Joe wasn't so happy with her clever plans. He shook his head sadly. “Why can't you just do what I tell you? I need the coffin,” he pointed out.
“Well, you should have let me in on it,” Helen said. “Oh well, I can always call them back.”
“No, no,” Joe said. “We can get a coffin elsewhere.” It proved simple enough. They just went to another funeral home and purchased a simple wooden coffin, suitable for transporting a body.
For a place to stay, Joe had decided on the apartment of Clarence Woods. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of it earlier. The only consideration he could imagine, from the viewpoint of security, was whether the police were watching the place in an attempt to get a lead on Woods's murderers. But Joe doubted it. He doubted that the police were working very hard, if at all, on this case. No doubt, like himself, they believed that Woods had been killed by his sometime associates, the Tongan gang, probably for some transgression or another. The police wouldn't really care. One dead crook is . . . well, one less crook. And, of course, the police were very busy just now with a more spectacular killing.
Along with this reasoning, Joe also felt confident that the Tongans would not be hanging around Woods's apartment, if only to avoid any contact with police. So it looked like a good, safe place. And so it proved. The building itself was modest, with only six apartments on its three floors. Joe had no idea who occupied the others, of course. Some of them might be Tongans, or allies, who would notify the gang if someone came around asking about Woods, but Joe doubted it. Anyway, it seemed worth a chance.
He and Helen waited in the little lobby after ringing the caretaker's bell. A pleasant woman of fifty or so, with graying hair in a bun and wearing an apron over a cotton print housedress, came to the door of the downstairs left apartment. She was clearly baking cookies, or cakes, from the odor wafting out the open door. She was Mrs. Homer Althing and she was so sorry to have heard about their uncle Clarence being killed that way. Salt Lake City never used to have things like that, she assured them, but nowadays. . . . She couldn't help but feel that it had something to do with the social work that Mr. Woods did—sorry, had done—among the islanders.
“They're good people,” Mrs. Althing said over her shoulder as she trudged up the stairs to Mr. Woods's apartment, “but some of them get into trouble, the young ones, because they're out of their element, don't you see? I wonder if it's the right thing for the church to bring these poor people over here in the first place. And they're so big! Well, here we are.”
She opened the door to the apartment and followed them in. “Well, this is it,” she said, in a sad voice. “It's a nice little apartment and he was paid-up through the end of the month. He always paid right on time. He was a very good tenant, although some of the others complained about the islanders tromping up and down the stairs, sometimes late at night, but generally they didn't cause any problems. Mr. Woods was very strict with them.” She chuckled, adding, “It was a sight to see him, so small and . . . “ But then she realized that Joe and Helen were themselves not very large people, so she let the idea drop. “And you're from where, again?”
“Montana,” Joe said. “We were related on our mother's side. Uncle Clarence was Ma's older brother. I'm afraid we didn't see much of Uncle Clarence, not since . . . when was it, Helen? When we were just . . . ?”
“I was ten, I think,” Helen said. “I always thought he lived back east, somewhere. We didn't even know he was in Salt Lake, until the police notified us. I guess they tracked us through some letters or something he had from Ma.”
“Oh, that's too bad,” Mrs. Althing said, wringing her hands in pity. Then she frowned and put her finger on her lip. “Um, is it all right for you to be here . . . I mean, do the police know?”
“Oh sure,” Joe assured her. “The probate court has to issue a release before we can remove any property, but I talked to them on the phone—their office is closed for the day, now, and we just drove into town—but they said it would be all right for us to come here and start packing his things up. Tomorrow morning my sister and I will get the release, but we won't remove anything until we do. I guess it'd be all right for us to stay here? Motels are so expens—”
“Oh, don't even think about it,” Mrs. Althing declared. “They charge thirty, forty dollars a night! You go right ahead and do what you have to do. I've got stuff in the oven, so I can't sit around. Uh, I suppose you would get the deposit?”
“Why don't we just forget the deposit,” Helen said. “We'll try not to make a mess but I suppose you would have to clean up after us anyway, so . . . “
“Unh-hunh,” Mrs. Althing agreed, obviously pleased, “well, if you say so. Do you have a key?”
“No, we weren't able to claim his effects, yet,” Joe said.
“Well, you stop by the apartment and I'll give you the spare, for tonight.” And she hurried off.
Joe shrugged, smiling at Helen. “I guess it's all right,” he said.
Helen looked around the stuffy little place and sniffed. “How did you know about this place?”
“I had some talks with Clarence, like I said,” Joe replied. “I'll bring up the bags and then we've got to move on to Act Two.”
After the ease of obtaining the body, it was annoying to have to deal with the Amtrak people. Helen convinced them, however, that Mr. Woods, having booked a room on the Zephyr, should be allowed to use that room although he was deceased. Room H was certainly large enough to contain a coffin, and it was conveniently located in the last sleeping car, on the bottom level. The coffin could be brought aboard with minimum fanfare and carried directly to the rear. It wouldn't disturb anyone. Woods's remains would be accompanied by her, his niece. She was happy to pay an additional fare for herself. Amtrak found it very irregular, but after considerable hassle and talking to various officials, it was agreed that the coffin could be carried in room H.
After that, Joe and Helen picked up a large pepperoni pizza and a six-pack of beer and returned to Clarence's apartment. The pizza was good. They fell upon it ravenously, laughing, between mouthfuls and while guzzling beer, at how they had pulled off their nephew-and-niece act. And suddenly, in the very midst of it, they caught each other's eyes and they leaped at each other. They tore at their clothes and only barely made it to the bed.
It was frenzied sex. Furious and passionate, their mouths bruising and bruised, their hands leaving red marks on the other's body, driving against and into each other. There was no hesitation, no doubts, no courting or care. They tore at each other with, as the poet said, rough strife.
Afterward, thrilled but sated, they lay back naked, their arms under the other's neck and stared into the dark corners of the ceiling, wondering how they could have let the other out of their sight.
“You know,” Joe said, “there's just one more thing I ought to take care of.” And then he told Helen about the night he had gone to the weird bar, his first night in Salt Lake City. “I can't believe, somehow, that it was all a dream,” he said. “I know the two muggers weren't a dream, I'm sure of it. But what about the rest? Was it just because I had drunk some fortified wine and was unused to it? Or did I really see that weird guy, the piano player? I tell you, honey.” He sat up, leaning on an elbow and looking into her face, lit by a panel of light from the other room. “He was like a bat, a freak.”
“A bat out of hell,” Helen said, and they laughed together.
“Let's go back down there and check it out,” he said.
“No,” Helen said, reaching up and drawing him down to her lean, lithe body, “let's fuck, instead.”
So they did. More slowly now, but just as pleasurably. But again, when they were finished, Joe wanted to go out. This time, Helen assented.
It wasn't hard to find the place. But when they entered, an entirely different scene presented itself. Not only were there no little tables with shadowy people sitting around them sipping from paper-wrapped bottles, but there was no bar at all. Instead, perhaps two dozen people s
at on folding chairs arranged in rows, facing toward the back of the room. A very large, dusky woman in a robe, clearly an islander of some sort, had just finished addressing the people, few of whom turned to see who had just entered. The large woman now took up a book, a hymnal apparently, and turned toward a skinny black man perched on a screw-type stool at an upright piano. Joe and Helen slipped into a couple of chairs at the back as this man, this piano player, spread his huge, spidery fingers and with a low, sidelong look under his right shoulder, hit a plangent blues chord.
The chord lingered on the air for a moment, then the man—it was the same tree-frog man that Joe remembered—began to slap his right foot while he blocked in several chords and nodded to the large woman. The audience, a mixed group of black people, Indians, and islanders, began to sing in a marvelous, almost shouting chorus: “Ahmmmm uh-gonna . . . git on mah feets, aftah while/ Annnn’ it won't be looonnng!”
It was a great, loping, stomping beat and the people were enjoying it considerably, interspersing the words with whoops and yelps of rhythmical delight. The piano man was whooping too. He would cast back his head and scream, even. He wore black glasses and his spiral cone of hair was slicked with—who knows?—bear grease? His lips were wide and grimacing, usually in glee, but sometimes in agony. His fingers sped up and down the keyboard, ringing marvelous arpeggios around the thunderous blues chords.
“Oooo-yes Jee-ziss, you been/My-eye keeper so loooong!" the people roared. The player played, leaping to his feet, knocking over the stool, while the large woman waved her hands to needlessly exhort the singing crowd.
Joe got up and took Helen by the hand. “It's not him,” he said and started for the door.
The door opened and two Tongans came through. They were followed by the biggest Tongan of them all. He was so huge he had to duck to get in the door and then he fully occupied the frame. The music stopped.
“You must be Joe,” the big man said, extending a large forefinger.
Joe extended a large Glock and shot the man five times. The man absorbed the 9mm slugs with a succession of jolts, then fell like a tree, crashing face first onto the floor. The floor shook and dust flew up. Joe, still holding Helen's hand, waved the others aside with a gesture of his Glock and stepped on the big man's back as they went out. And then they ran.
16
Pert' Near but Not Plumb
Mulheisen was not unhappy about the shooting at the south side social club. From what he could learn, the deceased was not a nice man. That didn't mean, of course, that it was all right for Joe Service and Helen Sedlacek to shoot him, but it did make a difference; it always does, despite one's moral qualms. Few people had bemoaned the murder of Carmine Busoni, although Mulheisen had now spent the better part of a year in hot pursuit of his slayers. This fresh shooting enabled the Salt Lake City police to keep the pressure on, and that was good. Normally, even a few hours of roadblock seemed interminable to the citizenry, even if the roadblock was little more than a slowdown, a kind of chicane at crucial points so that the police could look into slowly passing cars. Occasionally a car might be signaled out of the line of traffic and searched, but generally the traffic was kept moving. Still, the citizens didn't like it if it was kept up for more than a few hours. (One inevitable side benefit of the roadblocks was that several criminals were apprehended by the way, as it were.)
Obviously, Mulheisen thought, the outlaws (the Salt Lake Tribune was calling them Bonnie and Clyde) had a hidey-hole. But Mulheisen felt that there was a good chance that they would be caught. They were highly recognizable: two smallish, handsome young people whose pictures had been splashed all over the paper and television. The police had fielded several reports, none of them verifiable sightings, but obviously the public was paying attention. As the day wore on, perhaps more people would see the pictures and realize that they had seen the pair.
In the meantime, Mulheisen felt encouraged and unperturbed. He left the police department and went for a walk. He started to stroll through the grounds of the Mormon Temple, with its Gothic spires and the golden angel trumpeting from the highest one, but there was some kind of outdoor singing program going on there. He avoided the crowds and walked up the hill to the state capitol building. It was another lovely, if bracing, mountain day. The legislature wasn't in session, but the building was open and he wandered about the huge reception area, gazing with interest at the historical paintings of the Mormon pioneers. But soon he felt the need for a cigar and he set off back down the hill, pleasurably puffing on an H. Upmann petit corona.
He considered as he walked just how much he knew about Joe Service and Helen Sedlacek. He could think of at least four different cases in which Joe Service might have played a role, but he couldn't be sure. He thought that the earliest might have involved an insurance scam in which Service had managed to get away with quite a bit of money in the form of bearer bonds. Another case, he believed, was one in which Service had meddled with a gun-running scheme. What was interesting in that case, he recalled, was that an unidentified hit man had been killed by a police officer—Jimmy Marshall's fellow patrolman, Leonard Stanos—before he could make a hit. Mulheisen was fairly certain that Service had somehow managed to claim the body of the hit man (presumably a colleague). It had seemed a prankish thing, an odd example of fraternal feeling.
This thought brought Mulheisen to a dead halt, standing on the sunny sidewalk on the hillside, the city lying at his feet. For the past two or three days he had carried in the back of his mind the memory of one Clarence Woods, lately murdered in this city and sometime associate of Big Sid Sedlacek. This connection with Joe and Helen was tenuous, unclear, but it was one that he had not pursued. He hurried back to the police department and sought out Sergeant Getulio. The sergeant listened with interest, then made a phone call.
“The body was claimed by a niece,” Getulio told Mulheisen. “It was released to the Goodrich and Padgett funeral home this morning.”
At the funeral home they learned the bad news. Mr. Woods's body had been cremated that morning and the ashes turned over to the deceased's niece less than an hour earlier. The director identified Mulheisen's photo of Helen as the niece. She had actually shown her Michigan driver's license.
Driving back, Getulio said, “This guy sounds like some kind of sentimental dude.”
“Sentimental?” Mulheisen mused. “I never thought of Joe Service as sentimental, but you may be right. Maybe he just has a peculiar sense of loyalty to the profession.”
“Honor among hit men—or is it hit persons, in this case? Hit folk?” Getulio laughed. “Saints preserve us!” He nodded in the general direction of the temple, then added: “I don't think so, Mul. I've never seen it. If there was honor among these swine, Cap'n Lite wouldn't be dead.”
“Still,” Mulheisen pointed out, “they did avenge the little chiseler.”
“Tenfold,” Getulio conceded, “if we're counting pound for pound. Well, they're welcome to the ashes.”
At the station, Mulheisen called Marshall. He explained everything that had happened and said, “Probably our only real chance now is with DiEbola. I don't think we've got enough to connect him to any crimes here, but if you or somebody at Rackets and Conspiracy can make a connection with this Heather Bloom, we might be able to stick something on his sorry carcass.”
Marshall agreed to check it out, but he didn't seem very sanguine. “Are you coming back now?” he asked.
Mulheisen sighed. “I think I'll hang out for another day, anyway. There's a pretty good chance somebody will spot these two, but if nothing happens by tomorrow I'll head on back. There's no hurry, is there?”
“No,” Marshall blandly agreed, “no hurry at all.”
“I didn't think so. Maybe I'll take the train. I haven't ridden the train in a long time, and I'm sick of airports and airplanes.”
“Incidentally,” Marshall said, “Humphrey's plane did not return to Detroit. They filed an amended flight plan after leaving Salt Lake and landed in
Denver.”
This information was puzzling. Mulheisen could make nothing of it. Presumably there was just some additional corporate business in Denver that required the plane. But he advised Marshall to keep up surveillance on Humphrey and the Detroit City Airport.
Joe Service seemed disturbed. He sat in the pickup and stared at the plastic box that contained the ashes of Cap'n Lite. It was not much larger than a cigar box.
“I know he was a small man,” he muttered, “but surely . . . “
“Where to?” Helen said, impatiently. She had started the engine but hadn't backed out of the parking place behind Cap'n Lite's apartment.
Joe looked at the plastic box on his lap. “If they incinerated the coffin, too . . . “ He let the notion drop.
The coffin they had purchased was small and simple, made of polished pine with simple brass handles. It wasn't the child-size, but more like a youth size. They carried it in the back of the pickup, covered with a tonneau. In a downtown parking structure that housed a large mall, they found a remote corner; there they ripped out the thin padding of the coffin and Joe drilled several holes in the plywood bottom with a battery-driven drill he'd purchased. Next they stacked all the money inside and Joe crawled in. There was plenty of room. He lay in the box for a long minute with the lid down. It was not the greatest feeling, but he decided that it didn't really bother him. There seemed to be plenty of air, and he'd never been claustrophobic.
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