The Blind Pig (8 page)

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“All right, Sergeant. Was the defendant calm, or how did he appear to you, during interrogation?”

“He was very calm,” Mulheisen said. “Unusually so. He persisted in telling us that he was not Bobby Parenteau.”

“Would you say that this was a typical act, if you will, of a criminal who seeks to evade the law?”

“Objection,” Epstein said.

“Sustained,” said Judge Brownlow.

“Well, let me ask the sergeant if he thought the defendant was merely trying to be evasive,” Wilde said irritably.

Mulheisen couldn't understand what Wilde was driving at. He shook his head sadly and testified that it didn't appear
to him that Parenteau was merely trying to be evasive. It appeared to him that Parenteau
believed
that he wasn't Bobby. Shortly afterwards, the defense went back over the same ground with the witness, and it seemed to Mulheisen when he stepped down that Ray Wilde's glasses were tinted more darkly than ever, but that may have been caused by the waning light in the courtroom.

Court was adjourned until the next day, but Mulheisen was told that he probably would not be required. Wilde was taking a rueful but philosophical point of view as he walked across the street for a drink with Mulheisen. “I'll be damned if I know why I got onto that line of questioning,” Wilde said. “I think I got confused there. I meant to draw out that Parenteau was calm and not insane, but now it looks like I've done just the opposite.” He shook his head. “It must be overwork. My mind's snapped.”

Mulheisen leaned on the bar and gazed into his drink pensively. “There was something strange about that kid, Witt, who testified this morning,” he said, “but I'm not sure what it was.”

“He wasn't much use to us,” Wilde said. “You'd think if a kid got his throat messed up like that he wouldn't be too sweet on the guy who did it to him, but Witt was all ‘Let's let bygones be bygones.’ “

“Yeah,” Mulheisen said, “I thought that was odd.” He downed his drink and walked out.

At the precinct there was a note from Jimmy Marshall. He wanted Mulheisen to call him at home. Before Mulheisen could call, however, Lieutenant Johns came in. He was annoyed because he hadn't known that Mulheisen would be in court all day and apparently several people were trying to get hold of him. Also, the report on the Town Pump shoot-up was inadequate, and Buchanan had been brutal toward Johns about it. Andy Deane had called twice and Marshall was as excitable as a blue tick hound under a coon-filled persimmon tree.

Mulheisen wondered out loud where Johns had picked up language like that, and Johns admitted that during the war he'd been stationed for a while in Mississippi.

“What's got Marshall so excited?” Mulheisen asked.

“I guess he might have found out where your John Doe was staying,” Johns said. “It's a hotel over on Gratiot. I sent Jensen and Field to check it out.”

“Fine,” Mulheisen said. “Nice work for a kid. How long ago was this?”

“This morning. At first I told him to wait for you, but he kept calling back. He has to go on shift tonight, so I sent the Bobbsey Twins. They ought to be back soon.” Johns left in a more cheerful frame of mind.

Mulheisen knew he ought to call everybody—congratulate Marshall, find out what Deane wanted, see what Jensen and Field had dug up—but instead he called Records and Firearms and asked for a complete check on Mandy Cecil and her gun. Then he called her at Vanni's office.

“I thought I told you I was busy tonight,” she said in a low voice.

“Is the boss there?” Mulheisen asked.

“Yes.”

Mulheisen grinned. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, rotating an unlit cigar in his hand. “Well, I'll bet you just said that because you thought I wanted to see you on business. But I was thinking more about something a little friendlier. You sure you aren't free for dinner?”

After a moment she said, “For a while.”

“You have to go someplace later, that it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You have to go home first, after work?”

“Yes, well, I guess not,” she said.

“Good,” Mulheisen said. “I'll meet you at five-thirty at Captain Shumway's. You know where it is? On Jefferson. Right.”

Next he called Andy Deane. The Rackets man told him that the bartender of the Town Pump, Dick VanLerberghe,
had been down, and from the description he'd given of the two gunmen, Deane had a strong hunch that they were a couple of Toronto-based hoods named Maio and Panella, but the only pictures he had of the two were quite old. He was trying to locate something more current through the RCMP and the Toronto police. “They're pretty heavy, Mul,” Deane said. “I can't see them coming to town just to trash a juke-box. I've alerted the borders anyway, just in case they're still in town, but I imagine that they came in on a private boat, across the river. Soon as I get some fresh shots, I'll send you copies.”

“Thanks,” Mulheisen said. “What about this DeCrosta, now? And have you found any visible connection between Vanni and the mob?”

“DeCrosta has no official status with the Teamsters Union, Mul, but the word is that he's very close, especially on this vending-machine business. He has definite ties with the mob, through Rudy Percik and that bunch.”

“Percik? He's not with Carmine Kusane, then?” Mulheisen asked.

“Nope. Carmine isn't into vendors. Carmine's into dope, prostitution, numbers, guns, you name it. Basic stuff. He likes to call it ‘staples.’ “

Mulheisen mused on that for a moment. Deane probably knew more about the mob in Detroit than anyone, including the mob itself. He was a clearinghouse of information and he pursued it with scholarly enthusiasm. It was widely assumed that Andy would one day write the definitive treatise on the structure and function of organized crime in Detroit. It would be a text of interest not only to thugs and cops but to social and political scientists the world over.

“As for this Vanni kid,” Deane said, “none of my people know him. That doesn't mean too much. The mob has so much business in this town that no one could keep track of everybody who's involved.”

“He says he gambles a bit,” Mulheisen offered. “Plays cards at the pigs, now and then. What about blind pigs, since
I've got you on? Is the mob into the pigs?”

“Strangely enough, they don't seem to be,” Deane said. “Oh, I'm sure they've got good relations there, and they might run a card game or a numbers pickup, but as for actually running a pig, I've never heard of it. They're almost all run by blacks. I wouldn't be surprised if the mob bank-rolls a few of them.”

Mulheisen considered this information for a while after Deane had hung up. Presently Jensen and Field came in. As usual, Jensen did the talking, occasionally looking to his partner for support. Marshall had indeed found the hotel where the late John Doe had stayed, but, unfortunately, it hadn't helped the investigation much. Except for a change of underwear packed in an American Airlines flight bag, there was nothing in the room. The people in the hotel didn't remember much about the man. He had registered as Tom Brown. He had stayed for two days and had hardly spoken to anyone. No one noticed an accent. He had paid his bill in advance each morning. In the room they had found the key tag, which the man had apparently removed from the key.

“A very careful man,” Mulheisen said.

Jensen and Field didn't comment. They left.

Shortly afterwards Mulheisen got his reports on Mandy Cecil from Records and Firearms. He stretched and began to put things in order. Maki stopped by to ask if he was interested in catching a beer somewhere, but Mulheisen said he had a date with a witness.

Mulheisen had already had two Jack Daniel's Ditches at Captain Shumway's before Mandy showed up. She looked simply smashing, as always. This time she wore an almost archaic but nonetheless elegant gray gabardine suit with a skirt that came below her knees and a coat styled out of the thirties. It was complemented by a large caricature of a gangster's fedora. The vee of the jacket was filled with an eruption of multicolored silk ribbons, like a corsage. It all went very well with her figure and her brilliant hair. Every
man in the bar turned to watch her walk by, and most of the women as well.

“I haven't time for dinner, Mul,” she said right away. “I have some very important engagements this evening.”

“I'll bet,” he said.

“I see you're still wearing the same clothes,” she said. “Where did you spend the night?”

“Benny's,” Mulheisen said. “It was very comfortable. What's so important that you have to skip dinner?”

“None of your business,” she said. She sipped her drink, a stinger, perched on the barstool with legs crossed. Even with the long skirt there was a fine display of very glamorous legs.

“I ran a check on you today, through the computer,” Mulheisen said. “You're almost clean.”

“Almost?”

“You don't have that Beretta registered and you don't have a permit to carry it.”

Mandy didn't say anything at first. She seemed impressed by Mulheisen's serious manner. “What are you going to do, confiscate it?”

“I should,” Mulheisen said. “In fact, I ought to take you into custody and charge you.”

She smiled alluringly. “Sounds lovely. Why don't you?”

Mulheisen bared his teeth. “I'm prepared to give you another chance. Stop in and register it at the first opportunity, eh?”

Mandy mugged a sigh of relief. “Gosh, thanks, Marshall.”

Mulheisen looked at her for a long moment. “I keep thinking of you as a little girl playing hide-and-seek with Vanni and DenBoer. Then I look at you and the image vanishes.”

“I'm glad,” Mandy said. “Besides, we didn't play hide-and-seek, we played guns.”

“Guns?”

“Several variations on a theme of violence: cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, stagecoach, or war.”

“And you were always the Indian,” Mulheisen said.

“As a matter of fact, I wasn't,” she said. “Jerry was always Roy Rogers, so I was Dale Evans. Lenny was the outlaw who got plugged. In war, however, we were all on the same side, against the imaginary Japs and Nazis.”

“And in cops and robbers?” Mulheisen asked.

“That depends. Everybody wanted to be John Dillinger. Sometimes Jerry and I were Bonny and Clyde. But if the robber was just a crook and the cop was Sergeant Friday, then Jerry got to be Friday and Lenny got shot.”

“Who were you?”

“I was Frank, Friday's sidekick.”

“Poor Lenny,” Mulheisen said.

“Well, he's just one of those guys,” Mandy said. “Born to ride shotgun. But he didn't mind in the least. In fact, it always seemed to me that Lenny was the one most eager to play. He was still into that long after Jerry and I had out-grown those kinds of games.”

“I suppose you and Jerry became interested in more sophisticated games,” Mulheisen suggested, with a touch of malice that surprised himself.

Mandy didn't react the way he had expected. She smiled faintly without looking up from her drink. “Yes,” she said. “I was just thirteen,” she said. “It happened in our ‘bunkhouse,’ which was a kind of fortress built out of old tires and pieces of junk in an open field behind our houses. It was in the afternoon, in the summer. I cried.”

She looked up at Mulheisen and laughed huskily. It made him nervous but aroused him. He ordered another drink for her.

“It was quite something,” she went on. “We went at it pretty regularly for the rest of the summer. Lenny caught us once. I thought he was going to kill me. He went after me with a board, but I ran away.”

“He was jealous?”

“Not on my account, I think. He was afraid he would lose Jerry. But when school started we all sort of broke up, and then a year or so later, my family moved back to Kentucky.”

“But now you're all back together again,” Mulheisen said.

Mandy looked at him for a moment. “You aren't getting nasty, are you, Mul?”

“I'm sorry,” Mulheisen said. “I can't help being curious. It seems so cozy somehow, you and Jerry and Lenny over there on Eight Mile Road, doing a good business, thinking of moving into other things, none of you married. It all seems like an old movie. I keep waiting for the scene where the glamorous gal comes in to find Bing and Bob fighting over her and she declares that she's darned if she'll marry either one of those crazy galoots.”

“And then the self-effacing Bing takes a job as a musician on a cruise ship, abandoning the field to Bob because he thinks Bob really loves the girl, and vice versa,” Mandy elaborated.

“Only, even the wise-cracking Bob can see that the girl is really in love with Bing and he finally makes her admit it. In the last scene they're all on the cruise ship, sailing into the sunset.” Mulheisen finished the scenario to Mandy's laughter.

“Except that I don't really see Jerry and Lenny as Bing and Bob,” she said, still smiling. “In real life, Jerry wouldn't think of giving up the girl, and Lenny would sooner sink the ship with all aboard than surrender the girl if once he'd gotten her.”

“Really?” Mulheisen said dryly. “But I take it that he has never gotten her?”

“Your mind is in the gutter, Sergeant,” she said. “But I don't have time to sit here talking to you about it. I've got to get a move on.”

“How about later?” Mulheisen asked.

“I won't be home before midnight, if then,” Mandy said. “If you're still up, you could give me a call.”

“I'll do that,” Mulheisen promised. “But if I don't get hold of you, remember that we have a date tomorrow for eight.”

She waved, and with every other male in the bar he watched her all the way out the door. He had another drink
and let his mind wander back over what she had told him about Vanni and DenBoer. There was a danger, he realized, in thinking about people in terms of stereotypes. Vanni and DenBoer weren't Bing and Bob, any more than they were Laurel and Hardy. Imperceptibly, he found himself thinking about Bobby Parenteau. A few minutes later he dialed Ray Wilde at home.

“Sorry to interrupt your cocktail hour, Ray,” Mulheisen said, “but do you remember if any of the psychiatrists ever questioned Bobby's relationship with Frank Witt?”

“No, I don't think so,” Wilde said. “At least, I don't remember any mention of it in the reports.”