Antoni lowered his feet with a muffled thump onto the well- carpeted floor. “How's that, Mul?”
“Mario Soper was a professional hit man sent out here to avenge the killing of Carmine Busoni,” Mulheisen explained patiently. “His targets would be Joseph Humann, a.k.a. Joe Service, and Helen Sedlacek. He almost got Joe, but he didn't succeed with Helen. I think, and Jacky agrees"—he nodded at the deputy— “that Helen got him. Now, I accept that you don't have enough to hold Helen for this; it's just supposition. But there is a precedent for extraditing a person and holding them as a material witness, for his or her protection.”
“You have talked to Helen,” Antoni said. “Did she agree to this protective custody?”
“No,” Mulheisen said. “In fact, she wouldn't talk at all. She didn't have a lawyer, not yet, anyway. But I think she's scared. She knows the mob is after her. It's possible she may consent, but even if she doesn't, there is some precedent for holding a material witness against their will.”
Antoni shook his head, a sour expression on his face. “Maybe in Detroit, Mul, but I've never seen it in Montana. I don't know, maybe you could get a governor's warrant, but I doubt it. It's a mutual backscratcher deal with these governors, only I think your governor is a Democrat and ours is a fuckin’ Republican. But get your governor to ask, if you want. And I have to tell you, Mul, that Ms. Sedlacek has obtained the services of Daphne Z. Stonborough. You won't like Ms. Stonborough, Mul. Well, you'll like her at first, to look at, but you won't like dealing with her. She'll put up a killer argument against extradition on such unusual grounds. She'll point out that the shotgun you confiscated doesn't belong to Ms. Sedlacek, that Sedlacek resided in a place where the gun was stored and in the natural course of her residence probably had occasion to innocently handle the weapon, which accounts for the fingerprints. .. that there are no eyewitnesses that link Ms. Sedlacek to the murder of Carmine Busoni . . . that she has no previous criminal record or indication that she is a violent person . . . and, of course, you found the gun months after the murder, not at the scene of Busoni's death but seventeen hundred miles away, and so on and so forth.”
Antoni frowned at Mulheisen. “I imagine that would be just Daphne's openers, Mul, speaking as a lawyer myself. Montana judges are familiar with Daphne. They have had cases overturned where she was counsel. She's about as good a lawyer as we've got, out here. I wouldn't count on seeing Helen Sedlacek in Detroit soon. I don't think you have a chance in hell. I'm dropping all charges and releasing her.”
Mulheisen sat back and considered this statement. “What about the assault charge?” he asked. “She struck me with the .357, she tried to flee—”
“Mul, the lady was naked, bathing in a hot springs on property where she was a resident. You're not a Montana law officer .. . hell, if she'd shot you just about any Montana jury would let her walk. You disturbed a lady in her bath.”
Mulheisen was a little puzzled by his friend Antoni's cool attitude. When the case had begun, months before, Johnny had been enthusiastic. Now he seemed indifferent, perhaps even hostile. Antoni looked pained and said, “Do you really want to do this, Mul? If it got to court you'd have to come back out here to testify . . . Daphne would say you weren't qualified to make an arrest . . . all that sort of crap. Frankly, I'm happy to see these Detroit hoods out of here.”
After an uncomfortable moment, Mulheisen said quietly, “Johnny, you've had a citizen in good standing nearly murdered, now he's disappeared . . . you have a dead hit man on the citizen's property . . . you have five men killed in an explosion and fire at the man's home . . . and you're going to shrug it off?”
“Tell me how I can hold Helen Sedlacek, Mul.” He shook his head. “You talked to her, didn't you? What did she say?”
“She didn't say anything.”
“And now she has Daphne Z. Stonborough,” Antoni said. “Talk to Daphne Z. See where it gets you.”
Mulheisen didn't know how to respond. Later, he discussed it with the deputy, Jacky Lee. Jacky snorted, “What'd you expect from a politician, Mul? I know he's an old buddy of yours, but he also wants to be attorney general. That's how you get to be governor. I s'pose it's the same in Michigan, isn't it?”
Mulheisen agreed that it was one of the ways, all right, but still . . . . When he'd first come to Montana, months earlier, Antoni had actually tried to hire him to take a job with something called the Northern Tier Organized Crime Task Force; they were worried about the mob moving in on gambling on the Indian reservations. Antoni had promised him the top job, anything he wanted.
“But you turned him down,” Jacky pointed out. “I s'pose that didn't sit too well. He was hoping to make a splash with that program. Now he'll have to find someone else. The way it looks to me, all this mob stuff—hired killers, Colombians flying in, Detroit detectives poking around—probably it doesn't look so good to Antoni. The Northern Tier thing may still fly, but I ‘spect he's happy to see the last of Helen Sedlacek and Joe Service.”
The following day Mulheisen was sitting on an airplane, headed back to Detroit, via Salt Lake City. He was trying to think about his investigation, but images of Sally McIntyre kept intruding. Every time he pictured the mountaintop hideway to which he had tracked Helen and her accomplice lover, Joe Service, he thought of the hot springs nearby. In that hot springs he had first looked upon the naked flesh of Sally McIntyre. Later, he had also looked upon the naked flesh of Helen there. It was a great hot springs, but it was Sally's form that he kept seeing. He made a great effort to push those images to the back of his mind. No pale breasts with blue veins faintly visible, no pale belly, no smooth but powerful thighs, no strangely rough lips, no arms, no tender throat outstretched to receive kisses, no. . . . No. No.
He succeeded finally, by switching his thoughts to the redoubtable Daphne Z. Stonborough, attorney at law. He had met her only a couple of hours earlier. A remarkable woman, he thought. Attractive, but even more impressive on a nonphysical plane. Her handsome face was strong but amiable—indeed, when she smiled, as she did readily, Mulheisen had felt a kind of relief, a reprieve, from the powerful intelligence that seemed to radiate from that smooth brow and shining dark eyes. She looked Russian, possibly Jewish. A Stonborough she might be, but the Anglo-Saxon heritage didn't give her those almond eyes or smooth olive skin. She was tall, very trim, in her late thirties. When it came down to business, she was as solid as a brick outhouse. There was no way that her client was going back to Detroit to be interrogated for a crime for which the Wayne County prosecutor had as yet been unable to obtain an indictment. Period. If Mulheisen wanted to question Ms. Sedlacek here, that was fine, but Ms. Stonborough would be present.
The questioning didn't get anywhere. Helen was calm and looking fine, confident, even. She was a small, dark woman with a mane of black hair that had a silver streak running through. She was smartly dressed, having been released from the Butte-Silver Bow jail that morning, the assault charges dropped. The interview took place in Daphne Stonborough's office, a wood-paneled affair with a view of the Continental Divide, the craggy mountains to the east of Butte. It was an old building, uptown, and from here you could see the great white figure of Our Lady of the Rockies, perched on the Divide.
Helen was friendly, calling Mulheisen “Mul” and responding pleasantly with only a few conferences with Ms. Stonborough. They had clearly gone over what she would say. She admitted knowing a man named Joe Service, although she had no idea what he did for a living other than manage his own estate. She knew that he went by the name of Joseph Humann. They were not married. They had met in Detroit when he had come to her house to visit one of her late father's associates. She had no idea where Mr. Service was now. For the past three months she had been traveling, although she knew that Mr. Service was in the hospital. They had agreed to separate a few days before Mr. Service's hospitalization. When she heard about his misfortune she had consulted the hospital and learned that he apparently had no insurance, so she had contributed some m
oney toward his care. She understood he was now released, or had at least left the hospital. No, she had not seen him since September, when he'd left on a road trip. No, she had no idea where he'd been headed at that time. Once again, she had no idea where he might be now. As for her plans, she was unsure.
Mulheisen wasn't discouraged by any of this. All in all, it had been a successful investigation. If it hadn't solved any crime, at least he'd learned a lot. Some things, he knew with a kind of fatalistic certainty, would never be satisfactorily explained. But he felt confident that the main questions were well on their way to being answered. For one thing, he now knew the identity, more or less, of a man who had plagued his investigations for some time: Joe Service, a man with an ambiguous relationship to the Detroit mob. Apparently, he was not himself a mobster—not a “made man"—but his ties to the mob ran deep. That would be where to look for him, Mulheisen suspected.
Just knowing who you were looking for was a step forward, Mulheisen felt. He was reminded of an old partner of his, a mentor actually, a rough, crude, unconventional crazy man of a detective, now deceased, named Grootka. “The world is round,” Grootka would say, by which he meant that criminals kept on being criminals and if you didn't nail them on this rap, they'd offer you another opportunity sooner rather than later. In this case, Mulheisen felt that the trail was definitely warming up.
In fact, having arrived in Salt Lake City and standing on the moving conveyor that bore him to another concourse, where he would wait for his connecting flight, Mulheisen felt that the trail was very warm. Just a few weeks earlier he had spotted Helen Sedlacek on this same people-mover, passing in the opposite direction. He had not apprehended her at the time, but it had eventually led to a successful tracking of her movements. He had felt at the time that she hadn't been in Salt Lake City coincidentally, that there was a good chance that she had been staying somewhere in the area. Just a hunch, a vague notion. He had the same notion, now, not only about Helen, but about Joe Service.
When Joe Service had been dangling between life and death at St. James Hospital in Butte a few months ago, money for his medical expenses had been sent via Federal Express from Salt Lake City. It came in the form of cashier's checks from an anonymous donor for just less than three thousand dollars each (the maximum amount purchasable under current law without filing a telltale IRS form), purchased at several Salt Lake City banks. Subsequent checks had come from other cities around the West, but again, from time to time, from Salt Lake City. The pattern had suggested to Mulheisen at the time that Helen Sedlacek was using the Mormon capital as a base. He now made a little leap of logic: if Helen had been sending money for Joe Service's care, as she had admitted this morning in Daphne Stonborough's office, she must have access to a good deal of cash, inasmuch as she chose to purchase only those amounts under three grand. Otherwise, like any honest citizen, she would have sent a personal check. Of course, the reason could be that she hadn't wished to write a check, to remain anonymous, but Mulheisen felt the first reason was the more likely. It strongly indicated access to a lot of cash. Further, it was known that a large amount of drug cash was missing from a scam that had been run on the mob by Helen Sedlacek's late mobster father, Big Sid. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to believe that Helen had some or all of that money, and that it could well be in Salt Lake City, and that Joe Service knew it.
A lot of assumptions, but there was a behavior pattern here that had become familiar to police all over America. The cocaine business had generated a frankly mind-boggling amount of money in the U.S. for at least the past fifteen years. This money—always cash—had to be washed, made clean, if it was going to be used as real wealth is used, in investments that would themselves earn money. And the money had to get back to Colombia, somehow. One of the ways this was done was by “smurfing.” Teams of men and women were sent out by the drug operators to process cash into legitimate monetary instruments that could be mailed and deposited in, say, Panama banks. The process was precisely like the one that Helen had used to send money to the Butte hospital. It was illegal to “smurf,” but it was difficult, if not impossible, to prove that the cash the smurfer used was not legitimate. However, the cash could be impounded until the smurf could provide a legitimate source. This, of course, the true smurf never did. In fact, the smurf simply went on his or her way, rarely to be seen again. The amount of money was presumably written off by the drug bosses. Why bother with a few thousands when you were dealing in tens and hundreds of millions, even billions?
But Mulheisen didn't think Helen was a smurf, not in the usual sense, at least. If she was smurfing, it was on her own behalf, not some drug lord's. Her money had come out of the drug scam her father had run. He sat down in one of those busy little snack shops that flourish in large, regional air-traffic hubs like Salt Lake City and drank a cup of coffee while he gazed at the blue skies of Utah and contemplated the assumptions he had just formulated on the people-mover. He had a three-hour layover here. He had noticed before that the airport was not too distant from the city. Conceivably, he could go into town and look around. But for what? A pile of money? Mulheisen hadn't that much confidence in hunches. But he thought he'd take a little jaunt into town. In the meantime, looking at the striking mountains that glistened in the winter sunlight, he couldn't help wondering what Sally McIntyre was doing at that moment.
Jimmy Marshall stopped Leonard Stanos in the hallway that led from the precinct lobby back to the detectives’ offices and interrogation rooms. Stanos was a hulking, raw-looking man, now a full-fledged member of the Big 4, the “cruiser bruisers.” Marshall and Stanos had been squad car partners, once, in their youth. They were about as different as two men could be, but Stanos had once saved Marshall's life and this act had cemented a life bond: Marshall was certainly the only person of African descent for whom Stanos had any regard at all; that is, Stanos actually thought of Marshall as a person, and an important person, even (if he were capable of searching his inner being, his soul) a person he liked. Why the saver rather than the saved should be more changed and moved by the act is a ponderable curiosity. Jimmy Marshall wasn't unmoved—he tended to forgive Stanos for any number of ignorant racist utterances and acts—but Stanos was clearly more affected.
Marshall showed Leonard the note on Mulheisen's door. He pointed to the “F.” in Mulheisen's signature. “What do you think of that?” he asked. “What does ‘F.’ mean?”
Stanos stared at the note, his thick brow ridged in pretend thought and his mouth hanging open, as always. “Fuckin’ Mulheisen,” he said quickly, glibly. But then, aware that Jimmy didn't take kindly to adverse comments on his mentor, he said, “That ain't a eff. That's a Catholic seven.”
“A Catholic seven? What the hell's a Catholic seven?”
“You know,” Stanos said, gesturing with a huge hand in a kind of rotary fashion, a gesture of linguistic or intellectual incapacity, “a seven like a Catholic'd make. It has a little cross on it, like a ‘tee,’ or a'eff.’”
“Ah.” Marshall understood that Stanos was referring to what he thought of as a European 7. He had never connected it to a religion however, and he asked Stanos about that.
“Sister Mary Hilda, at St. John Berchman's, al's made us cross our sevens,” Stanos said.
Marshall nodded. “But.” He pointed at the signature. “Seven Mulheisen? What does that mean?”
Stanos pondered the signature for a long moment, then he said, “That ain't ‘Mulheisen,’ that's ‘McIlhenny.’ Yanh. McIlhenny was a famous football player. I heard my dad talk about him. Hugh McIlhenny. I think he played for the Rams or the 49ers, back in the fifties. His number was prob'ly seven.” And he walked away, leaving Marshall to stare at his back.
At this moment, Mulheisen was riding in a taxi into Salt Lake City, considering what he knew about “Joe Service.” He visualized the name with quotation marks because he wasn't in any way confident that it was the man's real name. It didn't sound any more real than Joseph Humann, the name he ha
d used to buy land and establish himself as a legitimate citizen in western Montana. Fingerprints, taken while he was in the Butte hospital, had not turned up any previous identity, nor even any previous history as Joseph Humann. The name Joe Service was one Mulheisen and his Detroit colleagues, especially the Rackets and Conspiracy bureau, had heard in connection with the mob. It was said that he was an outside man, a resource man. Someone who was called in to investigate problems within the mob. A mob detective. But he was not known to be a hit man.
Mulheisen could recall a half dozen cases in which it seemed that his own work had been hampered by the efforts of this “Joe Service” character. He imagined that, like any corporate body, the mob had inevitable internal problems with theft and embezzlement—no doubt much more than General Motors or the First Bank of Detroit experienced. The familial and hierarchical arrangements inside such a body as the mob must be horrendous to deal with. In order to avoid outright bloodshed, street war, such as had characterized the clashes of mobs in the twenties and thirties, the services of a man like Joe Service must have seemed very valuable. But he must have come from somewhere. It wasn't a job description that one could advertise in the classified section of the Free Press. How did he get to be “Joe Service"?
Mulheisen thought he could start here, in Salt Lake City. Maybe here he could pick up a trail that would lead back, little by little, to the real “Joe Service.”
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