Mulheisen gazed about the office and said, “I see you've still got Carmine's rat. Mind if I smoke?”
“Go right ahead, Mul. The rat belongs to Carmine's wife, but she hasn't come for it. Sit down, sit down. Can I get you a drink? Anything?”
“No,” Mulheisen said, lighting up a No. 4 La Regenta. “Well, coffee. Do you do good coffee, Fat?”
Humphrey lurched forward, his great belly pressing against the desk, to poke at a teak name board on which was mounted what looked like, but surely wasn't, a solid gold plate. It was engraved, MR. DIEBOLA. “Call me Humphrey, Mul,” he said.
Mulheisen's pale brows shot up. “Humphrey? You mean like Hubert H.? Or would it be the old Smollett character, Humphry Clinker?”
“Smollett?” Humphrey was surprised and pleased by this reference. As a teenager he had struggled through Smollett's strange eighteenth-century novel about an amiable and competent servant of a country squire, hoping in some sympathetically magic way that it would help to inform him about who he was. It hadn't, but he had found it amusing. He had never told anyone, of course, that he had read such arcane stuff, just as he had never let it out that he had read Jane Austen. But it was curiously gratifying to know that Mulheisen knew about Humphry Clinker.
Humphrey punched a button and told Miss Gardino to please bring in a tray of coffee. Then he heaved himself to his feet and made his way with swinging arms to a handsome cabinet, from which he extracted an old bottle of calvados. He wheezed his way back and set it on the edge of the desk just as Miss Gardino arrived with a chromed vacuum carafe of coffee, accompanied by a bone china creamer and sugar bowl to match the three cups and saucers. She poured. They all declined cream and sugar, so she left. Humphrey poured calvados into three tiny flutelike shot glasses. He carried his own coffee and calvados behind the desk and the two men helped themselves.
Mulheisen sipped the calvados with pleasure and drank the coffee. He cocked his head slightly and said, “Very good. Colombian?”
“Sumatra Blue Lintong,” said Humphrey.
“So, Humphrey,” Mulheisen said, “life is good? You're the king of the castle now. I imagine it's rather like Harry Truman found after the old man died—a lot more trouble than pleasure, eh?”
Humphrey smiled benignly, nodding his head in seeming assent. “What can I do for you, Mulheisen?” he asked. “How can I help you?” He spread his pudgy hands.
“I don't know if you can help me,” Mulheisen said. “I guess you don't know who killed Carmine? I didn't think so. I just thought I'd drop by for a visit, see how you were getting along and to ask if you knew anything about Helen Sedlacek.”
“Big Sid's girl? No. What should I know? We aren't very close. Although she used to like me. But when her dad died . . . well, she was a little angry. Grief, I guess, or shock. I could understand that. By the way, Mul, you did a fine job tracking down Sid's killer. I'm sure you will find Carmine's killer, as well. If I hear of anything that would help, I'll sure . . .”
“She's disappeared,” Mulheisen said. “Sold out her business and left, not a word to anyone.”
Humphrey was surprised. Big Sid's beautiful and fiery daughter was a successful businesswoman who ran some kind of consultant firm in Southfield. She had been outspoken about her father's death, recklessly blaming Carmine. Some said she was cooperating with the police. Well, of course, it had been a hit. The whole world could see it was a professional hit. Humphrey had hired the hitter himself, a man named Hal Good. But it wasn't as if Helen hadn't grown up knowing her father was a big man in the mob. There is a kind of discipline expected in these circumstances. But Helen, this crazy little girl—Humphrey remembered her as tiny and lively, a kind of black-haired Tinker Bell—she couldn't shut her mouth.
On Humphrey's advice Carmine had ignored her. So now she had sold out her partnership in her firm and had disappeared. This was not good.
“Just like that?” he said to Mulheisen.
Mulheisen shrugged. “Packed up and moved, bag and baggage,” he said, “except that she didn't really move. She put everything in storage. Her mother hasn't heard from her, her friends have no idea where she went. They say she had a new boyfriend, but none of them met him, and she didn't mention a name. So . . . I just thought, since her dad used to work for you, you might have some idea. No?”
“Mul, if I could help . . .” Humphrey spread his arms and his hands helplessly. “I'll certainly ask around, and if I hear anything . . .”
“I know,” Mulheisen said, standing. “Thanks for the coffee, Fat . . . er, Humphrey. You know, Humphrey suits you. I like it. And thanks for the calvados.”
They had not cleared the lobby of Krispee Chips before Humphrey was on the phone to Rossie. “Get me the Yak,” he said.
Roman Yakovich had been a lifelong associate of the late Sid Sedlacek. He still lived in an apartment in the garage behind Sedlacek's home, looking after Mrs. Sid, as he called her. He was a good man, Humphrey knew. He had him brought in, and from him he learned that Helen had been visited by Joe Service just a couple of weeks before she had disappeared.
“I didden think nothin’ of it,” the Yak said. “They played racquetball in Sid's gym, in the basement.”
“Did he come around again?” Humphrey asked.
“I didden see him,” the Yak said. “Joe's a good guy. Liddle Helen was mad at him, at first—she thought he was one of Carmine's boys—but then she seemed to think he was all right.”
“Well, don't worry about it, old friend,” Humphrey said, patting the burly Yak on his shoulder. “But if you hear anything . . . By the way, how does Mrs. Sid take this? She must be going crazy. She loved that girl.”
The Yak shook his head grimly. “It ain't right, Mr. DiEbola. First Sid . . . dies . . . which she almost died herself from grief. Then Liddle Helen just runs off.”
“Kids,” Humphrey said, despairingly, “they break our hearts.” He, of course, had no children. He had never married. He hadn't been interested in the opposite sex since he was about seventeen. He was quite comfortable about this by now. He had a benign if obscured view of women: He didn't really see them, in a way, but they seemed to be all right. Still, he had seen Helen since she was a baby—he had gone to her christening, in fact—so he didn't think of her the way he thought of women. She was more like a niece, a favorite niece. She used to bounce on his knee and make him give her horsey-back rides. She used to call him Uncle Umberto—"Unca Umby,” at first. He had seen her grow up and become considerably less interested in him, but he hadn't minded. They were still pals, at least up until the time that her father was killed. In fact, she had called him a few weeks after, tearful and outraged. He had tried to console her, but it was impossible. She wanted him to do something about Carmine.
“What can I do, honey?” he'd said. “It's the way things are. Your daddy knew that.”
No, no, she insisted, it wasn't the way things were. He must know that. He must do something about Carmine.
“You can do something,” he'd said, quietly. He had surprised himself by saying it and he didn't really know what he meant by it, but perhaps Helen had known.
Humphrey suppressed this thought now, this whole conversation. He hadn't really said any such thing to her, he decided. But now Helen had done something, he knew it in his bones. Helen and Joe. It bothered him that Helen would make herself so . . . well, how could you put it? So like a man. It wasn't right and it bothered him.
“Is Mrs. Sid all right for money?” he asked the Yak.
“Oh, sure,” the Yak said. “We got the household account. There's plenty. Sid allus had plentya money.”
“That's good, that's good,” Humphrey said, “but if you need anything, don't forget who to call.”
This information too went to the councils, and soon the loathsome Mario was back in town. He poked around and this time he got poked around, by the Yak. Roman had caught him nosing around the house, actually in the house. For this he got some loose teeth and some deep bruises.
But no hard feelings, he just took off and business went back to normal.
And then one day in October, Humphrey's inside man in the police department called: Mario Soper had been identified in Montana. He'd been found, shot to death, in an irrigation ditch. Mulheisen was investigating.
Not long after, the Yak called. He was not eager to talk about the family, but he trusted Humphrey. Mrs. Sid had received a postcard. All it said was, “Ma, I'm so sorry I haven't written. It wasn't possible. I'm all right. I'm fine. I'm very happy. But I can't bear for you to be unhappy. Are you all right? I'll contact you again, soon. Love, Nelly.”
“Nelly?” Humphrey said.
“Mrs. Sid allus called her Nelly,” the Yak explained.
“Oh yeah.” Humphrey remembered. “So what's the return address?”
“Liddle Helen didn't put no return address,” the Yak said. “It's got a pitcher of the Holy Mother, standin’ on a mountain. It says it's Our Lady of the Rockies, Butte, Montana.” He pronounced it “Butt-tee.”
“Butt-tee?” Humphrey got him to spell it. “And it's postmarked when?” The Yak didn't know about postmarks, but Humphrey told him about the little circle stamped on the card. When the Yak finally figured out that it had been mailed in Montana on September 5, Humphrey wanted to know how it had taken so long to get to Detroit, and why was he telling him about it in October?
“I didden see it,” Roman said. “Mrs. Sid had it under her pillow. I don't know how come she didden tell me about it. So, I don't know, maybe I shouldden even of told you.”
“No, no, you should tell me,” Humphrey said. “You should always tell me.”
6
Helen
She'd be just as happy if he never came back. Not true, really. It was a way of punishing him, in her mind, for going away. Of course, he had to come back, he would come back, she wanted him to come back. She couldn't live without him, but . . . she had begun to enjoy the time when he wasn't around.
Oh god, what a miserable thing. She asked herself why women let themselves be trapped into these situations. But then she refused to feel trapped. This was a situation of her own making.
She had gone to Joe for help, she couldn't deny it. And then he had invited her to come with him. The trouble was that having done what she had wanted to do, and having gone with Joe voluntarily, she had begun not to like it here. Who in the hell wanted to lie around Montana for the rest of their lives? She had things to do. She was a young woman.
Joe had things to do. He went off and did them. He didn't tell her about them, not really, just little jokes. He called it his Gogol Scam and then, because she'd misunderstood and said “Go-go?” he'd laughed and taken that up. For a time she had been convinced it had something to do with girls, that he had another woman somewhere whom he went to see. What was the big secret? No secret, he insisted, it was just too complicated to get into. He'd tell her all about it one of these days, if it worked out.
Helen hated that kind of talk. She was stuck here, waiting. That was the way it always was. She wanted to call her mother. No, says Joe. She wanted to send her mother a note. No. Don't contact your friends, he had warned. When you took out Carmine, you said good-bye to friends, to family. Sorry, but that's the way it is. Those guys get a lead on you, we're dead. They never quit. So, here we are. This is where we live now. Don't you like it?
She liked it plenty, for a while. They went fishing, they floated on rafts, they hiked. They bought matching Harleys and roared up to White Sulphur Springs, careening down empty highways through the mountains and over Missouri River bridges and dodging antelope, lights out, driving by moonlight. But soon enough, they roared home. It wasn't as if they had nowhere else to go. On a whim, they flew to Vancouver Island, to take high tea at The Empress Hotel in Victoria, then dinner in Seattle and the sweet ride on Amtrak's “Coast Starlite” to San Francisco to shop for a few days. They drove down to Flaming Gorge to make love on a mountainside, ignoring the cars winding up the road. But always back to the cabin.
She liked it here, basically. The house was terrific. She'd bought some nice things like dishes and a good sound system, hundreds of CDs, some great clothes. It was a lot of fun. They spent money sometimes like there was no end to it, and of course, there was no end to it, practically speaking. Boxes and boxes of money.
On a normal day they would get up late, loaf around over breakfast—which they made themselves, since Joe refused to have servants of any kind. This was a point of contention. Helen argued that since they couldn't very well go out for breakfast, they ought to have someone in to cook and do the housecleaning. Joe laughed long and hard at this. “You can't make your own breakfast? Hell, I'll make it.” And he did. And he cleaned house, too, though it was not an arduous task, after all.
After breakfast was shooting. Usually it was just Joe, but Helen frequently went with him. She didn't really enjoy shooting, not as much as Joe did, but she knew that he liked her to come along. They would walk up through the trees and back into the canyon. Some days they shot pistols as they walked—snap shots, Joe called it (he alternated right-hand days and left-hand days, quick drawing)—but usually they took the AK-47s, or the Uzi, and always a few handguns. After shooting, one of them ran down to town for the paper and to check the mail. Later they might fish, or go to Butte for dinner, or even to Bozeman or Livingston. There were some good restaurants over that way.
The one thing she loved without reservation was the hot springs, just over the ridge from the house. The hot springs almost made Montana a good deal. It was a sacred place, she'd decided. Lately she had come to resent Joe's presence in the hot springs, and Joe had seemed to recognize that. He liked her to do things on her own. He didn't mind if she traipsed off, naked as a jaybird, walking the four or five hundred yards over the ridge to the hot springs by herself.
He was almost unobjectionable. He acceded to everything. But so what? The gritty little basic thing was that she had grown up in Detroit, in the city. She liked people. Joe didn't give a damn if he never saw another human being in his life. It wasn't true, of course; he was very outgoing and gregarious at times. But at other times he seemed totally indifferent to, or even hostile toward, people. Helen found this unbearable. She needed people, particularly other women. She couldn't live without friends. If he knew that she had been to Holy Trinity, the Serbian church in Butte, he would flip.
As for Tinstar—well, it wasn't even a town, it was just appalling. A bar, a gas station that was also a post office, and a kind of convenience store that wasn't conveniently open—the hours depended on how the trout were hitting. And there was more poverty than she had expected: so many of the people on welfare, on some kind of assistance, living in shabby trailers. It didn't have the abject misery of Detroit, but misery was there just the same.
And she couldn't go by her own name. At first she had found it amusing to ask Shawna in the Tinstar Saloon to call her “Buddy.” But lately she had found it disagreeable. She wanted Shawna to call her Helen. She wanted to be friends with Shawna, but Shawna was an awful hick, it turned out. She was also on aid, even though she was employed. Conversation with Shawna was like, “Did you watch Sally Jessy Raphael yesterday, she had a guy on there who admitted that he'd raped two hundred women, whyn't they cut his balls off?”
Well, what did she expect from a bartender? The women available to her weren't equals, they were hairdressers and ranch wives, waitresses and unwed teenaged mothers. The milieu did not include upscale career women, lawyers and go-getters. About as close as it got was Milly, a realtor in the Ruby Valley, who sometimes came into the Tinstar Saloon. But Milly was in love with some redneck rancher and had a couple of kids. There were also a lady sheriff, whom Helen necessarily avoided, and a kind of interesting but somewhat aloof (or at least cool) single woman who had some kind of job with the irrigation district. And the old gal who ran the Garland Ranch, the XOX, who had sold Joe the property—she was not to be believed, a raw-boned, wind-rubbed cowgirl who evidently preferred
the conversation of red cattle.
Butte wasn't a hell of a lot better. A raggedy old falling down city, a kind of Flint-in-the-Rockies or maybe some time-warped decrepit burg from the Depression. She didn't find it nearly as interesting as Joe did. It looked trashy to Helen. She had been stunned to discover a Serbian Orthodox church there, of all places. Evidently, the Serbs had come to work the mines, and they made up one of the largest Serbian communities in the West, but it was incongruous, and anyway, she'd never been much for church.
Bozeman was a college town, deadly boring. Livingston was campy, tanned oldsters wearing Gucci bandannas. Missoula was also a college town; it had a couple of rock joints and some cultural offerings, but it was too far away and annoyingly self'important. Helena, the state capital, was the most boring of all: a political town in a state where the legislature only met for ninety days every other year. This was not the year.
Montana was not a bad place, she conceded. Their little mountain, their house, their pine trees, the view down the valley. But after all, what was it? Take away her hot springs and it was just okay, but it wasn't anything, really. Joe liked it. Joe loved it. He kept talking about how great it was, the air, no people . . . a man could piss off his front porch without checking on the neighbors. Big deal. Fine for him. But what was there for a dynamic young woman to do? Pissing on the front lawn didn't get it.
After a while she couldn't stand it. The day she discovered Holy Trinity in Butte, she felt so blue that she couldn't resist sending a card to her mother, mailed it from Butte. Big deal. What was the use of being infinitely rich if you couldn't live like a rich person, or even send a stupid postcard, like a poor person? Her idea of being rich was that they should live in, say, San Francisco, in the Palace Hotel. They would buy a boat. They'd have a small crew, and they'd sail to Mexico when they wanted to, or perhaps to Panama or Peru. But Joe didn't like the idea. Instead he'd suggest a float trip on the Madison, or maybe on the Missouri. Big deal.
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