Hit on the House (24 page)

Mulheisen blinked and entered. They were in a kind of cabin filled with a jumble of boxes and tools. An army cot stood against one wall, and against the opposite wall were built some cabinets with a counter bearing an electric cooker with a coffee pot on it. There was a sink filled with dirty dishes. A grocery sack overflowed with empty tins of chili and condensed soup. Against the back wall was a workbench with two vises, well lighted by fluorescent light and a gooseneck lamp. There were many tools—saws, files, drills, and some bladed instruments that were gouges. There were boxes of cartridges and miscellaneous shotgun shells lying about and something that Mulheisen thought was a shot-shell loader.

Lande waved him to a wooden kitchen chair next to a rickety table covered with coffee-cup rings and bread crumbs, a plate with the remains of dried chili on it, and a cup half-filled with cold coffee that reflected the light like the back of a grackle. There was also a nearly full bottle of Jameson whiskey.

Lande pushed a coffee cup across the table and poured it almost full of whiskey. He stepped back, and holding the shotgun by its pistol grip, he kept his eye on Mulheisen as he took a deep gulp from the bottle.

Mulheisen lifted his cup in toast and drank.

“Took ya long enough,” Lande said. “I wunnered how much longer I was gonna haveta hang out here.” He shook his head with disapproval. “Jeez . . . some detective you are.”

“I've been busy,” Mulheisen said. He rubbed his sore nose and took another sip of whiskey. “I guess I should have known about the shed, but I just didn't think of it.”

“Yeah. You were thinking about shit like taking Bonny to a nigger
funeral parlor. What the hell ‘ja do that for? That ain't no place for Bonny!”

“What difference does it make? You didn't want her to go to the morgue, did you? The people at Sweet Home are old friends. I trust them. Anyway, you left her.”

“I thought I could depend on you,” Lande complained. He didn't look well—gaunt, unshaven, his eyes red and glowing madly. Actually his beard didn't look so bad; if it grew out as it seemed intended to, it would go some way toward rendering his mustache more respectable. But his hair was disheveled and much grayer than it had been. Mulheisen wondered if he had dyed it before.

“Dead black people are like dead white people,” Mulheisen said; “you can't do anything to them anymore. What should I have done?”

“Cremation. That's what she wanted. I figgered you knew that. Hell, yer right. Dead is dead.” Lande shrugged. “So, ya figgered out I was here, but ya figgered I could wait until ya had time to deal with me.” He sounded bitter.

“No, . . . I thought you were gone.”

“Gone? Dead, ya mean?”

“No,” Mulheisen said, “to the Cayman Islands.”

“Cayman Islands,” Lande said with disgust. “Yeah . . . that was gonna be it . . . me ‘n’ Bonny lying in the sun. Shit! How'm I gonna go to the Cayman Islands?”

“Why not?”

“Besides never wanting to see the place again without Bon, pro'ly every cop in Michigan is lookin’ fer me. What'm I gonna do, drive there?”

Mulheisen drained his cup and poured himself another dram. “It's not my problem,” he said. “I figured you had a plan.”

“Plan! Sure, I hada plan . . . once't. Me ‘n’ Bon. But now there ain't no reason for a plan.” He choked and stopped, his eyes glittering with tears. He picked up the bottle and chugged from it, the shotgun pointed at the floor. When he regained control, he said, “Sid . . . he was a plan. But,” he flipped his free hand over and back, “ain't no Sid, either. No Sid, no Bonny . . . just ol’ Gene . . . and good ol’ Mul. Say,” he leaned
forward raising the shotgun provocatively, “how ‘bout you ‘n’ me go to the islands, Mul? Whataya say?”

Mulheisen just stared him in the eye. Lande blinked and stepped back. “Nanh? Guess not.” He picked up the bottle again and took another drink. “Good stuff,” he said. “I'm ‘onna miss this stuff.”

Mulheisen wondered what that meant. Two or three possibilities loomed in the hazy distance, none of them cheerful. “So, you're taking off . . . is that it?” he asked.

Lande made a raspy noise that could have been a laugh or a snort. “Yanh, I'm takin’ off. Soon's I figure out what to do about you, Mul.”

Mulheisen decided to ignore the remark. He took a careful sip of whiskey and said, “You could go by boat, I guess.”

Lande cocked his head, frowning. “Boat? What boat?”

“That boat you and Bonny used to go out on . . . last summer.”

“Sid's boat, you mean? The
Serb-U-Rite?
How'm I gonna go in Sid's boat, . . . steal it?”

Mulheisen shrugged. “Just a thought. But how will you get the money out?”

Lande waved a hand contemptuously. He must have been drinking before Mulheisen got there, because he was clearly drunk now. Mulheisen wasn't feeling that sober himself. He watched as Lande tottered over to the workbench and laid the alley sweeper down. He just as quickly picked up a .45 automatic, however, and absently checked that the clip was jammed home. He looked over at Mulheisen and thoughtfully racked the housing back, cocking the pistol. He casually gestured with the gun, saying, “I had a good plan, me ‘n’ Sid ‘n’ Bonny . . . an’ Germaine, a course.” He shook his head ruefully. “That damn Germaine . . . Bonny thought I had the hots for her. Can you believe it? Course, Bon didn't know about the plan! Couldn't really tell her, no way. To her it was just me ‘n’ Sid was gonna buy a golf resort . . . I'd transfer the money . . . no prob.”

“A lot of money?” Mulheisen asked simply, raising a brow.

“Oh, yes,” Lande said with surprising disgust, “a lot of money . . . too damn much money . . . no end to that damn money . . . sixty-seven million buckaroos, in fact.”

Mulheisen was stunned. “So much? Where did it come from?”

Lande shrugged. “Drugs. Sid ‘n’ Frosty ‘n’ Billy.”

“But I mean, how did they get it?”

Lande clearly didn't share Mulheisen's incredulity. “Maybe you ain't heard—there's a hell of a lotta money in drugs. More than even the mob realized, I guess. Sid tol’ me once't he was just amazed when he found out what the biz was worth.”

“Well, sure, there's a lot of money,” Mulheisen said, “but how could you rip off that much without getting caught?”

“You better ask Sid,” Lande said, “speakin’ of gettin’ caught. Him ‘n’ Frosty, they figured out that the territories was worth somethin’ to the South Americans, sorta like franchises. Only they didn’ realize how much at first, . . . which I guess is how come it took Carmine so long to tumble to what they was doin’. You sell a franchise—well, lease is more like it—to the Latinos for a neighborhood for say fifty thousand dollars a month, an’ you skim maybe ten percent. But then a rival group comes along and offers you a hundred thousand dollars. An’ you take it, but you don't tell Carmine. That's the way Sid tol’ it to me, anyways.

“So here's all this money. It just comes pilin’ in; you can't turn off the faucet, or somebody'll tumble to the deal, but you gotta get rid of the cash. Cash smells. It attracks rats. So you got Billy, he's layin’ the take out in loans . . . phony loans, so Carmine wouldn't wise up, . . . but even that ain't enough. Which is why they come to me.”

“Ah, yes,” Mulheisen said, relieved to have diverted Lande's attention, no matter how briefly, from the problem of his own disposal. “They would come to you, the computer genius. I'm sure you concocted something suitably brilliant.”

Any irony intended was lost on Lande. “Yeah,” he admitted. “It took me a little while, but I figured it out. At first I had some notion of gettin’ into the banks, you know, crackin’ their systems. But then I figured—what the hell, that's not the problem. We already had a bank- some guy who was into Billy for a lot . . . Billy was running loan money through him. An’ we already got the money, too much money . . . The problem is how to get rid of it, lay it off. So I just decided to deposit it.”

“Deposit it? You can't deposit that kind of money in a bank. The
feds would be all over you. What is it, any deposit of more than ten thousand dollars has to be reported to the IRS?”

“That's why I deposited it in thousands of accounts . . . a little more than seven thousand, at about ninety-five hundred dollars per.” He cocked his head as if calculating, then nodded. “Yanh, that's about it, in round numbers. Course, I hada make up a lotta names, lotta payments to innavidjuls. The computer did that. I just plugged in about two dozen last names, middle names, and first names—got ‘em oudda the phone book. The computer scrambled up all the possibilities—you can get eight thousand different names oudda twenny names from the phone book if you use a middle name and the last name doesn't sound too weird as a first name. You know—Jackson Lewis Arthur or Henry David John or Allen Martin James.” He grinned with the pleasure of his genius.

“I had the golf course, a legal corporation, and we had the development company. We could make payments to all these people, and they could make payments to us. The computer does it all. I tried to get them to buy a bank, a savings and loan really, and put Billy's tame banker in there. But Sid thought that was too complicated. So we used the one we had. I just tapped into their mainframe. But you gotta go to the bank once in a while with a bag of money—Billy had the tame banker, so he carried the bag—but it was all paid right back out, wasn't hardly there. The other bank people would never even see it. They never even knew we existed. The computer takes care of it, makes the transfer, then sweeps the tracks behind it. Trouble is there was always this money, this hard cash, comin’ in,” Lande complained. “An’ we couldn't turn it off ‘cause it'd blow the plan. Which I guess it must've, once Sid went down.”

Mulheisen tried to take all this in, but he couldn't quite get it. It would be something for Jimmy, or the Business Bureau to unravel. What he wanted to know was “Where is the money now?”

“Some of it's in the little accounts,” Lande said, “most of it . . . over forty mil. Some of it's already gone to the Cayman bank for the resort account. An’ then I got about fifteen mil in cash. It just kept pilin’ up . . . What a pain in the ass hard cash is. I can't wait till we go to straight ‘lectronic money.”

“Where?”

“Hunh? The cash?” Lande nodded toward the rear of the building.

“You have fifteen million dollars here? In cash?”

“Not izzackly. Fifteen mil is an awful lotta cash, even if it's all in fifties and hunnerds, which it was, ‘cause you can't be screwin’ aroun’ with twennies and that little crap. Lessee. If it's all hunnerds, that'd be a hunnerd fifty thousand bills, but ack'shly, with fifties included, you end up with about two-hunnerd thousand bills, or somethin’ like that. Now, if they was all new bills—you know, in little tight bun'les like the mint issues—you could prolly cram that much cash inna half-dozen cardboard boxes, say like they put whiskey bottles in. But what I had was a couple dozen boxes, ‘cause the money was used . . . It's thicker.”

“Had?” Mulheisen asked.

“Yanh. It's in boxes, in the shed.”

“In the shipment,” Mulheisen said.

“What shipment?” Lande said.

“To the Cayman Islands. The computers.”

“Computers? Oh, no. I mean, yahn, the computers are in the shed, but they're just computers . . . Course, they do have the program on the disk drives, that runs the show. You mean try to stuff the money into the computers, into the consoles or the drive cases? How you gonna do that? There ain't enough room. I mean, that's stupid. Nanh, I just put the extra cash in some old whiskey cartons. I was thinkin’ about gettin’ rid of it—dump it in the river, burn it, maybe—but then I got a idea.”

“A bright idea,” Mulheisen prompted.

“Sure. Whataya think? I'm ‘onna git a dumb idea? No, I packed it all up—well, all but about five mil, which I figgered I could use for expenses—an’ I give it to charity . . . orphanages, neighborhood projecks, drug clinics, that sorta thing.”

“You gave ten million dollars to charity? How?”

“Mostly I drove aroun’ at night,” Lande said. “I remembered seein’ on TV how these orphanages are allus gettin’ babies dropped off at their doorstep in the night, in a cardboard box. An’ I didn’ have nothin’ to do—waitin’ fer you—so I packed the stuff up and trucked it aroun’ town. Jus’ leave the box on the doorstep like other boxes. I
wrapped the shit in old newspapers and old clothes—so it's not too obvious, see. People leave boxes at these places with all kinds a junk, y'know.”

“I haven't heard anything about orphanages finding boxes of money on their doorsteps,” Mulheisen said skeptically.

“You will. An’ if not . . . then, not. Somma the places I dropped it didn't look too cool . . . I prack'ly threw the box oudda the window and split. I got ridda maybe five, six mil that way. Anyways, who cares? It was drivin’ me crazy, all that damn cash, but I ain't worryin’ about it no more. Yer here.”

Mulheisen didn't like the way this sounded, especially with the gun waving around as he said it. He felt he had to say something, anything, to keep this wired-up little maniac from going off half-cocked. “You know,” he said, “I promised Bonny I'd look after you.”

Lande's jaw dropped open. “You what? When?”

“In the hospital one day, when you were out. She said, ‘Promise me you'll look out for Gene.’ Didn't you hear her last words? ‘Look out for him?’ She was just reminding me.”

“She said that?” Gene's eyes filled with tears. “An’ you promised?”

Mulheisen shrugged. “I felt I had to.”

Lande sobbed, a ragged noise that he broke off. “Oh, God . . . this gets harder ‘n’ harder.” He fought for control, his face swept by tortured emotions. He grimaced and twisted his neck. His face seemed to grow larger, distorted, then subsided and shrank. For a moment Mulheisen was reminded of the distortions of Bonny's poor face in the terminal stages.

Lande sagged against the workbench, the .45 wavering toward Mulheisen, then away. “Just a coupla months ago,” he said, his voice surging, then waning, then surging again, “everythin’ was lookin’ great. Fin'ly. I hada great deal goin’ with Sid, me ‘n’ Bon was great . . .” He fought down a deep, welling sob. “ ‘N’ then they hada go ‘n’ hit Sid. ‘N’ everythin’ turned to shit. Not right off . . . It still looked like it could fly. But Frosty started buggin’ me, an’ Billy . . . Carmine gets on my case, . . . an’ then I met you. Bonny wanted us to be frien's. I thought we
could be frien's . . . We was frien's in the hospital, weren't we?” He was pleading. “I tol’ you shit in the hospital I never tol’ nobody, not even-Bon. I wanted to do something for you.”