Lieutenant Ackerman sighed. “I'll find out,” he said. He called back ten minutes later. “Well, here it is. They stopped in Traverse City, according to the pilot, because the weather hadn't cleared yet in Pellston. But then it cleared up right away and he came on. He had two passengers who got off in Traverse City.”
“Good Lord!” Mulheisen groaned. “Who were the passengers? Find out about the passengers. Get a description, and find out who employed this pilot.”
Ten minutes later, the answer came back. The pilot was very cooperative. He said the passengers were named Mr. Gordon and Mr. Arthur. Mr. Gordon was tall and had a pitted face. Mr. Arthur was short and dark. The airplane belonged to a private corporation in New Jersey, the Seaboard Corporation, but was usually kept in Miami. Late Christmas Eve, the pilot was informed by his employers that the plane had been chartered by a Mr. Arthur, who would be leaving shortly with another gentleman. He was to take Mr. Arthur and Mr. Gordon wherever they wished to go, so long as it wasn't outside the country. Beyond that, Oliver Lewis was saying nothing until he had a lawyer.
Twenty-six
They were setting up a meeting. Mulheisen was sure of it, and he could guess what the meeting was about. The question was, how could Clippert get to the meeting? It didn't seem probable that he could, but Mulheisen knew that if he could get into town, other people could. It just wouldn't be easy, that's all.
Mulheisen went outside. The snow had stopped completely and the wind was dying. What the forecasters had hoped for had happened. The ridge of high pressure over eastern Canada and the Midwest had shifted, permitting the storm to continue its normal eastward course. Now a high-pressure system of cold, arctic air was moving in. Christmas Day would dawn brilliantly clear and the temperature would be well below zero. A great day for the kids to go down to the canals that lined the Detroit River and try out their new hockey skates.
Mulheisen called Mendoza in Miami and told him to cancel the search on Wienoshek. Then he went out and started the Power-wagon, thinking that he would go downtown to pick up the warrants on Wienoshek and Clippert.
The city snow crews were attacking the snow-filled streets with some success now, but there was still no traffic. Mulheisen was grateful for the high clearance of the Powerwagon.
He swung down Gratiot Avenue just before dawn. The snow was generally a foot deep on the street, with many drifts that were much deeper. There was a chewed-up lane that the plows had opened for emergency vehicles.
Just beyond Trinity Lutheran Church, where the funeral services for Jane Clippert had been held, Mulheisen glanced to his left and noticed the high-rise apartment buildings of the Lafayette Plaisance. Conspicuous among the buildings was the Seaforth Tower. A number of the apartment lights were on. Mulheisen thought that this probably indicated apartments where children had arisen to see what Santa had brought.
“Shirley Carpenter.” He said the name aloud. Clippert might have gone there. He could even have walked there from Indian Village. It was just a hike down Lafayette Avenue. Not much farther than Mulheisen's walk to Oswald's Marina.
He pushed the big Powerwagon through bumper-deep drifts and pulled up in front of Seaforth Tower. A security guard looked at his badge and let him into the lobby. Mulheisen took the elevator to the twelfth floor. Outside Shirley Carpenter's apartment door, he opened his parka and put his right hand on his .38 Chief's Special. Then he knocked with his left hand and stepped to one side of the door, out of any possible line of fire from within.
The door was immediately opened and a small blond boy of ten or so stood there in pajamas. He looked at Mulheisen. Then he leaned out in the hallway and looked both ways.
“I thought maybe it was Uncle Arthur,” the boy said.
“He's not here?” Mulheisen asked.
“No. He left.”
“Are you Scott?” Mulheisen asked.
The boy nodded. He had a very round head, rather like his mother's. Mulheisen looked beyond the boy into the room. The floor was littered with torn wrappings from Christmas presents. There was a new bicycle, a very fancy racing model. A gift from rich “Uncle” Arthur? There were also a hockey stick, a Detroit Lions football helmet, phonograph albums, books, clothes and candy. The draperies had been drawn back on the big windows and dawn showed the white shroud that lay on a peaceful Detroit and Canada, with the black swath of the river running across it.
Shirley Carpenter came into the room. She wore a short robe that showed her nice legs. She had her hair in curlers with little pieces of tissue tucked into it and covered with a net.
“What do you want?” she asked, standing behind her son.
“Clippert,” Mulheisen said.
“He's not here,” she said.
“I'd like to see for myself,” he said.
“Do you have a warrant?”
Mulheisen bared his teeth in a weary smile. “Do you really want me to get a warrant?”
She stood aside and let him enter. He drew the pistol, his eyes darting to all corners of the room. “I'd appreciate it if you and the boy would just stand quietly over there,” he said. He didn't think Clippert was there, but he didn't want to take a chance. There might be gunfire.
Mulheisen moved cautiously from room to room, checking closets, draperies, even under the beds. He had found people under beds before. But not this time. Clippert was not in the apartment. As the boy had suggested, however, Clippert had been there. There was a rich tobacco smell in the air, from a pipe.
Mulheisen jammed his pistol back into the hip-grip holster and returned to the living room.
“How long ago did he leave?” he asked.
Shirley Carpenter stood with her hands resting on Scott's shoulders. The boy looked fascinated and excited by Mulheisen and his gun, but seemed quite unafraid.
“About an hour ago,” she said. “Maybe a little less.”
“Where did he go?”
“He didn't say.”
“How did he get here?”
“He said he walked. I guess he did.”
“What did he want?”
Shirley Carpenter shrugged. “I'm not sure. He said he was thinking of going away, for a few days. He wanted to say good-by.”
“How long was he here?”
“He got here around midnight, I guess,” she said.
That meant they had been together for six hours or so, Mulheisen figured. He wondered if they had been to bed together. He thought they probably had.
“Did he seem upset? Nervous?”
The woman looked thoughtful. “Perhaps. It's not easy to tell with a man like Arthur. He kept watching the time.”
“Did he talk about his plans? Call anyone?”
“He didn't call anyone. Somebody called here, about two hours ago. He answered the phone. It must have been a brief conversation. He just said hello, then gave this phone number and hung up. It must have been a wrong number.
“He said he had to be out of town for a few days and that the cops might come around, but that I shouldn't worry.”
“Aren't you curious what we want?” Mulheisen asked.
She shrugged.
“He didn't say where he was going? Or how he was going to get there?”
“No.”
“You think he's coming back?”
The woman suddenly looked very bleak and lonely, but she answered, “He said he would.”
Mulheisen nodded with a cynical grimace and went out of the room. Down in the lobby he questioned the guard. The guard said he knew Clippert and had seen him out the door at about five forty-five. He said he had seen Clippert set off toward Gratiot on foot.
The footprints were still visible. Mulheisen got into the Power-wagon and followed the trail up to Gratiot. There the prints ended at the plowed traffic lane. There were no further traces of a pedestrian. Obviously, somebody had picked him up.
Mulheisen stopped at a call box and called the precinct. “Dill,” he said, “do you have an up-to-date road report?”
“Roads are terrible, Mul,” Dill said.
“I know they are, I'm out on them. What about the highways?”
“The Interstates are still officially closed, say the state police, but they expect to resume their patrols shortly.”
Mulheisen closed the box. That meant that there were open lanes, he thought. He went to a phone booth and called the airports, Amtrak and Greyhound. All runways were closed and not expected to open for normal traffic for many hours, probably late in the day at best. Amtrak said their 8:30 A.M. train to Chicago had been canceled. They were hoping to run the 5:45 P.M. train. Canadian National's morning train from Windsor to Toronto was delayed and probably would not run. They had high hopes for their 6:10 P.M. train. Greyhound was not running anything. Maybe later in the day.
So where could he go? Obviously, somewhere where he wouldn't need anything more than a car, probably a four-wheel-drive type of vehicle. And Wienoshek was in Traverse City. Mulheisen called the state police and asked about highways in the Traverse City area. They put him on hold and checked with their Traverse City barracks.
“Roads are not impassable in the northern part of the state,” Lieutenant Ackerman said. “Traverse City barracks is checking for your fugitives but have nothing to report. They don't seem to be staying at the hotels or motels there, and they didn't rent a car. No reports of stolen vehicles, so far this morning. They didn't bother with roadblocks, ‘cause they figure that if your guys do have a car they can only use it on a few roads and the chances are very good that they'll be spotted, unless they drove to a nearby city and holed up, or have friends in the Traverse City area who could have picked them up. Nobody at the airport saw them leave.”
Mulheisen hung up. He sat in the truck and considered the possibilities. Kusane could have hidden Clippert away. He could hide out for a few days and meet Wienoshek later. But could Wienoshek afford to delay the meeting? He thought not. Probably they would want to meet as soon as possible, before the cops had a chance to get on their trails. But where would they meet? Anywhere, preferably up north. Perhaps in a northern city like Charlevoix, Petoskey, or even Sault Ste. Marie. The latter was comfortably close to the Canadian border, in case anyone wanted to get out of the country in a hurry.
Or they could meet at Clippert's Jasper Lake home.
For no conscious reason, Mulheisen took the Powerwagon down onto northbound Chrysler Freeway. The snow wasn't as bad as on the streets. Unimpeded winds had swept the road down to a more or less uniform foot of snow that had been broken by the passage of plows. There were only occasional drifts, and these offered little problem for a vehicle like the Powerwagon.
In a relatively short time Mulheisen found himself out beyond Eight Mile Road and headed for Interstate 75. What the hell? he thought, and stepped down on the accelerator. He knew he should have called in, but he figured that with any luck he might be able to make it to Jasper Lake in four or five hours. He thought it was worth the try.
The snow was worse around Flint, but there was still a passable lane. A plow had been through, not really clearing snow, but breaking a trail. It was heavier going around the Saginaw/Bay City area, but now it was after eleven and more plows were running. He even saw a state police patrol, fighting along in a blue Chevrolet. He tooted his horn and went by him at 45 m.p.h.
Gas was down to half a tank already, and there were few stations open today. But he had the two five-gallon cans sitting in the back. He went on.
The sky was a deep blue and the sun hurt his eyes as it reflected off the unbroken fields of snow. Even the cab of the truck was warm. He could take off his gloves.
By now, a hundred miles north of Detroit, Mulheisen had had time to reflect on what he was doing. He told himself he was either dumber than a run-over rabbit, or he was running in on target with both afterburners cooking.
He remembered a time when he'd sat in the control tower on a slow night and played hearts with the GCA crew. They played to a hundred points, at a quarter a point. An airman first class, a weatherman assigned to the tower, was “shooting the moon,” but no hearts had fallen yet. The weatherman played into clubs and two tricks later saw his jack go down to Mulheisen's queen. A heart had fallen on the trick, blowing the weatherman's chances. “Hearts are broken, I guess,” the weatherman said glumly. One trick later, Mulheisen slipped him the queen of spades, putting the man thirteen points down in one blow. “Hearts are really broken, now,” Mulheisen told him.
Mulheisen grinned his wolfish grin and leaned forward to the wheel as the Powerwagon roared past Midland. “Hearts are broken,” he cried out to the fields of snow.
The snow was lighter up here, he noticed. Not nearly as bad as in Detroit, and nothing like Saginaw. The Powerwagon was pushing sixty. He wheeled off the Interstate and into a small town called Clare. They had a sign on the highway that proclaimed the town “Gateway to the North.” The hotel was open and Mulheisen got a quick lunch at the dining room. A pretty little waitress told him the name of a man who would pump gas on Christmas Day. A half-hour later, feeling a little better for the food and coffee, and with a full tank of gas, Mulheisen was back on the Interstate.
It was almost two in the afternoon, a beautiful day, and he was feeling high. Exactly like a man who has been up all night, smoked too much and drank too much whiskey, he told himself.
A sign said: JASPER LAKE, 31 MILES. According to the map he had gotten at Clare, Mulheisen could see that there was a small town called Jasper Lake, but it was near the Interstate. The lake itself was quite large, one of the earliest summer resorts to develop in the state, and it was ten miles east of the town that used its name.
It was twenty to three before he reached the Jasper Lake exit. Instead of stopping in the town he drove straight through it and out into the country toward the lake. It was only after he had driven some five miles along the snowy country road that circled the lake that he realized that he should have stopped to find out just where to go. There were too many little country lanes running off the county road. At last he spotted a white farmhouse, with smoke curling up from the chimney and a veritable battlement of stacked firewood encircling the house. The driveway was filled with four pickup trucks and two cars.
Mulheisen left the Powerwagon running on the road and went up to the back door, where a path had been broken through the snow.
There were at least fifteen people—men, women and children—sitting at a table laden with turkey, a ham, bowls of broccoli, yams, mashed potatoes and rich giblet gravy. There were two bowls of cranberry sauce, shimmering cylinders fresh from the can. Mulheisen felt like a visitor from another planet.
The kitchen was warm and the windows were steamed up. It was a large room with enough space for the large table where the feasting farmers sat on every available chair in the house. The children were grouped together on a bench, except for a tiny child that a young woman carried on her lap and occasionally fed spoonfuls of mashed potatoes.
A color television in the adjacent living room had been positioned in the doorway so that the men could watch the Vikings play the Green Bay Packers, while they ate. Mulheisen was cheerfully urged to have dinner, drink a beer, watch the game. He thanked them, but declined. He asked for the whereabouts of Arthur Clippert's summer home.
No one had ever heard of him.
“It's a big place, I understand,” Mulheisen said. “I think one of his neighbors is a Carl Joyner, the fellow who started the Black Beaver Lake development.”
“Oh, that sonuvabitch, Joyner,” said a lean farmer through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.
“That's right,” Mulheisen said. “A fat man, with white hair.”
“He's a albino,” a ten-year-old boy said.
“He is not,” said a heavy woman with an enormous bosom. “You be quiet, Jabe.”
The lean farmer swallowed his potatoes and said, “You must mean the Bodnar place.”
“That's it,” Mulheisen said. “Clippert is his son-in-law.”
“Is that right?”
said another man. “I thought old Axel Bodnar'd sold it.”
“No. Mr. Bodnar died a few years back,” Mulheisen said.
“Is that right?” The man turned to a short, swarthy man who wore a thick black beard and whose pure-blue eyes actually twinkled. “Did you year that, Pat? Old Axel's died.”
“Wal, I'll be damned,” Pat said. He had a surprisingly Southern drawl. He forked a huge chunk of ham into the mouth that was nearly hidden behind the beard.
“You'll have a hell of a time getting there,” said the lean farmer. “You go down here a quarter mile, take a left, go to the third road and take another left. It has a sign that says Blackman Lane. You go up that lane, which probably ain't plowed, till you come to a stone fence and it has a big iron gate. I doubt you'll get up that drive. You'll have to walk about a quarter mile to the house.”
“Thank you very much,” Mulheisen said.
“You'll know the place,” the farmer said. “There's a name carved into the stone by the gate, says Valhalla.”
“Valhalla?”
“That's what old Axel called it. I think it's a town in the old country, maybe, where his folks come from.”
Twenty-seven
“This guy is something else,” Joe Service said to Wienoshek. They stood in a cold upstairs bedroom. There was no furniture in the room, no curtains on the windows. The floor was hardwood and polished with a thin film of dust on it. Also on the floor was a cardboard box. They had found it in the closet, pulled it out and opened it.
The box was full of money. Negotiable bonds in tidy little stacks, denominations of five thousand and ten thousand dollars, some even larger. It wouldn't be too difficult to convert these bonds into cash.
“I didn't really expect to find it here,” Joe Service said.
“So how come we got here early?” Wienoshek wanted to know. “I thought you wanted to make a search.”
“Just a matter of form, really, Byron. I couldn't come into the house without making absolutely certain that the money wasn't here.
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