Deadman (12 page)

However, Butte looked okay. It was as awful as he could wish and at the same time pretty grand. He especially liked the people. Jacky Lee's taciturnity notwithstanding, everybody here seemed to be friendly and cheerful. They were walking from the parking lot to the Finlen Hotel, and a passerby looked up and met Mulheisen's eye and said, “Hi ya, pardner.” Mulheisen was startled. He looked to Jacky Lee, but Jacky said he didn't know the guy. You don't make eye contact on the streets of Detroit; it invites an unwelcome intimacy, such as a gun alongside the head and ungentle hands tearing at one's clothing. The old guy probably mistook me for someone else, Mulheisen thought. But a few minutes later, as they walked over to the M & M saloon, a young fellow came out of Gamer's Restaurant, stopped to pick his teeth (everybody in Butte picked their teeth, he soon realized), and nodded to Mulheisen. “Howdy,” he said. In the great swirling mass of men and women in the M & M saloon, playing keno, drinking beer, eating lunch, several people nodded at him and said hello with a smile. He had no idea what the hell this meant, but it was pleasant, if a little unsettling.

For lunch Jacky Lee had driven him out to the perimeter road, Continental Drive, to a little pasty joint that didn't appear to have a name. It wasn't much of a joint. It reminded Mulheisen of some soul food places in Detroit: not more than a halfhearted attempt at decor, a simple counter with vinyl-covered stools, a couple of Formica-topped tables with mismatched chairs, some kind of ersatz wall covering that was supposed to resemble wood paneling but didn't come close. Clean though. And the pasties were delicious. They were served very simply: a single large pastry stuffed with meat and potatoes lying like a steaming brown island in a lake of brown gravy on a plate. You could get a side order of coleslaw in a Styrofoam container.

The pastry was not delicate. It had to be strong enough to contain the meat and potatoes. Mulheisen liked it very much and asked the young woman in a full apron who had brought the plates out from the kitchen just what the ingredients were.

“Oh, beef, potatoes, onions, sometimes carrots—depends on who is cooking.”

“Ground beef?” Mulheisen asked.

Her eyes widened in horror. “Ground beef! Good lord!
Flank
steak.” She disappeared back into the kitchen.

Not far from the pasty place, Mulheisen noticed a church with three somewhat Oriental, or Russian-looking domes. Jacky identified it as Holy Trinity, a Serbian Orthodox church. “The priest there is from Detroit,” he added.

“From Detroit? You're kidding.”

But he wasn't and when they stopped, the young priest was delighted to see them. This was his first parish, he told them, and he'd been amazed to find such a large, flourishing congregation way out west. The church was very beautiful, standing below the towering ridge of the Continental Divide. They chatted about the Tigers for a few minutes, and then Mulheisen asked if a young woman from Detroit, Helen Sedlacek, had been to visit. No one of that name had appeared, the priest said, it didn't even sound like a Serbian name, but when Mulheisen described Helen, he quickly recollected a young, dark-haired woman who had wandered in one afternoon, earlier in the summer. Very attractive, about thirty, with a silver streak in her hair. He knew nothing about her, he said, and he was sure that she hadn't talked to his wife or he would have heard about it, but he would ask around. He hadn't seen her again. He was sure that she hadn't given the name Sedlacek, however. He had assumed she was a tourist—"People drive along the highway there,” he said, pointing up at the road coming down from Elk Park, “and they see the church. If they're Orthodox, they recognize what it is, right away, and they stop by. They're always surprised by the size of the community, and sometimes
they find familiar names among the congregation, or even distant relations. I did.”

Driving back uptown, Lee explained that there had been a lot of ethnic neighborhoods in Butte, once upon a time. “Italians, Irish, Finns, Croats, Serbs, Poles, Cousin Jacks,” he waved his hand inclusively at the hills.

“Cousin Jacks?” Mulheisen said.

“Cornish, from Cornwall,” Lee explained. “They brought the pasties. They're all miners. Or were. A lot of the neighborhoods were gobbled up by the Pit and now, well you know how it is . . . a couple generations go by and the kids intermarry . . . the neighborhoods just kind of got all mixed up. But you still got a little of it. Hey, I'll take you to a good ol’ Cabbage Patch bar—Smokey's Corner.”

Bernard Stover was inevitably known as “Smokey,” after a comic strip character from the thirties. It may also have had something to do with his involvement in occasional convenient fires later in his career, fires that resulted in insurance payments to acquaintances. He was a Butte lad, born and bred, right out of the Cabbage Patch—a largely Irish conclave on the shoulder of the Hill. In its early days the Patch was a rackety collection of shacks and cribs that harbored immigrant miners and their families, then was renovated with government projects and was now due for another urban renewal process.

Smokey had come a long way from the Cabbage Patch, in a sense, although Smokey's Corner, the tavern that was the flagship of his not-very-far-flung enterprise, was located just a couple of blocks from where he'd been born. He was a good-sized feller, in the local parlance. In his seventies now, he was frankly paunchy, and his long face was jowly, the round blue eyes under that still-unwrinkled dome of a brow as innocently blue as a baby's. He still smoked a pipe, a new corncob every week, loaded with Union Leader tobacco.

He was knowledgeable about the mines and the Company, as one commonly referred to the Anaconda Mining Company, the organization that had operated the great copper mines of The Richest Hill On Earth before closing down and selling out to ARCO in the eighties. There was still some mining in Butte, but not on the grand scale that had made this the biggest, richest town in Montana. Smokey Stover had never spent a single shift in the mines. From childhood he had worked the bars, peddling papers, running for beer, running for sandwiches for gamblers, whatever paid. Later he had run bootleg liquor. Nowadays he was into real estate and development, and he still ran his cranky old tavern, as unreconstructed as possible.

The national mobs had never really had a foothold in Butte. It was hardly worth their trouble. Too few people, even in the heady days of nearly 100,000 population. Nowadays, with only 34,000 in the county, it was even less interesting. The old red-light district was gone and gambling was legalized. But they had always kept in good contact with some locals, primarily Smokey and his predecessors. There was a big Italian population in Butte, and possibly the mob had some contacts there, but it was mainly with Smokey.

Smokey's Corner was as old fashioned as a bar could be in America in the waning years of the twentieth century. The door opened right off the street. The floor was unpolished hardwood and already at ten in the morning it was littered with peanut shells and cigarette butts, mixed with sweeping compound. There were three coin-operated pool tables placed in the center of the narrow room that ran back some sixty feet to the back room, with a row of tables and chairs against the outside wall. The tables and chairs were wooden, seemingly the original furniture—deeply scored from knives and keys, displaying initials, crude representations of genitalia and other more obscure images—but the original furniture had long since been smashed in brawls and whittled into sawdust; these chairs and tables dated from the fifties.

The bar was original equipment, having been hauled by mule
train out to the gold mining camp Alder, down in the Ruby Valley, back in the 1870s and thence to Butte when that camp folded. Along the inner wall the bar ran fully thirty feet with a tall mirrored back bar on which many bottles of whiskey were displayed. The top of the serving bar was deeply scored and gouged, and there were at least two verifiable bullet scars in its wooden surface, one of them not that ancient—a client had absentmindedly pulled out a .357 magnum pistol while searching his pockets for another dollar, and when he slapped it on the bar it went off, blowing away part of the bar and shattering a corner of the back bar. This had happened two years ago; Smokey had banned the perpetrator from the bar for a week.

The old pressed-tin ceiling was still intact and repainted at least once a decade. Half of the brewery signs on the walls were of long-defunct brands. There was no attempt to make the bar look old, or traditional; it was just an old bar that had never been exposed to ephemeral trends of modernization. A very comfortable bar, actually, with a high ceiling that kept it from being too smoky, with fans that rotated infinitely slowly, with high, clear windows (rarely washed) that let in the fine mountain light. It had a kind of spaciousness that was pleasant. It didn't stink, either. While the floor was swept only nightly, the tables and bar and the sinks were kept clean and orderly. It was a regular old corner tavern, of a sort well known to Mulheisen from his youth in Detroit, but long since vanished.

Smokey was in the bar when Mulheisen and Jacky Lee entered. Also in the bar was the woman Heather, sitting at a table in the back, wearing a ski jacket. They didn't notice her. Jacky introduced Mulheisen to Smokey.

“From Detroit, hunh?” Smokey said with interest. He quit counting the take and wiped his hands before shaking Mulheisen's hand. “I know some guys from Detroit, they used to come over here once in a while.”

“That so?” Mulheisen said. He looked around the bar, liking what he saw. “Did you know a guy named Mario Soper?”

“Is that the guy you was asking me about, Jacky? Nah, I never seen him. If he came in here I didn't notice. See that guy over there?” Stover pointed to a gaunt, grizzled man who looked to be seventy or more, sitting by himself in one of the wooden chairs along the outer wall. He had a shock of stiff, silvery wire hair and black eyebrows. He peered through thick glasses at a newspaper. At his wrist was a glass of amber whiskey next to a beer chaser. “You should ask him. That's Dick Tracy. He was a reporter for the
Standard
for about a hundred years. If anybody seen him, it would be Dick.”

The woman in the ski jacket passed Mulheisen and Lee as they sat down to talk to Tracy. Lee watched her leave but didn't comment. Tracy was a pleasant, soft-spoken man. He seemed pleased to talk to them. He thought he recognized Lee's photo of Mario Soper, but couldn't remember when or where he had seen the man. He didn't know anyone named Joe Service or Joe Humann, or Helen Sedlacek.

“You're from Detroit, eh?” Tracy said. “You see much jazz back there?”

Mulheisen was pleased to talk jazz with the old reporter. They shared an interest in Cozy Cole—Tracy had played drums in his youth, for dance bands, swing bands at the old Columbia Gardens, a long-defunct amusement park that occasionally had brought in groups like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

“I sat in once with Ray Anthony's band,” Tracy said. “His drummer got drunk and lost some money in cards uptown and then he got noisy and finally his arm broke. So I sat in for him. It was unbelievable! What a band.”

He went on to tell them what a villain old Smokey was. “Looks quiet now,” Tracy pointed out, “but later the bikers come and others. You can get killed just walking by. A guy was stabbed about six months ago, just walking his dog. He should have known better than to walk a dog by Smokey's Corner.”

“Yeah, it can be bad,” Jacky affirmed.

Mulheisen found it hard to believe. Compared to Detroit,
Butte looked like a rest home. He asked again if Tracy hadn't seen Mario Soper, perhaps in conversation with Smokey. But Tracy didn't spend any time in Smokey's after about two
P.M.

“That's about as early as the bikers and thugs get up around here,” he said. “They stagger in here around three or so and knock back a few shots to get well. By then I'm up at the Helsinki—a much quieter bar, at that hour anyway. And then I'm home by eight. Your guy—what is he, a dope dealer?—probably would have been in later. But if he was a dope dealer, he was definitely in here, talking to Smokey. ‘Cause nothing like that goes down in Butte without Smokey.”

He glanced up at the bar and hoisted his empty glass with a faint smile at Smokey, who brought the bottle of Old Forester and poured out a huge couple of shots. Mulheisen quickly threw down a fiver and was surprised to get a couple of dollars back.

“He's a grand feller,” Tracy said, with a mock Irish accent. “We both took catechism at the same time from Father Keneally.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Did you see that great strapping butch who just strolled out? She's from Detroit. I was talking to her. She said she was looking for an apartment. Not a pleasant lassie, I can tell you. Hard, very hard. She's got hands like a navvy, as the old-timers would say. She and Smokey have their heads together every day. I saw him passing money to her. Maybe she won a bet, or something.”

“She move out here?” Lee asked.

Tracy said she had told him that she had taken a job in town. “Some kind of computer consultant, she says, but she doesn't impress me as a clerical worker. She's in and out of here all day. Someone said she was working at the hospital, saw her over there. Maybe she is a consultant, working on their computers. I guess she found an apartment, but I don't know where.”

The old newsman rambled on about one character or another
but nothing, including his dark suspicions of the dykey computer woman, caught the imagination of the two cops. They soon left.

On the street, Mulheisen said, “Dick Tracy? Smokey Stover?”

“Tom Tracy, I think,” Lee said, “and Clarence. But you know how these things are.” He shrugged. “I can drop you anywhere you want, Mul, but I've got to get back to work. We've been having a lot of arson fires lately, and everybody's got to concentrate on that. But give me a call, anytime, and I'll do what I can to get away if you need help.”

Mulheisen had obtained a street map. He said he thought he'd just walk around, try to get a sense of the town.

From his fourth-floor room in the Finlen Hotel, he could see a good deal of Butte. It wasn't a bad hotel, just a little old and dark with creaky floors. He went out for a stroll before dark. He walked all the way up the main drag, Park Street, to a kind of shoulder of the Hill where lay the campus of the School of Mines, or Montana Tech, as it was now called. He stood next to a bronze statue of Marcus Daly, one of the original Copper Kings who had built this western metropolis, and gazed out with Marcus at the city below. It was rather grand. He could see an awful lot of country from here: mountains to the south, mountains to the west, and of course the great wall of the Continental Divide to the east. He took a deep breath and exhaled. It was fine air, cold in the fall afternoon. It was the kind of country that made you want to take a deep breath.