Hit on the House

by Jon A. Jackson

  “Well, I'd better check him out,” Joe said.

  “Sure, you be the judge. And listen, Joe, I'm serious about the biz. What you say makes sense to me. I think we're on the same wavelength. We've got to overhaul this operation. We've gone stale. Relying too much on muscle, not enough on brains. We've got to take back the street. You could figure very large with us.”

  Joe shook his head. “No, Carm. I'm too young. To go down, that is. Because that's what I see—you guys are going down.” He looked almost sad. “I can't afford to get involved with an outfit like this. A year from now, maybe two . . . you're gone. It's going to go down, Carm, believe me.”

  Joe picked up the manila envelope and tucked it under his arm. “Thanks for this, Carm. I'll let you know on the other as soon as something comes up.”

  As soon as he'd left, Carmine buzzed his secretary and said, “Get someone in here to fix the bathroom.”

  “What's wrong with the bathroom?” she wanted to know.

  “Get someone,” he snapped. “And get Mitch on the phone.”

  A minute later the phone warbled. “Mitch,” she said. “The plumber's on his way.”

  “Get a carpenter,” Carmine replied. “Hello, Mitch? Hey, put that business on hold. I think I'm onto something. I was just talking to Service, he's got some ideas. But I'm gonna need a hitter before it's all over. Top of the line. Price is no limit. I'll let you know.”

  Seventeen

  Bonny looked dreadful. There was no other way to put it. The course of her disease was so rapid that even the doctors were surprised. Mulheisen and Lande were stunned. Neither had been prepared for this. It was like a stop-action film of an apple rotting. Not only was she markedly changed each day, but it began to seem to the two men that they could see almost hourly changes. The chief doctor, a youngish man, was himself a little shaken, and he did his best to ease the situation for them with explanations. Bonny needed no discussion; she was all too aware of what was happening to her. Obviously the disease had been much further advanced than the original assessment had indicated. It was in the lymph system and out of any prayer of control—the young doctor called it wildfire.

  Bonny's skin was frankly yellow now, and ghastly lumps distorted her jaw and cheekbones. Mulheisen quickly learned not to see these hideous distortions in order to actually see her. When he returned to her room from having slept himself or after attending to some business, he was relieved if he found her asleep, as she often was. It made it easier to approach her, to accept what had happened in just the few hours he'd been gone. Painkilling drugs were no longer very effective, and they had begun to provide her with cannabis and hefty “cocktails”—pure grain alcohol in a blend of fruit juices. She was always a little high, if not drunk. And she was curiously cheerful, though often her grotesque face was swept by a visible curtain of pain, reminding Mulheisen of the wind blowing across the reeds that he often watched from his bedroom window, looking toward the river.

  He would not have thought that mere physical transformation would make such a difference. It seemed a mockery of his firmly held belief that his affection for Bonny was not simply lust for her body. That body no longer existed and, in any case, had not been the glorious body of youth for some time (though it was undoubtedly still very attractive less than two weeks before).

  They often passed hours together, saying nothing. If Lande weren't present, Mulheisen would sit by her bed, holding her listless hand, which was like parchment—there was no warmth in it. She lay there, seemingly oblivious to his presence, eyes shut or staring at the ceiling, occasionally sipping at her cocktail. She was drifting away, her mind focused on some other place. Once in a while she would turn slowly to look at him and, after a moment, would seem to recognize him. She would smile and say, “Why, hello, Mul,” which she had already said a half hour before. Sometimes, in clearer moments, she would hold her skeletal hand before her face, as if to shield him from the horror of her deformity.

  Mulheisen knew he should be talking to Lande, questioning him about Big Sid and Carmine. But he'd promised Bonny, and she was all that mattered now. Early on she had given him a few tidbits that she'd wormed out of Lande, but they weren't very specific. Sid had asked Gene for some help with a money deal. They were all going to make a lot of money, Gene had told her, and they would go to live in the Bahamas, at the golf resort. They'd lie on the beach all day and drink large, frosty drinks made from exotic fruits. They were still going to do it, Gene would tell her. As soon as she got well enough to travel, they'd get away. There was some kind of miracle cure the doctors “down there” had—the American Medical Association wouldn't let it be used, he told her, because they wouldn't have any business, and the big drug companies were in on it. Bonny didn't pay any attention to any of this, although she told Mulheisen that it would be nice to get away from all the cold and rain.

  Mulheisen was spending almost all his time at the hospital, and so was Lande, of course. Mulheisen watched Lande and Bonny. They would all sit together in the little room, occasionally taking a break but really not talking much. Lande talked about “gawf” and his inventions, about plans to build a new golf course somewhere “in the islands.” He was going to teach Mulheisen how to golf.

  Once in a while Mulheisen would take a few hours to take care of business at the precinct and to catch up on other work, but not for long. He asked Andy Deane to make a serious effort to find Germaine Kouras. Nothing had come up yet, but Andy was now convinced that Kouras had not left the country after all. But nobody had seen her. She'd simply disappeared. The pressure on the street had eased apparently. The muscle stuff, anyway, according to Andy. But somebody was looking—that was the new word—some slick guy from the West was asking a lot of questions.

  A couple of times Lande asked Mulheisen if he'd mind staying with Bonny while he took off for an hour or two to “do some business.” Mulheisen readily agreed, but before he would let Lande go, he would excuse himself. “I'd better call in and let the precinct know I'll be here for a while . . .”—and Jimmy Marshall would then follow Lande. Jimmy said Lande went to his office and then to the golf course but never spent more than a half hour at each place, and then he would return to the hospital.

  One day a young man appeared at the door to Bonny's room, looking for Lande. Mulheisen thought the man looked familiar, but he couldn't place him. The fellow, who did not identify himself, said he was a friend of Lande's and he'd call him later. Mulheisen just nodded and turned back to Bonny, who hadn't noticed the intrusion.

  Mulheisen was finding it difficult to focus. His mother, who saw even less of him than usual, sensed that something was amiss, but she was busy with her own struggles with the dastardly developer. Mulheisen didn't notice. Nothing seemed important to him but the struggle going on at Bon Secours Hospital. He was losing somebody whom he had never possessed. He had discovered a love at the moment it was being taken from him.

  Lande was grateful for Mulheisen's company. It was annoying to Mulheisen, however, that Lande seemed to believe that Mulheisen's presence was as much on his behalf as on Bonny's. As for Bonny, she was glad they were both there. “My boys,” she'd say with a sly smile when she awoke and caught sight of them sitting dully; reading, or quietly talking—almost all the talk coming from Lande, who reminisced about past triumphs or complained about those who had swindled him in some ancient deal. They would immediately race to her side, the first one there seizing hold of the hand that was not enmeshed in tubes and wires. But they were thoughtful of one another, too, bringing sandwiches or magazines or even little nips of whiskey to the one who had stayed while the other took a break.

  In this way, almost against his will, Mulheisen began to acquire a certain understanding of Eugene Lande. Day after day the two men sat in the little room, looking at Bonny, who was practically disappearing before their eyes. When she began to be mostly comatose, they listlessly perused magazines (neither of them could bear television, and Bonny couldn't stand its banalities), so inevit
ably Lande would begin to talk. Naturally he chose his own life as his subject. Mulheisen didn't pay close attention, but snatches of this sotto voce reminiscence seeped through his indifference.

  “I don't remember a thing before I was twelve, . . . not a thing, but I been told things . . . My mother was a waitress . . . My dad was a bomber pilot in the Korean War . . . I don't remember my folks . . . I think we lived in Texas for a while . . . Uncle Ernie and Aunt June were my real folks . . . We lived on the East Side. They used to lock me in when they went to meetings . . . I think they were Communists . . . Yeah, they were Communist spies; they went to spy meetings alia time . . . When I first come to Detroit, they put me in that front bedroom, upstairs . . . I was thrilled—you could hear the paperboys goin’ up and down the street, yellin’ . . . They yelled”—a hoarse whisper—” ‘preee press pay-per!’. . . kind of a little jag on ‘pay-per'—you come up on the last part of it—'pay-per’ . . . I thought it was the Pree Press for a long time . . . Just sat in the room and listened to the radio and the clock tickin’ . . . I took the clock apart about a dozen times, then I started on the radio, but I musta lost a part; I couldn't get it to work . . . Uncle Ernie was pissed, but they never hit me. They were never really mean, but they wouldn't let me out . . . They musta been ‘fraid I'd snoop and find their Commie stuff, maybe turn ‘em in . . . I wouldn'ta turned ‘em in . . . That's the worst thing you can do, in my book, is squeal, to letcher pals down . . . He got me a new radio, but it didn't have the range of the old Philco; it couldn't get New Orleans or Denver . . . They were gone when I come back from the navy . . . They never wrote once . . . I couldn't read very well, but I had some Popular Mechanics; I read them a lot . . . School was no good; the big kids allus picked on you . . . I joined the Barons first, but they ratted on me; they left me to get caught by the cops when we hit this one K Mart . . . The Baggies was a nigger gang; they wore baggy pants . . . They let me in; well, they let in a coupla white kids; they were tough . . . The leader was called Hitler; he was a weight lifter, had a body you couldn’ believe, . . . but they run off, and I got caught by the cops . . . Well, they were good guys, but they was scared . . . In the navy I was a cook, never left the country, never even left dry land, stationed all the time at Great Lakes, near Chicago . . . I met this guy, Derek, from Detroit, too . . . We come home on leave together, but I didn’ have nobody to see; Uncle Ernie and Aunt June were gone, no forwarding address—the Commies sent them underground—and the guys from the Baggies were either all in jail or they were in the army, in Vietnam, all over the place . . . Me and Derek hitchhiked out West, but we got separated in Salt Lake City ... He went into this giant drugstore, to cop some pills, an’ after a while I went in to find him, and I guess he must of come out the other door and couldn’ find me . . . It was nuts . . . I never went back to the navy; well, I went back, but they give me an early out, . . . but Derek's old man, in Detroit, he run a ‘lectronics store; he give me a job . . . Derek never showed up, never saw him again . . . I met Tony Luke, great guy; we did a little you know in ‘lectronic parts, nothing heavy . . . Sid, well, Sid was just a good frien’, one a my best buddies; he threw a little business my way, took me to Las Vegas, interduced me to Bonny . . . I did his daughter's office computers. She's a brain, very smart broad . . . tough, too; I wouldn't wanta cross her . . . I just picked it up, the ‘lectronics . . . I was always real good at that kinda stuff . . . Started gawfin’ with Uncle Ernie, it was the on'y thing we ever did together . . . He wasn't a real good gawfer, but he was a good teacher, very strict, made you stand just this way, hold your clubs like this, not like that, like this, ‘you little dummy’ . . . an’ purty soon I could outshoot him an’ he quit—” He laughed raucously, waking up Bonny. “Sorry, sorry, hon, there, there, there . . .”

  The endless droning half-whispered narrative only began to suggest the intense rage that drove the man, Mulheisen realized. He became interested despite himself and his pledge to Bonny and started to ask an occasional not too pointed question. Thus, he learned that Lande could vaguely remember his mother, as a waitress, but that most of the information about his parents had come from his mother's much older brother and his wife, to whom Lande was sent at age twelve, “just to visit,” in Detroit. The mother disappeared. The aunt and uncle were good people, though rather strict. The idea of them as Communist agents seemed to be sheer fantasy, but one that Lande clung to. He did not, in fact, have any secure, first-person memories of his life before age twelve—“Just about a total blank, Mul.” He thought he had lived in Cincinnati because he could remember being taken to some Reds games by, he thought, a relatively benign foster “keeper”—he couldn't bring himself to refer to them as parents.

  The aunt and uncle were much older than his mother, he thought. Uncle Ernie worked at “the Dodge,” and Aunt June was a bookkeeper for a man who owned a small string of garages. It was true that they often went to meetings, and the boy was locked in the house, in his room, but Mulheisen got the impression that maybe it wasn't every night, and maybe it hadn't happened throughout the boy's youth. For one thing, there was the gang period. Obviously, Lande was out running the streets by then. The couple was not otherwise unkind to him. They didn't beat him; they didn't starve him or deprive him of good clothes. They just didn't pay much attention to him, and they clearly didn't love him. Lande appeared to have no feelings for them, pro or con, although it was their name that he used. (Jimmy Marshall's casual research revealed an Ernest and June Lande, formerly of Detroit, now living in retirement in Scottsdale, Arizona.)

  School was a different matter. Lande hated school and hated the whole idea of education, still. He had a withering contempt for people who had to be taught things; he himself had just learned everything “by paying attention and finding out.” Inevitably he'd been a victim of bullies, and he argued with his teachers. He didn't make friends. A gang recruited him to help them shoplift—he was sent in to cause a diversion while they stole things—and they casually abandoned him when he was caught. This was still a source of bitterness. Lande had longed for and relished his inclusion in these groups, and their callous betrayals still hurt. He was, nonetheless, as Mulheisen could see, attracted to the crime community while simultaneously furious with it.

  He left school early and wangled his way into the navy, where once again he got into trouble with authority and was given what he at first called “an early out.” Mulheisen asked Jimmy to check it out and discovered the truth—court-martial, stockade time, and a bad-conduct discharge—which he then coaxed Lande into revealing. What was interesting to Mulheisen was that the navy, then mired in Vietnam, had not bothered to send this troublemaker to the war zone but had simply got rid of him with a fairly lenient court-martial.

  But evidently he was a talented tinkerer, and the world of electronics fascinated him. He'd done very well in it. But the absolute star of his existence had appeared in his personal heaven when Bonny burst upon his consciousness like a supernova. From all their conversations it had become apparent to Mulheisen that Bonny Wheeler was probably the only real friend he'd ever had. And she was beautiful. A little wounded, too, and grateful for his assistance. He was very proud of her youthful debut as a centerfold girl; it was evidence that the woman who loved him was beloved by the rest of the world. Curiously he had little real jealousy of other men; indeed, he relished the notion that his wife was desired by others, although he frequently expressed conventional macho attitudes—“No guy better fool with Bon—I'd blow ‘im away.”

  All this information was acquired haphazardly, and it took Mulheisen considerable time to digest it, distracted as he was by the center-stage event—Bonny's rapid and shattering decline.

  One afternoon while Lande was taking a break, Mulheisen sat at Bonny's bedside, holding her hand. It was not raining for once, but broken clouds rumbled across the sky, intermittently permitting brilliant shafts of sunlight, then darkening everything. Mulheisen was staring at Bonny's ruined face without really seeing it,
not thinking about anything at all, when suddenly she gripped his hand tightly.

  “What is it?” he asked, aware that something was wrong.

  She looked at him, and her sunken eyes lighted up with a glow of alarm. She'd been having trouble speaking because of her distorted palate and jaw, but she struggled to say, “Get Gene. Something is happening.”

  Mulheisen raced down the corridor and met Lande running toward him. They turned together and ran back. Lande grabbed Bonny's hand, and Mulheisen stood over him as she said, “This is it, boys.” She caught Mulheisen's eye. “Look after him,” she said.

  A few seconds later her eyes became fixed, and Lande dropped his head onto her breast with a sob. Mulheisen didn't see the exact moment when it happened, but after a short time he realized that it was over. He turned away and picked up his raincoat and left the hospital.

  Mulheisen drove home, his mind in a dull, cobwebby state. His mother was not there. He changed into jeans and an old sweater and pulled on rubber boots and a windbreaker. He walked out beyond the weathered barn and let himself through an old, sagging gate. Hands in pockets, he followed the old path through the dried reeds, most of which had been flattened by wind and snow, until he came to the edge of the ship channel. He stood there for a long time, staring down toward Lake Saint Clair shimmering in the distance. He barely noticed the red-winged blackbirds or the ducks that flew here and there. A gaggle of coots evidently decided that he was no threat and continued to work along the edge of the channel, their chalky beaks rhythmically projecting forward and then drawing their dumpy charcoal-gray bodies after them. Mulheisen didn't notice. He was struggling to understand what had just happened. He knew that something serious, something profound had occurred, but what? It didn't make sense.