Nine

Mulheisen was awakened at nine o'clock by a stocky, middle-aged black woman who wore a housecleaning turban and a flowery cotton housedress with a plain white apron.

“Aagh,” he groaned and clapped his hands over his eyes.

“You havin’ a dream,” the woman said matter-of-factly, “but it's over now. Benny said I s'posed to get you up at nine, and it's nine. You gone be all right?”

Mulheisen groaned again, sitting upright. “I don't know,” he said thickly. “It was a good dream and a bad dream.” It had been two dreams, actually, running more or less simultaneously. In one he had his arm around Mandy Cecil's waist and was about to kiss her; in the other—and already he could not remember which dream came first—they had been shooting at each other.

“You wants to remember your dreams,” the woman said as she placed some folded clothes on the dresser. “I always looks mine up in the dream book, so's I can get my number for the day.” She turned to go out. “I done washed your clothes, but I ain't got your shirt ironed yet. You wants a shower, it's right down the hall. Breakfast be ready in ten minutes.” She closed the door. Mulheisen could make little sense of what she had said. He got up slowly, uttering low grunts of solace to himself. His head hurt, his mouth tasted like bile and his tongue had been attacked by some primordial fungus. He felt his throat and it seemed to him that it was swollen; he should have had his tonsils out long ago, he told himself again.

He wondered who the woman was. Benny's housekeeper, he supposed. Incredibly, she had washed and dried his underwear and socks while he slept. She must get here pretty early, he thought. He peeked out into the hallway and saw the bathroom just a few feet away. Naked, he flashed over there and quickly got into the shower. He was recovering nicely under the warm spray when he heard the door open and the woman's voice said, “I finished your shirt. They's a razor and a toothbrush there for you.” The door closed.

A few minutes later he was back in the bedroom dressing. The woman had brushed his coat and pressed his pants. His change and other pocket items were arranged neatly on the dresser. Fortunately, he told himself, he'd had the wit to put his .38 under his pillow. Perhaps that was why he had dreamed about guns and shooting, he thought, and wondered if the form of a pistol pressing against one's head could induce the image of that pistol in the mind and, thus, dreams of violence. He laughed at himself.

A few minutes later he sat down to hot buttermilk biscuits, grilled ham and fried eggs with hash-brown potatoes. There was also orange juice, milk and hot coffee. The biscuits were soft and fluffy and Mulheisen wolfed down more than a half dozen of them with copious butter and homemade rhubarb preserves. “You make these preserves?” he asked the woman.

“Who else gone make ‘em?” the woman replied. She sat across from Mulheisen, smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Occasionally she got up to fetch more coffee or more biscuits. Mulheisen couldn't tell if she was surly or was just one of those self-contained, self-sufficient women. He watched her with mild interest. She wasn't cheerful, but she wasn't sullen, either. She wasn't exactly indifferent, but she didn't seem to value Mulheisen's esteem. Irrationally, Mulheisen found himself wanting to be ingratiating, to gain her approval. But smiles and friendliness had no effect on her.

As he finished his coffee he decided that he had detected a family resemblance between her and Benny. He knew that Benny wasn't married, so maybe this was a sister or a cousin. But he hadn't the temerity to ask. He saw that it was ten o'clock, anyway. Time to get moving.

“Well, I've got to be going,” Mulheisen said, standing up. “Thanks for the swell breakfast. I guess Benny isn't up yet?”

“Hunh!” the woman snorted. “Be three o'clock ‘fore Benny gets up. Grown man, sleeping all day!” She huffed off into another part of the house. Mulheisen shrugged and went out, struggling into his coat.

It was a warm, sunny October morning with a high, milky overcast that made the sun weak. All the maples in Pingree Park were brilliant yellow and red, although some of them had already lost most of their leaves. There was the quiet peacefulness of midmorning, when all the working people are gone and few others are abroad. Squirrels raised hell in the piles of raked leaves in the park. Mulheisen suddenly felt very good, despite his lack of sleep and his frustration with the Collins alley affair. Obviously, the shower and the good breakfast had helped, he thought, as he drove downtown. As for the sleep, he wondered if it wasn't true that one only needs a couple hours of sleep, providing it is deep sleep. He had definitely slept well last night. It was only in the waking moments that the dreams had come. He pondered that, as he often had: do dreams really occupy only a few seconds of one's sleep? And then he turned his mind to more immediate matters.

He was due in court at ten-thirty, to testify for the prosecution in The State of Michigan v. Robert Parenteau. In every respect this case was more significant than anything he was now handling. The Parenteau case had been a minor triumph for Mulheisen. And yet he had very little interest in it anymore. He wished it were done with. Logically, he was committed to seeing the case through the justice system, but emotionally, he no longer cared what happened to Bobby Parenteau. For Mulheisen it was enough that he had caught Bobby, even if it wasn't really the killer that he had caught. It was the same boy, all right, and yet it wasn't.

Four years ago a dozen or more high school kids had gathered in the basement recreation room of the Parenteau home on Detroit's East Side. They were celebrating Bobby Parenteau's seventeenth birthday. About an hour after the party began, Bobby left the basement room and returned with his father's World War II souvenir, a smuggled-home Colt .45 automatic pistol. He opened fire from the basement steps and emptied the magazine. One girl of fifteen was killed by a bullet in the head. Four other teenagers were wounded, only one of them seriously—a bullet in the neck destroying part of eighteen-year-old Frank Witt's larynx.

And then Bobby had vanished. He disappeared for four years. Within a very short time the case was effectively dropped, though not officially, for lack of evidence and interest. There were just too many murders and other violent crimes clamoring for attention. And this was no burglar shot in an alley, no Wild West shoot-up in a tavern with the only casualty a jukebox. This was a fifteen-year-old blond girl named Lily Vargas with half her face blown away, and a kid named Frank who now talked like a throat-cancer patient after two years of extensive therapy. And three other kids with puckered circular scars that they didn't like to talk about. And yet the case had been allowed to molder quietly in the back files. Mulheisen very correctly assumed that he would not have much longer to play around with Vanni's dead burglar. For all he knew, there might be a homicide case waiting for him at the precinct even now.

He turned off Gratiot near the police headquarters and a few minutes later found a parking place near the courthouse. He went to the police detail office and was told which courtroom the trial was being held in. When he got there he found that the case had not yet been called. There were just a few spectators, despite the case's notoriety, and a full complement of reporters.

The assistant prosecutor was Ray Wilde, a thin young man who wore glasses that were light-sensitive so that they changed from clear to dark when worn in bright sunlight. For some reason, however, the glasses never got quite clear, so that Wilde always appeared to have dark circles around his eyes. He was glad to see Mulheisen, always a good, dependable witness.

“Something fishy's going on, Mul,” Wilde told him while they waited for the judge to appear. “Epstein is pleading Bobby guilty on a reduced charge of unpremeditated, which we'd worked out, but now he's also going to argue that the boy had diminished responsibility during the shooting.”

“Can he do that?” Mulheisen asked. “I thought that required a ‘not guilty’ plea.”

Wilde made a wobbly gesture with his splayed right hand and grimaced. “It's iffy, Mul. Bobby refused to plead insanity, you know, and the psychiatrists were divided. But Epstein apparently feels that he has sufficient evidence to sway the judge. Brownlow's soft on this kind of argument. He's always saying crap like, ‘The Law is a living thing. It isn't cut and dried.’ “

“So Bobby may end up at Northville instead of the pen,” Mulheisen said thoughtfully. “Well, honestly, Ray, I'm not sure that the kid wasn't nuts. The pen isn't going to be good for him. If I thought that the state hospital could actually help him . . .”

“I wouldn't be surprised if he got three years’ outpatient at Lafayette Clinic, Mul. Those four years on his own will count big with Brownlow.”

Mulheisen was startled and looked at Wilde questioningly, but the prosecutor shrugged.

Just then the prisoner was brought in. Bobby was now a tall and good-looking young man who wore dark-rimmed glasses. He had His hair cut neatly and wore a blue suit with a conservative tie and well-shined black shoes. He looked like a candidate for the Junior Chamber of Commerce's “Young Christian Businessman of the Year.” But then, Bobby had never been a rebel. At the birthday party there had been no marijuana, no hard liquor and only a modest quantity of beer. No one was drunk. Bobby had no history of psychiatric disturbance. He was slightly above average on his IQ tests. He played the outfield and won his letter at Southeastern High School.

At the party Bobby had not argued with anyone. He had a girlfriend there, but she had not been shot at. Nor had there been any suggestion that he was jealous of her. Indeed, outside of insanity, no one could even begin to suggest a motive for the shooting.

Of considerable interest was the way that Bobby had lived during his four years as a fugitive. In effect, he hadn't hidden at all. One day Mulheisen had happened to be driving down Lenox Street and passed Bobby's parents’ home. On impulse he stopped. He went to the door not knowing what he would say when it opened; he couldn't very well say, “Remember me? I was just wondering if you'd heard from Bobby.” But he didn't have to. The door was opened by someone he had never seen before. The woman told him that she and her husband had purchased the Parenteau home more than three years ago. She seemed not to know what had occurred in her basement, and Mulheisen didn't tell her. As far as she knew, she said, the Parenteaus had moved to the West Side, to Redford, she thought.

Curious, Mulheisen had found the Parenteaus listed in the telephone book, living in Redford. Out of what he later described as plain old orneriness, he drove out to Redford and asked around the neighborhood. The Parenteaus were well liked. They were a pleasant, middle-aged couple living in a neighborhood that housed mostly younger couples. The old man worked for Chrysler, the Mound Road plant. Occasionally their daughter visited them, with her husband. The daughter was very pregnant.

Mulheisen found that interesting: the Parenteaus didn't have a daughter. They had only one child, Bobby.

The next day a policewoman named Sandra Lewis called on Mrs. Parenteau. Officer Lewis represented herself as a door-to-door cosmetic salesperson. She sold Mrs. Parenteau some cologne and they talked a good deal about Mrs. Parenteau's daughter, and about baby showers. Officer Lewis obtained the address of Mrs. Parenteau's daughter.

That evening Mulheisen and Maki sat in Mulheisen's Checker, parked a few houses down from a small tract house in a new housing development out beyond Fifteen Mile Road. The owner-occupants of the house were listed as Robert and Evelyn Adamson. Adamson had been Mrs. Parenteau's maiden name. According to neighbors, the Adamsons were quiet, reclusive people. They didn't seem to go out much, they never had people over, except occasionally their parents. Mr. Adamson seemed very nice, the neighbors thought. He mowed his lawn and sometimes worked on his car, a recent-model Plymouth.

Mulheisen saw the Plymouth drive up and Bobby Parenteau got out. He went into the house carrying a lunch bucket. For a long moment Mulheisen considered that he held the future of this boy in the palm of his hand. Apparently, the boy was a good worker, employed at Chrysler, a job his father had gotten him. He had bought this house with his father as co-signer, and he never missed a payment. He had married a girl he had met at Chrysler and they were expecting a child in a few months.

The Adamsons didn't go to church, but they didn't party, either. They didn't read any books, as far as Mulheisen could tell. They watched their new color television a good deal. They didn't get a newspaper. They had no close friends, just a few other couples whom they saw once or twice a year. Mulheisen was appalled by their life. After the door closed behind Bobby, Mulheisen said “Let's go” to Maki and they went to arrest the boy.

When Bobby was brought in, he denied that he was Bobby Parenteau, which was not unusual, but he persisted in this denial long after being confronted with overwhelming evidence: fingerprints, visual identification and, finally, an admission of his identity by his parents. In fact, to date he had still to admit that he was Bobby Parenteau. Whether he maintained this curious fiction during the trial was something that interested Mulheisen.

He noticed that the canny defense attorney, Marv Epstein, had seen to it that Evelyn Adamson and her tiny baby boy were seated in the front row, where Judge Brownlow could not miss seeing them.

It was three o'clock before Mulheisen testified. Except for a couple of Coney Island hot dogs and a bottle of Stroh's beer, he had eaten nothing since breakfast. He was edgy and tired on the witness stand. His testimony was largely confined to a description of the crime scene and his interrogation of the defendant. Nobody was interested in Mulheisen's coup as an investigator.

“When you were questioning the defendant, did he seem sane to you, Sergeant?” Wilde asked.

“Objection,” said a bored Epstein. “The sergeant is not a qualified psychologist.”

“I know that,” Wilde replied, “I'm just wondering if he seemed sane to the sergeant.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“All right, Sergeant. Was the defendant calm, or how did he appear to you, during interrogation?”

“He was very calm,” Mulheisen said. “Unusually so. He persisted in telling us that he was not Bobby Parenteau.”

“Would you say that this was a typical act, if you will, of a criminal who seeks to evade the law?”

“Objection,” Epstein said.

“Sustained,” said Judge Brownlow.

“Well, let me ask the sergeant if he thought the defendant was merely trying to be evasive,” Wilde said irritably.

Mulheisen couldn't understand what Wilde was driving at. He shook his head sadly and testified that it didn't appear to him that Parenteau was merely trying to be evasive. It appeared to him that Parenteau believed that he wasn't Bobby. Shortly afterwards, the defense went back over the same ground with the witness, and it seemed to Mulheisen when he stepped down that Ray Wilde's glasses were tinted more darkly than ever, but that may have been caused by the waning light in the courtroom.

Court was adjourned until the next day, but Mulheisen was told that he probably would not be required. Wilde was taking a rueful but philosophical point of view as he walked across the street for a drink with Mulheisen. “I'll be damned if I know why I got onto that line of questioning,” Wilde said. “I think I got confused there. I meant to draw out that Parenteau was calm and not insane, but now it looks like I've done just the opposite.” He shook his head. “It must be overwork. My mind's snapped.”

Mulheisen leaned on the bar and gazed into his drink pensively. “There was something strange about that kid, Witt, who testified this morning,” he said, “but I'm not sure what it was.”

“He wasn't much use to us,” Wilde said. “You'd think if a kid got his throat messed up like that he wouldn't be too sweet on the guy who did it to him, but Witt was all ‘Let's let bygones be bygones.’ “

“Yeah,” Mulheisen said, “I thought that was odd.” He downed his drink and walked out.

At the precinct there was a note from Jimmy Marshall. He wanted Mulheisen to call him at home. Before Mulheisen could call, however, Lieutenant Johns came in. He was annoyed because he hadn't known that Mulheisen would be in court all day and apparently several people were trying to get hold of him. Also, the report on the Town Pump shoot-up was inadequate, and Buchanan had been brutal toward Johns about it. Andy Deane had called twice and Marshall was as excitable as a blue tick hound under a coon-filled persimmon tree.

Mulheisen wondered out loud where Johns had picked up language like that, and Johns admitted that during the war he'd been stationed for a while in Mississippi.

“What's got Marshall so excited?” Mulheisen asked.

“I guess he might have found out where your John Doe was staying,” Johns said. “It's a hotel over on Gratiot. I sent Jensen and Field to check it out.”

“Fine,” Mulheisen said. “Nice work for a kid. How long ago was this?”

“This morning. At first I told him to wait for you, but he kept calling back. He has to go on shift tonight, so I sent the Bobbsey Twins. They ought to be back soon.” Johns left in a more cheerful frame of mind.

Mulheisen knew he ought to call everybody—congratulate Marshall, find out what Deane wanted, see what Jensen and Field had dug up—but instead he called Records and Firearms and asked for a complete check on Mandy Cecil and her gun. Then he called her at Vanni's office.

“I thought I told you I was busy tonight,” she said in a low voice.

“Is the boss there?” Mulheisen asked.

“Yes.”

Mulheisen grinned. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, rotating an unlit cigar in his hand. “Well, I'll bet you just said that because you thought I wanted to see you on business. But I was thinking more about something a little friendlier. You sure you aren't free for dinner?”

After a moment she said, “For a while.”

“You have to go someplace later, that it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You have to go home first, after work?”

“Yes, well, I guess not,” she said.

“Good,” Mulheisen said. “I'll meet you at five-thirty at Captain Shumway's. You know where it is? On Jefferson. Right.”

Next he called Andy Deane. The Rackets man told him that the bartender of the Town Pump, Dick VanLerberghe, had been down, and from the description he'd given of the two gunmen, Deane had a strong hunch that they were a couple of Toronto-based hoods named Maio and Panella, but the only pictures he had of the two were quite old. He was trying to locate something more current through the RCMP and the Toronto police. “They're pretty heavy, Mul,” Deane said. “I can't see them coming to town just to trash a juke-box. I've alerted the borders anyway, just in case they're still in town, but I imagine that they came in on a private boat, across the river. Soon as I get some fresh shots, I'll send you copies.”

“Thanks,” Mulheisen said. “What about this DeCrosta, now? And have you found any visible connection between Vanni and the mob?”

“DeCrosta has no official status with the Teamsters Union, Mul, but the word is that he's very close, especially on this vending-machine business. He has definite ties with the mob, through Rudy Percik and that bunch.”

“Percik? He's not with Carmine Kusane, then?” Mulheisen asked.

“Nope. Carmine isn't into vendors. Carmine's into dope, prostitution, numbers, guns, you name it. Basic stuff. He likes to call it ‘staples.’ “

Mulheisen mused on that for a moment. Deane probably knew more about the mob in Detroit than anyone, including the mob itself. He was a clearinghouse of information and he pursued it with scholarly enthusiasm. It was widely assumed that Andy would one day write the definitive treatise on the structure and function of organized crime in Detroit. It would be a text of interest not only to thugs and cops but to social and political scientists the world over.

“As for this Vanni kid,” Deane said, “none of my people know him. That doesn't mean too much. The mob has so much business in this town that no one could keep track of everybody who's involved.”

“He says he gambles a bit,” Mulheisen offered. “Plays cards at the pigs, now and then. What about blind pigs, since I've got you on? Is the mob into the pigs?”

“Strangely enough, they don't seem to be,” Deane said. “Oh, I'm sure they've got good relations there, and they might run a card game or a numbers pickup, but as for actually running a pig, I've never heard of it. They're almost all run by blacks. I wouldn't be surprised if the mob bank-rolls a few of them.”

Mulheisen considered this information for a while after Deane had hung up. Presently Jensen and Field came in. As usual, Jensen did the talking, occasionally looking to his partner for support. Marshall had indeed found the hotel where the late John Doe had stayed, but, unfortunately, it hadn't helped the investigation much. Except for a change of underwear packed in an American Airlines flight bag, there was nothing in the room. The people in the hotel didn't remember much about the man. He had registered as Tom Brown. He had stayed for two days and had hardly spoken to anyone. No one noticed an accent. He had paid his bill in advance each morning. In the room they had found the key tag, which the man had apparently removed from the key.

“A very careful man,” Mulheisen said.

Jensen and Field didn't comment. They left.

Shortly afterwards Mulheisen got his reports on Mandy Cecil from Records and Firearms. He stretched and began to put things in order. Maki stopped by to ask if he was interested in catching a beer somewhere, but Mulheisen said he had a date with a witness.

Mulheisen had already had two Jack Daniel's Ditches at Captain Shumway's before Mandy showed up. She looked simply smashing, as always. This time she wore an almost archaic but nonetheless elegant gray gabardine suit with a skirt that came below her knees and a coat styled out of the thirties. It was complemented by a large caricature of a gangster's fedora. The vee of the jacket was filled with an eruption of multicolored silk ribbons, like a corsage. It all went very well with her figure and her brilliant hair. Every man in the bar turned to watch her walk by, and most of the women as well.

“I haven't time for dinner, Mul,” she said right away. “I have some very important engagements this evening.”

“I'll bet,” he said.

“I see you're still wearing the same clothes,” she said. “Where did you spend the night?”

“Benny's,” Mulheisen said. “It was very comfortable. What's so important that you have to skip dinner?”

“None of your business,” she said. She sipped her drink, a stinger, perched on the barstool with legs crossed. Even with the long skirt there was a fine display of very glamorous legs.

“I ran a check on you today, through the computer,” Mulheisen said. “You're almost clean.”

“Almost?”

“You don't have that Beretta registered and you don't have a permit to carry it.”

Mandy didn't say anything at first. She seemed impressed by Mulheisen's serious manner. “What are you going to do, confiscate it?”

“I should,” Mulheisen said. “In fact, I ought to take you into custody and charge you.”

She smiled alluringly. “Sounds lovely. Why don't you?”

Mulheisen bared his teeth. “I'm prepared to give you another chance. Stop in and register it at the first opportunity, eh?”

Mandy mugged a sigh of relief. “Gosh, thanks, Marshall.”

Mulheisen looked at her for a long moment. “I keep thinking of you as a little girl playing hide-and-seek with Vanni and DenBoer. Then I look at you and the image vanishes.”

“I'm glad,” Mandy said. “Besides, we didn't play hide-and-seek, we played guns.”

“Guns?”

“Several variations on a theme of violence: cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, stagecoach, or war.”

“And you were always the Indian,” Mulheisen said.

“As a matter of fact, I wasn't,” she said. “Jerry was always Roy Rogers, so I was Dale Evans. Lenny was the outlaw who got plugged. In war, however, we were all on the same side, against the imaginary Japs and Nazis.”

“And in cops and robbers?” Mulheisen asked.

“That depends. Everybody wanted to be John Dillinger. Sometimes Jerry and I were Bonny and Clyde. But if the robber was just a crook and the cop was Sergeant Friday, then Jerry got to be Friday and Lenny got shot.”

“Who were you?”

“I was Frank, Friday's sidekick.”

“Poor Lenny,” Mulheisen said.

“Well, he's just one of those guys,” Mandy said. “Born to ride shotgun. But he didn't mind in the least. In fact, it always seemed to me that Lenny was the one most eager to play. He was still into that long after Jerry and I had out-grown those kinds of games.”

“I suppose you and Jerry became interested in more sophisticated games,” Mulheisen suggested, with a touch of malice that surprised himself.

Mandy didn't react the way he had expected. She smiled faintly without looking up from her drink. “Yes,” she said. “I was just thirteen,” she said. “It happened in our ‘bunkhouse,’ which was a kind of fortress built out of old tires and pieces of junk in an open field behind our houses. It was in the afternoon, in the summer. I cried.”

She looked up at Mulheisen and laughed huskily. It made him nervous but aroused him. He ordered another drink for her.

“It was quite something,” she went on. “We went at it pretty regularly for the rest of the summer. Lenny caught us once. I thought he was going to kill me. He went after me with a board, but I ran away.”

“He was jealous?”

“Not on my account, I think. He was afraid he would lose Jerry. But when school started we all sort of broke up, and then a year or so later, my family moved back to Kentucky.”

“But now you're all back together again,” Mulheisen said.

Mandy looked at him for a moment. “You aren't getting nasty, are you, Mul?”

“I'm sorry,” Mulheisen said. “I can't help being curious. It seems so cozy somehow, you and Jerry and Lenny over there on Eight Mile Road, doing a good business, thinking of moving into other things, none of you married. It all seems like an old movie. I keep waiting for the scene where the glamorous gal comes in to find Bing and Bob fighting over her and she declares that she's darned if she'll marry either one of those crazy galoots.”

“And then the self-effacing Bing takes a job as a musician on a cruise ship, abandoning the field to Bob because he thinks Bob really loves the girl, and vice versa,” Mandy elaborated.

“Only, even the wise-cracking Bob can see that the girl is really in love with Bing and he finally makes her admit it. In the last scene they're all on the cruise ship, sailing into the sunset.” Mulheisen finished the scenario to Mandy's laughter.

“Except that I don't really see Jerry and Lenny as Bing and Bob,” she said, still smiling. “In real life, Jerry wouldn't think of giving up the girl, and Lenny would sooner sink the ship with all aboard than surrender the girl if once he'd gotten her.”

“Really?” Mulheisen said dryly. “But I take it that he has never gotten her?”

“Your mind is in the gutter, Sergeant,” she said. “But I don't have time to sit here talking to you about it. I've got to get a move on.”

“How about later?” Mulheisen asked.

“I won't be home before midnight, if then,” Mandy said. “If you're still up, you could give me a call.”

“I'll do that,” Mulheisen promised. “But if I don't get hold of you, remember that we have a date tomorrow for eight.”

She waved, and with every other male in the bar he watched her all the way out the door. He had another drink and let his mind wander back over what she had told him about Vanni and DenBoer. There was a danger, he realized, in thinking about people in terms of stereotypes. Vanni and DenBoer weren't Bing and Bob, any more than they were Laurel and Hardy. Imperceptibly, he found himself thinking about Bobby Parenteau. A few minutes later he dialed Ray Wilde at home.

“Sorry to interrupt your cocktail hour, Ray,” Mulheisen said, “but do you remember if any of the psychiatrists ever questioned Bobby's relationship with Frank Witt?”

“No, I don't think so,” Wilde said. “At least, I don't remember any mention of it in the reports.”

“Well, it just occurred to me that the first two shots that Bobby fired were aimed at Frank Witt. Only one of them hit him, the second. Then Bobby emptied the gun randomly at the rest of the crowd. Now, for no good reason . . . nothing that I can put my finger on, really, it struck me that Witt is a homosexual.”

“He is?” Wilde said. “I never heard anything about that.”

“No, nobody's mentioned it,” Mulheisen said, “but I'm certain that he is. There's a possibility that he and Bobby may have had a thing, a relationship. Maybe Bobby wanted to break it off and Witt didn't. Maybe Bobby was horrified—his four-year history indicates that he isn't a homosexual, apparently. But young men will experiment.”

“Yes, yes, I see,” Wilde said thoughtfully. Then: “Mul, do you really think I should go into this? Won't it be opening a can of worms? I mean, we're in trial, right now! I suppose I could get a temporary adjournment, but Brownlow won't like it. Anyway, what would the consequence be?” Wilde was thinking out loud.

So was Mulheisen. “It may not change things,” he conceded. “Well, I just thought . . . you know, the idea hit me. I guess it doesn't make any more sense to shoot a bunch of kids over a homosexual affair than for any other reason. Well, think it over, Ray. Give me a call if I can help on anything.”

•    •    •

For once, Mulheisen got home before dark, to the white-painted clapboard house in St. Clair Flats. It was an old farmhouse and he had always lived in it. It was in good repair, with neatly painted shutters, surrounded by maple trees with a large oak in the back yard. Beyond the oak was an old barn that was now a garage and workshop. Beyond the garage, the low fields covered with tall brown grass sloped imperceptibly to the St. Clair River. A huge ore freighter was downbound in the channel as Mulheisen pulled into the driveway. Through some trick of the terrain, the channel was not visible and the freighter seemed to be sailing through a hayfield.

There was a lot of mail in the box, including a couple of postcards from his mother, postmarked Galveston, Texas. She seemed to be having a good time and was looking forward to seeing the nearly extinct whooping cranes.

Mulheisen got himself a cold bottle of Stroh's from the refrigerator and went up to his bedroom. He sat down near the window, where he could look out at the ships traveling up and down the Seaway. He had put on an Erik Satie record and he listened to the gentle tinkling of the piano as the light failed and the ship's lights grew stronger. He thought of smoking a cigar and actually got one out, but not lit, before he fell asleep.