Deadman

by Jon A. Jackson

  Lee looked around the silent yard. “I don't think our forensic facilities are up to that kind of thing, Mul.”

  “I could take it to our man in Detroit,” Mulheisen suggested. “But for it to mean anything we'd probably have to have the forensic crew sweep the house, Humann's clothes and Helen's.” He sighed. “What else did you find?”

  “Quite a bit of money. Pert near fifty thousand dollars, in old bills, mostly fives and tens and twenties.” He detached a “Police Crime Scene” ribbon from across the door and unlocked it. They stepped inside.

  It was an interesting house, Mulheisen thought. He liked it a lot. It was basically one large room with four small rooms arranged against the back: two tiny bedrooms, only one of them equipped with an ample brass bed but both with built-in closets; an equally tiny “spare” room where Jacky had found the guns (a kind of office, or study, it also had a personal computer, a desk, and a filing cabinet and its closet was filled with women's clothing, evidently a spillover from the other bedrooms); and a bathroom with a tiled shower stall and a large, sunken tub. The large main room had a kitchen on one end and a fireplace with a sofa and chairs at the other end. There were a couple of practical-looking tables, one of which, by the entry, had a telephone/answering machine on it. There were a few pictures on the walls, mostly nicely framed prints of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins (a little odd, Mulheisen thought: no Western scenes, but Eastern scenes). It seemed a very livable, practical space.

  Mulheisen pointed at the answering machine. A red light indicated it was on, and a zero appeared in the message slot. “No messages?” he asked.

  “Just what's-his-name's voice, the greeting,” Lee said. “I left it on, just in case.”

  Mulheisen nodded approvingly. “What did you do with the money?” he asked.

  “It was in a desk drawer, loose. I put it in a box,” Lee said, “and I took it to the First Metals Bank in Butte and put it in their vault. I had one of the bank officers count the money and give me a receipt. Then I put the receipt in the Butte-Silver Bow evidence locker.”

  Mulheisen raised an eyebrow. “That what the sheriff told you to do?”

  “I didn't ask him,” Jacky said. “I just did it. I didn't want anyone saying I stole any of it, and I couldn't see letting it sit around the station house. I got Kenny Dukes, the other deputy, to witness what I did with it when I found it, and also Sally McIntyre, the ditch rider.”

  “She came up here with you?”

  “She showed me where she found the gun in the hot springs and then she came on up here.”

  “Can I talk to this ditch rider?” Mulheisen asked.

  “Sure. You want to see anything else in here?”

  “I'd like to look at that computer some time,” Mulheisen said, “and the files. I'd like to know the legal considerations, seeing that Humann isn't under arrest or anything. Of course, possession of a sawed-off shotgun is some kind of criminal offense, isn't it?”

  “I'm not so sure about that,” Lee said. “Is that a federal statute? I'd have to look up the Montana law. But, hey, you'll be interested in this.” He opened the door of what appeared to be a utility closet off the kitchen. He pushed aside the usual array of mops and brooms and slid back a concealed panel revealing an assemblage of electronic gear: three small television screens, a reel-to-reel tape deck, various switches.

  “I didn't check it out fully,” Jacky said, “but from this panel he can activate electric fences, lights, security TV cameras, tape conversations . . . who knows what all? The interesting thing is, there's no sticker from any electrician or electronics outfit. I checked around Butte, nobody there worked on this. It looks like Humann did it all himself. Far as I can tell, it all works. There's no labels on anything, so I wasn't able to figure out what it can actually do, but at least one of the screens shows the yard. The whole thing was turned off when I found it.”

  Mulheisen glanced around. “Where are the cameras?”

  “There's two of them down by the gates,” Jacky said. “There might be others. I haven't seen them.”

  “I didn't see any cameras.”

  “No, but you probably noticed a couple of bluebird houses on the fence posts,” Jacky said.

  “Bluebird houses. I didn't pay any attention.” Mulheisen smiled. “My mother would be outraged. This guy isn't just security conscious, he's a nut.”

  Jacky locked the front door and reattached the crime scene ribbon. Then he went to the Blazer and got on the radio, while Mulheisen strolled around the yard. It was extremely pleasant up on this mountain, Mulheisen thought. The wind soughing in the tall pines, the dry scuff of needles underfoot. He wandered up behind the house, along the narrow path that led over the ridge. A blue jay yelled at him and flitted away. It was too dark for a blue jay, he thought. Must be some Western counterpart of the Eastern blue jay. His mother would know.

  Jacky caught up to him. “Sally's at home, in Tinstar,” he said. “It'd take her a half hour to get up here. You want me to ask her to come?”

  “Why not?” Mulheisen said. “Or we could stop and see her on the way back to town. The hot springs is down this trail?”

  Lee nodded. “Go on down. It ain't far. I'll see if Sally'd rather we came down to her place.”

  Before Mulheisen reached the pool, Lee caught up to him, saying, “I couldn't raise her, she must have took off. We can stop by her place on the way down.”

  They stood on the rocks overlooking the pool and looked down into the greenish blue water. It was very clear and the bottom was lined with old needles with patches of fine, gravelly sand showing here and there. You could feel the heat rising off, and in the cool autumn air there were periodic blossoms of steam off the rocks and the surface of the pond, quickly swept away by the breeze.

  “Beautiful,” Mulheisen said.

  Lee nodded. “Sally said she found the gun right out in the middle.” He stared out at the water, then sat down on a large flat rock that appeared to have been placed there for the purpose and shucked off his boots. Next came the complicated belt and holster and then his starched gabardine trousers, which he folded carefully. Mulheisen looked on with amusement. Jacky Lee's relatively short, skinny legs sticking out of khaki shorts seemed like mere props for his oversized trunk, still clad in shirt and jacket. He looked at Mulheisen. “Want to?”

  “Well . . .” Mulheisen said, glancing around. It was as remote and lonely a place as one could wish. A few minutes later the two men were wading back and forth in the warm water, staring downward with arms clasped behind their backs, ostensibly searching for discarded weapons, but clearly enjoying the experience. No doubt they looked ridiculous, a couple of grown men in their baggy underwear with shirts and, in Mulheisen's case, a necktie.

  “Wheww.” Mulheisen breathed out gratefully. “This is pretty fine.” He relished the soft flutter of sand between his toes and soon he stopped to stare up at the circle of sky above them. The strands of gossamer still drifted high up. A raven flew into the top of one of the ponderosas and sat there, pointedly not looking at the ridiculous spectacle of the waders. It made a strange noise, almost like a wooden musical instrument—a Balinese xylophone, perhaps, Mulheisen thought—a rising “tick,” followed by three descending hollow “tocks.”

  “Ah hah,” Jacky Lee said. He rolled up a shirt sleeve and stooped. He held up a shiny pistol, dangling it from the trigger guard with his forefinger. Encouraged, the two resumed their watery shuffle, but another half hour of feeling about with their feet, occasionally picking up pieces of quartz or old waterlogged sticks, convinced them that they had found what could be found. They were about to get out and dress when a laugh froze them in their tracks.

  Sally McIntyre stood on the path. “I don't believe I have ever seen such a thing,” she said. “Mister Dee-troit Cop, I have to apologize for our local constabulary. It appears he has not told you the proper Montana way to use a hot springs.” So saying, she flung her sweat-stained Western hat aside and sat down to tug off her
battered cowboy boots.

  “Now, Sally . . .” Jacky Lee said, warningly.

  The woman's eyes flashed as she stood up and unbuttoned her jeans. “Don't tell me an Indin deputy, who once told me that Indins have no false modesty, that they're simple, direct people who don't let the white man's foolish ways shame them . . .” she said, now unbuttoning her shirt.

  “Sally, goddamn it . . .” Lee said.

  The brassiere and the panties were daintily deposited on the jeans and shirt. Mulheisen was stunned. What was it with these Montana women?

  Sally waded into the pool, directly to Mulheisen, who steadfastly kept his eyes fastened on her smiling face. She stuck out her hand and, although he recoiled at first, he took it and allowed her to pump his in a friendly way, saying, “I'm Sally McIntyre, the ditch rider. And you are . . . ?”

  “Mulheisen,” he said.

  “Well, Mul,” she replied, “this is how we do it.” She spread her muscular arms and he noticed that she did not shave under them. The same red hair as on her head and between her thighs. And then she fell slowly backward, splashing into the hot pool. She came up gasping but laughing and kicked backward toward the ledge. “It's grand, boys,” she cried. “Try it.”

  Jacky Lee shrugged and waded out. He dropped his drawers with his back to them, then added his shirt to his pile. He avoided Mulheisen's eyes as he waded back in and dove headfirst into the warm water.

  There was nothing for it. Mulheisen followed suit. Lying in the water, fully submerged, it soon seemed absurd to be embarrassed. But what, he wondered, was the protocol for conversation?

  “That's gossamer,” Sally said, gesturing with her chin toward their lofty canopy. “Tiny, tiny spiders make it. Happens every year, ‘bout this time.”

  “Ah,” said Mulheisen, glancing surreptitiously at her floating breasts, the areolas large and suffused with the hot water. “Gossamer?”

  “I looked it up in the dictionary,” she confessed, casually eyeing the head of Mulheisen's cock, poking out of the surface; he sunk down. “It's from Middle English, it says, gosesomer, or ‘goose summer.’ Probably like Indin Summer.”

  “I see,” Mulheisen said. Jacky Lee said nothing. He lay on his back, his eyes closed. A very large hawk, quite high up, sailed into the gossamer-curtained window. Nobody said anything for a good long time.

  “I could sure use a cigarette,” Sally said, “sacrilegious as it sounds.” She stood up and waded dreamily to the edge to rummage in her pockets. She sat on the big rock, next to Jacky's clothes, and lit her cigarette. She smoked gratefully, elbows on knees. Mulheisen thought she looked pretty, also humorous and refreshingly direct. He got out and joined her, lighting up a La Regenta.

  “That smells good,” she said, “strong and clean. Can I try it?”

  He handed her the cigar. She drew on it. “Mmm, milder than I'da thought.” She handed it back. Mulheisen could not recall another woman in his experience who had done or said such a thing.

  Out in the pool Jacky had moved to the shallows and sat on his butt, splashing water and rubbing it into his black hair and scrubbing his face. He lay back full-length and rotated violently, then stood up. “I'm done,” he said. He waded out and squatted next to them.

  Sally looked down at the chromed pistol lying on Jacky's clothes. “Is that another one?” she said. Jacky said it was. “Be a shame to have to drain this pool,” she said. She began to dress. Mulheisen was very taken with the unself-conscious way she bent forward to lever and adjust her breasts into the cups of her bra.

  “I hope we won't have to do that,” Jacky said.

  Mulheisen agreed. By now they were all dry and dressing.

  “Now I feel like a detective again,” Mulheisen said, knotting his tie.

  Lee grunted. It could have been a laugh or maybe it was just the effort of pulling his boots on his damp feet. “You do much of this back in Detroit?”

  Mulheisen and Sally laughed.

  The three of them strolled down to the meadow and the creek where Sally had found the body. Jacky pointed out that he had very early concluded that Soper was not killed at the site: There was no bloody ground, no cartridge cases, no sign of a struggle. A search of the house gave no indication that it had happened there, and so with the grounds. But he had found several .32-caliber cartridge casings about the path near the hot springs. He had also found the wheelbarrow in the shed. The forensic evidence wasn't back yet, but he felt there was a good chance that the victim, who had been shot at least nine times with two different caliber guns, had been shot somewhere around the pool. His assailant probably used the wheelbarrow to carry the body down to the creek. There was dried blood in the wheelbarrow, not a lot, but some. He also had a feeling that the same .32-caliber automatic, the one Sally had found in the pool, had been used on Carmine Deadman, aka Joseph Humann, aka Joe Service.

  He recounted all this leisurely as they climbed back up the path, past the pool, stopping to indicate where he had found the cartridges, and ending neatly as they stood in the yard by the cabin. It all seemed plausible to Mulheisen. He was impressed with the thoroughness of Jacky's work and the imagination it required to lead him in the proper direction. He told Jacky so and Jacky shrugged noncommittally.

  “What it don't tell us,” Jacky said, “is who did it. There's some smeared fingerprints on the thirty-two, probably more on this thirty-eight we just found, and maybe that'll do it, but I never found fingerprints to work out the way you want them to.”

  Mulheisen knew what he meant. Fingerprints were helpful, but not definitive. What they had was a man left for dead on a highway, another killed in the mountains, a missing associate of the first man, and possibly a missing associate of the second man. Presumably whoever almost killed Joe Service and then did kill Soper was one of the two missing persons—Helen, or the nameless associate that had been mentioned as a hitchhiker. Mulheisen sighed and let all this speculation drift to the back of his mind for further consideration.

  Sally showed them pretty much what she had observed when she first came up to the cabin, and she confirmed what Jacky had said about the interior. She recounted what she had heard from Mrs. Garland about Joseph Humann and his girlfriend, Helen, about the daily shooting practice, their frequent if relatively brief absences, Humann's general friendliness—everybody around here liked him, though no one knew him very well. Not many people had found Helen very friendly, however.

  Mulheisen thanked her for her help and asked if she'd keep an eye on the place—nothing special, just be attentive to rumors or, if she was passing, kind of look in. If anything came up, she should contact Jacky, or if that wasn't possible, she could call him collect in Detroit. He gave her a card.

  “In goose summer you kill the goose,” Sally said, as they stood in the sunny yard by their cars. “Unfortunately, I didn't raise no goose this year. But I did have a half-interest in a hog. Do you boys like side meat?”

  Mulheisen had no idea what side meat was, but he was desperately hungry after his hike and the bath in the hot springs. He looked inquisitively to Jacky.

  “Not me,” Jacky said firmly. “I got to be getting back. Mul, you can stay if you want to. I can probably come back for you, or maybe you could get a ride.”

  This wasn't satisfactory. It seemed clear to Mulheisen that Sally was interested in him, and he was certainly interested in her, but in the curious way of things, it wasn't quite appropriate for him to come over to her house alone. Regretfully, he begged off and she accepted the situation easily enough. But on the way back into Butte with Jacky, Mulheisen pondered the moral climate that made it possible for a woman to shuck off her clothes in the presence of a complete stranger and hop into a hot springs, but problematic for this same stranger (now rather more familiar to her) to come to her house for dinner.

  “What is side meat, anyway?” he asked Jacky.

  “Oh, that wasn't really intended for you,” Jacky said. “Side meat is side pork, it's uncured bacon. I don't think you'd like
it. But the thing is, see, me ‘n’ Sally had a kind of thing once, but since I got married she's been acting kind of funny. Some guys say ‘side meat,’ meaning a woman on the side. It's crude. I wouldn't say it, but I think Sally was just getting in a dig at me.”

  Mulheisen didn't think that was it at all, but he wasn't sure, and so he kept his own counsel.

  13

  Helen-A-Go-Go

  Helen had no idea how much money she had. She had counted at least half a million dollars, and she knew it was very much more than that. Joe had always stressed the notion that they had too much money, that its very abundance was the primary problem. This had seemed a laughable premise: How could you have too much money? Now that it was all sitting in the back of the little yellow pickup truck, however, it seemed an enormous problem. In Salt Lake City she had contemplated putting it in a bank, but she soon gave up that idea. It couldn't be done, not even simply in the sense of storage, without interest—a deposit box, or boxes . . . too many boxes. Nobody is going to store that much money for you without asking who you are and where you got so much currency, questions that Helen could not safely answer. Anyway, the thought of money simply being stored, not earning anything—wasting away, in fact—was too galling for contemplation.

  Joe had been working on an amusing plan, but he hadn't explained it thoroughly enough for Helen to grasp the essential details. He called it his “Gogol Scam.” When he'd first mentioned it, she'd thought he said “Go-go” and he had laughingly taken that up, afterward describing his occasional absences as “Gotta go go-go, for a couple of days.” He'd been on a “go-go” trip when he got hit. The Gogol joke still puzzled Helen, although he'd tried to explain it. “It's a variation on ‘Dead Souls.’ I'm buying dead uncles,” he explained cryptically, “for the enrichment of their impoverished heirs . . . and, of course, for the even greater enrichment of us.” This had something to do with the fact that the Reagan administration had generously increased the amount of tax-free inheritance to $600,000. As best as Helen could figure it out, Joe was finding heirs who had inherited little or nothing and then striking a deal with them so that they would “inherit,” say, $50,000 while Joe “inherited” $550,000, or so. How he retroactively enriched the dead uncle was not revealed, but she assumed it was as clever and secure as most of his schemes.