La Donna Detroit

by Jon A. Jackson

  “Who says?” Mulheisen wanted to know.

  It was mostly rumor. Deane said that people were so relieved not to have Mongelo around that they soon put him out of their minds. He was an old buddy of Humphrey’s, though, from the early days. They called him Mongelo, he said, because he bit people. But a lot of mobsters were disappearing, he said. He described it as a shake-up, the changing times. Besides the killings of Soteri, Malateste, and Leonardo, there was the murder or disappearance of minor hoods like Strom Davidson and Matty Cassidy. Davidson had been found in an alley, apparently the victim of neighborhood muggers. Cassidy, of course, had been identified as one of the victims in the explosion and fire.

  Mulheisen remembered Davidson, a real loudmouthed creep. He realized now that Helen must have taken over Davidson’s tobacco business. Deane said that was so, but that the word was that Davidson had been forced out, or sold out well beforehand. As far as he knew, LaDonna Detroit was legit.

  Mulheisen asked about Roman Yakovich. Any rumors? No. But then, Roman had more or less retired when his boss was hit. No one ever saw him anymore. Andy would ask around, though.

  In a mischievous mood, Mulheisen called Schwartz’s office and identified himself as Badgerri, asking for an appointment. The receptionist didn’t hesitate. She made the appointment, asking only if it was for any particular problem or just a checkup.

  “Just a checkup,” Mulheisen told her. “I thought I should. How long has it been?”

  She checked and said it had been two months. He was due. The doctor would want to know how his blood pressure medication was doing. In fact, they probably ought to do another blood panel, so he shouldn’t eat or drink anything but water after midnight before his appointment.

  Mulheisen said in that case not to schedule the appointment just yet, he’d have to see when a good time would be, then thanked her and hung up. He sat for a long while, contemplating the circumstance of two men, closely related in age and background, one of them until fairly recently so notoriously obese that he was generally called the Fat Man, while the other was just as fat and was said to be on a weight-losing regime. And both of them lately being attended by the same doctor. Is that coincidence? He considered the possibility that a man who has successfully dealt with a personal health problem like obesity might be eager to help out an old friend with the same problem. Like a reformed alcoholic sponsoring an old fellow drunk at A.A., maybe. Except that this old pal—one of the worst assholes in Christendom, a man whom nobody, not even a notorious Samaritan like DiEbola, would dream of assisting out of an open latrine he might have tumbled into—had disappeared from public view … at about the time he had been treated to medical care by Brother DiEbola. Too much coincidence for Mulheisen. These guys were disappearing into the woods like … like Indians, like Le Pesant. Another “bad bear,” or was it “malicious bear”?

  He called Brennan at the medical examiner’s office and asked what would be the difficulty of switching medical records, where both patients were treated by the same doctor.

  “You mean physically switching them? Gee, what a primitive concept! You’d have to break into the offices, transfer records, fake some, probably. And then there’s the records on the computers. You’d have to be computer literate, Mul. It’d be a laborious, time-consuming bit of business. But, oh sure, it could be done.” There was a silence, then he mused, “It could work. The thing about doctors, they’re very jealous of their record keeping. If something is in a file, the doctor would be insistent that it was no mistake. In such a case, the physician would prove to be a terrific ally if you were trying to say one guy is who you want him to be. And the thing is, you don’t have to be absolutely ironclad about this, as long as the big important details are covered. I assume you’re still scratching at the DiEbola evidence.”

  Mulheisen said he was. He speculated for Brennan that if, as he said, the “big important details” pointed toward one identification, then a smattering of noncorroborative evidence would be waved aside.

  “Providing,” Brennan expanded, “that A, there’s no serious doubt or suspicion of faked evidence, and B, no single item surfaces that conclusively rules out the desired identification. If you’ve got that, Mul, you’re on base.”

  Mulheisen felt it was worth pursuing. He called the legal guys and explained why he’d need a warrant. They said it sounded vague, but doable. They’d get right on it.

  He put that out of his mind and went back to studying his notes. He focused especially on the Porky White story. DiEbola’s version was fascinating. It was an obvious fabrication, even if it wasn’t clear whether it was intended to deceive or an unconscious dream fiction: displacing the dead Arthur White with a nameless child, a defenseless victim, and distancing himself from the event while being able to describe the frightening, nightmarish scene, via a secondhand account. It could be a work of imagination, certainly. A child who had known Porky White, who might in fact have been frightened of him, could have devised this nightmare. Mulheisen was familiar with some psychology, and he thought he recognized some timeworn themes, such as guilt, the sexual associations. He supposed that a child who had been afraid of Porky White might have felt guilt as a price of relief at his disappearance. Or it might be a veiled fear that he might not really be dead, or …

  He gave that kind of speculation up. For one thing, the body hadn’t been found at the time. As far as children of the period knew, Porky had simply run away. The expected reaction would be guiltless relief. Psychological speculation, especially when you had little hard evidence and couldn’t interview the parties involved, was a great waste of time. It was bound to be wrong. He didn’t doubt that kids might have had bad dreams about Porky White’s disappearance, but so what?

  He found himself humming the tune “Mairzy Doats.” As he recalled, the nonsense verse was repeated in plain language, revealing the code. “Mairzy doats and dozey doats, and little lambsy divey” became “Mares eat oats and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy.” “A kiddle-dee-divey too” finished out as “A kid will eat ivy, too, / Wouldn’t you?” Amusing—once. When repeated endlessly, it quickly became tiresome.

  A goofy thing to name a boat, though. He knew about boats, having grown up on the river. People gave them dumb names, sometimes. It was like vanity license plates, he supposed, without the restriction of space. People named them to reflect some jokey notion, like the expense—Me’n the Bank. Or a favored identification: Serb-a-Rite had been Big Sid’s boat, he recalled, presumably a play on sybarite. Or they named them after their wife or girlfriend. He wondered if Humphrey had ever had a girlfriend, one named Ivy.

  Suddenly, he recalled that Helen had mentioned that Humphrey had nourished a crush on a little girl. Perhaps.

  He called Helen. She was skeptical, to say the least. To the best of her knowledge Humphrey had never mentioned anyone named Ivy.

  “While I’ve got you on the line,” he said, thinking about Brennan’s notion of the difficulty of switching medical records, “was Humphrey what you would call computer literate?”

  “Humphrey was a computer bore,” she said. “He got into it late, but in a big way. I think he even took a private course from some guy, some whiz. No, I don’t remember the guy’s name. It was before I spent much time with him. He’d sometimes be up half the night fooling around on-line. He was a real nut for it. Maybe it was the bad dreams, afraid to go to sleep. He seemed apologetic about it, or do I mean regretful? He said it was eating into his reading. That’s what that bunker of his was all about, I suspect. He had all kinds of computer equipment down there.”

  Unfortunately, of course, Mulheisen realized, all those computers had been destroyed in the explosion and fire. It would have been interesting to see what was on them. He wondered if the hard drives had been at all salvageable. He didn’t know much about that kind of thing, but he thought he could find out. Of course, if Humphrey had staged the whole thing, he’d certainly have erased anything useful. But it was worth checking.

>   The other thing worth checking, he thought, was school records. Just out of curiosity. He supposed somewhere there would be a record of Humphrey’s classmates. Perhaps there was a little girl named Ivy. The name seemed familiar to him, but he guessed it was from recalling the song lyrics.

  It was too late for that today. He’d found out a lot. Too much, really. He had to digest it.

  Happily, he also had Becky’s special osso buco to digest. After dinner he set about shelving his books in his new library. He’d never had a library before, so much shelf space! Inevitably, he dug out White’s The Middle Ground. He reread the account of Le Pesant with profound interest. He was struck anew by the treatment of the problem of murder. This notion of the differentiation between the killing of an enemy—i.e, an enemy of the group to which one belonged—versus the killing of a “friend,” someone not an enemy of the group … it was difficult to comprehend.

  How could any society treat the latter so lightly? Any society he’d ever heard of considered that kind of killing particularly heinous, a betrayal of friendship, trust, striking at the very heart of the social contract.

  No, he saw that he misunderstood it. It wasn’t that the Algonquians took it lightly. They killed their enemies without compunction or sentiment and expected to be slain by them, if caught in a weaker position. That wasn’t particularly different from the traditional notion of the criminal inculpability of soldiers in battle. What was different was they absolutely rejected the concept of capital punishment for civil crimes, for murder. One man is slain; why should another valuable life be taken? What compensation was that? And yet, he had no doubt that there had been psychotics, murderers, among them. How did they deal with that?

  A man like DiEbola, now, what was his ethic? He apparently killed at will, dispatching whomever he judged to be inconvenient for him. As far as Mulheisen could tell, DiEbola was quite conscienceless about it. Although … he was troubled by dreams. Possibly he was mad. Possibly his crimes were catching up to him. If what Helen had told him was true, DiEbola had become fascinated of late with his earliest experiences. Mulheisen couldn’t help feeling there was something to this, that there was a significance to the Porky White episode. If he had been involved in that death, what a boon it would be to him if he could cover that body, or resurrect it, as the Algonquians saw it. What a concept!

  Mulheisen had perceived no inclination on Becky’s part toward further exploring their cohabitation. He went to bed thoughtfully, without tension.

  17

  Ontario

  It was raining hard when Mulheisen got up, and it was still raining when he got to the precinct and called the Roman Catholic archdiocese educational offices. A very helpful woman supplied him with the information that Umberto Gagliano had attended their schools in Oakland County and, later, in Wayne County, from 1940 through 1950, after which he seemed to have dropped out. She was even able to locate class lists from the grade school, but there had been no little girl named Ivy in any of those rather small classes. She looked, as well, at classes a year or two on either side of Umberto’s: no luck.

  This was disappointing, but Mulheisen reasoned that Umberto’s little girlfriend could just as well have attended public school. Through the Oakland County school district, with the help of yet another amiable official, he settled on Starr Primary School as the most likely place. If that didn’t work, he was prepared to try private schools. It wasn’t necessary. In 1944 and 1945, a girl named Ivy White had attended fourth and fifth grades.

  Of course, he thought. Porky White’s sister. He should have recognized it yesterday. Still, what did it mean? Just another connection to the White family, but they were neighbors, after all. Perhaps there was no more to it.

  In the fall of 1945, her records had been transferred to a public school system in Peterborough, Ontario. This was way the hell the other side of Toronto—a little far to pursue a nebulous link, he thought.

  The legal office called. They had his warrant. With the company of Detective Maki, Mulheisen visited Dr. Schwartz’s offices. Within minutes they found enough questionable entries and irregularities in the files of Humphrey DiEbola and Angelo Badgerri to arouse the suspicions of even Dr. Schwartz. Mulheisen impounded the files and took them downtown to Brennan at the Wayne County medical examiner’s office. Even a cursory glance convinced Brennan that the files had been tampered with. He would reopen the file on the corpse they’d identified as DiEbola, this time armed with data on Badgerri.

  Mulheisen left him to make a definite determination, but he was now convinced, himself. He returned to the precinct and called Jimmy Go. The trucker was not in, but his secretary said she’d try to get hold of him on his cell phone. He called within minutes. From the sound of it, he was in a dump truck in high gear. He was clearly pleased at Mulheisen’s news, but he was content to say “I told you so!”

  Mulheisen warned him that the next step would be the hardest. Just because the evidence had been confused didn’t mean that DiEbola was alive. People had died in that basement. One of them could have been Humphrey, regardless of the attempt to veil his identity. More to the point: if DiEbola was alive, where was he?

  Jimmy Go was eager to know what Mulheisen’s next moves would be. He seemed oblivious to Mulheisen’s statement that the case was still in the hands of the FBI. Mulheisen assured him that he himself would pursue DiEbola as the no-longer-believed-to-be-deceased suspect in the murder of Pablo Ortega, whose body had washed up in Mulheisen’s precinct.

  “Atta boy!” Jimmy Go yelled over the roar of traffic. “Keep me posted, Mul! I’ll make it worthwhile to you!”

  Mulheisen didn’t bother to respond to this artless bribery offer. He said Jimmy Go could read about it in the papers, if he was successful. For now, he had to do a lot more research into DiEbola’s past.

  “All I meant was, if you need any help,” Jimmy Go said, “you can count on me.”

  Mulheisen thanked him and went back to work. One of the things that had interested him was the boat. What role had it played in DiEbola’s plan? Like any Detroit policeman, Mulheisen had not only followed the case in the media but had supplemented that information by talking to other, official sources. By now he had seen the FBI report. The accepted scenario of the investigation had seen DiEbola as the victim of an assassination. Obviously, it had not gone well. At least one of the putative assassins, the security guard John Nicolette, had disappeared and was assumed to have died in the explosion of the Kiddle-Dee-Divey, although no bodies had been recovered. It was assumed that his original role would have been to let the killers into the grounds. That part of the assassins’ plan had gone awry, it seemed, when Nicolette was invited to play cards with DiEbola. Questioning of the other guards had established that: Nicolette had informed the gate man of where he was going.

  Mulheisen had thought that was a shaky assumption on the part of the investigators, but he hadn’t considered it very deeply, as long as the original scenario seemed to hold up. Now Nicolette’s role and the problem of access looked more interesting. It was thought that the assassins had gained access to the DiEbola estate via the lake, after they’d discovered the change in security plans. (Conceivably, they were notified hurriedly by Nicolette.) Why hadn’t the conspirators just canceled and hoped for a better occasion? The FBI had speculated that the change had been offset by the advantage of having a co-conspirator, Nicolette, on the spot.

  A stolen rowboat had been found, smashed at its mooring at the dock. Obviously, that was how they got in, or so the grand theory went. No abandoned vehicle had been found, but the assassins must have been dropped off, made their way along the canal path, where they stole the rowboat and simply rowed out to the lake and on to DiEbola’s. No one had seen the boat being rowed, but it was fairly late at night. Presumably, they had always planned to escape via the Kiddle-Dee-Divey, which was conveniently moored and ready to use—perhaps another benefit of Nicolette’s collusion.

  Now, with the indication that DiEbola had atte
mpted to confuse identification of the bodies, a new scenario was required. Two bodies had been found in the basement, neither of them intact. One of them was presumed to be Humphrey DiEbola, the other a small-time mobster named Matty Cassidy. It was thought that Cassidy was the key, somehow. He’d been allied to one of DiEbola’s less-than-supportive henchmen. The missing figure was Nicolette. He had some tenuous marital connections, but there was no reason to see him as a conspirator, Mulheisen thought. He was still missing. Who else had been down there? There was ballistic evidence from at least three guns. If one of the bodies was Badgerri, that meant a cozy four-handed poker game. The FBI had established fingerprints on two weapons found at the scene, and they matched with prints they had earlier established as DiEbola’s: prints derived not from files, since there were none, but from household sources, like drinking glasses, cups, doorknobs. But what if DiEbola had planted those? The FBI presumably had Badgerri’s prints—he had a long record— but they’d never had any reason to try to match them with the prints found at the scene.

  Mulheisen presumed that DiEbola must have intended to use the Kiddle-Dee-Divey himself. Why? The obvious answer: to escape to Canada. The international border here was notoriously porous. He might have laid plans to fly out of Canada to some other destination. Or he might still be in Canada. A standard check of the airlines showed nothing, but Mulheisen had expected little from that.

  And now, of course, another possibility raised its head. Say that DiEbola had escaped an assassination attempt, or even that he had staged the attempt himself, to make it appear he was dead. It was possible that he had died when the boat blew up. As yet, no sign of bodies had been found, and given the passage of a couple of weeks, it looked like none would be found. Was this just another subterfuge, to conceal the true nature of the plan? Had the assassins or, more likely, DiEbola destroyed the boat to close another channel of investigation? Had they, or he, then gone on in yet another boat? This seemed possible, even likely.