Jacky Lee said, “Let's call him Joseph Humann. That's the name he used down in Tinstar. It's the same guy. He's been around the Mountain West for a while under that name. No criminal activity that we can see, but there are hints. His medical bills are being paid by some woman who sends in cashier's checks from all over the West—Salt Lake, Denver, Phoenix, L.A. From what Mul tells me, this could be Helen Sedlacek, a woman last seen with Humann—or Service—in Detroit.”
“We figure she may have killed Carmine,” Mulheisen said. “The point is, they seem to have a lot of money, and the indications are that she is smurfing this money to pay for this Joe Whoever's care, and for her own needs. But she moves fast. We don't have any kind of line on her. I don't think a bulletin to every bank in the West is going to alert people to someone just walking in off the street to buy a cashier's check. But if Joe was trying to make a deal with this Lee and Shivers, that might be something. And then we have this other body—Mario Soper, found on the Humann property.”
Mulheisen sketched for them a possible scenario in which the mob had put out a contract on Joe Service and/or Helen Sedlacek. Somehow they had tracked them to this place, Mario Soper and possibly one other man had been sent, but Soper had been killed, probably by Joe. The other killer had apparently been more successful, and Joe's body was left on the highway by this unknown killer, who had then gone on his merry way.
“Could the second killer have been the woman?” Edwards asked.
“Helen? Why would she attempt to kill Joe, and then why would she be paying his hospital bills?” Lee replied. “We've talked to banks all over the West and they give a pretty good description of this woman, and she is always unaccompanied. No, we think there's another killer.”
The other question was, Who was the Joe Service who had talked to Shivers and Lee at the Flathead Lake meeting? Mulheisen said, “Say it is Joseph Humann. He has a lot of dirty money, a lot of cash, and he's looking for a way to get it out into legitimate uses. This thing about gambling machines may be just the ticket for him. The problem now is, of course, that he's laid up in the hospital for the foreseeable future.”
“The doctors tell me that he's responding to therapy,” Lee said, “but he's still disoriented, can't talk, can't take care of himself. He'll be out of it for weeks, maybe even months to come—if he ever really recovers. Let's face it, the man took a bullet in the head. He's lucky to be alive. Hell, I thought he was dead when I found him.”
Mulheisen knew it was pointless to go see Service again, but he wanted to. There was very little any of the detectives could do at this point, just wait and watch—particularly watch for Helen Sedlacek. “And watch for another killer,” he warned. “By now the mob must know where Service is. If they went to the trouble to send someone after him in the first place, they'll still be interested. Perhaps even more so. Whether they'd send the guy who failed to get him the first time is a moot point.”
Jacky Lee said that the Butte-Silver Bow police couldn't keep a guard on the patient. They simply didn't have the resources.
“Then he's lying up there exposed,” Mulheisen said, shaking his head. “Maybe he is a dead man, after all.”
“Mul, what can I do?” Lee said. “I can talk to the sheriff, maybe he'll let me have a man, but I doubt it.”
“Maybe the Northern Tier could help out,” Edwards suggested. “They seem to have money. We've identified Service as a guy who might be involved in this so-called Asian invasion. Maybe they could pay for a guard.”
Mulheisen agreed to press Antoni on the subject. “The trouble is, it gets me involved in their operation,” he said, “and at this point I have no intention of joining the task force. I've got plenty to do back in Detroit. Besides, I'm running out of cigars. There doesn't seem to be anyplace you can buy a decent cigar around here.”
With these halfhearted, minimal gestures the three men parted. Mulheisen said he would keep in touch, and he would be back out in Montana if anything developed. By this he meant if Joe Service ever came around and could be properly interrogated, or if Helen Sedlacek should make an appearance or was apprehended.
He did return to the hospital and was able to speak to the brain surgeon, who, as he expected, could give him no assurances or even any solid indication of what might happen with Joe Service's recovery.
“I see people who fall out of an apple tree and they never remember a thing,” the doctor said. “Something happens inside, but we can't see what it is. The person is a vegetable, never recovers. Another one, like Deadman, he gets shot and we can see the damage—I was in there for hours, I saw brain damage—and we think, ‘Vegetable, no chance,’ but then he's recovering. He hasn't recovered to the point of talking or indicating that everything is going to be all right, but he has made amazing progress already. He recognizes things, he responds to stimuli, and he's guarding himself.”
This was interesting to Mulheisen. He wanted to know more.
“I'm observing him,” the doctor said, “and I get the impression that he has recovered more than he lets on. Little inadvertent responses that are hard to describe, and a certain look in his eyes at times that seems to indicate that he understands something you say, but then he doesn't respond, as if he were willfully holding back. It isn't too unusual. Most patients are eager to respond, they sense that they are helpless and they want to recover. Mr. Deadman sometimes seems to want to keep it to himself, to husband his successes, to reserve a margin of privacy.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Maybe I am all wrong. Maybe he is doing nothing of the sort. It's just a mannerism, perhaps, something he is not conscious of doing.
“The brain is so enormous, you see. It is a large organ, but its extensions, through thought and memory and so on, are as vast as the universe. We have mapped the physical brain pretty well, by now. If there is injury here"—he tapped the left rear of his skull, approximately where the major injury had occurred to Service—"we know that it affects the motor capability here.” He lifted a presumably dead right hand with his left and waved it. “It should be gone forever, but it recovers. Sometimes. Whatever was in this region"—he tapped his head again—"is presumably destroyed when the tissue is destroyed. But is it? No. So the information is spread out throughout the brain? Hmm. Maybe. Like every other field, in brain studies there are contending factions. One group says the brain is like a complex mosaic. Another says it is more like a field, a gestalt. The mosaic concept is useful, but so is the field. Me? I don't know. I'm watching Mr. Deadman. He makes remarkable recoveries, but he is holding something back, I think.”
Mulheisen went in to see the patient. He was sitting up, staring at nothing. As usual, the pretty little nurse was there. She had been talking when Mulheisen entered, but she stopped in midsentence and after puttering about for a few seconds, she left. Joe Service shifted his eyes to meet Mulheisen's. He seemed to smile. His head was still well wrapped in bandages, but more of it was exposed, and clumps of hair were beginning to hang out through apertures. He looked forlorn, as gormless as a wet hawk, but the eyes still shone brightly.
Did this man have memory? Mulheisen wondered. And if he didn't have any memory, or only imperfectly remembered his crimes, was he still culpable? If he couldn't remember killing a man, could he be held accountable? The act was not altered, but the actor was. What then? It was something to think about.
“Have you ever been in Iowa City, Joe?” Mulheisen asked. He watched the eyes carefully. No apparent response. “Did you ever meet a man named Hal Good? It wasn't his real name. His real name was—” and Mulheisen drew a blank. He couldn't remember the real name of the man from Iowa City, who had been a contract killer for the mob, a man who had been a respectable lawyer in that small city in Heartland, U.S.A., and had misused his position to become a heartless killer. It was embarrassing. “Well, it doesn't matter what his real name was. You would have known him as Hal Good. Somebody tracked Hal Good down and killed him, Joe. Hal Good killed Helen Sedlacek's father. Somebody killed Hal, then somebody—p
robably Helen—killed Carmine, the man who hired Hal to kill her father. It's like an endless series—A leads to B, which leads to C . . . But it has to stop sometime, Joe. I mean to stop it.”
Mulheisen stepped over to the window and looked out. There was a pretty decent view of the mountains to the west. He gazed out at the scattered fluffs of clouds that drifted toward them from beyond the mountains. He felt that he could watch this scene for a long time. Without looking at Joe, he said, “What is the nurse always talking about, Joe? Does it bother you?” He glanced sideways at the bed. There was no response from Joe. “Talk, talk, talk. I hate hospital rooms. You must. You've got to get out of here, Joe.”
On his way out, Mulheisen stopped to talk to the nurse. He explained to her that her “Deadman” was still in danger from the same people who had put him in the hospital in the first place. The police were not capable of guarding him, he told her, so it fell to her and the rest of the staff to keep their eyes open, to report any suspicious behavior around Deadman, any unusual inquiries about him, any visitors. He advised her to contact Jacky Lee if anything happened.
Cateyo accepted all this warning with great seriousness and gravity, Mulheisen was pleased to see. But then she smiled and said, “I'll take good care of him, Sergeant Mulheisen. Nothing can happen to him.”
“What do you mean?” Mulheisen said. “You know nothing about this man, Miss Yoder.”
“I know quite a bit about him, Sergeant. He's a good man.”
“Joe?” Mulheisen gestured with his head toward the room he'd just left. “You don't know Joe Service. This man is a thief, a spy, a betrayer. I think he has killed other men, but I can't prove it. His friends, his associates, are drug peddlers and murderers and corrupters. They aren't good people. And now they're mad at Joe. They want to kill him. They have unlimited resources. They will kill him, eventually. But not on my watch.”
“And not on mine,” she snapped back, the color rising in her cheeks. “And you're wrong about Pau—Joe. He's a good man. Christ was hung with thieves. He associated with people everyone thought were bad. Saul of Tarsus was a persecutor, a spy, a betrayer.”
Mulheisen wanted to laugh, but he didn't. Instead, he just looked at the young woman for a long moment, then nodded and walked away. He stopped at the work station and asked for the head nurse. He tracked Nurse Work down a few minutes later and waited while she finished talking to another young nurse before he drew her aside. “What's with Cate Yoder and Deadman?” he asked.
Nurse Work allowed that Cateyo seemed inordinately attached to the patient. “It happens, sometimes,” she said, “but Miss Yoder is a good nurse, one of our best. I'm confident that she won't let her feelings interfere with her care of the patient. In fact, it may help.”
Mulheisen told her Cateyo's remarks.
“Religious people see everything in terms of their religion,” Nurse Work said. “It doesn't mean anything, any more than . . . well, than a doctor using sports metaphors in describing a patient's prognosis.”
“I hope you're right,” Mulheisen said, “but I'm going to give you my card. If anything unusual happens I want you to call me collect, in Detroit. Will you do that?”
She took the card and slipped it into her uniform pocket, saying she would call. Mulheisen left. He felt uneasy.
15
The Gates of the City
Flying east out of Salt Lake City, Mulheisen realized a simple truth: The modern city is similar to ancient cities. He had taken this route for no particular reason, except that it happened to be quicker in this time slot, and anyway, he thought it would be more interesting to take a different route home, instead of the Billings-Minneapolis route he had come out on (it had nothing to do with the gut-wrenching fighter-jet take-offs and landings on the Butte-Bozeman-Billings run, he told himself). Out of Salt Lake, a much bigger jet climbed out powerfully and majestically over the Wasatch Front, nonstop for Detroit. Mulheisen settled back with his insight about ancient cities and soon recollected a visit to Mexico City, many years before.
In those days he always took his vacation. He had long since quit doing that. He might take an occasional day or two, if he were out of town anyway, and sometimes he took a few days to visit an old friend who had moved to Reno. But he rarely took a formal vacation anymore. But someone had told him that Mexico, D.F., had purchased the old Detroit Street Railways trolley cars, and it occurred to him that he would like to see the Gratiot Avenue car that he used to ride with his father when they would go to a ballgame downtown. This was a very special memory, involving straw hats and men smoking cigars and the first sight of the green field within the tiered walls of Briggs Stadium. So he flew to Mexico City.
He liked it very much, although it was a mess, of course. There were already many too many people. But the city seemed quite livable in the regions that he explored. And he did get to see the old Gratiot Avenue car and ride on it. Unfortunately, it did not go very fast, as it used to do when the motorman got out toward Seven Mile Road and Eight Mile Road. In Mexico City it stopped on every block and it was loaded with people. But he rode it a couple of times anyway and enjoyed it. They hadn't bothered to paint it, apparently. It was still the same pale color with dark green trim. They had painted over the lettering, but “D.S.R.” had bled through, faintly.
One day he got off the trolley and was walking along a big street (he couldn't remember its name) when a voice called out, “Hey, Yank.” He turned and confronted an old Mexican man sitting on the steps of a very large building that housed the national health insurance agency. The old man was dark and wrinkled but dressed in a neat and clean suit of yellowed linen. He had evidently taken off his shoes, but now he slipped them back on. He had no socks. He stood up. He was about five feet four inches, including his panama hat. “I knew you were a Yank,” he said, in very good English.
“You must have spent some time in the States,” Mulheisen said. It was very bright here in the street and hot. He wondered how long this conversation would take and if it meant only handing over a few pesos (the peso was worth much more at this time).
“Yes, I have been in many cities of the United States,” the old man said. “Not just Texas cities or California cities, but also in Chicago, Illinois, and Dayton, Ohio, not to mention Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Have you been in those cities?”
“Yes,” Mulheisen said, “but it is hot. Would you like to go to a cervezeria?”
“No, I can't leave here, but I would appreciate something to drink, if you don't mind.” He gestured at a vendor of soft drinks, not far off. Mulheisen went to get the old man a bottle of warm citron drink.
“Why can't you leave here?” Mulheisen asked when he had brought the drink.
“My daughter works here. I need to see her.”
Hundreds of people were entering and leaving the building constantly. The old man watched them out of the corner of his eye while he talked to Mulheisen.
“How long have you been here?” Mulheisen asked.
This was the fourth day, the old man said. He said he had been a schoolteacher. He taught English. He was also a poet and a short-story writer. He had a collection of his short stories and poems with him, in an old and cracked leather briefcase. They were typed with a very faintly inked ribbon on blue-lined school exposition paper for a three-ring binder, with many “xxxx” markings on several words in each paragraph. They were written in English and had titles such as “The Aged Crone at El Pastor Fido Home.”
“That's where I live,” the old man pointed out. “It is a retirement home, as you would say. It is an infamous place.” The home was located outside the city. The old man had gotten a ride with a market farmer part of the way, then walked the rest. He walked home each evening, after the offices closed.
“Some of these stories have been rejected by The New Yorker and Esquire, even by Playboy magazine.” He showed Mulheisen the printed rejection slips. “The stories are too risqué for Mexican magazines. They are about prostitution, one of the g
reatest evils in the history of civilization. This is a terrible country for censorship. Sometimes the American editors send me five dollars, which I have told them to hide within the sheets of the story, for there are thieves in the post office.”
“Does your daughter know you are waiting?” Mulheisen asked. “Did you call her to tell her that you were coming?”
The old man smiled forbearingly. “You Americans.” He chuckled. “Not everyone has a telephone. The home would never allow me to use their telephone, even if I could pay and if Daisy had a telephone.”
“You could have written to her,” Mulheisen pointed out.
“I don't know which office she works in, or where she lives. She won't tell me. But I will see her today. This is the last door where she could go in.”
Mulheisen didn't know if the old man had ever intercepted his daughter, but he had seen Helen Sedlacek this morning at the Salt Lake City airport. As a policeman he was used to the drill whereby you monitor airports, bus stations, and train stations to intercept wanted criminals, but he also knew that the tactic didn't often succeed, since most people drove cars. Modern cities were too porous when the police were dealing with auto traffic. But he realized now that when it came to air travel, a great hub such as Salt Lake City was like the walled cities of yore. They had just a few gates, and one could watch for travelers there, in just the way that the old man waited patiently for his daughter to go in or come out of one of the four great doorways of the national health building in Mexico City.
At Salt Lake he had just caught a glimpse of Helen on the conveyor system. She was going in the opposite direction. By the time he hopped off the conveyor bearing him toward a different wing of the huge complex, the wing where the gateway to the east was located, and doubled back, he could not find her. But what he soon learned, however, was that she must have gotten on a plane to the north. That was where that gateway lead, the same one he had come in on. She was flying to Butte, perhaps, or Spokane, even Seattle.
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