“Why did he go, then?” Mulheisen asked.
“I think he figured he could handle it, and if he couldn’t, then it was his time,” Jimmy Go said. “He wasn’t scared. He said he’d gotten away with a lot of shit in his time, but maybe this was the payback. He never expected an angel chorus. But, what the hell, he might win! Only he couldn’t. They must have jumped him.”
“Maybe it happened that way,” Mulheisen said, “but so what? DiEbola’s dead. Well, maybe we could get the guys who did the deed. Did you show the paper to the FBI?”
Jimmy Go had. They didn’t think it was much. They had taken the paper. They said they’d get back to him if something came of it. But they hadn’t. Jimmy Go didn’t think they were going to do anything. Trouble was, DiEbola wasn’t dead. He was sure of it. Nardo had told him that he believed something funny was going down. The Fat Man was getting ready to cut. He was settling old scores, clearing the decks. He’d been knifing guys right and left, selling his operations to the highest bidders. That’s what Nardo said and it looked like it was true. And if the Fat Man sold the biz out, could he stay on? No. He had to bolt.
“What do you care?” Mulheisen said. “He killed an old buddy of yours. Leonardo told you … what was it Nardo said?”
“He said he never expected to die in bed, flights of angels singing him home.” Jimmy Go almost smiled, but he was a pretty mirthless sort of guy—his thin lips writhed for a second. “He was a pretty good guy, for a crook. He wasn’t no Holy Joe, but he treated me good. Most of ’em out there”—he waved a thick, callused hand at the dirty window with its protective bars—“you reach out for a hand up and they’d as soon shit in your palm. Nardo was all right. I gotta do something for him. He did something for Nita. He didn’t haveta do nothing, but he did.”
Mulheisen sat and stared at this knotty-looking man. He was impressed. The guy rambled on about his sister, Nita. She was never a nun, he said. They’d been orphans, stuck in a succession of foster homes, where they’d been kicked around. His sister had been raped when she was ten by one of the foster fathers. Jimmy had been younger by a couple years. He had tried to protect her, but it was she who had protected him from the beatings, she who had insisted that they couldn’t be separated and had pitched such a bitch that the social workers had capitulated and found them homes together.
“She always thought she was so smart, but she wasn’t that smart,” he said. “She was good to me, though. I tried to look out for her when I got big. But you couldn’t help Nita. She was into drugs, that kinda shit. But I ain’t gonna let DiEbola get away with this.”
He was raging inside, Mulheisen could see. But he kept it well muffled, choked off.
“I’ll find the bastard, somehow,” Jimmy Go said, getting up. “I’ll find him and pound his fucking head in like he did old Nardo.”
He was through talking to Mulheisen. He could see that Mulheisen couldn’t help him.
“Well, wait a minute,” Mulheisen said. “Where would I start?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Jimmy Go said. “You’re the fucking detective. There must be something that would tell you, some way to figure it out.”
“I’ll look into it,” Mulheisen said. But Jimmy Go was gone, out the door.
An hour later, Mulheisen was talking to Brennan, the medical examiner. He had done the autopsy. Was there any way that the body was not DiEbola? No, Brennan said. It was DiEbola. The body was pretty destroyed, but they had plenty of identification, blood, tissue, teeth. They had ransacked the house upstairs, which hadn’t been damaged. They were able to match hair and sloughed skin from the bedsheets. Good matches.
Good matches? Not perfect matches? Mulheisen asked. Well, there were some anomalies, sure, Brennan conceded, but there always were, and they were heavily outweighed. The medical files were the clincher. Nothing ever matched up one hundred percent. But the evidence was there. That was DiEbola.
What anomalies?
Well, there was some blood they couldn’t account for, some fingerprints, some hair, some tissue. The investigators thought there may have been another man there, possibly he had perished in the boat that blew up and sunk in the lake. Probably one of the assailants. They hadn’t been able to make a match on him. No body. Probably never find it.
Mulheisen drove to the Federal Building offices, to visit the FBI. He was surprised to find a federal agent he had met before there, Dinah Schwind. She was kind of cute, he thought. He looked at her differently today, perhaps because of his experience with Becky. Women looked more attractive today.
The last time he’d seen her she’d been looking for a missing agent, evidently investigating Humphrey DiEbola. She was like a lot of federal agents in Mulheisen’s experience: they asked the questions, but they didn’t provide many answers to your questions. She had pumped him for details of his investigations of DiEbola and was particularly interested in his comments about Joe Service and Helen Sedlacek. As for the missing agent, she hadn’t been able to provide him with much information; in fact, she’d said that he was more on the order of an informer, or a source, than an actual agent. He’d been working at Krispee Chips. His name was Pablo Ortega.
At the time, the name meant nothing to Mulheisen, but not long after he’d received a visit from Ortega’s brother, from Mexico. The family had heard from Ortega, months earlier, in a letter that suggested he was doing very well at Krispee Chips. But when Mulheisen and the brother had gone there to inquire about the missing man, they were told that Ortega had left the company and there was no information on his whereabouts.
Mulheisen mentioned this to Dinah Schwind now. “I’d have passed this on before now,” he told her, “but you never said what office you worked out of. You’re not FBI?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Right now I’m in and out of the country so much, I don’t even know who I work for. My mother can’t even get hold of me. But you did find Ortega?”
“No,” Mulheisen said, “just his brother. But, you know, I’ve been thinking about it … you must have blood tests, that sort of thing, on your agents, eh? I’ve been talking to the medical examiner about the bodies they found at the DiEbola crime scene and they’re still up in the air on some of the identifications. Maybe you should see if your guy wasn’t one of the sources of some of the tissue and blood they found there.”
Schwind was skeptical. The guy wasn’t really an “agent,” after all, but she was grateful for the suggestion. She’d get back to him on it. And before he knew it, she had run off. Oh well, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other work to occupy him.
The FBI had a big file on DiEbola, but it didn’t tell him much. They were totally convinced that DiEbola was a closed case. They weren’t looking any further. They had listened to Mr. Golsen, but his information wasn’t helpful about the actual perpetrators of the Leonardo murder. One of the other agents had the note. They could send him a copy if he needed it. They left Mulheisen to examine the file. He took some notes.
According to the records, Humphrey DiEbola had been born in Detroit, in 1935, and christened Umberto Gagliano. His mother had died soon after, his father in 1947. Custody of the youth had been awarded to Dominic and Sophia Busoni, of suburban Royal Oak, maternal relatives. He first attracted police attention in 1944, an Oakland County juvenile matter, no record. Later, the family moved into Detroit, and Umberto began to rack up a long series of police attentions, but no arrests and no fingerprints. At age twenty-one he had legally changed his name to Humphrey DiEbola, a simple matter of requesting the change through probate court.
Over the years, DiEbola was often suspected of violent crimes, often questioned, but never formally arrested. And again, no fingerprints. It was an amazing feat for a man so active in crime.
Mulheisen was strangely at peace as he left the federal offices. He stood on the sidewalk, among the tall buildings. It was a cool day in late spring, a milky sky. A good day for something. He felt good. Maybe it was Becky, he thought. But it had a old, familiar feel
to it. He’d felt this way before, though not lately. He felt like doing something, but he wasn’t in any hurry. He was in a zone, as the kids said.
He went to juvenile court and was denied access to ancient records. He didn’t blink. He called an old Royal Oak detective, a man named Hearn. They had met years ago. Hearn was in his eighties now, but he remembered Mulheisen. Did he remember any significant juvenile cases in 1944, involving a kid named Umberto Gagliano? No. But he remembered the Busonis.
“They were real gangsters,” Hearn said. “They had a half dozen kids. The wife was something, a real beauty. She was Sophia before Sophia Loren. Nice gal, too. Busoni was always into something. We were glad when he split to Detroit.”
“Why did he leave?”
“I don’t know. Moving up in the world, I guess.”
Mulheisen called a friend at the Detroit News archives. She said she would put together a little file of DiEbola stories. They flirted a little. She hadn’t seen him in a long time, she said. They should get together for a drink, or something. Mulheisen said he’d like to, but he was seeing somebody. It probably wasn’t wise. His friend picked up on that. “Sounds serious,” she said.
Hearn called back. He’d thought of something. “Busoni got run out of Royal Oak,” he said. “It was funny, because it wasn’t his fault.”
“What do you mean, ‘run out’?”
“The neighbors got after him. Him and his gang. They wanted him out. They even had a scene, what we’d later call a demonstration, in front of his house. We had to go out and break it up, protect him.” Hearn laughed. “I mean, the guy was into a lot a stuff, but we had to protect him for something that didn’t have anything to do with him.”
“He had a gang? In Royal Oak? This was during the war?”
“Well, not a real gang, as such. But he always had guys, foreigners, coming around. Yeah, it was the war. People were wary of foreigners, you know. We had another deal out there, same neighborhood, where a baby-sitter saw a copy of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s book. She told her folks, they told somebody else, next thing you know, a mob is shouting ‘Nazi’ outside the guy’s door.”
“I heard about that,” Mulheisen said. “That was in Royal Oak? I thought it was Harper Woods. What happened?”
“Aw, nothing,” the old policeman said. “The guy came out and said it was a free country, he could read any damn thing he wanted to, told ’em he wasn’t a Nazi, just wanted to know what this Hitler guy was up to. That’s all. We broke it up.”
“Was the Busoni thing like that?”
“No, no, I don’t even know if Busoni could read. Not English, anyway. It was … let’s see … yeah, a kid had disappeared in the neighborhood. Didn’t have anything to do with Busoni, though. He’d been out of town at the time. But maybe they were used to getting up mobs by then. Anyway, after that, Busoni and his family moved to the city.”
“What about the kid?”
“The one who disappeared? They never found him. Oh, I take that back. They dug up his body, excavating. It was quite a while later, maybe ten years. Just bones. The guy on the cat, he didn’t see it, at first. Bones were scattered all over, all crushed up. They figured the kid had crawled into an old abandoned excavation, got caved on. There were a lot of those old excavations, housing project that got started but then the war came along and there were no building supplies, no customers. After the war, though, they started to build like mad. By the late forties, they were …”
Hearn went on for a good long while about the postwar building boom. Mulheisen made some notes, hung up, and began to look at some of the other available records on DiEbola’s career. Late in the day, his friend Sheila from the Detroit News called. She had a nice collection of stuff, if he wanted to come out and look at it. It was all in Sterling Township, at the News offices. Mulheisen felt a little odd about going there. He supported the News staff that had gone on strike some time back and hadn’t been recalled. In the end, he figured that the archives belonged to an earlier, prestrike era. His union sympathies didn’t apply. He said he’d come out.
He called Becky to say he wouldn’t be home until late. “For godssake,” she said, “let’s don’t start this crap. You’re a big boy. Just because we had a little fun doesn’t mean you have to call every time you’re gonna be out. What, did you expect supper or something?”
She didn’t sound cross, so he was relieved. “Oh, okay,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.”
“So now you know. Jeez, no tension, remember?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, “no tension.” He almost made a crack about not feeling any tension all day, but decided against it.
When you look at old files a certain weariness sets in quickly. Especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Soon enough, he was grateful for the bad coffee that Sheila brought to the viewer. Here was a depressing and seemingly endless parade of articles, many with pictures, of a younger, fatter Humphrey being questioned about and denying murder, theft, arson, you name it. In no case was he arrested or charged. It was an amazing performance. And at about age thirty, the pictures ceased. He was no longer even brought in, or if he was, it was handled more discreetly. That meant powerful lawyers.
Mulheisen knew, of course, who the lawyers were, but there was no point in approaching them. He wondered, however, if there weren’t some documents that must now be made public, given the official demise of DiEbola. He would have to check.
He sat back and sipped the coffee. A thought struck him. He explained to Sheila about the disappearance of the schoolboy, in Royal Oak. About 1944. She soon found it. The boy was named Arthur Cameron White Jr. He had been fifteen. A large, heavy boy, certain to have been called “Tubby,” though probably not to his face, not by his classmates. He was only in the eighth grade, so he’d been held back at least one year.
The original article described him as missing. The article hinted that he might have run away. He had run away before, it said. He had left the school that day for disciplinary reasons—sent home. But there was no one at home. Things were a little looser in those days, it seems. It appeared that for the first few days the police looked for him in bus stations, hobo jungles, highway stops, that sort of thing.
Mulheisen was entertained by the “hobo jungles.” He remembered scouting them, in his uniform days. He supposed they still existed, in some form. Nowadays, they would look among the haunts of the homeless.
After a few days a more general search was made of the neighborhood. But it was too late. Evidently there had been “torrential” rains. He supposed that meant several days of pretty heavy, more or less constant rainfall. Not much chance. He’d participated in a search like that, once, as a young cop. There was nothing drearier than walking through parks and neighborhoods, looking but not knowing what to look for. Sort of like what he was doing right now. You soon fell prey to the conviction that nothing would be found. Nothing was found. It was rare to find anything that way. Just a bunch of men, stumbling around, wishing they were somewhere else, watching the leaders for the first sign that it was time to call it a day.
He didn’t feel that way now, though. He felt interested. The story had moved to page 2, dropped to page 5, and then disappeared. It was revived by the mob that had besieged a neighbor’s house. The reports didn’t identify the neighbor. It was an unfounded rumor. Where the rumor had originated was unknown and not pursued. The story disappeared.
In 1950, Crooks Woods was finally sold and chopped down and the abandoned sites were bulldozed for a new subdivision. That’s when the body was discovered—six years later, not ten. Much too late. The White family had moved away, to Ontario. They were from Ontario originally. An ambitious young reporter had evidently talked her editor into letting her do a lengthy Sunday feature piece on the sad tale. It wasn’t much of a story. The family had believed that “Porky” (Aha! Mulheisen thought) had run away. They had never believed that anything bad had happened to him.
Porky was a bad boy, Mulheisen concluded from th
e article. They were secretly relieved at his disappearance. Anyway, he was the kind of kid who hurts others. Not a victim. The principal had expelled him that day for twisting a smaller kid’s arm so violently that the child had to be taken to the hospital by the school nurse. (They had a school nurse!)
The main interviewee in the feature article was a teenage girl, Ivy, the younger sister, one of three girls. The youngest girl had died of diphtheria not long before Porky vanished. The parents were despondent and went back to a small town near Midland, Ontario. But the teenaged girl remembered that Porky “had a kind of hideout somewhere, he never would say where.” She thought he must have gone there, but they had no way to find it, no clue.
Oh, this is a waste of time, Mulheisen thought. He gathered up his stuff and thanked Sheila. She asked him what his new girlfriend was like. He said she wasn’t his girlfriend, just a woman he was living with. “That’s cute,” Sheila said. He didn’t feel like explaining. He promised to take her to lunch, soon, and drove home. He was tired. Becky had gone to bed. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. He just tiptoed upstairs and got in bed himself.
The sheets were clean. They smelled nice. He thought she must have washed them. This might work out, he thought. He fell asleep wondering if she was his girlfriend.
16
Netherworld
Helen was gracious. She looked tired, though. Mulheisen thought she must be finding the life of a don hectic. A donna? She did not look like a crime boss, none he’d ever seen, anyway.
“I thought you’d be around long before this,” she said. “Mr. DiEbola has been dead for weeks.”
“It wasn’t my case.”
She just looked at him, disbelieving. “What do you want, then?”
“I’m trying to close out another case,” he said. “When did you last see Pablo Ortega, also known as Pepe Ortega?” He was pleased to see a flicker of alarm cross her face. Before she could answer, he hastily rattled off the standard Miranda warning.
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