No Man's Dog: A Detective Sergeant Mulheisen Mystery (Detective Sergeant Mulheisen Mysteries)

by Jon Jackson

  “You don’t mind cigars?” Mulheisen inquired.

  “Not at all,” Luck said. “I’ll join you in a minute.”

  Mulheisen lingered in the kitchen, politely, while Luck ground the coffee and put it to drip in the automatic maker. The two of them stood and sipped the whiskey and Mulheisen offered him a La Donna Detroit. Luck accepted it graciously. “I was going to offer you a Cuban,” he said. “Maybe later, eh? I’ve never seen this brand.”

  “An outfit in Detroit makes them,” Mulheisen said. “I know the people. Supposedly they’re made with Cuban tobacco, but I suspect it’s Dominican. Rolled by Cuban émigrés. They’re not bad.” He clipped them and they lit up.

  “Not bad,” Luck agreed. “All right.” They both puffed. “Ain’t this the life?” Luck said. “All my own provender, except for the wine and the coffee . . . and your cigars, of course. Now what’s this about your mother? What does it have to do with me, Mul? Hey, let’s go in the living room and get comfortable.”

  He turned on a couple of standing reading lamps and settled into a chair near the stove. Mulheisen sat across from him on a couch. Mulheisen glanced out the window and realized that the yard was bathed in light.

  “Comes on automatically,” Luck remarked. “Now, you were saying, about your mother.”

  Mulheisen didn’t really know how to proceed. “Well, she was going to a meeting of the county commissioners. I don’t know what it was about, exactly, a public hearing, I think, about some kind of development project. She’s a bird-watcher, you see . . .”

  “Ah. One of those radical environmentalists,” Luck said jokingly.

  “Something like that,” Mulheisen said. “Anyway, she left something in the bus and went back to get it and a bomb went off. It killed the driver, but it just stunned her. Stunned her pretty badly. A few bruises, a few cuts. That healed up.” He went on, describing the situation briefly.

  Luck sipped at his whiskey. “You ready for some coffee, Mul?” When Mulheisen nodded he got up and went into the kitchen, returning with a couple of mugs full of coffee. “Black all right?” he asked. “More Dickel?” He poured their whiskey glasses full.

  When he was seated again, he said, “I’m glad your mother’s okay. It must have been quite an ordeal for her. Tell me, does she remember much of the, uh, event?”

  Mulheisen said that so far she didn’t. She remembered going to the meeting, but as for the rest, how she got out to the bus, and so on, he’d reconstructed it from talking to the investigators.

  Luck nodded sympathetically. “Maybe she’ll remember more, later on,” he said. “But where do I come in? Oh, don’t bother. I know all about it, Mul. I don’t mean to act dumb. You’ll have to forgive me. The feds came to see me. They tried to lay it on me. It was all bullshit, of course. Nothing came of it. I haven’t heard a word about it since. But how did you hear about me? I’d have thought they’d given up on that angle.”

  Mulheisen sipped the coffee. “Your name came up,” he said. “Along with several others, of course. I just thought . . . well, I don’t know what I thought. None of the other suspects were available to me, but you were in Michigan . . .”

  “So you thought you’d drive up here and see what I was like, what was going on? Something like that?” Luck sat back, at ease, and puffed his cigar. He looked at it. “Not bad.” Then he leaned forward and looked at Mulheisen carefully. “But tell me, Mul, you say you quit the force to look after your mother. So am I to understand that this is strictly a personal thing, unofficial?”

  Mulheisen lifted his eyebrows, a gesture of apology. “I was a cop, Mr. Luck—”

  “Call me Imp, Mul. Everyone always has.”

  “Anyway, I quit, true. But naturally, I know some of the people who are investigating.”

  Luck sat back then. “Thanks for being open about it, Mul. But let me confess . . . I recognized your name. I’ve seen your name in the papers. I was being a little paranoid, forgive me. I just wondered how far you’d take the undercover routine.”

  “I’m not undercover, Imp. I’m just—as you say—up here to see what you were like, see if I couldn’t get a sense of what this is all about, as far as it involves you.”

  “Well, it doesn’t involve me, at all,” Luck said, firmly. “I hope you believe that. It’s true. I don’t know anything about what happened down there. But the way it is, something like that happens anywhere I’m near and the cops come calling.” He shrugged. “I don’t like it—who would? But there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it.”

  “’Anywhere near,’” Mulheisen said. “How near were you?”

  “I was in Michigan. That’s near enough for the federales. As a matter of fact, I was probably, oh, about a hundred and fifty miles away. Fishing. Caught some good walleyes. Well, I guess you’ve seen my file. My dossier. You’d know all that.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m not on the force. My old associates might talk a bit, but they’re not sharing their files with me. All I know is your name. I can’t say I’d ever heard anything substantive about you, before or since.”

  There was a brief silence. Luck seemed to digest this information, such as it was. Then he said, “So where are we? That it? Satisfied?”

  Mulheisen just looked at him and drew on the cigar. “What’s your take on this, Luck?”

  “You mean, who did it? I don’t know. Arabs, maybe. Though why they’d bomb a bunch of environmentalists, I don’t know. Maybe they were after somebody else, some other agenda.”

  “Arabs doesn’t make any sense to me, either,” Mulheisen said. “But what about bombing? What do you feel about that?”

  “Unofficially? I’m agin it,” Luck said. “Oh, to be frank, I’m not philosophically opposed to violent actions, not categorically. When something of importance is at stake. I don’t know what could have been at stake here. Like I say, it may not have been aimed at your mother and her group at all.”

  “What about those fellows at the World Trade Center, or at Oklahoma City?” Mulheisen inquired.

  “Two different things,” Luck said. “The 9–11 thing, that was an Arab thing. My understanding of this al-Qaeda group is that they’re radical Muslims, terrorists with a complicated religious and political ax to grind. They don’t like the U.S. We’re too powerful, too secular. They want us out of their world and their governments aren’t doing anything about it. Oklahoma City, now, that’s a little different. I knew some of the boys who were involved in that. If you’d read my dossier, which you say you haven’t, you’d know that I got questioned pretty thoroughly on that one, too. Pretty thoroughly.” He looked grim.

  “What’s your take on it?” Mulheisen asked.

  “You’ll laugh,” Luck said, “but I do believe it was the U.S. government. Clinton needed an incident, to take the heat off the Waco mess. It was supposed to be a right-wing conspiracy that the FBI would miraculously intercept at the last minute. Oh, there would be a small explosion, maybe. The trouble was, they hired the wrong guys, got it all screwed up. It was a sting, in a sense. They set up a phony front that promoted the whole thing to these guys. But the feds set up something like this and then they forget that the people who bought into the plan are in it for real, they want to do it. To them, it’s not a scheme, you see? The feds slip into the habit of regarding it as an operation, while their dupes don’t think that way.”

  Mulheisen nodded. He’d had some similar problems with federal agencies, a conflict of purpose. “But were the bombers aware that it was a federal project?” he wondered aloud.

  “Well, we can’t be sure, can we?” Luck said. “The other problem was that the feds didn’t realize that these guys were really capable. They knew how to build a bomb—a couple of tons of nitrates in a rental truck. McVeigh knew how to do that. I’d guess that at least one of the other guys was on to the real nature of the project. Not Terry Nichols, but the so-called Mr. X. He was an undercover agent.”

  “Did you know any of these people?”

  �
�I knew Nichols. I’d met him at some meetings of patriotic groups. The man is a patriot. I truly believe he intended to pull the plug at the last minute, only Mr. X and McVeigh jumped the gun. I can see you’re skeptical.”

  “It sounds kind of complicated,” Mulheisen offered.

  “These things get complicated, inevitably,” Luck said. “McVeigh wasn’t too complicated. The key is Mr. X. You start down a road, an enterprise based on deception, people working at cross purposes. It’s like Watergate: a simple little break-in that gets complicated, because of a janitor who notices some tape over the latch of a door that’s supposed to be locked. In this case, you have a guy like Mr. X, who starts out as part of a double cross, but somewhere down the line maybe he starts thinking like the others, gets caught up in their enthusiasm, or maybe he’s even converted to the cause.”

  Luck laughed lightly. “If you’re a cynic, you might believe he got to thinking he’d be the star of this show, be the hero who takes down the bombers. Only, McVeigh is a little too sharp for him and he ends up getting blown to bits.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” Mulheisen said.

  Luck, who had gotten more intense as he explained it, suddenly sat back and smiled. “Well, it’s just a theory. Totally speculative. Nobody can know for certain now. Mr. X got blown to pieces. Only his leg was found. Which, of course, the FBI passed off as the leg of one of the innocent victims.”

  “What about McVeigh? Was he just a nut, or what?”

  “McVeigh wasn’t a nut,” Luck said, sweeping that suggestion away with a contemptuous gesture of his hand. “McVeigh was a soldier. He knew what he was doing. The way he saw it, our government had taken to attacking innocent civilians, at Ruby Ridge, Waco. And not just some rogue elements in the government, but the very highest officials—the attorney general, the president. And what was the result? The Anti-terrorist Act, which directly impacts on everyone’s civil liberties. So, was he crazy? Is it okay to blow up innocent people in the pursuit of a noble cause? I don’t know. Are there innocent people?”

  “There were children there,” Mulheisen said.

  “Half a million children have died in Iraq because of our pursuit of oil, so Americans can drive SUVs. And that was before the war, just from the embargo. Is that a noble cause? I don’t think McVeigh thought that there would be children at the Murrah building. I’m not saying it would have deterred him if he’d known, just that he didn’t seem to have known it. But, hey! You’re running low. Let me get you another George Dickel.”

  When he’d poured them another large jolt of whiskey and had sat down again, Mulheisen said, “You seem to respect these guys, McVeigh and Nichols, or their philosophy. What’s your philosophy?”

  “I am . . . ,” Luck started to say, but hesitated, seemingly to gather his thoughts, “. . . let’s say I’m a libertarian anarchist.” He smiled disarmingly. “I’m a realist. I figure folks will act in what they think is their best interests. It doesn’t always seem logical to the outsider, looking on. McVeigh believed in what he was doing. He was bound to do it as well as he could, and he was quite competent. He was a patriot. He believed in America. I’m a patriot, too.”

  “Would you have done that?” Mulheisen asked. “I mean, if you’d been invited in?”

  “No. I’m more of a realist than McVeigh. I’m sure it would have seemed too . . . too far-fetched. I don’t think the federal government is going to be changed by blowing up the odd building. I don’t think they would get the intended message. I think you have to work in more fundamental, political ways, get people thinking your way. The public wasn’t positively influenced by that act.”

  “But you said that you believed that violence was sometimes a legitimate act,” Mulheisen said.

  “Well, the Boston Tea Party seemed to have an effect,” Luck said. “It wasn’t all that violent, perhaps, but a lot of valuable property was destroyed. Unions believe in strikes, and they sometimes result in pretty brutal actions.”

  Mulheisen was piqued. He almost blurted out that the violence was usually enacted upon the strikers. But he didn’t respond. It wasn’t his purpose to provoke Luck. Instead, he remarked, almost offhandedly, “Quite often people don’t act in their own best interest. Don’t you agree? They do things that they know damn well they shouldn’t do, that will harm them. It’s as if they can’t help themselves.”

  Luck stared at him. He seemed stunned. “You mean . . . like compulsive behavior?” Then he seemed relieved. “Well, that’s just psychology,” he said. “I was talking about something else entirely, not about abnormal states.”

  “No, I didn’t mean ‘abnormal states,’” Mulheisen said mildly. “I was just thinking of the guy who, let’s say, suddenly does something erratic. He hardly knows why he did it, but it wasn’t to his advantage, maybe it even was obviously to his disadvantage, but he does it anyway. And when you confront him with it, later, he often starts by outrageously denying it, although it was well observed, but then he quickly subsides, saying ‘I don’t know why I did that. I knew it was wrong. I could have stopped, but I went straight on and did it.’ I’ve run into that phenomenon in my work fairly often.”

  Luck leaned forward, obviously interested. “For instance?” he demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was just musing,” Mulheisen said. “It’s difficult to think of an example, right offhand. It typically comes up in confessions.”

  “Ah, it’s a kind of alibi,” Luck said, sitting back. “A way of exonerating yourself—’I don’t know what came over me. I must have been out of my head.’”

  “No, it’s not that,” Mulheisen said. “Okay, here’s a classic example. Let’s say a guy steals, he embezzles from his company. But he gets away with it. Nobody knows, the lost money is accounted for in some other plausible fashion and everyone forgets about it. Five years later, he’s chatting with his boss, and all of a sudden he blurts out, ‘I stole that money.’ I’m called in, I talk to him, and after he’s given me all the details, I ask him: ‘Why did you confess?’ First he says he doesn’t know, but when pressed he’ll often say he couldn’t help himself. It suddenly occurred to him that the only way anyone would ever know is if he told. And from the moment he thought that, he felt compelled to tell. He might give hints, allusions. People don’t pay attention. Finally, he just blurts it out. ‘I did it.’”

  Luck said, “That’s just compulsive behavior. If you’re suggesting that about McVeigh, he wasn’t a compulsive person. He knew what he was doing.”

  Mulheisen nodded, as if conceding that point, and said, “Well, it’s not uncommon. Anyway, you’ve given me something to think about. I appreciate it. But let me ask you: what kind of thing would motivate you to act in . . . oh, let’s say, a violent way?”

  “Whoa! That’s a leading question.” Luck grinned broadly. “Well, as you’re no longer a cop, I suppose it’s innocent enough. Oh, I’d say what would motivate me is about what would motivate most folks—say, the government, or someone, tried to take my land, and I found I had no legal recourse. Then, well, it’s purely hypothetical, but I might be driven to take action.”

  Mulheisen nodded.

  “How about another drink?” Luck said.

  “No, no, I’m fine. I’ve had enough.” Mulheisen stood up. “I’ve got to drive. I’m not so sure I can find my way back to town.”

  “Hey, you can stay here,” Luck said. “I’ve been enjoying this. I don’t often get interesting folks out here, not that I’m lonely, or some kind of hermit. But I’ve got a great little guest room fixed up, out in the barn. It’s not like being in a barn, believe me. All the comforts of home, running water, bath. I make a hell of a breakfast.”

  “No, that’s nice of you to offer,” Mulheisen said, “but I really have to get going. I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’m sure you have stuff to take care of. I’d like to talk again, though, maybe in a day or two.”

  “Oh? Still not satisfied? I’m sure you’ll find I’m pretty much what I said I
am.”

  “You didn’t exactly say what you were,” Mulheisen noted. “Other than an anarchist libertarian.”

  “That’s just philosophically,” Luck said, “in theory, or by disposition. In reality, in practice, that is, I’ve been a carpenter, a pilot, a federal employee. I worked for one of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs, teaching adult literacy . . . hell, I’ve done everything. I’m also a student of history, of politics, economics, you name it.”

  “A pilot? Were you in the service?”

  “Not really, not the regular service. I flew for a private outfit, contracts in Southeast Asia, later in Central America. You won’t find it in the dossier but it was government work.”

  “Sounds important,” Mulheisen said.

  “It was important for me,” Luck said. “Kind of opened my eyes, gave me some insight into how our government really works. But it’s not something I can discuss. Yeah, I’ve done a lot of things. Worked for the Forest Service at one time. Heck, I’m even an environmentalist.”

  Mulheisen smiled. He didn’t show his fangs much. “You are?”

  “Well, a naturalist, of sorts, anyway. I don’t go along with most of these radical environmental groups, naturally. But, hey, I’m a bird-watcher, if not a tree hugger, exactly.”

  “A bird-watcher!” Mulheisen was surprised.

  “Heck, yeah,” Luck said. “I know all these birds around here, practically by their first names. Hey, you know the weirdest thing I ever saw? I was in the woods one day, out back of here, and I heard this buzzing in the ground. Really! It was amazing! Just like a giant beehive or something, a regular dynamo. I was standing on a little hill, sort of like a mound, in a clearing. So I’m looking around, trying to figure out what’s going on, and I notice all these birds flying around, silver martins. It’s a kind of swallow we have. And I’ll be damned if I don’t see one of ‘em dive right into the ground!”

  “I’ll be darned,” Mulheisen said, intrigued.