging out of the hole. But lately he just didn't find it in himself to say that, even to himself.
When they got to the precinct, there was a message. A body had been found in Montana. There were some indications that the body belonged to Detroit. It belonged to the mob. Homicide thought it might be a link to a persistent case that involved Mulheisen. The case concerned the death of a well-known mob figure in Detroit. Some lawman in Montana had asked if Mulheisen was interested. There was a phone number. A Mr. G. Antoni, county prosecutor, Silver Bow County.
Mulheisen sat in his tiny cube of an office and mused about Silver Bow County. He had a kind of Charles M. Russell vision of plains with snowy mountains in the distance, an encampment of Sioux by a winding river, the smoke from campfires rising silently into the Big Sky . . . perhaps a file of blue-coated soldiers on horseback, approaching the camp.
“What's it like in Montana?” Mulheisen asked the man on the other end of the line.
“It's great, Mul!” the man said, surprisingly familiar. “The aspen are all gold, the sun is shining, the trout are biting.” Then, when Mulheisen didn't respond, the man said, “Hey Mul! It's Gianni! Gianni Antoni! Remember me?”
The name was faintly familiar. Mulheisen had a momentary flash of rows of double-decker bunks in an air force training camp in Texas. Footlockers. Uniforms hung up with the left sleeve exposed.
“An-tony,” he said, emphasizing the second syllable.
“An-toni,” the voice corrected, accenting the first syllable.
“Antoni,” Mulheisen agreed. His heart lifted. This was a good memory. A good guy. They'd been in boot camp together. The drill instructor had always said “An-tony,” and the other troops had insisted on this pronunciation, despite Antoni's constant corrections.
“Antoni,” Mulheisen said again. “What the hell. Are you the guy behind this mob thing? They have the mob in Montana? Where is Silver Bow?”
“It's Butte. Mul, I'm so glad to get hold of you,” Antoni said. “What are you, still a cop? You know anything about this guy?”
The questions tumbled back and forth. The sheriff had found a body. Some identification checked through the FBI said it was a man named Mario Soper, reputed to be a hit man out of New York, but with a reference to slain Detroit mob boss Carmine Busoni. Could this be Busoni's killer? And why would he be in Montana? Could Mulheisen come out?
Mulheisen was astounded. This was the breakthrough, he thought. The murder of Carmine had been on his lap for months. He had so many questions to ask Antoni, but they seemed too many for the telephone. Gone were all thoughts of becoming a disc jockey.
The dead man, Mario Soper, had been found on property belonging to a man named Joseph Humann, who had moved into the area a few years earlier, presumably from Canada. Humann had been missing for more than a month, along with a young woman named Helen, who had been living with him since earlier in the year.
“Tell me about the woman,” Mulheisen demanded.
The local cops had come up with a description. She was about thirty, small and dark, a city woman.
She'd appeared with this man Humann about six months before, after Humann had been away for a few weeks, as apparently he was wont to do (some of the locals were of the opinion that he had a job, or a business, in California, and had to return there from time to time). The woman had impressed everyone. Very attractive. A mane of black hair, with a silver streak in it. She might be the man's sister; they were both small and dark.
Mulheisen was puzzled about Soper. He knew who Soper was, but he had never connected him to Carmine's murder. He had no idea why a notation on Soper's FBI file would mention Carmine. Perhaps Carmine had employed Soper at some time, or the mob employed him to track down Helen, and an informant had passed it on to the FBI. Mulheisen had never heard anything about it. Still, it was interesting. He told Antoni that he would have to check it out with his superiors. It might be worth sending an investigator.
Mulheisen called Laddy McClain, the chief of Homicide. “We've got a lead on Helen Sedlacek,” he said. “She may have been in Montana, just a few weeks ago. Apparently, one of the mob boys tracked her down. But she—or someone—got him first.” This concatenation had occurred to Mulheisen just in the act of relating it to McClain.
McClain was just as interested. “Maybe you better go out there,” he said.
5
No-Fat
Humphrey Di-Ebola was reflecting on how quickly things change. Truly, nothing was permanent in this ephemeral world. The old priest from his father's hometown, not so far from Salerno, had told him this when DiEbola took his father's body home for burial. DiEbola had only been in this little sunny village once before, not long after World War II. In those days Humphrey was Umberto to his family, but no American kid was ever called Umberto by his friends. Among his friends he was called not after the tough guy Bogart, but a character who appeared in the “Joe Palooka” comic strip. This Humphrey was a huge, cheerful blimp of a guy who rode around on a tricycle that carried his house, although one could never see how the character could have squeezed into the house, which resembled a hillbilly outhouse on wheels. This nickname was a very painful thing for young Humphrey, but he learned to take it cheerfully. There was no question that he did in fact much resemble the cartoon Humphrey.
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