Deadman (4 page)

The gate on the driveway to the clearing was a hundred yards away, but Sally could see that it was chained and locked. She went up on the porch of the cabin and knocked, although she knew there was no one there. There was no answer at the door. Not a sound but the soughing of the wind in the ponderosas that stood back from the cabin.

Sally walked around to the rear of the cabin, skirting a latticework structure of weathered cedar that concealed a propane tank which presumably fueled the range and/or the hot water heater, and stepped up onto a low deck supplied with a picnic table and some wooden lawn chairs. Someone had forgotten to take the cushions off the chairs and they were covered with pine needles and bird stains. There was a sliding patio door and she cupped her hands against the glass, trying to see inside. The drapes on the door were nearly, but not quite, pulled shut and all she could make out in the dark interior was
the end of a brass bed and a view through an open door into a room beyond, presumably the living room, where a portion of a couch was visible. She shrugged and went back along the path, up the ridge and down past the pool, where she stopped to pick up her fork and the gun she'd found. She continued on along the warm trickle of runoff, the spill from the pond, until she came to Tinstar Creek.

She headed upstream. She had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile when she came upon a huge wet spill that spread down the mountainside. Under the water the grass was still a pale glistening green, flattened. Many little rills trickled off into the meadow and were lost among the rocks. The grass was deep green there.

A hundred feet farther up the creek she found the reason. Debris had jammed among the rocks, creating a dam. At first she thought it was just a mass of branches and possibly a chunk of rotted cottonwood. She set the pistol down on the ground and prodded among the debris with her fork. It was well-packed and oddly yielding. Then she saw a glint of paleness, and she thought it might be a dead fish, a pretty good-sized one, at that. She had heard there were some surprisingly large trout up these creeks, but in this dry season they would surely have fled down into the river. Maybe it had been spawning. She didn't know enough about trout to be sure, but she thought there was a fall spawning run and the spawning would take place in the feeder streams, rather than in the river.

This was interesting. She dagged at the white spot again with the fork. It had considerably more heft to it than she had initially thought. Much more than a fish. No fish could be that big in this creek. So what could it be? A sheep? Red Garland didn't run sheep. A calf? A white calf? Fallen into the creek? She raked away the debris and tossed it up on the opposite bank. She worked at this preliminary task methodically, like the earnest child she had once been, digging and poking, engrossed and unheeding a mother's tentatively anxious calls. She exposed more and more of what she began to think of, abstractly, as a waxy-looking bundle, when suddenly she realized that
she was looking at the back of a human being. That tapering part of it led to a shoulder and an arm thrust into a mass of old black branches. And then she could see the back of the head—longish black hair tangled among the brush. And still the significance of it didn't strike her, so intent was she on her task. She was about to poke the major bulk of it with the fork again, when the enormity blossomed in her consciousness.

She gave a cry of dismay and stepped back, flinging the fork from her. She stood on the bank above this temporary dam for several long minutes, gawking down on this fleshy mass partially engulfed and obscured by debris, willing herself not to run. She breathed deeply and checked her watch. It was 2:30. She looked around. There was nothing of any interest, except for the eagles soaring and the distant view of a road, miles and miles away. A red fuel truck was driving down the road, trailing a plume of dust. Then she turned and searched in the grass for her fork and the pistol, found them, and walked back down the mountain.

At her truck she flipped on the CB radio. “Base, one-seven,” she said. When they answered, she said, “I'm up on Garland Butte, Doris. I found something odd. You better call Carrie, get her out here. Ten-four.”

Doris wanted to know what “odd” meant, but Sally said only, “Real odd. Too odd. Call Carrie, Doris. In fact"—she sighed—"you might as well call the sheriff's office, in Butte. But call Carrie, first. I'm on the service road above Garland's place. They'll have to come through the gate. I'll be waiting.”

Then she sat down. She felt a little ill, a little queasy, but not bad. The magpies were still sailing around. “Hey! Indian woodpecker!” she called out at the magpies, a name she'd heard old-timers use. “You're no woodpecker,” she said, as the long-tailed birds swirled about and glided up across the meadow to inspect the thing in the ditch, “you're a dead-skunkpecker and deer-hit-by-car-pecker. Call you the deathpecker.” She frowned, thinking of the implications of a
phrase like “dead-skunkpecker,” then laughed. Why are you laughing? she asked herself. Well, why not? I'm not going to cry for this . . . this whoever it is, or was. She wanted to go back up and do something about the corpse, but what was there to do?

Carrie Conlin, the sheriff's deputy who lived and worked in the Tinstar area, arrived in her fancy county Blazer. She was a woman much like Sally. They had been to school together. They had both run off men who couldn't treat them right. But they were not friends, for some reason. Carrie Conlin was just too—what? Too cool, too distant?—for Sally's taste. Sally didn't think that Carrie liked her, or approved of her. Sally didn't fret about it, but there it was. It got in the way. Still, they got along, in a careful, gingerly fashion.

The two women hiked up the stream to the site. Sally fell back and waited a few yards downstream. She had no need to see the body. When Carrie had stooped and hunkered and looked to her heart's content, she walked on back, and the two of them descended the meadow in silence.

Jacky Lee arrived shortly afterward, with Deputy Kenny Dukes riding in the passenger seat. They got out and talked to Carrie for a few minutes, then Jacky came over to Sally. She liked Jacky. Once upon a time she had liked him too much, and then he had gotten married. She told him how and why she had found the body and then they all hiked up to the creek.

“Well, he's not going anywhere,” Jacky said, after he'd viewed the body. They had not attempted to move it. “Kenny, go back down and call. We'll need the coroner and the wagon, and make sure they bring a body bag, for a drowning.”

When Kenny had gone down, Jacky turned to Sally. “How did you happen to find this?” he asked. Carrie Conlin stood off to one side, listening but not part of the conversation; she might be guarding the body.

Sally told him again, the longer version now: about Grace Garland, declining water flows. Then she remembered about the gun. For
some reason she had forgotten all about it, hadn't even mentioned it to Carrie. It was lying on the seat of her pickup, down on the road.

Jacky frowned when she told about finding it in the hot springs. “What were you doing up there?” he asked.

“I thought it might be closer, to call,” she lied. “It was just lying there in the shallows. You couldn't miss it.” For the life of her she couldn't imagine why she had made up this awkward version. It wasn't like her. Shock? Embarrassment? She didn't know, but it was too late to backtrack and it wouldn't make any difference. She would just tough it through.

“Nobody home up there?” Jacky asked.

Sally shook her head. “Didn't look like anybody'd been there in a while. There was dust and pine needles on the porch, in front of the door. No car tracks, no footprints.”

Jacky listened attentively to these observations, but said nothing. He looked at her carefully. She looked all right, a little upset, a little nervous, but okay. In fact, she looked pretty good—fresh, clean, her hair a little frizzled from the wind, he guessed. “How are you?” he asked.

“I'm fine,” she responded, returning his gaze frankly. She didn't say, How's your wife?

“Whose house is up there? Didn't Grace sell to some guy from California or something? A new house?”

Sally related the story she'd heard from Grace Garland, adding, “Red says the guy—Joe Humann—is some kind of gun nut. Target practice every day, when he's home. Maybe this gun didn't shoot straight and he tossed it.” She pointed off beyond the trees where the hot springs was. “The cabin is just beyond the ridge.”

Jacky asked Carrie if she'd mind sticking around, then he asked Sally to show him where she'd found the gun. They set off for the woods. When they got to the springs, she pointed and said, “Out there.”

Jacky hadn't said a word on the walk up there and he didn't say
anything now, just looked at the pool. Finally he asked, “Out in the middle?” When Sally nodded, he said, “You must have waded out to get it, eh?”

“Deeper'n it looks,” Sally said. “I had to take off my boots.”

Jacky glanced at her dry jeans. The faintest of smiles softened his large Indian face. “Pants too?”

Sally laughed. “Pants too,” she said.

Jacky looked away, up the path, as if to hide his smile. “This the way to the house?” She nodded and they walked on. He walked about the place, much as she had, even peering in the window and lifting the lid on the lattice-work frame that concealed the large white propane tank to find out who serviced it. He jotted some notes in a little book. Finally he said, “I think you're right, nobody's been here for at least a coupla weeks, or more. Well, a body was found on the property and a gun in the pond. I think we could get a warrant to go in. I'll have to check it out. We better go on down, talk to Mickey"—the coroner—"he'll be here by now. If I need you later, I guess I can find you.”

“Oh, really? You remember where I live?” She stalked away.

4

Dirty D

I
t was overcast, cool but not unusual for October. Jimmy Marshall found a parking place among the abandoned autos interspersed with the occasional late-model Chevy on the narrow street. This wasn't a neighborhood where you could find a lot of parking during business hours because not so many people were actually at work, not in the daytime, anyway. It was the east side of Detroit. The houses were brick multifamily flats, massive and unpretentious, though undoubtedly quite prosperous and encouraging, once upon a time. That was a long time ago, however. Now at least a third of the large front windows wore plywood glazing, and there was no grass, no flowers planted on the little yards in front of their front-wide porches. Here and there a wrought-iron fence was bent and battered ruthlessly, the gate always missing, though sometimes it could be seen nailed over a window.

Mulheisen and Jimmy Marshall stood on the street for a moment, neither of them feeling very cheerful under this gray but no doubt rainless sky. A little rain would have been better, Mulheisen thought. Rain was natural, it was something happening, falling out of the sky and collecting on sidewalks and washing some of this dirt
down into the gutters. But it didn't rain as much as one always thought that it did, when one remembered the long parade of dull, gray, overcast skies.

The Big 4 cruiser was parked around the corner, a large sedan with wings painted on the doors and the words
DETROIT POLICE
. Dennis “The Menace” Noell leaned back against the hood of the cruiser, all six feet and eight inches of him, with his arms folded across his chest and a sour look on his handsome face. “Okay, Mul,” he said, “you got ten minutes, then we're coming in.”

By “we,” he meant the other three members of the team of special detectives, all of them over six-four, all of them white. They stood out in this neighborhood like statues on a mountain. The only black man in the whole group was Jimmy Marshall.

“Better make it fifteen,” Mulheisen said.

“It's my collar, Mul,” Dennis insisted. “I saw him first.”

“It's your collar,” Mulheisen conceded. “I just want to make sure he gets to jail alive.” He and Marshall set off around the corner.

The steps of the house were gritty with broken glass and dirt. The door in the center that led up to the second floor was gone. There was a tattered piece of paper that said
PINCKNEY
in a faded ballpoint script with an arrow pointing upward. They trudged up the stairs. It smelled pretty bad. Moldy plaster, Mulheisen thought, but the awful odor was compounded of many things: garbage, cat piss and cat shit, rotting clothes, beans cooked too long, cabbage cooked to perdition, vomit. Huge chunks of plaster were hacked or smashed out of the walls of the stairwell. There was scribbling all over the walls, idle obscenities in crayon or spray paint, an exhausted litany of rage and despair. The stairs themselves were littered with garbage and broken things. One couldn't always tell what the things had been—toys? Smashed pieces of plastic or pot metal. Things were actually jammed into the wall—curious pieces of wire, or the broken-off barrel of a cap pistol—as if someone had casually stabbed the house just in passing.

At the top of the stairs was a dirty sash window, the bottom pane knocked out. On either side were doors to the two opposing flats. On the right was the sibling of the note downstairs, saying
PINCKNEY.
Mulheisen stepped to one side of the door and pulled his raincoat back, laying his hand on the butt of the pistol in his hip grip. Jimmy Marshall actually took his gun out of his shoulder harness and held it in his left hand, then knocked on the door.

They were both good-sized men, Marshall a bit leaner and ten years younger, dark with a widow's peak on his closely cut black and curly hair. Mulheisen was older, fortyish, and his pale face had a much sadder look. It was the eyes, light blue and slightly protruding with the beginning of bags under them. When he smiled, or tried to, however, he revealed the long, somewhat spaced teeth that had given him the street name “Fang.”

The door opened and a young black girl looked out. She could see they were cops. She was only about fourteen but had unusually large breasts. She wore a too-small yellow sweater that didn't reach the waistband of her very short leather skirt. Her mouth was open, slack, and her thick lips were heavily smeared with dark red lipstick. Her eyes were sharp, however, and intelligent.

“What are you looking for?” she said, directing her question at the black detective.

Jimmy Marshall didn't answer her. He pushed the door open and stepped past her into the incredibly cluttered and filthy kitchen. The sink was full of dishes and scummy water with oily crust; rings surrounded the utensils and dishes that broke the cold but molten-looking surface.

“Hey!” the girl said, but not loudly, really a hoarse whisper, as if not to wake a sleeper. There was loud but muffled music coming from an interior room.

Mulheisen moved past her looking to the left, his gun out. Jimmy went directly for the front of the house, shoulder to the jamb of the entries, then slipping through, looking to either side, sweeping his
pistol smoothly, carefully, not extending it so that a hidden person could strike at his hand.

Mulheisen had checked the back porch and came on behind and to the left of Jimmy. The house was very cluttered with furniture and clothing thrown here and there, trampled underfoot, and many cardboard boxes. It looked like someone was moving in or out. A cat lounged placidly, its fur matted and yellow. They moved swiftly through the dining room and into what had once been a parlor. Doors opened off to the left, into bedrooms. The first door was open, and inside appeared to be the girl's bedroom, for it was neat and orderly, the bed made and no clothes strewn about. Mulheisen caught glimpses of posters stapled to the walls: Whitney Houston, was it? Michael Jackson? He wasn't sure.

The second bedroom door was closed, however, and this was the room where the music was playing. Jimmy Marshall barreled through the door low, his shoulder at knob level. He dropped to his knees, gun ready.

This was a good thing, for a fusillade of nine-millimeter bullets rattled through the opening at about the chest level of a man. The boy on the bed, his back against the headboard, was shucking out the clip when Jimmy hit him, sprawling across him, pinning him to the far wall. The Cobray submachine gun flew, smacking against the wall and bouncing back on the bed. The boy cried out, but his cry was stifled as Jimmy rolled across him.

Mulheisen stayed in the doorway, looking into the other rooms as available to line of sight. A middle-aged woman, perhaps no older than himself, sat frozen on a couch in the front room, surrounded with junk and clothing, her head, wrapped in a colorful cloth, turned slightly, eyes staring.

When Mulheisen was sure that the boy was subdued and Jimmy was in control, he moved cautiously into the front room and looked about. The television was going. Oprah was raising an eyebrow sarcastically at some women who were gesticulating wildly and
talking all at once. There was nobody else in the room. Mulheisen nodded and backed away, looking behind him. The girl was glowering in the doorway, her hands at her sides.

“David Pinckney,” Jimmy said, hauling the boy to his feet, “you're under arrest for the murder of Scott Willard. You have the right to remain silent, you have the right . . .” His voice recited precisely. The boy was slender and handsome, about sixteen years old, wearing sexy briefs and a tank top, his hair cut in topiary fashion. His eyes were large and expressive. He wore no other clothing. He said not a word as Jimmy cuffed his hands behind his back.

“You know what I like about the Cobray?” Jimmy said to Mulheisen as he brought the boy forward.

“It's not very accurate,” Mulheisen said.

“And it gets empty real fast, especially when you're excited and just hang on the trigger,” Jimmy said.

Mulheisen stepped back into the front room. “Mrs. Pinckney,” he said, “we're arresting your boy, David, for killing Scott Willard. You probably want to call a lawyer. We're taking him downtown, to Homicide. Thirteen hundred Beaubien. Jimmy,” he called into the room, “get some pants and shoes on him. A jacket.”

He looked back at the woman. She had that dull, resigned look he had come to dread. “You can't come in here like this,” she said, but with no great energy.

“Well, yes. Yes, I can,” Mulheisen told her. He waved a legal document. He looked around, taking in the disorder, smelling the decay, the disgrace of this wretched place.

“I'm sorry the house is a mess,” she said.

Mulheisen shrugged. “You didn't know I was coming.”

“We was gonna move soon,” she said. “Davey was gonna buy us a house. In Warren.”

“Well,” Mulheisen sighed. “It would have been a good idea, I guess.” He wanted to say that the girl, the daughter, had kept her room nice. She had tried to make a life for herself, something that
wasn't just a hell. He looked at the girl. She looked grim, her arms folded under her extraordinary breasts. Then she went into her room and slammed the door.

Afterward, they stood on the street as the cruiser took the kid away. It was really awful out. Dreary, smelly—smoke in the air, as usual, but not something nice like burning leaves, an odor suitable to October and one which Mulheisen remembered well. . . . Nor was it wood smoke, romantic and intriguing. This was the usual wet, noxious smell of smoldering garbage, of wet mattresses and sodden auto wrecks. It pervaded the air of Detroit these days. Mulheisen lit a cigar to defeat it, and he paced slowly back to the car with Jimmy.

“Sixteen,” Jimmy was saying. “I don't know how you get to be a seasoned killer by sixteen.”

“It's not young,” Mulheisen said.

“Not young? Sixteen is not young? My Kirby is twelve, a child. He won't be grown up in four years.”

“Knights were probably only teenagers,” Mulheisen said. “In most North American Indian tribes you had to prove yourself a man by that age. An old man would be . . .” He paused, looking around at the wreckage of this venerable city, “. . . say, thirty. A sage, a very wise old man would be my age.”

Jimmy regarded him with good-humored sarcasm: “You feeling sage, old man?”

“No, but I knew a lot at sixteen. I knew a lot more than people—my parents—gave me credit for. They kept thinking I was only a child. But I was more than a child. We underrate kids. This guy has some growing up to do—too bad he'll be doing it in prison. He'll be pretty grown up when we see him again. But my point is, a hundred years ago he would have been considered a man at his age.”

“David Pinckney isn't a man,” Jimmy said. “I doubt they'll try him as a man. And Scott Willard wasn't a man. He was only fifteen.
He wanted to join the gang, but David just used him for target practice.”

“Sometimes, you know, Jimmy, you just fall into your life. And sometimes . . .”

“Fall into your life?”

“Your life falls together,” Mulheisen amended. “But then it never holds together, does it? Every once in a while it kind of falls apart, or sags awry . . . and all at once you find you can walk through gaping holes. The fabric is torn.”

“You're not feeling sage,” Jimmy noted.

Mulheisen shook his head. “I feel strange. I'm thinking I should become a . . .” he hesitated, looking shyly at Jimmy.

“What?” Jimmy looked over the top of the car, unlocking the door.

“A disc jockey,” Mulheisen said.

They got in the car and drove, dodging in and out of spaces to let opposing cars by. “A disc jockey,” Jimmy said, thoughtfully. “Like on the back of a matchbook cover. ‘Big Money in Broadcasting.’ “

“I'd just play jazz. Older jazz,” Mulheisen said, “from the fifties and sixties. Coltrane . . . Cannonball . . . Horace Silver.”

“Forties, too,” Jimmy suggested. “Ben Webster, Benny Carter . . . maybe the John Kirby Sextet.”

“Or a pilot,” Mulheisen said. “I always wanted to fly.”

“You'd be a terrible deejay,” Jimmy said. “You don't have the personality for it.”

“I don't?”

“You're too . . . I don't know . . . quiet. Too thoughty.”

“Thoughty?” Mulheisen smiled.

“A deejay has to be more upbeat.”

“Believe me, Jimmy, if I had nothing to do but play jazz and talk about it, I'd be more upbeat.”

Mulheisen was in one of those periodic moods, not quite depression—no,
no, not that—but still, a little gloomy, where he was wondering what the hell he was doing in the cop business. Most of the time he was quite happy in this business, engaged, intrigued, fascinated even. But often enough, more often lately, the sheer caseload had begun to wear him down. An endless task from the very beginning, it had become a monumental task, a job for mythic heroes.

He wasn't one of those who actually believed that cases are solved, but generally he expected to see an end to a case, a moment when there was little more to do. The murderer would be apprehended, the evidence gathered, the case gone to trial, the murderer locked away. In reality it rarely happened in just such a fashion, but occasionally it did. And anyway, he sort of expected it to happen pretty much along those lines. Sometimes a case would be shunted aside until a more favorable moment, but then he'd come across some interesting new lead and it would all spring back to life. Anymore, however, that didn't seem to be the usual way of it at all.

Instead, the new way was that he'd barely get started, and he'd be called away for something more pressing, some murder more bizarre, more spectacular, the victim more important, the press more interested. This had something to do with the burgeoning of violent crime in America's large cities, particularly in Detroit, where he was the mainstay of the Ninth Precinct, on the east side. For a long time, out of some peculiar sense of loyalty to his hometown, he had denied that Detroit was any worse than other large cities. Or at least he would insist that they were turning the corner, digging out of the hole. But lately he just didn't find it in himself to say that, even to himself.

When they got to the precinct, there was a message. A body had been found in Montana. There were some indications that the body belonged to Detroit. It belonged to the mob. Homicide thought it might be a link to a persistent case that involved Mulheisen. The case concerned the death of a well-known mob figure in Detroit.
Some lawman in Montana had asked if Mulheisen was interested. There was a phone number. A Mr. G. Antoni, county prosecutor, Silver Bow County.