La Donna Detroit

by Jon A. Jackson

  “What’s that all about?” she asked, carefully.

  “We’ve identified Ortega’s body. He was murdered. Do you want an attorney?”

  “Am I a suspect?”

  “Not the primary suspect,” Mulheisen said. “But you could be an accessory.” They were sitting in the living room of her mother’s home. Helen had left DiEbola’s estate, although she was the heir in his will.

  “What happened to Pepe?” she asked.

  “For one thing, someone chopped off his head.”

  “My god!” Her emotion was genuine.

  “He was dead before that happened, according to the medical examiner,” Mulheisen said. “His hands were chopped off as well. It was an attempt to conceal the identity. Effective, as long as we had no clue to his identity, but ultimately the DNA matchup was definitive.” He had delivered this information in a calm, almost casual way. It allowed her time to recover her poise.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said. “Pepe was a nice man, very talented. Do you have any idea why he was”—she hesitated—“killed?”

  “Yes. He was an undercover agent for a federal agency. Presumably, DiEbola discovered this and either ordered him murdered or did it himself. But you haven’t answered my question: When did you last see him?”

  She thought for a minute, then gave up. “Sometime in January,” she said, “I’m not sure of the date.”

  “Think about it,” Mulheisen prompted her. “It could be helpful.” When, after a moment, she shook her head, he went on: “What was your relationship with Ortega?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you friends? Lovers? Did you have any extended conversations?”

  “We were friends,” she said. “He was Humphrey’s chef. So we talked, occasionally. Not anything extensive. He was funny, fun to be around.”

  “Not lovers?” When she shook her head, he saw that she was lying. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “The M.E. thinks he made love just before his death. The FBI is pulling his room apart, right now. They may find evidence that will link him to a lover. A hair, fluids, maybe a note. I’ll be surprised if they don’t want to talk to you.”

  She denied again any intimacy, more firmly this time.

  “DiEbola’s the main suspect, of course,” he said. “And he’s dead. Did he say anything odd about Ortega’s disappearance to you, or in your presence?”

  She said that Humphrey had shrugged off Pepe’s absence, he didn’t seem to regard it as anything significant. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that he may have said that Pepe had simply decided to leave. Her impression was that Humphrey and Pepe had discussed this, prior to his leaving. She wasn’t sure, now, but that was always the impression she’d had.

  Mulheisen asked if DiEbola had seemed excited, or disturbed, acting unusually during this period. She said he’d talked a lot about his life, his youth, but that she hadn’t paid much attention.

  “About his childhood? That’s interesting,” Mulheisen said. “Did he by any chance ever mention a boy, Porky White? From his youth?”

  “I can’t think of any names at the moment,” she said, “but he talked a lot about some childhood experiences.” When Mulheisen pressed her on this, she went on: “He told me about a boy who had been killed, a neighbor.”

  “Killed? When did this happen?” Mulheisen asked.

  “When he—Humphrey—was about, oh, eight or nine. Maybe older. I didn’t try to calculate it.”

  “What did he know about this killing? Was he involved?”

  “I didn’t think he was involved, but the incident seemed to have had a strong impact on him,” she said. At Mulheisen’s urging she described DiEbola’s account of the incident: a neighbor child had wandered off into the woods, where he encountered some kind of pervert who murdered him and buried his body in a cave. The murderer was never caught.

  Mulheisen was jarred. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this. There were serious problems with this story, even if one hadn’t any awareness of the events. He enumerated them for Helen: Arthur White had disappeared in 1944, his body found in 1950. Nobody knew how he had died. So: How did DiEbola know what had happened to the child? If the killer was never caught, how did he know he was a pervert?

  “I thought it was a dream,” Helen said. “The way he talked about it, and … come to think of it, he said he’d had trouble sleeping, nightmares. And then he told this story. I guess I just thought it was his dream, or something like that had actually happened, but this was his dream version. I got the impression that he’d been troubled by this dream before, a lot, since childhood. He must have talked about it a half dozen times.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mulheisen said. “Was there any particular time, say the first time, that he told you more?”

  Helen considered this. The first time was fairly early, not long after she had moved in, say early January. Humphrey had complained of a sleepless night, of nightmares. He didn’t tell her about the dream right away, but later that afternoon, in the study. It was awful weather, they hadn’t gone out. He’d been reading, then more or less spontaneously he had told her this story, which, at first, she’d thought was a variation on a fairy tale. But then, from something he said, which she couldn’t remember now, she realized this was the nightmare. She really couldn’t say if he’d told her all the details at that time, or if she was just conflating various versions that he mentioned, piecemeal, over the ensuing weeks.

  “He started out talking about being buried alive,” she said. “I think that was it. Or maybe he asked if I’d ever had that nightmare. That’s pretty common, isn’t it?”

  Mulheisen supposed it was, but he was curious about the further details. What was that about a fairy tale?

  “At first it sounded like Hansel and Gretel, or even Goldilocks,” she said, “you know, babes in the woods. Lost children, ogres, giants. I didn’t take it seriously, of course.”

  “But later?” he prompted.

  Later, the dream and the fairy-tale element seemed to have faded away, somehow, she said. She was trying to reconstruct the sequence, but not having much luck. She really hadn’t given it much attention at the time, although she could see that it was bothering him. At some point, she said, he began to talk about it as a real incident, something that had actually happened.

  “I know what it was,” she said. “There was another child involved. Humphrey had heard about it from him. It had always bothered him, it seems, because he had felt protective toward this second child, a cousin or something. This child had barely escaped, but was scared witless and had made him promise never to tell anyone, and he hadn’t, not until he told me. Well, that’s what he said, anyway.”

  The full story went like this, as best as she could remember: the neighbor child and his cousin—he had never named him—had wandered off one day, playing. They had gone to a woods, forbidden to them. There they had found a cave, which they crawled into, knowing it was wrong. In the cave they had found stuff.

  “Stuff?” Mulheisen said.

  “Grown-up things, maybe dirty pictures or something,” Helen said. “He didn’t describe what they found, but from his tone or manner I got the impression it was something like that. The whole story was very dark, very scary. Anyway, they found the stuff. Then, just when they decided they better get out, the Boogey Man came home. That’s what he called him!” she said, pleased to have recovered this tidbit. “Or, another time, he referred to him as the Ogre. The Boogey Man punished them for messing with his stuff. That’s how he put it. Then he tried to force them to do bad things. It sounded sexual to me. The Boogey Man grabbed the neighbor boy, who was the smallest, and while he was fooling around with him, the cousin escaped. The neighbor boy never came out of the cave, and the Boogey Man, or Ogre, must have gotten away. The cousin was afraid to say anything, because he knew the Boogey Man was still out there, would get him. So they never told anybody anything. Let’s see.” She stopped to think, then went on after
a minute. “I think that’s all the details, all I remember, anyway.”

  “He never mentioned the name Porky? Porky White? Or Arthur?”

  She was sure he hadn’t. He’d also told her several stories about scrapes he’d gotten into with other kids, later, and she did remember some of those names: Carmine, Angelo, Howard, Denny. She couldn’t remember all the names. But no Porky, or Arthur.

  They went on to talk of Humphrey’s surprising interest in books, particularly Machiavelli, his theories about power, influence, and so on. Mulheisen was intrigued. He asked about other people in DiEbola’s life. She told him what she knew, but guardedly. It wasn’t of much interest. He asked if she thought DiEbola was homosexual. She said she didn’t think so. He seemed interested in women, although he didn’t have any attachments. She told him about Humphrey’s idealized love for the little girl. If he was gay, he was well closeted. The culture in which he operated was male, exclusively, but she knew of no associates of his who were even rumored to be gay. And no, she stated firmly, before he could ask, she had not been his lover. But she knew men. Humphrey had been a man. They’d been close, and, if he wanted to know, she’d considered it. The notion had been entertained, in a civilized way, by both of them. They had decided against it.

  Mulheisen listened to all of this attentively, and not just because it reminded him of Becky’s voiced dread of tension. Never once did Helen betray even a hint that she thought Humphrey DiEbola was still alive. That was convincing, to Mulheisen. He began to think that he’d been unduly influenced by Jimmy Go’s stolid certainty. After all, he considered, Jimmy Go had strong feelings about the man and probably just wanted him to still be alive so that he could wreak personal vengeance.

  Just to satisfy himself, he asked her, point-blank, if she thought there was any chance that the body found in the ruins of the basement was not DiEbola. To his surprise, although she claimed she had no doubts, he detected a measure of uncertainty. What was this? He pursued the question.

  “He was talking about retiring,” she said, finally, yielding to his pressure.

  “But how could he retire?” Mulheisen asked. “Did he have somebody in mind to succeed him? Was he ill?”

  She didn’t know. She denied any knowledge of his plans, but she was unconvincing. At long last, she conceded that she’d had some doubts about the explosion and the fire. He had insisted that she not be present in the house that night. She had come home, to her mother’s.

  “Then, maybe it wasn’t his body,” Mulheisen said. “Maybe he ran away, like the Boogey Man.”

  “If he ran away,” she said, “he ran away on the boat, the Kiddle-Dee-Divey. And that blew up. So he’s dead, anyway.”

  “They didn’t find a body,” Mulheisen pointed out.

  “You mean, he could have destroyed the Kiddle-Dee-Divey, to make it look like he was dead, just in case someone doubted the basement scene? Humphrey was a plotter,” she conceded, “but that’s too elaborate. If he’d gone to all the trouble to fake his death in the basement, he wouldn’t want to do something like the boat. That would make the basement deal look fishy. No, no way. He was crazy about that boat.”

  “If he escaped on the boat,” Mulheisen pointed out, “it would have been a dead giveaway.”

  “So maybe he wasn’t on the boat,” she said. “I don’t know. But he wouldn’t have purposely destroyed it.”

  “Why not?” he persisted. “He apparently abandoned everything else personal—assuming he escaped. Didn’t he? Surely he had some other objects, books or pictures or whatever, that were dear to him. Is anything important to him missing?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” she admitted. “But he would never have destroyed the boat.”

  She was convinced, and Mulheisen could see she was convinced. “That’s a funny name for a boat,” he said. “It sounds like the old song ‘Mairzy Doats.’”

  “That’s what it was,” Helen said. “You know the song! He told me that was what he named the boat after.”

  Mulheisen reverted to DiEbola’s health. Helen saw through that one. Humphrey had been in better physical shape than he’d been in in years, perhaps since his youth. Of course, losing a lot of weight could bring its own problems, she conceded, but he seemed fine. Still, you could never tell. It was possible that he’d had a terminal illness and had decided to go out in a grand blast, but the idea was too iffy. She suggested he consult DiEbola’s regular physician, Dr. Schwartz. She thought he’d been to see him not too long before his death.

  Mulheisen got up to go. He told her again that she could expect to see the FBI, about Ortega. Then he asked about Roman Yakovich. He wanted to talk to him. Here was another surprise: she seemed uncomfortable, said she hadn’t seen Roman lately.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Mulheisen asked. She was evasive. She didn’t know. Maybe a week. He kept to himself, she said. Mulheisen asked to see her mother. Her mother was ill, she said, under a doctor’s care. She couldn’t see anyone. Mulheisen insisted.

  Mrs. Sedlacek didn’t seem ill, but she was withdrawn and uncommunicative. She acted as if she couldn’t understand English, or speak it. She spoke Serbian to her daughter, who translated.

  “She hasn’t seen Roman lately,” Helen said. “She thinks he went on vacation, maybe he went to Florida.”

  Mulheisen hadn’t heard anything in the conversation that sounded like “Florida.” He persisted: How long had he been gone? Maybe a week, he was told. Had he ever gone away like this before? Oh, sometimes. He was a grown man, he didn’t have to tell them where he went. That was the story. Mulheisen gave up.

  “So what are you doing these days?” he asked Helen, as he was leaving.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He didn’t want to say, How do you support yourself now that your sugar daddy is gone? But that’s what he meant, and she knew it. He tried to cover up the gaffe with a jest, but as usual he went too far. Mindful of the joke around the precinct that Helen Sid was now the don, he quipped, “Just as long as you don’t start thinking you’re La Donna.”

  “But I am,” she said. She said it with pride.

  “You’re what?”

  “That’s me,” she said, picking up a box of cigars and thrusting them at him. “La Donna Detroit. Take them. On the house. Or do you consider this a bribe?”

  “These are you?” he said stupidly.

  “All legit,” she said. “I own the company. Hell, I invented the cigar. I know you’ll like them.”

  “I do,” he confessed. “They’re very good. Thanks.”

  “I’ll tell you a little secret,” she said, leaning close. He was reminded of Becky. It was the feral mouth, perhaps, or the catlike litheness. “They really are Cuban.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Trade secret.”

  He smoked one on his way to Dr. Schwartz’s offices. Schwartz was not happy to see him. He’d been through all this with the Grosse Pointe police, the FBI, several times. He had verified the findings of the Wayne County medical examiner from his records of Humphrey DiEbola. He was frankly hostile, wanting to know why the Detroit police were involved. Mulheisen managed to present a vague justification that Schwartz could have refuted if he’d cared to take the time. But gradually, after Mulheisen allowed him to pontificate about medical expertise and the infallibility of his record keeping for a while, he grew more friendly.

  “I know DiEbola was supposed to be this monster,” Schwartz said, “but really, Sergeant, I can’t say I found him to be so. The man was a pussycat, as they say. It’s odd, isn’t it? You read these newspaper articles, you’d think he was a cold-blooded killer, but he wasn’t.”

  “No? Well, he was never indicted, anyway,” Mulheisen said, “or even charged. An amazing record.”

  “Maybe he never did what they say,” Schwartz suggested. “If you ask me, he was a businessman. A little shady, maybe, but basically just hard-nosed and pretty astute. He talked like a truck driver, but he knew how to
run a business. And he could be generous, too.”

  “How is that?”

  “Well, he sometimes sent friends or employees to me for medical care, and then he took care of the bills, out of his own pocket. That’s pretty decent.”

  Mulheisen agreed. He recalled that Leonardo had acted similarly. He wondered if Humphrey had paid for medical care for a mistress. That would be worth finding out. He’d dearly love to locate a mistress of Humphrey DiEbola’s, it could be a valuable link. But Schwartz said he’d seen no female referrals. All males. He didn’t care to speculate, at Mulheisen’s quick follow-up suggestion, on the possibility that DiEbola was homosexual. He doubted it. He’d seen no such signs.

  “Who did he send, for instance?” Mulheisen asked.

  Schwartz said he didn’t mind discussing with the police a client who was deceased and under investigation, but he didn’t think he should discuss or even identify other patients, even if they had been referred to him by the deceased. Of course, if Mulheisen could obtain a warrant, or a court-ordered deposition, that was another matter.

  Mulheisen nodded agreeably. He could see the point. But had DiEbola sent him many clients? It turned out that he’d sent in only one, in the last year. That was about three months ago. The man was in poor physical shape, grossly overweight, but as far as he knew—he hadn’t seen the patient recently—he had benefited from DiEbola’s interest. He’d lost weight, gotten into shape. Schwartz supposed that it had interested DiEbola because he’d turned his health problems around in a similar way.

  Mulheisen thought about this on his way back to the office. He hadn’t pursued it with Schwartz, although normally the doctor’s stiffness would have provoked him, but the idea nagged at him. He called Andy Deane at Rackets and Conspiracy and asked who in the mob was a fatso, someone DiEbola might have thought he could reform. Andy laughed. They were all pretty tubby, these days, he said. He named half a dozen notorious thugs who were seriously obese. Angelo Badgerri was probably the worst. A vicious swine, a collector. But he’d disappeared a few months ago. He was said to have retired, to have left the country.