Hit on the House (11 page)

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.”

A
ndy 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.”