“No, no I haven't. I suppose I should have enquired. . . . I don't know. . . . I didn't think.”
Obviously, she hadn't had to worry, Mulheisen decided, because she knew what had happened to Heather. Heather had either gone with them or she had already left, or she had been disposed of in some way. It was also possible that Cateyo only thought she knew what had happened to Heather, and (he had to admit to himself) it was possible that she simply didn't care or was distracted by her concern for Joe. But he had a feeling that she knew that she needn't be concerned for Heather Bloom.
He could sense that Daphne Stonborough was bristling, although he didn't look at her. He didn't want to pursue this line at the moment. He opted for neutral ground again.
“You've been back to your house, here in Butte,” he said. “Is there any sign that she returned there?”
“Not that I saw,” Cateyo said.
“Would it be okay for me to go to the house, to have a look at her things, her room?”
“Wouldn't you need a warrant for that?” Cateyo said, looking to Stonborough for help.
“I'm sure the sheriff could easily obtain a warrant to examine the living quarters of a prime murder suspect,” Mulheisen said, “but I just wondered if you had any objection to my coming by the house. No? Fine. And you didn't have any suspicions of this woman? She didn't act strangely toward you? You didn't notice any odd behavior? Hmmm. Did you ever see her with other people, friends, associates? No? She didn't talk about her associates? Where did she say she was from, anyway?”
When Cateyo said “Detroit,” Mulheisen almost shivered with excitement. “She had references from Detroit? No? You didn't ask for references when you rented a room to her?”
“It was only temporary,” Cateyo said.
“She lived with you for—what—a couple of months? Do you have a camera? Did you ever take a picture of her? No? What kind of person is Heather? I mean, was she fussy? Excitable? Quiet? Athletic?”
Cateyo found it difficult to describe Heather. In fact, the woman had made Cateyo nervous from the start, but she couldn't say just how. “Aggressive, maybe,” she said finally. “She was nice, but . . . I don't know . . . she could be a little pushy.” What she was quite unwilling to say was that she had become nervous about Heather's way of coming into the bathroom when Cateyo was taking a bath, of offering to scrub her back, of commenting on Cateyo's physical appearance—"You have a great figure,” she'd said, more than once. But Cateyo said nothing of this to Mulheisen—it was too embarrassing.
“Let's go back to the cabin for a moment,” Mulheisen said. “Did anybody else come to the cabin while you were there? No? Did you receive any phone calls?” Again, no. Mulheisen was stumped. He had been at the cabin himself, some hours later, having tracked Helen there. By that time the thugs had also arrived and apparently encountered Helen, who had fled. Then the cabin had blown up. Joe Service and Cateyo had long since disappeared, as had Heather Bloom. If Heather had not gone with Joe and Cateyo, she must have been in the vicinity, hiding out. Subsequently, she had appeared at Grace Garland's, with fatal results. He had found Helen himself, hiding in the hot springs, but he had been totally unaware of the presence of Heather, until he'd seen the satellite pictures. She had been around, though. Perhaps she had fled immediately after the departure of Joe and Cateyo, to Grace Garland's. But he recalled that the deputy, Jacky Lee, had talked to Grace after the incident at the cabin, to explain the events of the night. Garland had not mentioned anything about a visitor, but perhaps she hadn't made a connection with the incident at the cabin. There was more to it than that, of course: Garland had subsequently told Sally that she was being visited by a “cousin,” or some such relation. Why Garland would do this, he didn't know, and he doubted that they ever would know, unless they apprehended Heather and she told them.
“Let's get one thing straight,” he said, speaking more sternly now. “Did you part with Heather on friendly terms? Did she consent to stay?”
This was the critical moment. Cateyo made her decision. “Yes,” she said firmly. She saw the implication: that if she and Joe had run out on Heather, then Heather's presence at Grace Garland's, and the murder of Grace Garland, was their moral responsibility. She couldn't accept that responsibility, for herself or Joe.
Mulheisen recognized this as a lie. He nailed it down. “She agreed to stay, without a car, in a blizzard?”
Cateyo said yes, taking another step into the morass.
“So, she must have been driven from the cabin by the arrival of the men who broke into the cabin and ultimately destroyed it, and themselves,” Mulheisen said.
Cateyo shrugged, a kind of agreement. It had nothing to do with her, or with Joe, she felt confident.
“Why would she agree to this?” Mulheisen pursued. “Did she have reason to believe that you and Joe would return?”
“I guess,” Cateyo said.
“You guess?”
“There was plenty of food, plenty of fuel,” Cateyo said. “She could stay there for days. We didn't know those men would come there.”
“So, you and Joe were planning to come back and get her? You told her that?”
“Well, more or less,” Cateyo said, unconvincingly.
“Where did you and Joe go?” Mulheisen asked—the ultimate question.
“I don't see that it's important where they went,” Daphne Stonborough said.
“You don't?” Mulheisen said. “I think it could be very important. If they just ran into Tinstar, a few miles away, to get cigarettes or something, planning to return right away . . . “ He let the suggestion hang. “But it sounds like they actually went much farther, and that Heather Bloom knew it, that she thought her only way out of there was to trek over the hill to a neighbor's . . . “ He let that hang, too.
“We went to Salt Lake City,” Cateyo blurted out. “We were planning to get married.”
The lawyer and the detective stared at her. The young woman looked so innocent, so wishful, that they involuntarily turned to each other with a look of surprised pity. Mulheisen recovered first and said, “Did you get married?”
“Um, no.”
“Where is Joe now?”
“I don't know,” Cateyo said. She looked defiant.
“Where do you think he is?” Mulheisen asked.
“He's probably still in Salt Lake City, but I don't know where. He checked out of the hotel we were staying in. He said he had some business to take care of.”
“You expect to hear from him?”
“Yes.” She went on to say, in response to Mulheisen's request, that she would be sure to contact him if Joe called. But Mulheisen knew better.
“I don't know who you think Joe Service is,” Mulheisen said, with a tone of sad regret, “but he's not a good guy. He has very close connections with organized crime in Detroit and, in fact, all across the country. He's a contract man. We think he was involved in at least two murders, maybe more. He's a dangerous man, Ms. Yoder. He's very likable, apparently, quite convincing, but he isn't a good guy.” The admonition had little effect on Cateyo, he could tell.
“I just hope he's taking his medicine,” she said.
They went to Cateyo's house, then, accompanied by Ms. Stonborough. As Mulheisen had feared, there was no evidence there that Heather Bloom had ever been in the house. Everything had been removed from her bedroom. But he still called Jacky Lee and got him to come by with someone who could check for fingerprints. It was always worth a chance.
Cateyo went back to work and Mulheisen took Daphne to lunch. She was admiring of his technique in questioning Cateyo, but seemed annoyed with herself. “She was singing away there, in the end,” she said.
“I don't think you have anything to worry about,” Mulheisen said. “Johnny isn't going to prosecute her for anything. All she did was run away with a patient. It's interesting, though, to think of a woman like that being so close to the action and yet not really seeing anything.”
“Love is blind,” S
tonborough said.
“So is justice. Well, Cateyo saw more than she let on, but even she doesn't know what she saw, so it's hard to get her to say what it was. I think she's very disturbed about this Heather.” He let that drop, seeing that Daphne wasn't going to discuss what her client might or might not know. Instead, he asked, “So, are you still representing Helen Sedlacek?”
“No. She fired me from Detroit. Said to send her a bill.”
“What address?” Mulheisen wanted to know. But Daphne couldn't remember. They went on to chat about other things, such as Johnny Antoni and his excessively healthy family, and they ended up laughing at Mulheisen's misadventures fishing the Big Hole River. It was a very pleasant lunch and Mulheisen half-wished he could think of some way to continue it, but the fact was that he was suddenly extremely anxious. He had to get on with this case, now that it was starting to break.
What ensued was several hours of pacing, phone calls, more pacing. He knew he should call Sally McIntyre, make some kind of amends for . . . well, for what? He hadn't done anything to her, but they weren't talking very well. Instead he called everybody else he could think of and paced up and down the Butte-Silver Bow sheriff's offices. He went for a walk at one point, just to get some fresh air, and found himself east of town, at the Berkeley Pit. This was an immense hole in the ground, from which the Anaconda Company had taken millions of tons of copper ore. Now it was just a hole, but a vast hole, miles across and a half mile deep. It was filling slowly with water, obviously not very clean water, either: earlier that fall more than two hundred snow geese had been found dead along its shores, evidently poisoned. He stood on the little viewing platform, feeling the cold wind snapping at his face, while he gazed about at the terraced walls of this monument to man's capacity to destroy. He thought, idly, that if his mother ever saw this . . .
In the afternoon he learned from the telephone company that someone had called a number in Grosse Pointe from Grace Garland's house. Mulheisen contacted Andy Deane, his old buddy at Rackets and Conspiracy. Andy identified the number as Humphrey DiEbola's home phone. Mulheisen asked if Humphrey had shown any signs of activity lately, but Andy said they hadn't been watching. However, he agreed to check on movements of Humphrey's private plane, which was normally stationed at Detroit's City Airport.
Mulheisen talked to a detective in Salt Lake City. The conversation was mainly about Joe Service and his possible whereabouts—nothing had been noticed at the Main Street house—but a curious little tidbit was tossed out. The detective, apparently in association with Mulheisen's Detroit origins, mentioned that they had recently found a local “character” strangled on the street. The detective seemed to think it was just another curiosity, a testament to the evil times we live in, when such a harmless guy as “Cap'n Lite” could be strangled and tossed idly onto a curb. He supposed the guy had gotten into some kind of deal that had gone sour. It happened. The only reason he mentioned it was that this character was apparently an old Detroit hood named Clarence Woods.
At first the name didn't register with Mulheisen, but then he felt a vague prickling of the scalp. “Cap'n Lite, you say?” he asked. “A little guy, kind of beaky?” Mulheisen knew him. He knew him as a nonentity, a gofer who'd been tolerated and supported by the late Big Sid Sedlacek, father of Helen. Many, many years ago, long before the scam that had gotten Big Sid killed, Sid had engineered a milder ripoff that had almost gotten him permanently retired, but out of which he had staged a remarkable comeback. In that affair, one of the people who had taken the heat for Big Sid was little, beaky Clarence Woods, a.k.a. Cap'n Lite. Clarence had disappeared, was thought to be dead, but evidently he'd only been exiled, doing penance for his patron, Big Sid. And now, just a day or two earlier, Clarence was strangled. Mulheisen never was a believer in coincidence.
14
New Kid II
Joe Service was very interested to read in the Salt Lake Tribune that a man named Clarence Woods had been found dead on the street the day before. And not very far from where Joe was sitting, in the Rio Grande Cafe, a converted railway waiting station. There were these cafes all over the West—railroad architecture was attractive—but this was one of the nicer conversions. Joe was fond of trains and so he had naturally gravitated toward the Rio Grande. In this case, Amtrak still used the depot from which the much-admired Denver & Rio Grande silver trains used to go racing out across the Rocky Mountains. The cafe featured an upscale Mexican cuisine. Joe had enjoyed the tostada. Now he was enjoying the coffee. But he found himself strangely disturbed by the murder of Clarence Woods.
At first he hadn't paid any attention to the article, and doubtless wouldn't have, but the colorful nickname Cap'n Lite was mentioned. There was no picture, but none was needed. There couldn't be two such characters in Salt Lake City. And this small man had been strangled. Joe could easily imagine it. He couldn't help thinking that he was in some way responsible. Not genuinely responsible, of course; it was clearly the work of the Tongans. But it wasn't hard to see that Cap'n Lite had been brutally punished for his failures with Joe. And publicly dumped, an unsubtle demonstration for other would-be rats. No doubt the Tongans would be redoubling their efforts to nail Joe. He had no idea what kind of an organization they had, except that it didn't seem all that efficient. What kind of gang was this?
He thought back to his own experience with gangs. As a boy in Philadelphia he had admired older boys who belonged to gangs. But when his turn came, for some reason he had never joined. His reasons were vague. The idea of being part of a gang ultimately didn't sufficiently appeal. These older boys were too bossy, forever making the younger boys run and fetch, “do this, do that.” Joe wasn't into that. Nonetheless, he had liked to operate around the edges. He had ended up doing things for the gang on an independent, contract basis: things like finding out about someone, where someone lived, who his girlfriend was. He liked it better that way.
This Tongan gang, what was it? Was it mostly adults, mostly kids? Were there colors involved, secret signs, a special language? How many people were in it, he wondered, and were they all Tongans, or were other islanders, other ethnic groups involved? He didn't really care, except that they represented a possible danger to him. It was another reason to get his act together fast and take it on the road . . . out of Salt Lake City.
Still, he felt annoyed, angry even, at this murder. He had kind of liked the raspy-voiced little man who, after all, had given him a break—a calculated break, to be sure, but still a break. Perhaps it was the sympathy that one small man might feel for another in a world of overgrown oafs, especially oafs like these monstrous islanders. Perhaps that was why Cap'n Lite had given Joe a break. For Joe's part, he never thought of himself as small. Not tall, but not small. Cap'n Lite was a little guy, but hanging out with a bunch of Tongans would make even a six-footer feel puny.
It was early afternoon, a nice winter day, cold but sunny. He went into the Amtrak station and inquired about trains. The eastbound Zephyr wasn't due until 4:45 the next morning. He'd been on that train before. In fact, he'd ridden the Zephyr to Iowa some nine months earlier, a trip that had led to his present situation. He had been on the trail of a mob hit man who seemed to have gone astray, had begun to do a little more work than he'd been hired to do. Joe had found the guy, all right, but he'd had to take him out. He'd felt a little bad about it at the time, but he hadn't let it bother him too much. And from that he had become entangled with Helen.
Well, well, he thought, here I am back on the same track—or is it a loop, going around in circles? He wasn't sentimental, not a superstitious type. It didn't bother him. What bothered him was whether he could accomplish what he needed to accomplish between now and four in the morning. He decided he couldn't. He booked for the following day, for a room he had checked out carefully during his last trip on the Zephyr. Room Η was a big and comfortable room, complete with a shower. He figured he'd need a little extra space. He paid in cash, using the name Clarence Woods—in memoriam, as it were. He
booked straight through to Chicago.
Yes, he told himself, I'm just back on track. Only this time he wouldn't stop in Iowa City. And then he realized with a start that he hadn't even thought about his memory problems all day. He was back on track.
Next he called the Utah State Medical Examiner's office and was gratified by the information he was able to obtain there. Based on that, he called around to a few funeral homes until he found the deal he wanted and he made the requisite arrangements.
He drove to Main Street and parked in the alley again, but this time several houses away from the colonel's lookout post. He still had a pair of Glock 9mm automatics that he'd liberated from the Tongans when he'd rescued Cateyo. They were heavy, clumsy things, not the sort of gun he would have chosen, but they had firepower to spare. He discovered that his down ski jacket had a couple of inside pockets which would hold the guns fairly well and, the jacket being bulky anyway, they weren't obvious. He jammed one in each jacket pocket and walked blithely up the alley, away from Helen's house to a corner convenience store and gas station.
He bought a couple of magazines and a red and white knit wool cap that had the “Utes” logo of the University of Utah football team on it. He pulled this over his head, down low, right to the heavy black brows, and went outside. It was colder now, breezy. From the pay phone outside he could scan the whole block. He held the phone in his hand and uttered the words to the old tune “I'll Be Home for Christmas” while he carefully examined the street. After about five minutes he was fairly certain that there was no extensive observation of Helen's house. To be sure, the colonel and Edna were next door, very likely with a third agent upstairs operating a radio. But it didn't appear that there was a second watching post. No parked vans. No idle walkers, no electrical or telephone workers hanging in the air in power-lift buckets, no street workers standing around a sewer access looking aimlessly about.
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