I looked at the kid. He was a smooth-faced, innocent-looking, ordinary black kid in baggy pants and shirt, except that he wasn't wearing Air Jordan sneakers that cost about one hundred and fifty bucks a pop. Instead he had on some kind of boot with a CCM label. That being a manufacturer of hockey equipment, I wondered if he was a Red Wings fan. I thought he probably wasn't, being an African-American, boots or no boots—maybe he just thought they looked cool; but then I wondered if that was a racist notion. I knew black men who were hockey fans. But not many boys. I asked him, “What do you think of the Red Wings?”
“The Red Wings suck,” he said, bitterly. So he was a fan. I felt a little warmer toward him.
“Why do you say ‘her,’” I asked. “The last transmission was signed ‘Gaffer Hexam.’ Do you know who that is?” When the boy shook his head, I told him, “It's a literary character, from a novel by Charles Dickens.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, with a look of interest, “like in Tale of Two Cities.”
“That's right,” I said. “I wouldn't have got it myself, except that I just happened to reread this novel recently. Gaffer Hexam is a river scavenger, a guy who picks up floating stuff in the river that runs through London.”
“The Thames,” Kenty said, pronouncing the “th” as in “thumb.”
“I think they say ‘Temz.’ But yeah, that's how he makes his living. At the beginning of this book he recovers a body, which everybody thinks is the body of a young man who is the heir to a fortune. But it turns out that the body is that of a man who only resembles the heir, who has been the victim of a robbery and murder plot that nearly succeeded. But the funny thing is, the author—Dickens—doesn't seem all that interested in that side of the story, after a while. He's got too many other stories to tell us about, so the central murder mystery is kind of pushed aside. Life goes on is the message, I guess.”
Kenty looked interested, but I didn't want to test his patience; he was a true child of the computer age, with the attention span that implied. Still, people always seem to be interested in a story, so I went on. “You'd think for a novelist that a murder would be the main focus, wouldn't you? But Dickens just pushes it aside, pretty quickly, so he can tell us all about a bunch of other people. I guess Dickens got more interested in Lizzie Hexam's story.”
“Who's Lizzie?” Kenty interrupted.
“Sorry. That's Gaffer's daughter. She also works the river with him in his skiff.” Kenty nodded. “Anyway, the idea is that Gaffer starts the story rolling, but then he sort of fades into the background—he dies, and you kind of get the impression that Dickens kills him off, just to get rid of him. But Lizzie's story does become important. It kind of drives the last several chapters, and lots of other characters are caught up in it. But what does all that have to do with this . . . ? What is this thing? I mean, what do you call it?”
Kenty looked confused. “What is it? It's just a thing somebody sent to my E-mail address, but it wasn't for me, it was for you.”
“This is E-mail? Hmmm. So now I've gotten my first E-mail. Second, really. Well, what does it mean? Maybe what our person here is saying, is that somebody has been killed, thrown in the river, and she knows about it and the killers are now after her. But,” I concluded lamely, “so what? It's only a cartoon. Do you get a lot of this stuff? Things just popping into your E-mail?”
“Nope. Mostly I get people on the Net, people I talk to, mostly about games, that kind of stuff. Sometimes you get folks playing jokes, or they leave stupid messages, but this seemed different.”
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
Kenty shrugged. “I ain't no detective,” he said. “You are . . . or you s'posed to be. To me it sounds like somebody is scared and they need help.”
I tried not to sigh. “This kind of thing happens all the time, Kenty. Not exactly this, not misdirected E-mail, but this basic situation. People get worried because they think someone is trying to hurt them. Sometimes it's true. We have to take it seriously, to a degree, but that degree is based on the message. Here we have a somewhat mixed message. It seems to be a serious threat, but it's in the form of a crude cartoon that isn't even sent directly to the police but to a . . .”
“A kid,” he said, with a serious nod.
“Well, yeah, a kid.”
“So you don't take it too serious,” he said. “But what if that's her only way out? What if she has a computer but can't get out, or is afraid, or somebody won't let her? But she can send a message on the Net?”
I had kept the first disk. I located it in my desk, somehow, and got Kenty to pull up the material on a computer screen in Jimmy Marshall's office. As I'd recalled, it was just a series of panels depicting threatening events that would, or perhaps could, befall the blond woman. But there was no explicit message of help. We looked at the second disk, saved it, and copied it onto the first one, so I could keep it.
Kenty was sitting at the desk, his fingers idly riffling across the board, not unlike a pianist. He had called up the cartoon again. “See that?” Kenty said, pointing at the screen. “There's a number on her house.”
So there was. And in fact, by backtracking we were able to find a street sign. I had missed all that. Well, it wasn't exactly jumping out of the screen. The kid looked at me, as if to say, And you call yourself a detective?
I got out the address telephone book and looked it up. “Vera Jacobsen,” it read. The name rang as pure as a silver bell. It's hard to describe the feeling that a detective can get, sometimes, when he stumbles on something like this. It resonates deep in the marrow.
The address was in Ferndale, not more than six or seven blocks from where I'd been earlier, visiting Becky Berg.
“You live around here?” I asked Kenty. “Come on, I'll give you a ride home.”
“Nah, that's all right,” he said.
“What are you, afraid? Don't want the homies to see you riding in the cop's car? It's just an old Checker, it isn't like a real cop car.”
I don't know why I was pushing it; I guess I had some notion of wanting to see Kenty's house, his setup. It was a neat, well-maintained brick house on Three Mile Drive, off Mack. His grandmother came to the door, a round-faced woman with gray hair cut short, wearing a clean but wash-worn blue pajamalike outfit that made her look like Chairman Mao—she even had his fat cheeks. She was alarmed to see Kenty with a white man, and she quickly pegged me as a cop.
“This boy been in trouble?” she said, quickly. She grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him inside. Kenty tolerated her handling with a roll of his eyes.
“No, Ma'am,” I assured her. I showed my identification. “He was just helping us with some other citizen's cry for help. Trying to warn us, you might say. May I come in?”
She let me in, and I was about to explain that I was just interested in Kenty's layout when I realized that she would never believe that. She would think I was looking for drugs in his room. I said that I was interested in the house. I was looking to move and I'd considered this neighborhood.
“You?” she said, skeptically, looking me up and down.
“Yeah,” I said, looking her up and down. “Are there any places for sale around here?”
She shrugged. “Go ahead, look around. It's a nice house. Sure, there's places for sale, up by Forest.” She frowned at me, assessing my worth, then said, “This for a single man?” When I nodded she pursed her lips, as if to say, I thought as much. “The church"—she pronounced it choich—"is fixing up some houses to sell below Mack, but I don't know. . .” she faltered, but then decided to take a chance and went on, “if you would qualify.”
“Well, I've got a steady income,” I said.
“I mean, I don't know that the church is wantin’ to sell these homes, which they been fixin’ up, to um, single folks. Single men, anyway. There's lots of single women who have families and need the housing, but . . .”
“What church would that be?”
“That's the Penile African Baptist Church.”
She gazed at me as blandly as any Chinese emperor, daring me to smile.
“The Penile Church,” I said.
“Penile African Baptist, on Joy. You'll find it in the book.”
I thanked her and started to leave. Kenty said, “You want me to go with you?”
I didn't understand.
“To see the lady?” he said.
“Oh. No. I couldn't do that,” I said. I did want him to go with me, for a couple of reasons, one of which was to find out what this church was, but also because he might be helpful, and then . . . well, I'd enjoyed his company. But it wasn't something I could do. You can't take a kid with you on police business.
Which reminded me, in the car, of Grootka's warning about the dangers of this investigation, as old and stale as it was. I had not, of course, called in the Fat Man—who was now generally known by his real name, Humphrey DiEbola, if for no other reason than that he was no longer fat, but also because he was now the Man, his boss Carmine having been put away by assailants unknown, though widely believed to have been Ms. Helen Sedlacek and her lover, Joe Service. That is, the reason I hadn't called Humphrey in was that . . . well, let's face it, the material that Grootka had left me just wouldn't support that kind of action. It was a barely legible manuscript written in old school-exam books, hardly a document that one could rely on for an indictment. I hadn't even told Jimmy about it, and so how was I going to go to him, or to the Big 4, and ask for backup? It just wasn't in the playbook. Still, I had an uneasy feeling that Grootka's warning oughtn't to be ignored. He wasn't easily spooked. This had an edgy feel to it, and the feeling was getting edgier. Too, Grootka was not wrong in saying that I was not really keen on the outside aspects of detective work. I was never one to think of a gun first. It always seemed to me that a detective probably should not be in a situation where the only option was a gun. If he was, he'd probably made a mistake, not done his thinking first, as he should have.
With that in mind, I stopped by the Fifth Precinct, which is also the shooting range, and spent an hour getting rid of a couple pounds of lead. It was good exercise and I was gratified by the approving comments of Sergeant Bell, the range instructor, who noted that my scores were up. He wondered if I'd quit something.
“Quit something? Like what?” I asked.
“Usually the first thing that improves a guy's scores is, he's quit smoking, or even drinking,” Bell observed.
Now that I thought of it, I realized that I had not had a drink in several days, which may have been the first time that had happened in some time. But it had not been volitional: I simply hadn't felt like drinking. How odd that I hadn't noticed. Also, I hadn't had a cigar for a day or two. I felt like one now, however, and on the way to Ferndale I lit up an H. Upmann “Petit Corona.” It tasted very good and got me all the way to the little white house with the picket fence.
I don't know what I'd expected from Vera Jacobsen. If she was the woman Grootka had talked about, I guess I was thinking of a middle-aged busty blond stripper. She didn't much answer to Grootka's description. This Vera was as ordinary looking as a woman could be. Her graying hair was cut boy-short, which perhaps contributed to the impression of handsomeness, rather than feminine beauty. Her face was plain and not very wrinkled, with a smooth brow and firm mouth. The famous bosom had deflated, for another thing. She looked to be about fifty years old, perhaps more, her face rather browned in that way that we associate with yachtswomen and golfers, people who have spent all their lives out of doors. She was about five-seven, lean and lithe, a golfer. She wore jeans and an expensive-looking cashmere pullover, running shoes. An intelligent, open, alert face, none of the bosomy, flower-child/earth-mama-cum-sexpot image that Grootka had sketched. But, somehow, I felt that this was the woman in the notebooks. This is what happens to us when we grow up, I thought.
“You must be Mulheisen,” she said. “It's taken you a while.” The statement was flat and declarative. I nodded. “The kid finally convinced you to look into it, I guess.”
“Do you know Kenty?” I asked. She ushered me into a very sparsely furnished living room. There was a folded-up wooden bed, one of those Japanese things, with a colorful pad. There were a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs, strangely attractive for such simple things, and there was a piano, a music stand, a clarinet on a stand, and against the wall a modernistic Scandinavian stereo system of some sort. There were exactly three pictures on the three walls that didn't have a window—small, abstract paintings of seascapes, presumably, being simply blue shading to a straight horizon, then a subtly different blue shading to deep sky. The three paintings were not the same and yet, somehow, how could they be different?
“I know who he is,” Vera Jacobsen said. “I gave him his computer. I don't think he knows that.”
“How mysterious,” I said, unable to repress a tone of pleasure, I guess, because she smiled complicitly.
“It's nice to be able to do something for somebody, once in a while,” she said.
I glanced around the room. I didn't feel in any hurry. “These your work?” I gestured at the paintings. She nodded. “A bit more to this than the cartoons.”
“You can't do this on a video screen,” she pointed out. “But I had to do something to get your attention. It was time.”
“So you're not really in danger?”
“Of course, but I've lived with it for a long time. I try not to let it depress me. Grootka said it would take something serious, preferably with a literary twist, or historical maybe, to get you to pay attention. ‘You might have to paint him a picture,’ he said.”
“No kidding, Grootka said that?”
“In those words. ‘With a naked lady,’ was his suggestion, but I couldn't quite do that.”
“And when was this?”
“By now you should have guessed,” she said. “Would you like coffee, or would you like a drink? By the way, you can smoke your cigar, if you want.”
“No thanks, I just had one. But the coffee sounds good.”
She went into the little kitchen toward the rear and quickly returned with two cups on saucers, brimming with hot coffee. “I just made this a little while ago. It's Ethiopian. Cream? Sugar? Me neither.” She set the cups down on a kind of bookshelf that also held a small plant with thick, fuzzy leaves. She brushed the plant with a flickering look of dissatisfaction. “I'm not much of a gardener,” she said.
“How's the clarinet?”
“I'm not much a player, either.” She waved her hand dismissively. “I like to keep up with the music—well, I have to. In my work.”
“Your work?” I asked. “Do you play professionally?”
“Oh no, but I produce. That is, I produce records. CDs. It's just a little outfit, you've probably never heard of it: Hastily Improvised Productions, otherwise known as H.I.P. It's all avant-garde stuff.”
She was right; I hadn't heard of them, but I said I was interested. “Who do you record?”
“I doubt if you've heard of any of them,” she said. “They're mostly European, but we occasionally get onto some wild tenor player from Montana—there's a guy out there now, somewhere, who used to play in Detroit, but we haven't been able to interest him in a recording session yet. Chuck Florence?”
“Never heard of him,” I said. “You ever record M'Zee Kinanda?”
“Oh no, he's too big for us. But . . . who knows, we might be able to get him to ‘guest’ on somebody else's session.”
“Where do you do this?” I looked around.
“Not here,” she said. “This is just my Detroit pad. I used to live here years ago, but now I'm mostly in Santa Barbara. Are you familiar with the business? Well, it's not what it sounds like, I guess. Being a record producer doesn't mean you have an office at RCA, it's just a telephone in Santa Barbara, and here, too. A recording tells the caller where I am. I try to put together the artists and we rent a studio, usually in L.A., but also here, or New York, wherever's convenient. But, you didn't come here to talk about . . .”
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“No, it's interesting,” I said.
“Do you play? No? I guess I knew that. But you are a fan.”
“You know a lot about me,” I said. “Was this from Grootka?”
“Mainly. He thought very highly of you, perhaps too highly. I don't mean that in a bad way.” She had seated herself, or perched, on a high stool against one wall. It was another indication that this was not a room for relaxing, although she didn't seem ill at ease. She held her cup in both hands and sipped carefully from it. I'd already burned my tongue.
“I don't mean that you aren't worthy of his esteem,” she amended, “but that his esteem prevented him from being as open with you as he would have liked. He thought you were a bit above him, you see.”
“You learned all this from a few hours of . . . ah, of being together up at the lake, at the resort?”
“Oh, no, we kept very close contact over the years,” she said, looking at me with surprise. “I kept waiting to have it all come out, but Grootka kept saying, ‘No, no, not yet, the time isn't ripe. We'll let Mulheisen decide, when it suits him.’ And then, of course, he died . . . well, you were with him. After that, I wasn't sure what to do. But obviously, now, things are coming to a head.”
“They are?”
She looked at me kind of funny, but said, “I'm sure you see the problem. How to approach you in such a way that you wouldn't get all alarmed and go official on this. That was Grootka's feeling, as well. He wanted to avoid an official response, because he felt that the situation was too . . . too delicate, I guess. Too many innocent people stood to get hurt, if the official response didn't properly protect them, which he felt that it wouldn't. He felt that there had to be a way, which you—the great Mulheisen—would be able to figure out, to deal with this so that the little guy didn't get hurt.” There was a delicate balance in her tone of skepticism, if not scorn, and genuine concern.
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