“I wonder if the lady would consider a buyout of the lease,” Joe said. “It's just about in the area I want. Do you think you could check?”
“We could try,” the realtor said. She didn't say anything about Mulheisen's visit, but she was suspicious about this inquiry. She got out a file and laid it on her desk. Joe stood up and paced about, whistling softly while the lady tapped out a phone number. Joe wandered casually away to the window, hands in jeans pockets. When she put down the phone and said, “Sorry, she seems to be out,” Joe sauntered back and perched on the edge of the desk, nothing threatening, just friendly and interested. He leaned over. “What were those other two properties?”
The realtor's suspicions vanished. She shoved the folder aside, but not before Joe had seen the name “Helena Kaparich” and the phone number. She scribbled down the two other addresses for him on her card. Joe said he'd go take a peek at them and he'd check back with her.
It was beautiful, he thought, walking away in the cold. It was dark now, the Christmas lights blinking on. Helena Kaparich! He loved it.
He hurried back to the Market Street Grill, eager for warmth, for Cateyo. But when he waved his membership card at the entry and walked in, there was still no Cateyo. He sat there, sipping a drink, until suddenly he was alarmed. Cateyo was not a foolish woman. She had been upset when he left her, but she wouldn't do anything silly like stand him up. He walked to the hotel, hoping that Cateyo might have given up on finding him and had returned to the room. But she wasn't there. He threw himself on the bed and thought.
Something was amiss. He examined the room. All of her gear was gone. She had followed his instructions, come back to the hotel and left. Presumably she was still down on the street. But she hadn't been to the cafe. That was clear.
He lay on the bed thinking about this until, quite exhausted, he fell asleep.
6
Some Like It Chilly
Humphrey DiEbola was a big man but it was clear that he was not as big as he once was. He had once weighed three hundred and fifteen pounds, which did not sit lightly on a five foot, eight inch frame. But now he was down to two hundred and fifty pounds, which had begun to seem like a manageable weight. He wasn't sure he wanted to weigh much less. Two twenty-five looked like the reasonable lower limit to Humphrey. Any less than that and he would begin to seem a small man; not an attractive prospect. He had no desire to be a small man.
He attributed his new svelteness to his diet—an overliberal use of chili peppers, in all their myriad forms—and a modest regimen of exercise: regular, if not very long or arduous walks along the lake shore by his Grosse Pointe home and about the spacious grounds. He was a man who had never exercised, had never worked physically. The basis for muscles just wasn't there. He could lose weight, but he couldn't really be lean.
It was the chili pepper that was most important. He believed that peppers actually consumed fat, burned it off somehow. Obviously, the hotter the pepper the greater the conflagration and the more fat was consumed. Thus, his favorite was the habanero, that incredibly volatile pod from the Cobán region of Guatemala, with its 200,000 to 300,000 Scoville Units of fieriness (the hottest jalapeňo registered only 5,000). But he liked all kinds of peppers. He had graduated from merely buying bottles of prepared sauces (although he still harbored a fondness for Salsa Picante de la Viuda, a de Arbol pepper sauce from Jalisco, mainly because the photo of the dowdy “widow” on the label reminded him of his late mother) to buying dried peppers from various suppliers who advertised in Chile Pepper magazine, lately his favorite reading. Besides the nearly combustible habanero (what on earth did it have to do with Havana? he wondered), he was fond of the beautiful if relatively mild cascabel, with its reddish-black shiny skin; the wonderfully hot little cobanero, also from Guatemala; the nippy little wild tepins and pequins, or the pico de parajo (bird's beak) peppers; the lovely long red de Arbol, burning at a respectable 15,000 to 30,000 S.U. Ah, there was no end to this study. He was in correspondence now with the poet Harrington, debating the merits of peppers and trading recipes for menudo and nam prik sauce (employing “prik ki nu,” or “mouse droppings” chilies grown by expatriate Thais).
At the moment, a stormy winter afternoon with the wind howling off frozen Lake St. Clair and hammering the French doors of his living room, causing the fire in the fireplace to huff and roar, he had the first inkling that others were beginning to find him too small. Specifically, a visitor from New York, who was sampling Humphrey's good Scotch and pointedly remarking that Humphrey's Detroit crime fiefdom had declined. Not so, Humphrey mildly protested.
“All my indicators are up,” Humphrey said. “Collections, real income . . . all up significantly.”
“Good,” the wise guy from the East said, “but you could expect that, once Carmine was gone. He was a drag on business. But it isn't up, I bet, from what it should be.” The wise guy didn't have any figures, of course, or not any reliable figures, but he had a general perception of business. Any figure was bound to be less than “what it should be.”
“The thing is, you have lost respect,” the wise guy said. “Not only is Carmine still not revenged, but you lost three guys in that business out in Montana, which you know your business best but it looks like a total screwup, plus the Colombians lost a couple guys and even Vetch, our best contact, your best contact, looks like he'll croak. . . . I'm telling you, Fa—” The visitor almost made the mistake of calling Humphrey by his once universal nickname, Fat, but caught himself in time. “Er, Humphrey, it looks like you're weak. I'm not saying you are weak, but it looks like you're weak.”
Humphrey almost shrugged, but he didn't. He wasn't weak. He knew the business was better than ever, much better, in fact. Better than the Eastern organizations could imagine. The Detroit organization was solid, now that he no longer had to contend with Carmine's foolish arrogance and unproductive gestures of old world mafiosimo. He contented himself with remarking that business was never up as much as one might hope. How could it be? But it was up plenty.
Privately, he knew damn well that this visit wasn't prompted by any notions of disinterested concern on the part of the Eastern mob. True, they had lost their man Mario Soper, the man they had sent to kill Joe Service, with Humphrey's grudging assent. But they were nosy and greedy. He supposed what they were most curious about was just how deeply the Detroit mob had been into the Colombian drug market and how much was involved. That was all Carmine's doing, against Humphrey's advice. A negligible part-timer named Eugene Lande had pulled off a scam with Big Sid Sedlacek. All the principals were now dead. The money had not been recovered. It wasn't even known how much was involved. The key figure here was Helen Sedlacek, of course. She was presently in jail in Butte, Montana, but Humphrey expected her to be released on bail, soon. He had every intention of discussing this problem with Helen herself, but he didn't need the Eastern mob poking around and he especially resented implications that he was weak, that he wasn't as big as he used to be.
He decided to cut down on the habanero sauce and emphasize some of the milder peppers, although he loved the flavor of habanero above all others. He would draw the line at two hundred and twenty-five pounds. It would make his tailor happy, anyway.
“Everything is in hand,” he told the man from the East, and he made a slight gesture of gripping and crushing that did give the visitor pause. “I'll do the right thing about Carmine and your boy Soper. I could give a shit about the Colombians, especially that back-stabbing Vetch Echeverria, but they too will be avenged. You know, revenge is a dish best served cold. I think Edgar Allan Poe said that. It's supposed to be a Spanish saying, eh? Though what the Spaniards know about cold dishes I can't imagine. Myself, I like it hot.”
“Everybody likes it hot,” the man said.
“Not like I like it hot,” Humphrey assured him. “Still, you gotta face up to reality. If you don't get it hot you gotta settle for cold. When hot goes cold it's too late for hot.”
The wind whumped again
st the French doors and the fire roared.
“So turn up the heat,” the man said. “I hope you are including Joe Service on your platter of cold cuts. Mitch asked me to mention Joe especially. You know, Carmine almost had Joe popped just before he went down himself. Did you know that? He thought he could handle Joe, but it looks like he thought wrong.”
“Carmine, God rest him, never figured Joe right. He was forever screwing him over. I guess Joe finally got fed up. That don't make it right—if Joe was behind Carmine's death. I don't have no proof.”
“Proof! You want proof? What are we, the fuckin D.A.? Rules of evidence don't apply here. We know what happened. The guy was in it with Big Sid's kid. She ran off with him, didn't she? She couldn't of done nothing like that on her own.”
Humphrey shrugged. “Maybe we underestimate Helen. She's very capable. She took down your prick, Mario. And Joe was in the hospital at the time. That was your man's fuckup. Mario left him breathing. I didn't recommend Mario. That was you guys. So please, don't tell me what Helen can do. She's a handful. It looks like she also took down one of my own.”
The man from the East was interested. “I never heard about that. Who was the guy?”
“A loser,” Humphrey said, as offhandedly as he could manage. It had just slipped out, in his annoyance. He was not about to admit that his hitter had been a woman, someone the traitor Rossamani had recommended. In a way, he considered the Butte episode successful since it had flushed out some disloyal figures in his own operation, but that wasn't something he wanted to discuss with the Eastern boys, either. “No one you ever heard of,” he said. “But let me tell you, I'm not totally convinced Joe had anything to do with Carmine's killing. Plus, you gotta consider that over the years Joe did good work for all the organizations, never screwed over anybody, even when Carmine was jacking him around. Did Joe ever screw over you guys? No, I didn't think so. A useful kinda guy, I'd say. But, if it turns out he was in it with Helen, I'll deal with it. You can count on it.”
“Where is Joe, anyway?” the man asked.
“Who knows? He got out of the cabin before my people and Vetch got there. He's running, obviously. But we'll hear from him, don't worry. He's not a guy to lay low forever. In the meantime, I'll deal with little Miss Sid.”
The Easterner didn't comment. Humphrey took that to mean that they weren't dropping their interest but that they were withholding judgment. The wind blew and the man held up his empty glass. “This is good shit,” he said. Humphrey poured him another glass.
When the man had left, Humphrey sat for a long while, pondering. It was strange, he thought, that all the years when he was serving Carmine, making the dumb asshole's decisions for him and cleaning up after his messes, he had never given a thought to the need for someone like himself when, and if, he were ever to succeed Carmine. He had taken it for granted that he would be able to handle everything himself. But it couldn't be. The boss can't do everything. He had inherited Rossamani, one of Carmine's lesser lieutenants, and Rossie had turned out to be a snake. Rossie had foisted the killer Heather onto him. She had evidently perished in Montana, no doubt whacked by Helen. Rossie had collaborated with Vetch Echeverria. Rossie had been a traitor. Humphrey was glad he was gone. But who did he have to help him now? A boss had to have dependable lieutenants. Joe would have made a great one. A very capable man, Joe. Maybe too independent, but Humphrey had always gotten along with him. What he couldn't really figure, however, was why Joe had helped Helen whack Carmine.
Helen he felt he understood. He had known her since infancy. She used to call him Unca Umby, from his real name, Umberto. She had been a willful child, impossibly indulged by her adoring papa, Sid. When Sid was whacked—and it had to be done, Sid just had never learned to keep his fingers out of the pie—there was no way she was going to let it go. She hadn't been brought up that way. He could see why Joe would like her: they were pods from the same plant. But how could Joe fall so completely for her that he would help her whack Carmine? Joe wasn't that kind of fool. Or so Humphrey had thought. Loyalty was the highest virtue. Joe had always been loyal, if complaining.
Humphrey pondered now if there wasn't some way he could work around Joe's disloyalty. Let's be practical, he told himself. Is there ever a time when disloyalty can be okay, when it can be overlooked? Ever? He considered, for instance, if there could be a higher loyalty, say to the organization. How ‘bout if you saw that the leader was betraying the group itself? Wouldn't a man have the responsibility, even the right, to act against the leader? He mistrusted this notion. It wasn't right for a follower to decide for himself when the leader had gone too far. Maybe a guy, if the boss was actually threatening his life, had a right to strike first. That could be, he thought. He had been shocked when he had first learned that Carmine had contemplated a contract on Joe. Carmine had said nothing to him about it, at the time. Oh, he recalled an occasion, or two, when Carmine had angrily exclaimed that if Joe didn't straighten up and do what Carmine wanted, then Joe could be whacked too. But that had been anger, a momentary thing, the kind of thing that anybody might say, not really meaning it. But to go so far as to suggest to the New York mob that Joe was expendable. . . . Humphrey had never heard that kind of thing, not until after Carmine's death. But maybe Joe had heard it. Maybe Joe had learned about it, somehow. Joe had a way of learning things like that. If he had heard it, he might have decided he had to cap Carmine first. Was that justified? Humphrey wasn't sure. He himself had sometimes thought that Carmine was running down the whole business and if it went too far he might have had to take steps. But he hadn't taken steps.
And then it occurred to him that maybe Joe had been loyal to him, to Humphrey himself. Maybe Joe had seen that Humphrey was the guy who should be running things. He had to admit that he liked this idea, but he also didn't like it. He didn't like the idea that an underling, a guy who was in a lot of ways not really part of the organization, not on the inside, anyway, would set himself up as a kingmaker.
Joe had a peculiar status: he was an independent investigator for the mob, he worked for everybody. But he was not an inside man, not a made man. That had been the whole point. Sometimes, when things went wrong in a large, loose affiliation like the national mob, a truly independent investigator was invaluable. You needed someone who had no particular loyalty to any particular member of that loose federation—that is, no deep, essential, familial loyalty. That was where Joe came in. It was a role that Carmine had imperfectly understood: he grasped the principle, but he was too old-fashioned, or wanted to be: the grand don, everybody's papa, padrino. He had treated Joe like his personal tool, and that wasn't right. Or was it? Maybe a truly independent figure like Joe was unique and maybe it was a role that couldn't be sustained over the long haul. In fact, now that he thought about it, before Joe Service there hadn't ever been an independent investigator. Now that he thought about it, Joe Service had come up with the idea himself.
Humphrey sighed. This wasn't getting him very far. He needed someone, he felt. The only confidant he had these days was his chef, Pepe, and they didn't always see eye to eye. Pepe was a Mexican, but not very interested in hot cuisines. He had trained as a French chef, in Paris. He saw all his expertise going sadly to waste in Humphrey's kitchen. He knew how to make menudo, how to cook posole, even, but it wasn't what he wanted to cook. It was peon food. Lately, however, he had begun to come around to Humphrey's point of view. He had decided to pursue this chili business, to see just how much heat his boss could take. So far, Humphrey could take anything he dished out and ask for seconds.
The cold wind huffed against the French doors. Humphrey looked out at the bitter lake. He caught a glimpse of one of his people, bundled up in a bulky down coat and a wool hat, standing near one of the fir trees, out of the wind. The guard was obviously making his rounds, talking on his portable phone. Humphrey shivered. It was cold out there. He wanted heat. He picked up a copy of Chile Pepper magazine and leafed through it. Suddenly, he leaped to his feet—much
more nimble these days—and raced into the kitchen, shouting “Pepe! Pepe!”
It was a good thing that Pepe heard his still quite hefty boss pounding down the corridor that led to the kitchen, for he was at that moment in the act of penetrating the sumptuous Caroline, the maid. She was bending over the butcher block, her tiny skirt flipped up over her buttocks, her panties around her ankles, and Pepe's white duck pants were coiled about his own ankles.
“Madre de dios!" Pepe exclaimed, hiking his pants up and shoving the horrified maid into the pantry. Humphrey burst through the swinging door seconds later.
“Pepe! Listen to this!” He brandished the magazine, his face glowing with delight. “Some guys in England—scientists!—have proved that capsaicin actually consumes calories! They gave a bunch of volunteers the same amount of food each day, but some days they added chili powder. On the chili days the volunteers consumed twenty-five percent more calories, on the average! See! See!” He held the magazine open to the article. “It's like I always told you. I knew the chilies burned fat. But you laughed. You laughed!” Humphrey laughed.
Pepe adjusted the belt of his trousers surreptitiously under his apron while he looked at the article, which Humphrey had spread on the butcher block. “May temporarily accelerate the metabolic rate . . . “ he read. He pursed his lips judgmentally, then smiled. He noted, “It does not say that it burns fat, boss, it says calories.”
“Fat is calories,” Humphrey retorted.
Pepe shrugged. “So? Perhaps.”
“Perhaps? There ain't no perhaps about it.” Humphrey sniffed then. “What's that? You cookin’ something?” He sniffed again. “Fish?”
Pepe turned his back to him, standing by the maple cutting-board counter, rummaging in a paper sack. Suddenly he spun around and held up his hand with a small orange-colored thing in it. “Voilà!” he exclaimed.
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