He was suddenly struck by an appalling recollection—at some early point in Bonny's confinement—he couldn't recall the exact moment—she had embarrassed him with a remark about their shared school days. She'd said something to the effect that he'd always had “character.” He had let it pass at the time, but now that she was dead, it had come back to haunt him. The fact was a long-repressed sense of guilt had reasserted itself, based on an incident that dated from the very first days of their grade-school careers.
Bonny had just moved to the Saint Clair Flats School District from, he thought, Detroit. He'd been immediately attracted to her, and at the morning recess he had made the incredible social blunder of following her about the playground, teasing her and, finally, holding hands with her. His schoolmates had instantly pounced on this uncharacteristic behavior, and at the noon recess, after he had sat by her in the lunchroom, they had ridiculed him when he came out onto the playground with her. Obviously they had already decided that Bonny was not “in,” and they pointed out to him that she had a hole in her sock. It was true. It was quite visible, a little crescent of naked flesh above the heel of her run-down loafer. Mortified and confused, Mulheisen had instantly repudiated his affection for the new girl and had run away with his pals, abandoning her.
After school, lying in the still-sweet old hay in the barn, little Mul moped over the humiliations of the day. He was struck by two things—the quiet, brave way in which Bonny had endured her humiliation, withdrawing to a remote corner of the playground alone, and the fact that he knew exactly what his parents would think of his behavior.
The next day, and on every possible occasion in the years they spent together in public school, Mulheisen defended and promoted Bonny. He encouraged other girls to befriend her; he nominated her for class president in high school; he had even bribed a buddy to ask her to the prom. All of this had seemed necessary because despite the fact that Bonny was very attractive physically, she was never popular with the other kids. This had always been inexplicable to Mulheisen, although he himself never sought any relationship with her more intimate than a kind of casual friendliness. And now he saw that he had spent the rest of his—or her—life regretting and paying for that single act of repudiation on the sixth-grade playground.
The fresh breeze brought tears to his eyes. He blinked and looked about him. Green shoots were emerging between the dried stalks of the reeds. The coots—even he knew they weren't ducks—looked comical as they bobbed and turned, constantly looking for food and picking up shreds of grass for their nests, but Mulheisen didn't register their behavior. Rather, he was appalled by their industry. What was the point of coots in this universe? Why would there be these mindless coots but no Bonny? For that matter, what was the point of himself? Of cops? He could taste the bitterness at the back of his palate. Out on the lake a large ship was angling toward the channel. He drew himself up with a groaning sigh—there sure as hell was no reason for crooks.
Eighteen
The way Billy Conover saw it was a guy might not be some kind of hunk, but if a guy had enough clout (a word he liked—it had a nice solid sound), the hot-looking women had to go to bed with him anyway. So he loved the drug biz. He'd been in the loan biz, and that was all right (he kept a finger in that pie), but it didn't bring the women in, and Billy really dug women. The drug biz brought him women who ordinarily wouldn't have talked to him. The problem, aside from an uncharming personality, was that Billy also liked to eat, which tended to make a chunk out of a hunk. But Billy had never been a hunk anyway. He was about six feet tall and had one of those unfortunate shapes—small head, narrow shoulders, swelling belly, and very wide hips and ass—cruel Sid Sedlacek used to say Billy looked like an ice cream cone that landed on its head.
Lately Billy had fallen in love with Mexican food. He was introduced to it by his friend Ray Echeverria, who although a Basque by origin, had become enamored of Spanish-American cuisine. Billy was particularly fond of seviche. Echeverria took him to a little Mexican place down on Cass Avenue that made a great seviche. Tonight they'd had the seviche and a terrific chili verde con carne, in this case pork, washed down with a considerable amount of cerveza. At a few minutes after ten Billy and Ray—a wonderfully slim and elegant man in middle age, for all his gourmandizing—had strolled out, arms about two incredibly lush young women and accompanied by a couple of lesser-ranking pals from the biz, all of whom agreed that Casa Pablo's had the greatest seviche in the world.
It was raining, of course. Billy cursed and ordered one of the heavies, a hood named Gus, to go get the car. At that point a little guy in a raincoat passed by, wearing shades, of all things, and a sailor's rain hat. He had his hands in his pockets, and he suddenly turned back and swung up his right hand, through a reach-through pocket, the raincoat swinging open to reveal a gun of some sort. The little man took a stance, bracing himself and holding the top of the gun down with his gloved left hand. It was now clear from the large bore of the barrel that the man was holding a shotgun. He pulled the trigger.
It was a firestorm. Five of the group were standing in a kind of alcove that formed the entrance to Casa Pablo's. In the rolling thunder of the five blasts, Conover was the first to fly. Two tremendous blows struck him in the chest and lifted him off his feet. He struck the girls and Echeverria like a giant bowling ball, and his movement might have saved some of their lives, though not Echeverria's.
The shooter struggled for a moment, extricating his right hand from his raincoat pocket. Gus, who had started to jog down the street after the car, turned back, gun in hand, and got off two shots with a .357 Colt. One of the shots may have hit the shooter, for he seemed to stagger momentarily, but then the left gun came up, and the man stood like a rock, bracing himself with his right hand on the top of the gun while it crashed away and blew Gus into the street. The gunner swiveled and blasted the remaining bodyguard, who had struggled to his hands and knees in the alcove, then emptied the chamber into Billy and Ray.
In the silence that followed, the gunner calmly delved into a pocket and reloaded one of the guns, the other swinging by his side from its leather strap. Then he stepped among the bodies and carefully blew Billy Conover's and Ray Echeverria's heads into indescribable mush with two shots apiece. He then tucked the two dangling guns back into his raincoat and walked quickly down Cass, buttoning the coat as he went.
Afterward a cab driver who had just pulled up when he saw the party leaving the restaurant, hoping for a fare, described the whole process as instantaneous. Bodies had been flattened like ripe wheat in a hailstorm, he said. The killer had used a shotgun, all right, but it looked more like a long pistol. The barrel had been sawed off, as well as the long part of the stock. It must have been an automatic, he said, “'cause the fire poured outta that cannon like shit through a tin horn.”
Conover and Echeverria had each received more than a dozen .30-caliber pellets in their chests and twice as many in the head. The pellets had blown up the two men's hearts, but they hadn't the penetrative power of a rifled bullet, and that had saved the lives of the two young women, lying beneath the two men. They had received some serious wounds to their legs, however. Gus and the other hood were simply shot to pieces. Whether Gus had winged the killer was unclear, since witnesses reported him walking easily as he left the scene.
The case belonged to the Thirteenth Precinct, but Laddy McClain declared it a gangland slaying, probably related to the killings of Tupman and Sedlacek. Mulheisen was called at home, where he had gone that afternoon after the death of Bonny Lande. By the time he arrived downtown at the scene, McClain was telling a television reporter that it appeared there was a gang war in progress. Neither Mulheisen nor Andy Deane took that view, but they didn't say so to the reporters. All three crimes had involved different modes of killing.
Dennis Noell of the Big Four had arrived. A very pretty young black woman standing before a camera, shielding her helmet of hair from the rain with something that looked like a pizza take-out box, m
anaged to snag this big, handsome detective and asked, “What kind of weapon could inflict this incredible carnage, Sergeant Noell?”
“Easy,” said Noell with great relish; “it had to be an alley sweeper. Well, that's a sawed-off twelve-gauge automatic shotgun, loaded with double-ought cartridges, ma'am. You could take out a platoon with a couple of them.” He went on to describe the victims as “just a buncha dope dealers and whores. Looks to me like some good citizen has done us all a favor.”
Mulheisen watched this with disgust, then signaled to Jimmy Marshall. They got into Mulheisen's Checker and sat there in the flickering glow of emergency-vehicle lights. It was raining steadily and dawn was many hours away. Mulheisen lighted a cigar and puffed it while Jimmy sat silently, waiting. A thought popped into Mulheisen's mind—who exactly had he mentioned to Lande, all those weeks ago at the restaurant, as people whom he could do without? He wasn't sure, but he thought it included Frosty Tupman and Billy Conover. And hadn't he mentioned something about Captain Buchanan?
“I think we've got a problem, Jim,” he said.
“You mean Dennis?”
“Dennis? Well, yes, . . . Dennis.” Mulheisen tapped on the steering wheel for a minute, watching the bodies being removed. There wasn't much of a crowd, and the television people had gone. Mulheisen sighed and said, “Not just Dennis. You heard what the cabby said.”
“One man? A little guy?”
“That's the one.”
“Must have been Little David,” Jimmy said.
“Bonny died this afternoon,” Mulheisen said.
“I know . . . I called the hospital. They said you'd gone.”
“Did you talk to Lande? No? Well, there was no reason for you to. I wonder where he is right now.”
“I guess we better go look,” Jimmy said.
“Yes, we better go look.”
On the way back to the Ninth Precinct, Mulheisen pondered aloud—“To what extent can we, or should we, contain the suspicions we have about Lande?”
Marshall considered and replied, “We really don't have any more on him than we had before, Mul. It's all speculation. If you're thinking about a warrant, I don't know if a judge would listen.”
Mulheisen agreed. From the precinct he called all the numbers he had for Lande, including the hospital, but drew nothing but blanks. The hospital was very interested because Lande had left not long after Mulheisen, without leaving any instructions for the disposition of Bonny's remains. They were holding the body in their morgue. Mulheisen promised to contact them as soon as he learned anything.
He and Jimmy drove separately to Lande's apartment and the Doc Byte office, then met at the Briar Ridge Golf and Country Club. Neither had seen any sign of Lande. The parking lot of the golf course was empty, and there was a soggy, handwritten sign taped over the sign at the gate that said “Closed until further notice.” Another sign was taped to the door of the pro shop, saying essentially the same thing but advising vendors and delivery people to contact Eric Smith in case of emergency and giving a Detroit phone number. It was 3:00 A.M. before Mulheisen was able to get the young pro on the phone. He had just rolled in from a date, he said, and he hadn't seen Lande in several days. He was sorry to hear that Mrs. Lande had passed away. He guessed that the course would remain closed for the time being, but he expected he'd hear from Lande soon, and he'd sure let him know that Mulheisen wanted to see him.
“There's nothing much going on out there anyway,” Smith said. “The membership list is just about nil, and Gene told the grounds crew to take a holiday for the time being. To tell you the truth, Sergeant, I don't know if he's ever going to reopen. He was pretty down when I saw him. He was talking about taking a vacation with his wife, to the islands, to recuperate. I didn't realize she was that bad off.”
Mulheisen sent Jimmy home for a few hours with instructions to be at Doc Byte when it opened, to talk to Alicia Bommarito and to check on the shipment. Jimmy was to call Mulheisen at Laddy McClain's office as soon as he found out anything. Then Mulheisen took himself to the cot in the squad room for a couple hours’ sleep. It was a sleep troubled by dreams of coots and ducks and the banging of shotguns.
By eight o'clock he was in McClain's office downtown. McClain was not in a great mood, having slept little and now furious at the sight of Dennis Noell on television. Mulheisen had never known McClain had a television in his office; it must have been buried under the piles of reports and old newspapers.
“Look at this idiot,” McClain said, wielding a remote device. “One of the guys taped it earlier.” He punched a button and the screen got furry. When the tape started again a very pretty blonde was saying, “Now we're going to show you some pictures that the kids probably shouldn't see. We're going to Gina Woodridge on Cass Avenue.” Then the black woman came on, the camera angle somehow excluding the pizza box as she gestured at the ambulances and the body bags. Shortly they cut to the interview that Mulheisen had partially witnessed. The reporter was looking up at the incredibly handsome Noell. His voice was deep, and he sounded remarkably articulate as he described an “alley sweeper” and even demonstrated how to saw off the barrel on a Remington shotgun. The interviewer was wonderfully sexy, standing up under Noell's great shoulders, looking up at him with delight. She said, “They call you Dennis the Menace, don't they?” And Noell replied frankly, “I'm not the real Dennis the Menace.”
“Can you believe it?” McClain said. “Describing an alley sweeper! ‘I'm not the real Dennis the Menace.’ What is he, arming the home guard?”
“Dennis believes very strongly in the right to keep and bear arms,” Mulheisen said.
“I'd like to tear off his arms and beat him over the head with them,” McClain snarled. “This is real bad stuff, Mul. I just hope it doesn't make it onto the evening news. Some cluck is going to think the cops say it's all right to sweep the streets of drug peddlers, like our shooter did last night.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” Mulheisen said. “I was a little disturbed about what you were telling the reporters.”
“Me?” McClain was indignant. “I didn't say anything.”
“You said it was a gangland slaying,” Mulheisen reminded him, “and you linked it to the Big Sid and Tupman cases. I'm not so sure of that. In fact, it looks pretty clear that we've nailed down the guy who killed Sid.”
“This Iowa guy? I saw your report on that. But so what? So they took him out, too. It's still mob stuff, right?”
“Maybe,” Mulheisen said, “maybe not. Now I'm on to this guy Lande, who was originally picked up near the Sid killing. Little bits of information keep popping up that link him to all of these guys, but nothing really strong enough. The thing is he's not a mob guy.”
McClain obviously knew nothing about Lande and was curious about Mulheisen's take on the man. Mulheisen filled him in as much as he felt he could, making only vague references to the part Bonny had played in his investigation. He said he'd talked extensively to Lande and had become convinced that the man was at least peripherally involved. The point he wanted to press, however, was that now would be a good time to tell the press that they had essentially solved the Sedlacek case. It might help to ease media pressure, and it could conceivably be used to separate this spate of slaughters in the public mind, to mitigate the effect of Dennis's sensational revelations about alley sweepers, for instance.
McClain nodded. It sounded good to him. “But what about this Lande?” he asked.
“He's disappeared,” Mulheisen confessed. “His wife died yesterday. Maybe he's just gone on a bender or something, I don't know, but I can't find him. I know he had developed some kind of attitude about the mob . . . holds them responsible in some strange way for his wife's troubles . . . It would take a better psychologist than me to sort it out.”
“You mean he could have done this alley-sweeper thing?”
“I don't know that,” Mulheisen said, “but he let drop a few things to me that make me suspicious. I'd like a warrant.”
>
“For what?” McClain spread his hands questioningly.
“I'd like to enter his apartment, his place of business, the golf club . . . He's acting strangely, Mac. He left the hospital without making arrangements for his wife.”
McClain pondered this, glancing at Mulheisen suspiciously from time to time. Finally he said, “I think I can arrange it.”
A few minutes later Jimmy called. “The shipment is gone,” he said. “The lady says it was sitting in the back room when she left last night.”
“Meet me at the precinct,” Mulheisen said. “I'll have a warrant.”
An hour later Mulheisen laid it out for Jimmy. “We've got to do something about Buchanan, Jim. I know this sounds weird, but I'd like you to make a call for me.”
A half hour later Mulheisen heard a commotion in the hall, and when he went out, the desk man told him excitedly that they had just received information from Captain Buchanan's home that an anonymous caller had warned that the commander of the Ninth Precinct would be “blown away if he showed his slimy snout in public again.”
Buchanan looked calm when Mulheisen went in to see him, but his voice was strained. “What do you make of this?” he asked.
“It must be a crank,” Mulheisen assured him, “but to be on the safe side, I'd recommend a low profile for a day or two. In fact, it might not be a bad idea if you went home to be with Alice. She'll be worried and, let's face it, she could be in danger herself.”
“Oh, Lord, you're right,” Buchanan said. “Johnson,” he shouted for the blue lieutenant, “get a car out to my house pronto!”
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