Mulheisen was moving. Or rather, he wasn’t moving but he should have been. Instead, he sat in an old easy chair in his bedroom, gazing out at the shipping in the channel, across the field behind his mother’s house. It was very quiet, very peaceful. He wondered if he was making a mistake. He glanced at the clock radio next to his bed. It was nearly three in the afternoon on a Sunday. He was all packed. Becky would be here soon with the truck. He looked around him, relishing the quiet familiarity of this room, his boyhood bedroom. When would he sit in this room again?
Becky was a small, fast-mouthed woman in her late thirties. Mulheisen wasn’t sure of her last name. She’d lived with a man named Marvin Berg for years, until he died. Had she taken Berg’s name? Had they ever married? He was shocked at his lapse, as a detective, in not knowing this. She had helped Mulheisen on a case not long before, and given him some nice, vintage H. Upmann cigars left over from the days when Marvin had owned a great little cigar store down on Fort Street. Becky’s help had consisted in providing Mulheisen with some notebooks, left in Marvin’s care by the late and not much lamented detective Grootka, that had proved useful in the never-solved disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. It had been nice to see her again. Mulheisen thought she was … attractive. Not beautiful or cute, but nice looking. And she had been only halfheartedly insulting.
The house she had inherited from Berg was much too large for Becky. Mulheisen had mentioned that he was looking for an apartment and they had kidded about him moving in, but he had told her that it was pointless. The house was in Pleasant Ridge, one of the numerous little suburbs that ringed the city. It wouldn’t qualify as a Detroit residence.
Then, soon after he’d found the apartment downtown, Becky had called. She had discovered something interesting: the village of Pleasant Ridge had only a single police patrol, so they had contracted with the city for additional services. Could it not be construed that Pleasant Ridge was, in effect, part of the Detroit Police Department responsibility and, hence, its employees could legally reside there? It was worth an inquiry. He had pitched it to his boss, Captain Jimmy Marshall, and he’d approved.
Still, Mulheisen hadn’t been sure. What would sharing a house with Becky entail? He had decided to take a run out there and investigate.
Becky looked better than on the previous visit. She was not so pale; maybe it was makeup. Also, she was dressed better: instead of dungarees and garden boots, she wore shorts and a tank top. She was lean and muscled; evidently she worked out. Her body might be hard, but her new life since Marvin had died seemed to have softened her. She wasn’t so caustic as before, though given to occasional sarcasms.
She said he ought to pitch his beloved H. Upmann cigars— not the vintage ones she’d given him, but the new ones. They were overrated, she said, living on their past glory. Before Mulheisen could voice misgivings, however, she was quick to add, “Don’t look like that. I didn’t mean you should quit. I like a good cigar as much as the next guy. You know me, Mul. I’m just saying, as an old cigar seller, Upmanns are what we’d call a parlor pitch. You can price ’em like a virgin, but they’re more like an old slag. Here, try some of these.”
She gave him a box of LaDonna Detroit figurados. They came in a fancy wooden humidor-style box with a clasp, and the picture inside was a splendid painting of a woman on a milk-white mare, strewing flowers and cigars on the world. They claimed to be handmade in the U.S.A., in Detroit, of “highest Cubano-quality tobacco.” That was a nice touch, he thought. It didn’t actually say Cuban. He raised an eyebrow at Becky.
“Try ’em,” she said. “You’ll see. It’s as good a cigar as you can get, and only five dollars per. No, no charge for this box. I got ’em as a promotion.”
“I didn’t know you were still in the business,” he said.
“I do a little wholesale,” she said. “Why waste experience and connections? It keeps the money tap open. Try one.”
He took one out and sniffed. It wasn’t cellophaned, which he liked. They seemed handmade, all right, and well made. Tight, no large stems obtruding. The shape was terrific, a true torpedo with a double taper, thicker on the smoking end. He clipped and lit it. She was right. It drew very well, though a little tight at first. It was mild in the mouth, but had a full body. There was no disagreeable aftertaste. Kind of earthy. He liked it.
“Five bucks,” he said. “How do they do it?”
“Somebody’s underwriting it,” Becky said. “You can’t sell that for five bucks, not made in the U.S. Or anywhere else, probably. Maybe they figure on building a clientele, then raising it to ten. But you oughta take advantage of the introductory offer, as they say. I get ’em at wholesale, of course. That’d be one of the advantages of living here.”
“What are the others?” He looked at her through the smoke.
“Low rent,” she said. “No upkeep. Of the house and grounds, I mean. I’m not washing your clothes or sheets. Maybe you can run them out to your ma’s.” She laughed then, evidently envisioning him lugging an armful of sheets out to his car, stepping on the trailing edges. “Maybe I could do the sheets,” she said, grudgingly. “Throw ’em in with mine. And you could help me put up the screens and take ’em down. But no leaf raking, lawn mowing, painting, or… I don’t suppose you know anything about plumbing? Good. I do. I hate a man screwing up the plumbing with his ignorance. Rent’s five bills. That’ll pay my utilities and help with the taxes.”
He decided to look at the room. It turned out to be most of the second floor. He’d have a large bedroom that overlooked the parklike street. A private bath that she had totally remodeled, much more splendid than the one in the flat he’d looked at: this had an enormous walk-in shower with a built-in bench, plus a huge, jetted tub. Heated towel racks, infrared heat lamps in the ceiling, full-length mirrors.
He could also have a large, shelf-lined study that adjoined the bedroom. She had repaneled it herself with old cherrywood she’d found up north and had remilled. Everything was rewired, new lighting that could be adjusted with a rheostat. There was room for his stereo equipment, and she said that she’d insulated when she’d repaneled the rooms. With the insulation he could play music fairly loudly without disturbing her, in her downstairs domain.
She showed him her fabulous kitchen. All new appliances, beautiful maple countertops with inlaid marble and lovely Mexican tiles where one would need that kind of surface. Professional- quality ovens and cooking surfaces, and hearty exhaust venting. A couple of huge refrigerators. “You could have a designated reefer,” she said, “if you think you’d need it. Otherwise, help yourself from these. I don’t eat much, but I like to cook. Kind of hard to cook for one, though.”
The whole tour took quite a while. It was a huge house. They could stay out of each other’s way. He’d noticed that it was a nice place when he’d visited before, but he hadn’t seen much, just the basement, where the cigars were kept and she’d put in a lot of exercise equipment. He was glad to see that she was not a neatness freak, but liked things pretty much picked up and stowed in the obvious places. And she didn’t mind cigar smoke.
“Be pretty weird if I did,” she said. “I kinda got this joint jerked back into shape after the slob kicked. Oh, Marv was a good man. I miss him. Once or twice a month. But he was hell to pick up after. You don’t look like a slob.”
Mulheisen said he didn’t think he was. An early stint in the armed forces had left its impact. He made his bed tight every morning. Clothes up off the floor, that kind of thing. His desk might get a little messy.
“How come you didn’t sell those vintage Upmanns?” he asked her. She had twenty boxes, stored in a walk-in humidor that was bigger than the apartment downtown—another enticing feature (or was that two?). She had offered them to him at the time and he’d had the impression that she wanted to get rid of them. Now it seemed she was still in the cigar business.
“Marvin said he kept ’em for you,” she said. “Don’t you want ’em?”
“For me? Well, sure. How much?”
“I figured it was a bequest. From Marvin.”
Mulheisen was not sure how to take this. Could it be true? Marvin had retired at least a few years before he’d died. He’d never called, never mentioned any such thing. But who could object? As far as he knew, the cigars—vintage Cuban—were perfectly legal pre-embargo goods. Perhaps Marvin had forgotten, or was just too ill to pursue it, had put it off until the right moment—which never came. Mulheisen certainly didn’t care to debate the issue, in case the offer was withdrawn.
“One big thing,” she said, when they were back in the downstairs living room. She stood there with her hands on her slim hips, engaging his eyes frankly. She looked younger than her mid-thirties. Maybe it was the sandals or the short hair. “Fucking.”
Mulheisen laughed quietly and glanced about, embarrassed. “Hey, I’m only renting a room. Rooms. Thinking about it,” he amended.
She nodded briskly. “I know. But a man and woman live in a house and fucking inevitably pops up, causes a lot of tension. I’m not agin it.”
There was a silence of perhaps ten seconds, although it seemed much longer. Mulheisen looked at her.
“I hate tension,” she said. She smiled. She had wicked little teeth. Like a baby panther. “How do you feel about it?”
Mulheisen didn’t know what to say. “It’s … ah …” He watched her for a clue, thought he had one, and finished, “It’s bad. Oh, you mean the other? I thought you meant tension. The other is good. I like it. I wasn’t thinking about it, just now.”
“You got a girlfriend?” she asked. “I didn’t think so. Me neither. I’m not a lez, I mean. No boyfriend, either, although I don’t mind going out once in a while, maybe getting laid. Used to, anyway. That’s over. AIDS and stuff. Bad times for fucking. It was fun while it lasted, though. I had the tests. I’m clean. You?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, we have to get regular checkups.”
“So that’s all right,” she said.
“Ah, well,” Mulheisen said, hoping this discussion was concluded, “that’s good.” He nodded and glanced around the room. He was about to make a comment about the nice fireplace when she sighed.
“Shit,” she said. “I guess I could have put it better. Let’s see.” She furrowed her brow in thought. She looked up. “I’m not saying we should … no, that’s not it. How about this? If you wanta fuck, we could try it. We might like it. Maybe we’d hate it. But I hate the tension, waiting for it to happen. You dig?”
“You mean … now?”
She shrugged. “If you wanta. I don’t, particularly, right at the moment. But it’s there if you wanta give it a whirl. I just don’t want it hanging in the air, screwing everything up. So to speak.” She laughed, a throaty chuckle.
“Okay,” he said, relieved. “That’s good to know. Thank you. Uh, I wouldn’t, you know, dream of bringing a woman in if that’s …”
“Well, I don’t think I’d care for that,” she said, “but it’d be none of my business, I guess. Those things happen, sometimes. I’m not likely to be partying down here, either. The thing is, two people live in a house, they want to keep their own lives, you know? Their own space, as the kids say. That’s important.”
He agreed. “But the thing is,” he said, “I’ve found an apartment, downtown.”
“Oh.” She lifted her eyebrows. “Nice place?”
“Yeah. It’s all new. Not as big as this, but … I already made a deposit, first month’s rent, that kind of stuff.”
“How much?” she asked. When he told her twelve hundred dollars, her face registered shock, then relief. “Well, hell,” she said, “I can get your deposit back for you. No big deal.”
So that was settled. They proceeded on to other things, like when he wanted to move, whether there was room in the garage for his Checker. He wondered what his mother would make of her. Fortunately, Cora Mulheisen was in Galápagos, or was it Ulan Bator? Someplace where they had cranes. She knew he was moving, of course, but she’d have to be told about Becky, some time.
Becky arrived with her pickup truck, right on time. Mulheisen’s gear would take at least two trips. When they had taken one load across town and returned for another, she came up to his room and suggested he might like to take his chair. She was pretty strong for as slim as she was; she hauled as many boxes as he did and didn’t get winded, either. And she didn’t even comment when he did.
Mulheisen was exhausted. He offered to take her to dinner, but Becky insisted on cooking a tremendous grilled flank steak with a special barbecue rub. Becky had some good wines. A rather boisterous cabernet seemed appropriate. It revived and yet relaxed them.
After that, they went to bed. It was … energetic. Becky was as lively as a trout and as hard to hold. Sometime during the night she eluded his embrace.
In the morning, he found her in the kitchen, where he’d gone in pursuit of a delicious aroma of freshly ground and brewed coffee. Becky thanked him for his efforts of the previous night in a friendly, matter-of-fact way and accepted his compliments.
“You were better than I’d hoped,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you get breakfast. I mean, you were excellent. Really. It’s just, I’ve got stuff to do. We’ll have to do it again. I’m glad we got that out of the way, though. No tension, see?” And she disappeared into the basement to work out.
Mulheisen went to work. It was a long drive to the Ninth Precinct, but he had a LaDonna figurado and thought about that slim body as he waited for lights. He felt great. He wondered what she had hoped. But she was right. No tension.
* * *
“You look like the shark that ate a whale,” Jimmy Marshall said. “You get laid, or something?”
“What do you mean? What makes you say that?” Mulheisen came back at him. But Jimmy wasn’t listening.
“We’ve got a guy here, wants to talk to you, about the Fat Man,” Jimmy said.
“Why me?” Mulheisen said. “That’s a Grosse Pointe case. Or the FBI. Why didn’t you send him to them?”
“He’s been to them,” Jimmy said. “They brushed him off. He asked to see you. Said he’d heard about you. I’ll send him in.”
A stocky, muscular man about fifty appeared in the door. He was blond, with thick blond eyebrows and pale eyelashes, an old-fashioned G.I. haircut. A tough guy, it seemed. He was Jimmy Go, he said. “Golsen, but they call me Jimmy Go.” He seemed to think that Mulheisen would know him, or know of him, but Mulheisen didn’t. Mulheisen got him to sit down. They were in the cluttered cubicle that Mulheisen called an office. He wondered, as he cleared some files off a chair for Jimmy Go, what Becky would think of the mess.
“What was the name again? Golson, with an o, like the tenor man?” he asked, scribbling in a notebook.
“E,” the man said. “I thought Golysczywzki was bad. I had to change it. Nobody could pronounce it, or spell it. ’Specially at the motor vehicle department. Now I gotta spell Golsen. I’m a trucker. Gravel, stuff like that. Got a fleet of trucks. Yeah, it’s about the Fat Man. Diablo, or whatever they call him.”
He sat foursquare, hands on his powerful thighs, looking directly at Mulheisen. The detective waited.
“He ain’t dead,” Jimmy Go said.
“FBI says he is,” Mulheisen said. “They did an autopsy, forensics identified him. They seem satisfied, from what I’ve heard.”
“That’s what they say,” Jimmy conceded. “But it ain’t him. It’s somebody else. It’s bullshit.”
“What do you know, Jimmy?”
“The Fat Man ain’t gonna get whacked by some security guard, a guy he hired, like the papers said. It’s a put-up job. I know the guy. I had dealings with him, for years, the prick.”
“What kind of dealings?”
Jimmy explained that for years the mob had tried to muscle in on his business, had harassed him, harassed his drivers, had tried to push him off jobs, sabotaged his trucks, and so on. It was a familiar story. Jimmy had fought back. He was tough. And finally, he made a deal with Wally Leonardo. Nardo was running that end of things in those days, when Carmine was boss.
It turned out that Nardo and Jimmy Go’s sister had been acquainted. His sister had been a whore. He said it as if she had been a waitress. She had been Nardo’s mistress for a while. And later, when his sister had fallen ill, Nardo had paid for an operation, even though they were no longer lovers. Jimmy Go’s sister had died anyway, despite the operation. But Jimmy Go had found that Nardo played pretty straight with him.
Jimmy Go had been protected, for a not unreasonable price. It was the cost of doing business, he said. And Nardo had kept up his end. They got along. They were cut from the same stone, Nardo had told him. And now DiEbola had whacked Nardo. They had tried to lay it off on Pelodian, but Jimmy Go wasn’t fooled. He’d talked to Nardo the night before he died. Nardo had told Jimmy Go he’d been to dinner at DiEbola’s. Nardo knew it was coming. He knew what that dinner was all about. He’d said that the other two guys who were there, Malateste and Soteri, were gonna get it too. And they had.
Mulheisen didn’t think that was much. What else was there?
Jimmy Go said Nardo had shown him a piece of paper. He’d given it to him. It was an address, where he could find Pelodian. It was way the hell out in the country, not far from the stone quarry where Nardo’s body had been found. It was written in DiEbola’s hand. Jimmy Go didn’t know DiEbola’s writing, but Nardo did. He knew it was a setup.
“Why did he go, then?” Mulheisen asked.
“I think he figured he could handle it, and if he couldn’t, then it was his time,” Jimmy Go said. “He wasn’t scared. He said he’d gotten away with a lot of shit in his time, but maybe this was the payback. He never expected an angel chorus. But, what the hell, he might win! Only he couldn’t. They must have jumped him.”
“Maybe it happened that way,” Mulheisen said, “but so what? DiEbola’s dead. Well, maybe we could get the guys who did the deed. Did you show the paper to the FBI?”
Jimmy Go had. They didn’t think it was much. They had taken the paper. They said they’d get back to him if something came of it. But they hadn’t. Jimmy Go didn’t think they were going to do anything. Trouble was, DiEbola wasn’t dead. He was sure of it. Nardo had told him that he believed something funny was going down. The Fat Man was getting ready to cut. He was settling old scores, clearing the decks. He’d been knifing guys right and left, selling his operations to the highest bidders. That’s what Nardo said and it looked like it was true. And if the Fat Man sold the biz out, could he stay on? No. He had to bolt.
“What do you care?” Mulheisen said. “He killed an old buddy of yours. Leonardo told you … what was it Nardo said?”
“He said he never expected to die in bed, flights of angels singing him home.” Jimmy Go almost smiled, but he was a pretty mirthless sort of guy—his thin lips writhed for a second. “He was a pretty good guy, for a crook. He wasn’t no Holy Joe, but he treated me good. Most of ’em out there”—he waved a thick, callused hand at the dirty window with its protective bars—“you reach out for a hand up and they’d as soon shit in your palm. Nardo was all right. I gotta do something for him. He did something for Nita. He didn’t haveta do nothing, but he did.”
Mulheisen sat and stared at this knotty-looking man. He was impressed. The guy rambled on about his sister, Nita. She was never a nun, he said. They’d been orphans, stuck in a succession of foster homes, where they’d been kicked around. His sister had been raped when she was ten by one of the foster fathers. Jimmy had been younger by a couple years. He had tried to protect her, but it was she who had protected him from the beatings, she who had insisted that they couldn’t be separated and had pitched such a bitch that the social workers had capitulated and found them homes together.
“She always thought she was so smart, but she wasn’t that smart,” he said. “She was good to me, though. I tried to look out for her when I got big. But you couldn’t help Nita. She was into drugs, that kinda shit. But I ain’t gonna let DiEbola get away with this.”
He was raging inside, Mulheisen could see. But he kept it well muffled, choked off.
“I’ll find the bastard, somehow,” Jimmy Go said, getting up. “I’ll find him and pound his fucking head in like he did old Nardo.”
He was through talking to Mulheisen. He could see that Mulheisen couldn’t help him.
“Well, wait a minute,” Mulheisen said. “Where would I start?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Jimmy Go said. “You’re the fucking detective. There must be something that would tell you, some way to figure it out.”
“I’ll look into it,” Mulheisen said. But Jimmy Go was gone, out the door.
An hour later, Mulheisen was talking to Brennan, the medical examiner. He had done the autopsy. Was there any way that the body was not DiEbola? No, Brennan said. It was DiEbola. The body was pretty destroyed, but they had plenty of identification, blood, tissue, teeth. They had ransacked the house upstairs, which hadn’t been damaged. They were able to match hair and sloughed skin from the bedsheets. Good matches.
Good matches? Not perfect matches? Mulheisen asked. Well, there were some anomalies, sure, Brennan conceded, but there always were, and they were heavily outweighed. The medical files were the clincher. Nothing ever matched up one hundred percent. But the evidence was there. That was DiEbola.
What anomalies?
Well, there was some blood they couldn’t account for, some fingerprints, some hair, some tissue. The investigators thought there may have been another man there, possibly he had perished in the boat that blew up and sunk in the lake. Probably one of the assailants. They hadn’t been able to make a match on him. No body. Probably never find it.
Mulheisen drove to the Federal Building offices, to visit the FBI. He was surprised to find a federal agent he had met before there, Dinah Schwind. She was kind of cute, he thought. He looked at her differently today, perhaps because of his experience with Becky. Women looked more attractive today.
The last time he’d seen her she’d been looking for a missing agent, evidently investigating Humphrey DiEbola. She was like a lot of federal agents in Mulheisen’s experience: they asked the questions, but they didn’t provide many answers to your questions. She had pumped him for details of his investigations of DiEbola and was particularly interested in his comments about Joe Service and Helen Sedlacek. As for the missing agent, she hadn’t been able to provide him with much information; in fact, she’d said that he was more on the order of an informer, or a source, than an actual agent. He’d been working at Krispee Chips. His name was Pablo Ortega.
At the time, the name meant nothing to Mulheisen, but not long after he’d received a visit from Ortega’s brother, from Mexico. The family had heard from Ortega, months earlier, in a letter that suggested he was doing very well at Krispee Chips. But when Mulheisen and the brother had gone there to inquire about the missing man, they were told that Ortega had left the company and there was no information on his whereabouts.
Mulheisen mentioned this to Dinah Schwind now. “I’d have passed this on before now,” he told her, “but you never said what office you worked out of. You’re not FBI?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Right now I’m in and out of the country so much, I don’t even know who I work for. My mother can’t even get hold of me. But you did find Ortega?”
“No,” Mulheisen said, “just his brother. But, you know, I’ve been thinking about it … you must have blood tests, that sort of thing, on your agents, eh? I’ve been talking to the medical examiner about the bodies they found at the DiEbola crime scene and they’re still up in the air on some of the identifications. Maybe you should see if your guy wasn’t one of the sources of some of the tissue and blood they found there.”
Schwind was skeptical. The guy wasn’t really an “agent,” after all, but she was grateful for the suggestion. She’d get back to him on it. And before he knew it, she had run off. Oh well, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other work to occupy him.
The FBI had a big file on DiEbola, but it didn’t tell him much. They were totally convinced that DiEbola was a closed case. They weren’t looking any further. They had listened to Mr. Golsen, but his information wasn’t helpful about the actual perpetrators of the Leonardo murder. One of the other agents had the note. They could send him a copy if he needed it. They left Mulheisen to examine the file. He took some notes.
According to the records, Humphrey DiEbola had been born in Detroit, in 1935, and christened Umberto Gagliano. His mother had died soon after, his father in 1947. Custody of the youth had been awarded to Dominic and Sophia Busoni, of suburban Royal Oak, maternal relatives. He first attracted police attention in 1944, an Oakland County juvenile matter, no record. Later, the family moved into Detroit, and Umberto began to rack up a long series of police attentions, but no arrests and no fingerprints. At age twenty-one he had legally changed his name to Humphrey DiEbola, a simple matter of requesting the change through probate court.
Over the years, DiEbola was often suspected of violent crimes, often questioned, but never formally arrested. And again, no fingerprints. It was an amazing feat for a man so active in crime.
Mulheisen was strangely at peace as he left the federal offices. He stood on the sidewalk, among the tall buildings. It was a cool day in late spring, a milky sky. A good day for something. He felt good. Maybe it was Becky, he thought. But it had a old, familiar feel to it. He’d felt this way before, though not lately. He felt like doing something, but he wasn’t in any hurry. He was in a zone, as the kids said.
He went to juvenile court and was denied access to ancient records. He didn’t blink. He called an old Royal Oak detective, a man named Hearn. They had met years ago. Hearn was in his eighties now, but he remembered Mulheisen. Did he remember any significant juvenile cases in 1944, involving a kid named Umberto Gagliano? No. But he remembered the Busonis.
“They were real gangsters,” Hearn said. “They had a half dozen kids. The wife was something, a real beauty. She was Sophia before Sophia Loren. Nice gal, too. Busoni was always into something. We were glad when he split to Detroit.”
“Why did he leave?”
“I don’t know. Moving up in the world, I guess.”
Mulheisen called a friend at the Detroit News archives. She said she would put together a little file of DiEbola stories. They flirted a little. She hadn’t seen him in a long time, she said. They should get together for a drink, or something. Mulheisen said he’d like to, but he was seeing somebody. It probably wasn’t wise. His friend picked up on that. “Sounds serious,” she said.
Hearn called back. He’d thought of something. “Busoni got run out of Royal Oak,” he said. “It was funny, because it wasn’t his fault.”
“What do you mean, ‘run out’?”
“The neighbors got after him. Him and his gang. They wanted him out. They even had a scene, what we’d later call a demonstration, in front of his house. We had to go out and break it up, protect him.” Hearn laughed. “I mean, the guy was into a lot a stuff, but we had to protect him for something that didn’t have anything to do with him.”
“He had a gang? In Royal Oak? This was during the war?”
“Well, not a real gang, as such. But he always had guys, foreigners, coming around. Yeah, it was the war. People were wary of foreigners, you know. We had another deal out there, same neighborhood, where a baby-sitter saw a copy of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s book. She told her folks, they told somebody else, next thing you know, a mob is shouting ‘Nazi’ outside the guy’s door.”
“I heard about that,” Mulheisen said. “That was in Royal Oak? I thought it was Harper Woods. What happened?”
“Aw, nothing,” the old policeman said. “The guy came out and said it was a free country, he could read any damn thing he wanted to, told ’em he wasn’t a Nazi, just wanted to know what this Hitler guy was up to. That’s all. We broke it up.”
“Was the Busoni thing like that?”
“No, no, I don’t even know if Busoni could read. Not English, anyway. It was … let’s see … yeah, a kid had disappeared in the neighborhood. Didn’t have anything to do with Busoni, though. He’d been out of town at the time. But maybe they were used to getting up mobs by then. Anyway, after that, Busoni and his family moved to the city.”
“The one who disappeared? They never found him. Oh, I take that back. They dug up his body, excavating. It was quite a while later, maybe ten years. Just bones. The guy on the cat, he didn’t see it, at first. Bones were scattered all over, all crushed up. They figured the kid had crawled into an old abandoned excavation, got caved on. There were a lot of those old excavations, housing project that got started but then the war came along and there were no building supplies, no customers. After the war, though, they started to build like mad. By the late forties, they were …”
Hearn went on for a good long while about the postwar building boom. Mulheisen made some notes, hung up, and began to look at some of the other available records on DiEbola’s career. Late in the day, his friend Sheila from the Detroit News called. She had a nice collection of stuff, if he wanted to come out and look at it. It was all in Sterling Township, at the News offices. Mulheisen felt a little odd about going there. He supported the News staff that had gone on strike some time back and hadn’t been recalled. In the end, he figured that the archives belonged to an earlier, prestrike era. His union sympathies didn’t apply. He said he’d come out.
He called Becky to say he wouldn’t be home until late. “For godssake,” she said, “let’s don’t start this crap. You’re a big boy. Just because we had a little fun doesn’t mean you have to call every time you’re gonna be out. What, did you expect supper or something?”
She didn’t sound cross, so he was relieved. “Oh, okay,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.”
“So now you know. Jeez, no tension, remember?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, “no tension.” He almost made a crack about not feeling any tension all day, but decided against it.
When you look at old files a certain weariness sets in quickly. Especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Soon enough, he was grateful for the bad coffee that Sheila brought to the viewer. Here was a depressing and seemingly endless parade of articles, many with pictures, of a younger, fatter Humphrey being questioned about and denying murder, theft, arson, you name it. In no case was he arrested or charged. It was an amazing performance. And at about age thirty, the pictures ceased. He was no longer even brought in, or if he was, it was handled more discreetly. That meant powerful lawyers.
Mulheisen knew, of course, who the lawyers were, but there was no point in approaching them. He wondered, however, if there weren’t some documents that must now be made public, given the official demise of DiEbola. He would have to check.
He sat back and sipped the coffee. A thought struck him. He explained to Sheila about the disappearance of the schoolboy, in Royal Oak. About 1944. She soon found it. The boy was named Arthur Cameron White Jr. He had been fifteen. A large, heavy boy, certain to have been called “Tubby,” though probably not to his face, not by his classmates. He was only in the eighth grade, so he’d been held back at least one year.
The original article described him as missing. The article hinted that he might have run away. He had run away before, it said. He had left the school that day for disciplinary reasons—sent home. But there was no one at home. Things were a little looser in those days, it seems. It appeared that for the first few days the police looked for him in bus stations, hobo jungles, highway stops, that sort of thing.
Mulheisen was entertained by the “hobo jungles.” He remembered scouting them, in his uniform days. He supposed they still existed, in some form. Nowadays, they would look among the haunts of the homeless.
After a few days a more general search was made of the neighborhood. But it was too late. Evidently there had been “torrential” rains. He supposed that meant several days of pretty heavy, more or less constant rainfall. Not much chance. He’d participated in a search like that, once, as a young cop. There was nothing drearier than walking through parks and neighborhoods, looking but not knowing what to look for. Sort of like what he was doing right now. You soon fell prey to the conviction that nothing would be found. Nothing was found. It was rare to find anything that way. Just a bunch of men, stumbling around, wishing they were somewhere else, watching the leaders for the first sign that it was time to call it a day.
He didn’t feel that way now, though. He felt interested. The story had moved to page 2, dropped to page 5, and then disappeared. It was revived by the mob that had besieged a neighbor’s house. The reports didn’t identify the neighbor. It was an unfounded rumor. Where the rumor had originated was unknown and not pursued. The story disappeared.
In 1950, Crooks Woods was finally sold and chopped down and the abandoned sites were bulldozed for a new subdivision. That’s when the body was discovered—six years later, not ten. Much too late. The White family had moved away, to Ontario. They were from Ontario originally. An ambitious young reporter had evidently talked her editor into letting her do a lengthy Sunday feature piece on the sad tale. It wasn’t much of a story. The family had believed that “Porky” (Aha! Mulheisen thought) had run away. They had never believed that anything bad had happened to him.
Porky was a bad boy, Mulheisen concluded from the article. They were secretly relieved at his disappearance. Anyway, he was the kind of kid who hurts others. Not a victim. The principal had expelled him that day for twisting a smaller kid’s arm so violently that the child had to be taken to the hospital by the school nurse. (They had a school nurse!)
The main interviewee in the feature article was a teenage girl, Ivy, the younger sister, one of three girls. The youngest girl had died of diphtheria not long before Porky vanished. The parents were despondent and went back to a small town near Midland, Ontario. But the teenaged girl remembered that Porky “had a kind of hideout somewhere, he never would say where.” She thought he must have gone there, but they had no way to find it, no clue.
Oh, this is a waste of time, Mulheisen thought. He gathered up his stuff and thanked Sheila. She asked him what his new girlfriend was like. He said she wasn’t his girlfriend, just a woman he was living with. “That’s cute,” Sheila said. He didn’t feel like explaining. He promised to take her to lunch, soon, and drove home. He was tired. Becky had gone to bed. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. He just tiptoed upstairs and got in bed himself.
The sheets were clean. They smelled nice. He thought she must have washed them. This might work out, he thought. He fell asleep wondering if she was his girlfriend.