Hit on the House

by Jon A. Jackson

  “just about every city in the country has problems like Detroit's, to some extent,” Mulheisen said. “You know, Detroit has had longer to deal with these problems. No doubt I'm just a fool, but I suspect that if anyone in the country comes up with any answers to these problems, it'll probably be in Detroit.”

  “You are a fool,” Yvonne said.

  “So, what's your answer?” Mulheisen asked, annoyed.

  “I'm thinking I might get me a gun,” she snapped back. “Anymore of these punks come into this neighborhood, I'm just liable to blow them away.”

  “Whoa!” Jimmy cried.

  “No, no,” Mulheisen pleaded. “You can't think like that. That doesn't get us anywhere.”

  Yvonne laughed, sitting back triumphantly in her easy chair. “Look at you two! My, oh my. Mama say she gon’ get her a gun, and two big ol’ mens—both of whom are packing—say ‘Whoa!’ “

  “Actually, Yvonne has a different idea,” Jimmy said, sitting forward. “Tell him, hon.”

  Her idea was simple, perhaps simplistic. She was one of the organizers of a group that was planning to push for a new form of urban government, one that would not just oversee the city of Detroit but would embrace all the outlying suburbs and towns.

  “You white folks have run out on Detroit,” she said, “but you still need it, to make money out of it. We'll have something called the Greater Detroit Urban Zone. Reorganize all the services, realign the taxes, and cut through all this bull crap of all these little towns that ring the city—Warren, Harper Woods, the Grosse Pointes (why in hell should there be five Grosse Pointes?), Royal Oak, Ferndale, Hamtramck, Center Line (Center Line!). . . Why there's dozens of them. Already the police have so much bureaucratic red tape to get through when someone robs a store on Eight Mile Road—it's just crazy. The zone will take in Wayne County, Oakland County, Washtenaw . . . and we'll have a CEO instead of a mayor, . . . a zone commission instead of a city council . . .”

  She went on for a considerable time, quite excited and exhilarated. Mulheisen listened, fascinated but skeptical. Schemes of this sort had been bandied about for decades. She was right, of course; the present system was insane and part of the problem itself. It would have to change, and it was in transition now, but Yvonne was working for radical, abrupt change—go to bed in Royal Oak and wake up in the zone. And finally, it appeared that Yvonne herself was planning to be the CEO.

  When at last Yvonne tore herself away to prepare for her next day's classes (she taught at Macomb County Community College), the two men went down to the basement, to Jimmy's den. This was a room that the previous owner had partitioned off from the conventional part of the basement (washer, drier, clothesline, laundry tubs, hot-water heater, furnace, heating ducts) but had never really finished. Jimmy had paneled the walls with sheets of pressed composition board that was patterned to look like expensive wood—rosewood, perhaps, or something more exotic. It did look like wood, except for a much too slick, plastic finish. He had a thick carpet on the floor, and he'd furnished the room with an old, but passable couch and a couple of easy chairs. The lighting was recessed into an acoustic-tiled ceiling. It was almost cozy, except for an ineradicable dampness and a certain faint odor of detergents.

  Jimmy kept his computer down here, on a desk in one corner, but the main feature of the room was an elaborate stereo system and floor-to-ceiling racks of jazz recordings, mostly old LP's but now more and more CD's. He was a complete jazz buff, one of his most attractive traits in Mulheisen's eyes. Jimmy liked just about any kind of jazz, but particularly the small groups that had flourished throughout and after the swing era, groups that were led by Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry—the powerful, smooth, and fluent players who could break your heart with the blues or a ballad and then swing you silly. He also possessed a clarinet, on which he sporadically practiced, and he could play a pretty decent low-register imitation of Benny Carter on “Just a Mood.”

  Jimmy corresponded with several jazz record shops across the country, and now he eagerly put on a recently obtained recording of some forgotten armed forces “Jubilee” broadcasts from the forties, featuring singers like Savannah Churchill and Helen Humes with the Carter band and others. Mulheisen would normally have been delighted with this record, but he was distracted and troubled, not just by Yvonne's extended rap, but by the cumulative effect of an investigation gone sour and, probably more important, although he was not yet openly admitting it, the news of Bonny's illness. He also longed for a cigar, but that was not something that could be seriously contemplated in Yvonne Marshall's house, even in her husband's basement den.

  The fact was Mulheisen was very close to depression, a state he greatly feared. From early youth he had fought depression, not frequently, but memorably. In his adult life he'd had at least two episodes of profound depression. They were devastating. He had learned from experience that alcohol was not a good idea in this premonitory state; he surprised Jimmy by refusing a drink from a carefully sequestered bottle of Jameson whiskey.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “I told you before that I'd screwed up this investigation. Well, it's gone even further than I told you then.”

  “What do you mean, Mul?” Jimmy was alarmed. Mulheisen didn't look well. He had grown accustomed to his mentor's occasional withdrawals into distraction and uncommunicative rumination, but this seemed more serious. “Are you all right?”

  “I'm OK,” Mulheisen said, “but I've got to get this straightened out. It's Lande. There is starting to be just a lot of little things popping up that seem to point to a connection between Lande and the Sedlacek killing and the Tupman killing.” And with that he began to pour out the whole business—Lande's name in Tupman's book, his acquaintance with Germaine Kouras, his strange offer at the dinner party, Bonny's mention of a woman named Germaine—all of it, including Mulheisen's own connection with Bonny.

  “The thing is, Jimmy, every time I get around Bonny and Lande, I seem to get kind of confused. I can't focus on what I'm supposed to be doing. It's as if my judgment were clouded or something . . . I can't put a finger on it. I mean to ask certain questions, push for answers, but I don't. I get distracted. I'm sure it has something to do with Bonny. I think I can work through it, but I need your help. I should have confided in you from the start, but I didn't, and then it was easier to just keep it to myself. Under the circumstances, I'd just as soon keep it between us—after all, it may be nothing, and if certain people got the idea that I coddled this Lande because of an interest in his wife . . . well, it'll just complicate things.”

  Jimmy understood completely. In fact, he hastened to assure Mulheisen that he was probably making too much of it. He was confident, he said, that the personal side of it needn't be revealed. “The fact is, Mul, any other detective would simply have written Lande out of the picture long before this. But you've kept at it, I guess because you must have unconsciously suspected something. There's nothing wrong with that.”

  “You don't think so?” Mulheisen felt relieved. He felt much better. “Why don't you put on that old Artie Shaw record,” he suggested, “the one with ‘Summit Ridge Drive'?” This piece never failed to cheer Mulheisen up.

  “You realize, Mul,” Jimmy said when the mood had lightened sufficiently, “that we really don't have a ghost of a fart on Lande? What's really bugging you about this guy . . . I mean, apart from Bonny?”

  Mulheisen thought about it for a moment. “There's a couple of things,” he said finally. “There's the money. Every time I talk to someone, the amount has grown . . . a couple million, five, ten . . . soon it'll be fifty. Then I saw some boxes at Lande's shop, computer equipment presumably, labeled for the Cayman Islands. I didn't think anything of it, but then there's this stuff about Big Sid maybe going to South America, possibly with a stop en route. Now the Kouras woman has split, also for the south. And then there's Lande babbling something at that dinner about how money isn't just a fifty-dollar bill. Frankly, I don't know what he meant by it, but I took h
is point—nowadays it isn't really necessary to ever actually see money, in currency, as long as the crucial people and—probably most important—the machines are convinced it exists.”

  “Sort of like that Wettling case,” Jimmy said, referring to a murder case Mulheisen had got drawn into through a now-retired partner, a strange character named Grootka. Wettling, a bank official who had been an auditor, had invaded his bank's computer system with his own program, which made minute withdrawals and deposits in the customers’ accounts at whirlwind speed, an essentially undetectable act that provided a more-or-less constant balance of thousands of dollars in an account to which Wettling had routine access. The account was never enormous, but it was like a magical pitcher—no matter how much you poured out, it remained full.

  “I hadn't thought of that,” Mulheisen said, “and I guess that isn't really what I have in mind, but the idea is similar. I really don't have any notion of how it would apply here. It probably doesn't. The trouble is Lande. He's supposed to be a computer genius, but when you talk to him, it's hard to believe it. Well, you saw him. He's rough, crude ... he hardly seems literate. But evidently he's done very well for himself.” He told Jimmy about the golf course.

  “If he's rebuilding a golf course, some kind of development project,” Jimmy pointed out, “that would be an ideal way to make money disappear.”

  “Washing money?” Mulheisen was skeptical. “This is sort of washing money in reverse. Presumably Sid and Tupman, and maybe others, were skimming extensively, collecting actual cash that now has to be got out of the country so that whoever has inherited Sid and Tupman's scam can make use of it in South America. It's bound to be complicated. It seems almost easier just to smuggle the damned cash out of the country.”

  “No,” said Jimmy, “it's really not that difficult with computers. I've been working on programming, and it's amazing what you can do if you just take the trouble to devise a program.”

  “If they're washing money, we have to go to the feds,” Mulheisen pointed out. They both knew what that meant—inevitably the case would be taken out of their hands. And like all local cops they had no confidence whatever in the federal agencies’ ability to accomplish anything without totally screwing it up.

  Jimmy came up with an interesting thought: “How do we know that the mob hasn't already found the money?”

  “Andy Deane assures me that the word is still out on the street. Anybody who can come up with a lead to the money can make big bucks from the bosses. And, they say, Carmine seems to be throwing a lot of weight around. Andy hasn't seen it—nobody is filing a complaint—but apparently people are being roughed up. They want answers.”

  “Which I guess is why they blasted Tupman,” Jimmy said.

  Mulheisen shook his head. “No, there's something weird about that. Nobody tossed Tupman's apartment, you notice. If the mob thought Tupman had something to tell them, wouldn't they have shaken the place down? And I still don't buy the idea of sending a single hit man to take down five guys. No, it doesn't compute, as you would say.”

  They talked for a little while longer and mutually admired Jimmy's treasured recording of “Down the Road a Piece” by Freddie Slack-Jimmy never played the actual recording anymore, just a well-filtered and cleaned tape (he used videotape rather than the common cassette stuff—it seemed to offer more possibilities). And Mulheisen went home feeling infinitely better, the dark beast at least temporarily at bay.

  Fifteen

  Bonny looked pale and weak in the hospital bed, a third smaller somehow. Her face had bones that Mulheisen couldn't remember. The doctor was just leaving and Lande went with him. Bonny beckoned Mulheisen to the bedside and took his hand.

  “How have you been, Mul?”

  “Me? I'm fine. How are you doing?”

  “'I guess I'm doing as well as expected,” she said, “but I feel wrecked.”

  “You look pretty good,” he lied. Actually, he was appalled. It hadn't been long since he'd seen her, and although he hadn't known she was ill and thus had not been looking for signs of illness, now she looked radically changed. It didn't seem possible.

  “How's our investigation going?” she asked.

  Mulheisen sighed. “Not too good, I'm afraid. I can't find Germaine Kouras. She seems to have flown the country.”

  “Well, that's good news.”

  “I think she's flown, Bonny; I don't know it. The airlines have no record of her leaving. Of course, she might have left under another name, but if she was actually leaving the country, as she told everybody she was, she'd have had to use her passport. She could have flown to, say, Miami, and then used her passport, but I really don't have the facilities to check that extensively.”

  Bonny frowned. “As long as she's gone, that's good enough for me,” she said. “Why are you so concerned?”

  “There's more to it, Bonny. We think she was involved in some kind of scam with Sid Sedlacek.” He pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed. “Bonny, . . . I have to know . . . how much do you and Lande know about Sid and Carmine?”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, then said, “Forget Germaine, Mul. She's not important.” She looked away, at the rain on the window, then said, “I've always loved you, Mul.”

  “Bonny, . . . don't.”

  “I always thought you were just terrific, even when you were a skinny kid. You weren't a big jock or anything, like Jack Street and those guys, or the class president, . . . but you were just this terrific guy. Everybody knew it. You weren't even a brain.” She uttered a whispery little flutter that was a kind of laugh, and she patted his hand. “Oh, you were smart enough, Mul. But the point was everybody in the school respected you, even the teachers. You had character.”

  Mulheisen was embarrassed. He shook his head.

  “I know you never loved me,” she said. “You liked me, though, didn't you?”

  “Oh, yes, I liked you.”

  “I knew you did. Maybe you lusted after me. But I think sometimes that you're one of the few people who have any idea who I am. That's a kind of love, I think. Now don't . . . oh, come on, don't get so damn embarrassed.”

  Mulheisen's eyes blurred. “Oh yeah,” he said, in a husky voice, “I like you, Bonny. I always liked you, more than you know.”

  He held her slender little hand, which gripped his passionately. She had to close her eyes, and her face became tight, but after a moment it relaxed, and she looked at him and managed a wan smile. “Love is very different from like, Mul. Like has reasons and logic, . . . it makes sense.”

  Mulheisen nodded agreement, but Bonny stared at him until he dropped his eyes. The whispery flutter of her laugh made him look up. She said, “Maybe you're stupid after all.”

  Stung, Mulheisen looked at her indignantly.

  “. . . As the rest of them—men, I mean,” she said, modifying the accusation. “Maybe men can't help being stupid. Maybe it's a trade-off in evolution for being larger and stronger, more powerful . . .” She glanced away at the gray skies outside her window, the black, wet limbs of a tree on which there were tiny leaf buds. Half a dozen miserable starlings hunched along the branches, their beaks startlingly yellow against their bedraggled feathers. Suddenly they all flew. “This has been the wettest spring,” she said. “I wish . . .” Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked and one ran down her cheek. Mulheisen wiped it away.

  “Birds learned how to fly,” she said, speculatively. “That was a very great trick, learning to fly. But they ended up with tiny brains and hollow bones.” She glanced slyly at Mulheisen. “You're pretty smart, Mul, but you can't overcome gender stupidity.”

  Mulheisen decided to take this jocularly. “At least I don't have hollow bones. Anyway, if women are so smart, how come they marry men?”

  Bonny's face darkened instantly, and she snapped, “You know nothing!”

  Mulheisen was mortified by his gaffe, and he immediately tried to mollify her with assurances that he was just kidding. She impatiently pulled her hand
free from his. Then Lande returned, evidently from conferring with the doctor.

  Lande was quite changed. He was friendly and cheerful. “Well, the doc says it looks pretty good,” he told both of them. “Doc says you'll be up in no time, Bon. Looks like they got it all. A coupla weeks of therapy, and you'll be good as new.”

  “That's great,” Mulheisen said. He hoped it was true. Lande seemed to believe it.

  Lande nodded and said, “Yup, looks like they got it in time. Boy, the things they can do these days!” He turned to Mulheisen. “So, . . . how's the cop business, Mul? Say, don't Bon look great?”

  “She looks fine,” Mulheisen agreed, but Bonny had turned her head away and was staring out the window. It was raining again. Mulheisen gestured with his head toward the door, and Lande nodded. “I've got to run, Bonny,” Mulheisen said. “I'll try to stop in later.” She smiled and he left.

  Lande caught up with him in the lounge. The cheerful look had entirely vanished.

  “No hope,” Mulheisen said, not even questioning, and Lande only nodded, chewing on a thumbnail.

  “They want to do chemo,” Lande said. “But what's the point? Maybe she gets to stick around a few more weeks.”

  “How long otherwise?” Mulheisen asked. His heart felt like it was bursting. He couldn't breathe very well. He had to sit down.

  Lande stared at him, stricken. Perhaps he had only just now let himself look the horror in its face. “A month,” he said, in disbelief.

  “A month! But, my god, man, . . . they only just . . .”

  “It's too far gone.” Lande could barely utter the words.

  “A month?” Mulheisen couldn't believe it either.

  “Maybe less.”

  Mulheisen struggled to his feet. He felt panicky. He had to get out of there.