Ten

“Hey, who's this prick?” Tupman asked. He and his four companions were standing near the elevator in the basement parking lot of his apartment building.

The prick was a person in a bulky tanker jacket and jeans and a woolen ski mask covering his face. He had just stepped out of the shadows when the Tupman party reached the elevator. The five men peered at the strange figure, who was fumbling with something that had a long string, or perhaps a leather strap, attached to it. One of Tupman's two burly bodyguards suddenly realized that the strap was attached to the barrel of an automatic pistol.

“That's a gun!” he shouted. He almost got his own pistol out, but a half-second late can be eternally late.

The masked man had finally got the strap unraveled so that it was draped from the barrel of the .45 to his left fist, which he held tightly against his left thigh. When his arm was fully extended, making the tether tight, the gunner squeezed the trigger. The .45 began a raucous coughing roar, bucking and fighting against the tether. The gun swung through a limited arc. It had an extralong clip, and in very short order it was empty. The slugs ripped through the little group of men by the elevator, knocking them flying in a spray of blood and screams. All the men went down, tumbled in a pile of bloody cashmere and tweed overcoats. The ejected cartridge cases continued to ring and ding off the concrete floor of the parking garage in the deafening silence.

Halfway into the firing of the clip, the rapid back-and-forth movement of the barrel housing had caused the leather restraint to slip free. The pistol had begun to climb wildly, sending half the bullets up the walls and, finally, deflecting off the concrete ceiling.

The shooter stared at the leash unbelievingly and then threw it down. In a panic he hastily ejected the clip and flung it aside. Anxiously he fumbled out another clip and jammed it home. Some of the victims were groaning and writhing. One man had clambered on hands and knees toward the elevator call button. The gunner stepped forward, and holding the pistol with both hands, squeezed off another bellowing roll of thunder, spraying the sprawled bodies and ending with a fortuitous shot that caught the man at the call button.

The gunner inserted a third clip, and this time he stepped among the bodies, treading on some of them, squeezing the trigger spasmodically, turning the gun on one or another of the victims as he saw them move, their bodies jumping on the concrete and bullets ricocheting dangerously in a spray of chips when a shot missed. When that clip, too, was exhausted, the killer stared down at the pile, blinking rapidly through the eyeholes of the mask, chest heaving wildly, gasping noisily. He squeezed the trigger spasmodically, but nothing happened, and he finally grew aware of this. He turned and ran to the exit.

The mesh gate that served as the garage door had automatically descended and locked when Tupman's car entered the garage, an eventuality the killer had evidently overlooked. He craned his neck frantically, then jammed the pistol into a jacket pocket. He knelt and grasped the mesh with his bare hands, heaving upward mightily. It lifted a quarter inch, but that was all. The cold metal cut into the palms of his hands painfully.

“Goddamn!” he roared in frustration and panic, looking about wildly. Nobody had come as yet—it was four o'clock in the morning—but it could only be a matter of seconds before a guard of some kind, a night watchman, a passing motorist—anybody!—would come to investigate the horrendous volley of gunfire that had been unleashed.

“Stop it,” the killer said aloud, fighting for calm. He stood and walked over to the man who had been driving the Mercedes and rolled him over. The body turned without difficulty. The killer fished out the man's wallet and calmly but quickly found the plastic card that would open the gate. He took the wallet with him and inserted the card into the locking device. The mesh slid obediently upward. When it was halfway up the killer ducked under it and walked swiftly away. He had gone some thirty feet before he stopped and returned to take the plastic card, smeared with bloody fingerprints, out of the machine and stuff it into his pocket. Something caught his eye. He ran across the bloodied concrete and snatched up the two empty ammo clips. The gate had closed again, of course, when the card was removed. The killer swore and got out the card again, inserted it, and then withdrew it. The gate descended behind him as the killer walked calmly away.

A bunch of cops stood around in the cavernous garage. In the early morning it was as cold as the seventh level of hell. Mulheisen recognized a young detective who had started out in the Ninth but was now downtown. “Who is it, Kip?” he asked.

“Hi, Mul. How ya doin'? Didn't you know? It's Tupman, and is he frosted.” He grinned like a cheerleader and pointed to the sprawl of dead men. Then he caught Mulheisen's grimace and said, almost apologetically, “Well, he won't be missed.” He stepped aside as Laddy McClain hove up.

“Sorry to get you out of bed, Mul,” McClain said in a tone that belied the statement, “but I thought you'd want to see this, being as you're still on the Big Sid case. This could be related.”

“Technically, I'm on Sid,” Mulheisen conceded, “but nontechnically and in every other way there isn't any Big Sid case. Oh, Jimmy's running down a lead in Iowa, but that isn't looking too promising.”

“Well, you might get something out of this. Anyway, you asked for Big Sid, and it's yours, . . . and so is this.” McClain was friendly, but he was making a point. “If you want any help, my boys will be glad to, you know. C'm'ere.” He led Mulheisen over to the carnage.

Marty Tupman had been a thirty-two-year-old white male, until about an hour earlier. Then he had become a pasty blob of inert matter that couldn't do any of the things that differentiate an animate mass of cells from an inanimate one. Tupman's cells were in a different state at the moment, in transition toward some other form. Frosty Tupman had never been attractive in life and now looked awful. He was wearing a blue cashmere overcoat that had been pierced by at least three heavy-caliber bullets that had blown out the back side of the splendid garment. He had a doltish expression on his flabby face, his eyes staring, though now clouded, and his mouth hanging open.

He half-lay on a younger white man, also in a nice coat, tweed, that had been ruined by a single shot. Against the wall, by the elevator, another young man, this one black, stretched an arm toward a call button that he'd never reach. His face was flattened against the fake brick effect of the concrete. Blood congealed in a very large puddle underneath him.

A fourth man lay on his back a few feet away from the others but sharing the great lake of blood. He was young and black and, like the others, wore a fine overcoat. His coat and jacket were open, and there were bloody smudges of hands and fingers on his white shirt. A pistol was visible in a shoulder holster.

There were footslip smears in the pool of stiff blood, and the reversed logo ????? was clearly visible on two of the footprints leading toward the open mesh gate of the garage. The Crime Squad had erected protective barriers and done a lot of chalking and posting of temporary signs to protect the crime scene. Lights were set up and cameras still flashed. A man with a video camera was directing another officer with a portable rack of lights.

A Crime Squad technician brought a curious item over to Mulheisen: a long leather strap, bloodied and dirtied, with a loop on one end. He dangled it from a pencil, like a dead snake.

“What's this?” Mulheisen asked. The technician had no opinion. He suggested that it might be some kind of dog leash; perhaps it had been lying there, innocently lost, when the killing had begun. Mulheisen told him to bag it and log it.

“There was another guy,” McClain said, “still ticking. They took him to Grace. The guys said he didn't look like he'd make it there. You wanta go look at him?”

Mulheisen surveyed the remaining corpses with a calm eye. “Not yet,” he said. “How many shots do you figure were fired here? Fifty? Not that many? Let's say thirty.” He wandered around, examining the bodies and the pockmarks made by bullets in the concrete. “You think maybe it was a team?” he said to McClain. “What I want to know,” he added, “is why you think this is related to the killing of Big Sid.”

“Tupman was a pal of Sid's,” McClain said. “Andy tells me they may have been into this coke rip-off together.”

“Yanh,” Mulheisen conceded, “but they sent a lone guy to get Sid and Mickey, who was probably just in the way, but would they send the same guy to get Tupman and . . .”—he gestured at the sprawled bodies—“all these guys? The artist who cooled Sid was a Rembrandt compared to this. He used a .22-caliber brush. Whoever stilled these lives . . . I don't know, they were more the Jackson Pollock type. Maybe it was only one guy, but he didn't have the same attitude.” He gestured at the bloody footprints. “That looks like one guy, but maybe he was the only one who approached the bodies.” He shook his head, “It's not the same at all, Mac.”

“Well, Mul . . . one guy, two guys, a dozen guys. So what?” McClain asked.

“Well, if it's one guy,” Mulheisen said, “even if he's got a tommy gun, he's standing here facing five guys, all of whom he has to expect are armed . . . and he's going to take on the whole crew? He got lucky, obviously, but that isn't the way they work, Mac. They send ten guys to take out five. You know that. Also, they know their ground better than this. They know how many there will be. Good, the guy we think took out Sid, he knew he only had to deal with Sid and Mickey, and he was perfectly set up. Waiting by the gate.” He thought for a moment, then conceded, “Well, this is almost the same deal . . . But I'll tell you this much, whoever did it was lucky to get out of here alive.”

“Let's go talk to the survivor, Mul,” McClain said, “if he's still with us. He might be able to say something.”

Mulheisen gazed around at the garish lights, the crumpled bodies, the lake of blood. It might be an abattoir, a medieval torture dungeon, or a Nazi execution cellar—not an inappropriate site for the business done here. “Maybe the medical examiner can make them speak,” he said.

On the way to Grace Hospital, McClain briefed Mulheisen. “Two of the guys with Tupman were lawyers. The other two were Frosty's heat. One of them almost got his gun out. It looks like the killers took one guy's wallet . . . don't know why. It obviously wasn't robbery. Tupman was carrying a wad.”

“Petty theft but not grand larceny,” Mulheisen said wryly. “What's that old Beatles song . . . ‘She could steal, but she could not rob.’ “ He half-sang the line. “I suppose he took it so we wouldn't have it.”

McClain said, “So you think it was one guy.”

“I don't know,” Mulheisen replied. “But I don't think it was the same guy. One new guy, or a handful.”

“Group art,” McClain said, “by the Three Stooges.”

Mulheisen pictured those manic dopes with buckets and whitewash brushes, and he smiled. They were riding in a cruiser, behind a uniformed driver and McClain's assistant, Joe Greene. McClain said, “The guy they hauled away was one of the lawyers. Name is Benesh. He had about an ounce of cocaine on him.”

“Is this Benesh a mob lawyer?”

“I never heard of him,” McClain said. “You?”

Mulheisen hadn't heard of him either. “And Tupman had a lot of cash on him? A buy?”

“Could be. Benesh looked kind of straight to me, a regular yuppie. A client, maybe.”

“Any other witnesses?” Mulheisen asked. He drew out a cigar but didn't light it. He had an idea that the hospital people would object, and they were almost there. He put it back in the leather case.

“No, as usual,” McClain said complacently. “The guard was in the lobby upstairs. The driver must have let them into the parking garage with an ID card—which is missing. Probably with the stolen wallet. The door would have closed automatically behind them. The shooter was either waiting or had ducked in behind them as they drove through.”

“And the guard didn't hear anything?”

McClain snorted. “The guys picked up eighteen .45-caliber empties. Say there were twenty or more shots fired down in that echo chamber, . . . and Rentacop didn't hear a thing. He had a radio going.”

“Loud enough to drown out shots at that time of night?”

McClain looked disgusted. “He had on a headset. He said he didn't, but it was lying on the desk next to the radio, plugged in. He's just a kid, twenty years old. Works part-time for Pape Protection. That's the way they do things these days.”

Benesh lay on an operating table, festooned with wires and tubes and surrounded by blinking electronics. An intensely bearded young man in a white smock and the blue turban of a Sikh raised his hands fatalistically when Mulheisen asked if it was all right to talk to the patient. “I cannot be optimistic that he will be capable of responding, but I see that you are determined. Do what you must.”

Mulheisen bent close to the patient and said, “Benesh. Benesh.” The patient's eyes struggled open. Mulheisen looked into the dullness of those eyes and felt he was looking into the beyond. “Benesh,” he said, “did you see the killer?”

The dry lips moved. A whisper: “Smaw.”

Some more? Or it might be small, Mulheisen thought. “Small?” he asked.

Benesh nodded minutely. “Short,” he breathed. “Mas’. Gun strap.”

“Mask? Don't nod, just blink.” The man blinked. “One man?” Mulheisen held up a single finger. “Or two?”

No blink.

“Guns? Trap?” Mulheisen asked.

No blink. He wouldn't be blinking anymore.

Mulheisen, McClain, and Greene stood looking at Benesh, three monumental mourners. They shrugged in unison and left.

It was dawn and spitting rain, just getting started apparently, like a water pistol before a steady stream is brought on. The three detectives walked from John R Street to Woodward, to My Brother's Bar. It was just opening. The bartender didn't recognize them, but he had a sense of who they were. He brought out a fresh pot of coffee from the brew machine and set up a shot of whiskey before each cup.

“I know you been having probs out in the precinct,” McClain said, pouring the shot into the coffee itself. “I mean, with Dennis and Buck and witnesses walking. Maybe this'll break things open and lower the heat.”

That wasn't the way Mulheisen saw it, but he didn't argue. The way he saw it somebody was going to have to do a lot of explaining eventually, and he hoped it wasn't himself. He shook out a cigar and lighted up. It tasted good, and he didn't mind that both McClain and Greene mooched one off him. And the shot of whiskey and the fresh coffee made things begin to look a little better.

“Let's see,” he said, “we've got five dead men, including a dead witness who says, ‘Small, short, mask, guns, trap.’ Or, maybe it was ‘Make it short, ask me, I'm gonna crap out.’ “

Greene laughed out loud. “You forgot the deaf, dumb, ‘n’ blind security guard, Mul,” he said.

Mulheisen nodded sagely, drawing in the delicious smoke of the H. Upmann. “What else is there?”

“Lotsa .45 casings,” McClain said.

“Yeah, what about that?” Mulheisen asked. “That suggests a guy firing a couple of Colt Commanders, one in each hand. Can he really fire off that many rounds quickly enough to keep the heavies from getting off at least a couple shots in return?” He shook his head in disbelief.

Greene had a theory. “If you modify the shear, you can fire the whole clip in one pull,” he said. “Kind of hard to hang onto the sucker, but at least you're not toting around a tommy gun, which is kind of hard to conceal. Also, you could use extralong clips, which could carry maybe fifteen shots per. The danger, in this situation, is that a round might misfire, or it won't have enough of a load to fully cock the gun. Then you've got to manually eject the load. As far as we could see, this didn't happen.”

“But how do you keep it from climbing?” Mulheisen wanted to know. “If you make it into a squirt gun, doesn't it just keep climbing?” He was trying to remember firing the .45 pistol in the air force. He had a vague recollection of horrendous noise and a bucking, barely controllable weapon.

“I saw a guy on the range once,” Greene said. “Had a kind of leash, or strap, attached to the barrel. He wound it around his other fist and held it clamped against his hip. Worked pretty good.”

“Gun strap!” McClain and Mulheisen said it in unison, remembering the leather strap. They laughed and for a moment thought they were on to something, but then they realized that it put them no further forward, except, as Mulheisen noted, the killer was likely a gunsmith, or perhaps a gun freak. “It was probably Dennis the Menace,” Mulheisen joked, thinking of the first gun afficionado who came to mind. He marveled again at the audacity, if not plain foolishness, of a killer (assuming it was just one man) who would go into an extremely dangerous confrontation with men who he must have known would be armed, equipped with such a questionable apparatus.

Gun evidence wasn't always helpful in this sort of crime, Mulheisen knew. The trouble with trying to track a killer through the guns he used was that there were so many guns out there. Of course, if and when he was caught, and if the weapons were found, they could be excellent evidence in a trial.

“What did you tell the press?” he asked McClain.

“Gangland slaying,” McClain said.

Mulheisen smiled. “How much consideration did you give to coke king carnage?”

“That's good,” McClain said, “but what about coke kings croaked?”

“Crack kings croaked,” corrected Greene. They laughed.

Then they sighed. Mulheisen expressed it for all of them: “I don't see the mob sending Baby Face Nelson after a coke dealer, especially with these yuppie lawyers present. A competitor maybe?”

“They like Uzis,” Greene said. “They like mobility . . . drive by and spray. They don't . . . it's just not . . .” He waved a hand in frustration.

“Not their style?” Mulheisen asked. “I wonder. Sometimes I think we give these creeps too much credit for knowing what they're doing. And the mob is the same. Too many blood relatives on the payroll. You have one or two bright boys who are trying to hold together a billion-dollar business with the assistance of a bunch of cousins who tend to be brainless, bloodthirsty loons, all of whom are walking around with more armament than a World War II rifle platoon. The fact that the yuppie lawyers were present wouldn't bother most of them. It doesn't mean anything to them. Look at it this way: say Carmine or the Fat Man is sitting around at dinner and someone brings up Tupman's name. Carmine says, ‘Tupman is getting to be a pain in the ass. Life would sure be easier if someone just blew him away.’ So one of the young studs is there, listening, and he . . .” Mulheisen let it die.

McClain and Greene nodded in agreement, but Mulheisen was thinking of someone else, who had said words pretty much along those same lines. Nanh, he told himself, that's too silly. Forget it.

They drank their coffee and McClain said, “So? What d'you think, Mul?”

Mulheisen said, “A short man in a mask with some kind of gun on a strap shot down five guys in an underground garage. But he didn't take Tupman's money or steal the coke, so he probably wasn't a rival dope dealer or some kid looking to rip off Tupman. He had enough sense to take the plastic card that would let him out of the garage. And now, off to work, gentlemen.”

They drank up, got the car, and drove back to Tupman's apartment. Jimmy Marshall was waiting. He and Mulheisen went up with the others to Tupman's rooms. There were several detectives and specialists from other departments carefully taking the place apart. Mulheisen talked to Horton from Central Vice, Geiger from Narcotics, and Andy Deane from Racket-Conspiracy. They wandered about, hands in pockets, talking to the men who were doing the dismantling, and comparing notes. The dismantlers were bagging and labeling nearly everything, notebooks, phone books, letters, anything with writing on it. Mulheisen looked at it all before it disappeared, but nothing seemed to lead to anything that rang a bell. Tupman's private phone book would yield something, maybe plenty, to Geiger and Deane, but to Mulheisen it was just numbers with anonymous letters preceding them, Tupman's little code. Someone would work out whose numbers these were, of course, and Mulheisen would get a printout, so the code was pointless.

Mulheisen and Jimmy joined Andy at Tupman's bar, where they sampled his bourbon and gossiped. The popular theory was that Tupman had so many enemies that they had probably formed a committee for extinction and hired a mad-dog killer from someplace very far away, like Canada. Mulheisen finally nodded to Jimmy and they slipped away.

“Where to, Mul?” Jimmy asked.

“My car's here,” Mulheisen said. “I'm meeting Andy Deane at headquarters. Did you get anywhere on that Iowa connection?”

Jimmy had found three names, with addresses, of men who had booked through to Detroit from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, via Chicago. Only one of them was from Iowa City, and he had paid cash. A check with the police there revealed that the name was not known, nor was the address. Mulheisen agreed with Jimmy that this seemed promising. Neither of them had any idea how large a population was served by the Cedar Rapids airport, but as Jimmy put it, “It's Iowa, isn't it? Farm country. Maybe a clerk at the airline counter would recognize this guy and could put another name to the picture.”

“The trouble is, whose photo do we have? Harold Good—the killer? Or is it the late Harold Good—the suicide?” They came out of the building into the rain, and Mulheisen waved Jimmy into his car. He started it up and got the heater going. “It's probably worth going to Iowa,” Mulheisen said. “It's the best lead we have. But we need to know about that picture. I'll tell you what. Get a list of the guys who went down to court with Good, and show them the picture. One of them might recognize the photo. If it works there, it may work in Iowa.”

He paused. “I've screwed up, Jimmy. I should never have let Good get away from us, but maybe you can find him. This thing here,” he gestured through the foggy, rain-streaked window at the parking garage, “it may be related, but it almost certainly wasn't Good who did it. Still, we might get a lead out of it. I'm going to start over on Sid and do it right.”

He considered for a moment telling Jimmy about his contact with Bonny and Gene Lande, but decided against it. The whole thing seemed so preposterous, especially Lande's offer to do Mulheisen a favor and the mention of Tupman. Obviously no one does you a favor by killing a casually mentioned nemesis. The problem was Gene Lande was such a flaky guy—a short, flaky guy, at that. And he was already connected with the Sid Sedlacek killing, though in a way that seemed merely coincidental, even irrelevant.

Another problem was Bonny. Mulheisen was conscious of ambiguous feelings toward her. Much of it had to do with their shared experiences in high school, but there was something else. He was attracted to her still and felt an irritating and irrational sense of responsibility toward her. It was the sort of thing she had always done. She came on so helpless and so vulnerable that he couldn't repress an unwilling desire to look after her, to see that she wasn't hurt by a rough, uncaring world. At the same time he resented the urge, aware that her problems had nothing to do with him. They were of her own making. She was a grown woman who presumably could look after herself. Now she wanted him to find out who her husband was seeing, as a favor. It was ridiculous. Mulheisen couldn't mention it to Jimmy. But he would damn well check out Lande further.

“The time you screw up,” he told Jimmy, “is when you get complacent and think you know everything. Everybody screws up, Jimmy. Remember that. The trick is to realize it and start fixing the screwup. You go on back to the precinct and start making arrangements to go to Iowa. I'll be back there as quick as I can.”

Andy Deane, as usual, had anticipated Mulheisen's questions. The minute he'd heard about Tupman, he'd begun calling his contacts. The initial reports were vague and uncertain, Andy said, but he expected to see his main fish later that day. He didn't invite Mulheisen to come along, and Mulheisen didn't suggest it. A man's sources, especially deep sources like this one, were like fish that dwelt in the Mariana Trench—if you brought them to the surface, they would explode, and you were left with a gooey, unrecognizable mess. Only in extreme cases when it couldn't be helped, were they brought out into the light. This wasn't such a situation. Not yet, anyway.

But Andy had been improving his earlier theories in light of the latest developments. He noted first of all that a slime bag like Frosty Tupman is always killable. “I never heard of a kindly dope dealer, but Frosty was in a league—hell, a species, a genus—by himself. The least vicious of these guys are merely indifferent to the rest of humanity, Mul, but Frosty apparently enjoyed his victims’ sufferings. One of my little fish told me that Frosty once made a girl eat one of his turds in exchange for a hit of heroin—and then he didn't give her the smack. Now I don't know if that is just a fish's imagination—I never had the stomach to inquire further—but I was impressed by the way the fish emphasized that the girl didn't score the smack. The fish didn't emphasize the turd part, just the lack of result. True or not, you get an idea of the esteem Frosty Tupman had won in junkie hearts. Maybe I'm gullible, but I think it's true.”

Andy had never struck Mulheisen as gullible.

“A creep like Frosty, Mul, lives either by making himself indispensable—through some singular talent, like a willingness to kill anything—or because there aren't any really viable alternatives to his services. In the long run, of course, Tupman had to go down. Guys like him never get old. He defiled too many, stabbed too many backs, kissed too much ass, and generally lined up potential assassins as if he were conducting auditions. I don't know who did it, but except for the heat it throws, mainly because of the yuppie lawyers, the killer has probably made himself a lot of friends in the community. Maybe my lantern fish can throw some light on the subject.”

“What about Sid and the money?” Mulheisen asked. “Was Tupman involved?”

“He could have been,” Andy said, “and the money is still missing. There's always money missing with these guys, of course. The accounting is so irregular. But this is really a lot of money. Ten, maybe twenty million. It has attracted attention.”

“Sid had a girlfriend,” Mulheisen said.

“Yeah. Germaine Kouras. What about her?”

“Well, what do you think, Andy? Is she involved in this?”

Deane looked surprised. “Well, Mul, you must have talked to her. What do you think? She's a girlfriend. These guys don't usually involve their girlfriends in their business, especially if they've got something special and irregular going down. I mean, they just don't do it.”

“Well, what do you think about her, though?” Mulheisen asked. He was reluctant to confess to Andy that he had never talked to the woman.

“She's interesting,” Andy said. “Crazy, I think. Not a very good singer, but she's awfully pretty, and she has a certain flair. Well, you know what I mean.” He smiled. “I like her, but I wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole, even if she weren't a mobster's girlfriend . . . ex-girlfriend.”

“Of course,” Mulheisen said. “Say, you ever hear of a guy named Etcheverry, might have been an associate of Big Sid's, or of Tupman's?”

“Etcheverry. No . . . There's a Ray Echeverria, hangs out with Billy Conover. What about him?”

“Nothing. I just heard his name somewhere. He's a dope dealer, this guy?”

“Yeah,” Deane said, “or at least we think he is. We've never been able to make anything on him. He's more of a money man, I think, but the money is dope money. He's a little weird, kind of a skinny guy, tall, wears dark glasses day and night. I get the impression he thinks he's some kind of Latin lover.”

“Ah. Well. By the way, I don't have my notes on the Kouras woman with me. You wouldn't happen to have her address, where she works?”