Deadman (17 page)

“Sally, goddamn it . . .” Lee said.

The brassiere and the panties were daintily deposited on the jeans and shirt. Mulheisen was stunned. What was it with these Montana women?

Sally waded into the pool, directly to Mulheisen, who steadfastly kept his eyes fastened on her smiling face. She stuck out her
hand and, although he recoiled at first, he took it and allowed her to pump his in a friendly way, saying, “I'm Sally McIntyre, the ditch rider. And you are . . . ?”

“Mulheisen,” he said.

“Well, Mul,” she replied, “this is how we do it.” She spread her muscular arms and he noticed that she did not shave under them. The same red hair as on her head and between her thighs. And then she fell slowly backward, splashing into the hot pool. She came up gasping but laughing and kicked backward toward the ledge. “It's grand, boys,” she cried. “Try it.”

Jacky Lee shrugged and waded out. He dropped his drawers with his back to them, then added his shirt to his pile. He avoided Mulheisen's eyes as he waded back in and dove headfirst into the warm water.

There was nothing for it. Mulheisen followed suit. Lying in the water, fully submerged, it soon seemed absurd to be embarrassed. But what, he wondered, was the protocol for conversation?

“That's gossamer,” Sally said, gesturing with her chin toward their lofty canopy. “Tiny, tiny spiders make it. Happens every year, ‘bout this time.”

“Ah,” said Mulheisen, glancing surreptitiously at her floating breasts, the areolas large and suffused with the hot water. “Gossamer?”

“I looked it up in the dictionary,” she confessed, casually eyeing the head of Mulheisen's cock, poking out of the surface; he sunk down. “It's from Middle English, it says,
gosesomer
, or ‘goose summer.’ Probably like Indin Summer.”

“I see,” Mulheisen said. Jacky Lee said nothing. He lay on his back, his eyes closed. A very large hawk, quite high up, sailed into the gossamer-curtained window. Nobody said anything for a good long time.

“I could sure use a cigarette,” Sally said, “sacrilegious as it sounds.” She stood up and waded dreamily to the edge to rummage in
her pockets. She sat on the big rock, next to Jacky's clothes, and lit her cigarette. She smoked gratefully, elbows on knees. Mulheisen thought she looked pretty, also humorous and refreshingly direct. He got out and joined her, lighting up a La Regenta.

“That smells good,” she said, “strong and clean. Can I try it?”

He handed her the cigar. She drew on it. “Mmm, milder than I'da thought.” She handed it back. Mulheisen could not recall another woman in his experience who had done or said such a thing.

Out in the pool Jacky had moved to the shallows and sat on his butt, splashing water and rubbing it into his black hair and scrubbing his face. He lay back full-length and rotated violently, then stood up. “I'm done,” he said. He waded out and squatted next to them.

Sally looked down at the chromed pistol lying on Jacky's clothes. “Is that another one?” she said. Jacky said it was. “Be a shame to have to drain this pool,” she said. She began to dress. Mulheisen was very taken with the unself-conscious way she bent forward to lever and adjust her breasts into the cups of her bra.

“I hope we won't have to do that,” Jacky said.

Mulheisen agreed. By now they were all dry and dressing.

“Now I feel like a detective again,” Mulheisen said, knotting his tie.

Lee grunted. It could have been a laugh or maybe it was just the effort of pulling his boots on his damp feet. “You do much of this back in Detroit?”

Mulheisen and Sally laughed.

The three of them strolled down to the meadow and the creek where Sally had found the body. Jacky pointed out that he had very early concluded that Soper was not killed at the site: There was no bloody ground, no cartridge cases, no sign of a struggle. A search of the house gave no indication that it had happened there, and so with the grounds. But he had found several .32-caliber cartridge casings about the path near the hot springs. He had also found the wheelbarrow in the shed. The forensic evidence wasn't back yet, but he felt
there was a good chance that the victim, who had been shot at least nine times with two different caliber guns, had been shot somewhere around the pool. His assailant probably used the wheelbarrow to carry the body down to the creek. There was dried blood in the wheelbarrow, not a lot, but some. He also had a feeling that the same .32-caliber automatic, the one Sally had found in the pool, had been used on Carmine Deadman, aka Joseph Humann, aka Joe Service.

He recounted all this leisurely as they climbed back up the path, past the pool, stopping to indicate where he had found the cartridges, and ending neatly as they stood in the yard by the cabin. It all seemed plausible to Mulheisen. He was impressed with the thoroughness of Jacky's work and the imagination it required to lead him in the proper direction. He told Jacky so and Jacky shrugged noncommittally.

“What it don't tell us,” Jacky said, “is who did it. There's some smeared fingerprints on the thirty-two, probably more on this thirty-eight we just found, and maybe that'll do it, but I never found fingerprints to work out the way you want them to.”

Mulheisen knew what he meant. Fingerprints were helpful, but not definitive. What they had was a man left for dead on a highway, another killed in the mountains, a missing associate of the first man, and possibly a missing associate of the second man. Presumably whoever almost killed Joe Service and then did kill Soper was one of the two missing persons—Helen, or the nameless associate that had been mentioned as a hitchhiker. Mulheisen sighed and let all this speculation drift to the back of his mind for further consideration.

Sally showed them pretty much what she had observed when she first came up to the cabin, and she confirmed what Jacky had said about the interior. She recounted what she had heard from Mrs. Garland about Joseph Humann and his girlfriend, Helen, about the daily shooting practice, their frequent if relatively brief absences, Humann's general friendliness—everybody around here liked him,
though no one knew him very well. Not many people had found Helen very friendly, however.

Mulheisen thanked her for her help and asked if she'd keep an eye on the place—nothing special, just be attentive to rumors or, if she was passing, kind of look in. If anything came up, she should contact Jacky, or if that wasn't possible, she could call him collect in Detroit. He gave her a card.

“In goose summer you kill the goose,” Sally said, as they stood in the sunny yard by their cars. “Unfortunately, I didn't raise no goose this year. But I did have a half-interest in a hog. Do you boys like side meat?”

Mulheisen had no idea what side meat was, but he was desperately hungry after his hike and the bath in the hot springs. He looked inquisitively to Jacky.

“Not me,” Jacky said firmly. “I got to be getting back. Mul, you can stay if you want to. I can probably come back for you, or maybe you could get a ride.”

This wasn't satisfactory. It seemed clear to Mulheisen that Sally was interested in him, and he was certainly interested in her, but in the curious way of things, it wasn't quite appropriate for him to come over to her house alone. Regretfully, he begged off and she accepted the situation easily enough. But on the way back into Butte with Jacky, Mulheisen pondered the moral climate that made it possible for a woman to shuck off her clothes in the presence of a complete stranger and hop into a hot springs, but problematic for this same stranger (now rather more familiar to her) to come to her house for dinner.

“What is side meat, anyway?” he asked Jacky.

“Oh, that wasn't really intended for you,” Jacky said. “Side meat is side pork, it's uncured bacon. I don't think you'd like it. But the thing is, see, me ‘n’ Sally had a kind of thing once, but since I got married she's been acting kind of funny. Some guys say ‘side meat,’
meaning a woman on the side. It's crude. I wouldn't say it, but I think Sally was just getting in a dig at me.”

Mulheisen didn't think that was it at all, but he wasn't sure, and so he kept his own counsel.

13

Helen-A-Go-Go

H
elen had no idea how much money she had. She had counted at least half a million dollars, and she knew it was very much more than that. Joe had always stressed the notion that they had too much money, that its very abundance was the primary problem. This had seemed a laughable premise: How could you have too much money? Now that it was all sitting in the back of the little yellow pickup truck, however, it seemed an enormous problem. In Salt Lake City she had contemplated putting it in a bank, but she soon gave up that idea. It couldn't be done, not even simply in the sense of storage, without interest—a deposit box, or boxes . . . too many boxes. Nobody is going to store that much money for you without asking who you are and where you got so much currency, questions that Helen could not safely answer. Anyway, the thought of money simply being stored, not earning anything—wasting away, in fact—was too galling for contemplation.

Joe had been working on an amusing plan, but he hadn't explained it thoroughly enough for Helen to grasp the essential details. He called it his “Gogol Scam.” When he'd first mentioned it, she'd thought he said “Go-go” and he had laughingly taken that up, afterward describing his occasional absences as “Gotta go go-go, for a couple
of days.” He'd been on a “go-go” trip when he got hit. The Gogol joke still puzzled Helen, although he'd tried to explain it. “It's a variation on ‘Dead Souls.’ I'm buying dead uncles,” he explained cryptically, “for the enrichment of their impoverished heirs . . . and, of course, for the even greater enrichment of us.” This had something to do with the fact that the Reagan administration had generously increased the amount of tax-free inheritance to $600,000. As best as Helen could figure it out, Joe was finding heirs who had inherited little or nothing and then striking a deal with them so that they would “inherit,” say, $50,000 while Joe “inherited” $550,000, or so. How he retroactively enriched the dead uncle was not revealed, but she assumed it was as clever and secure as most of his schemes.

“Foolproof,” Joe assured her, “at least, pretty foolproof. The heir is discouraged from ratting to the IRS, or whomever, since they have been party to a felony. In addition, they continue to enjoy a modest annuity from the trust fund, providing they don't make a fuss. Still"—he sighed—"there are fools who will take a hatchet to the golden goose. Nothing is really secure. But I've built in a couple of cut-outs that should insulate us from investigation.”

At any rate, in the few months since they had acquired the money (which was how she saw it:
they
had
acquired . . .
although she'd had no part in stealing the money), Joe had not managed to place more than a couple of million into these seemingly legitimate accounts. This hadn't bothered him: “I've got the rest of my life to lay it out.” Helen's problem was more pressing: she had something like twenty million dollars sitting in the back of a truck on the street. She finally hit upon what she thought was at least a reasonable solution. She considered that as long as she and Joe lived in Tinstar, they weren't too concerned about so much cash lying around. They'd simply stashed it in convenient places: a few handy thousand in a drawer; a hundred thousand in an artfully incised and relabeled plastic antifreeze jug that sat on the floor of the garage among similar windshield-washer-fluid containers; lesser amounts in plastic bags in the bluebird
houses (bluebirds crowded out by millionaires, alas) that Joe had mounted on trees and posts. Of course, the bulk of it was stashed in the abandoned mine that Joe had fixed up, up behind the cabin.

What she did now was go to a rental agency in Salt Lake City and lease a house. It was a nice house—two bedrooms, half-basement, a small garage—on Main Street, about a mile and a half south of the city center. She spent a restless night at the hotel, constantly reassuring herself that the little pickup truck and its fabulous cargo (approximately that of a seventeenth-century Spanish treasure galleon) would be safe in the hotel garage. She had taken the trouble to purchase and have mounted a simple, lockable pickup campertop, but she knew that wouldn't survive even a modest attempt at burglary if left on the street overnight, even in Salt Lake City, which was no Detroit. The very next day she found the house by midmorning and obtained the key. That same afternoon she unloaded the money into the half-basement and had a locksmith install some formidable security. By grossly overpaying a couple of carpenters, she got them to drop their current projects and immediately set to work to further secure the house with some unobtrusive window barriers and steel doors. “I can't help it, I'm just paranoid,” she said, easily emulating a woman-alone-in-a-strange-city. In the small half-basement they had constructed a vault remarkably like the one that Joe had constructed in the old mine.

So here was at least a measure of security. It still didn't answer to the nagging anxiety of money that was idle. This was a genuine anxiety for Helen. She had never encountered this problem before. As the child of a well-placed mob figure she had never wanted for money, even when Big Sid was being punished for overly sticky digits. Later, as a young woman running her own consulting business, she had done quite well (with, admittedly, occasional donations from Sid when cash flow waned), but she had no capital, and so she had never given much consideration to what happens to capital when it isn't invested. Now she viewed capital in fairy tale terms: the golden goose versus the sack of grain with a hole in it, on the back of an ass, en
route to market. Even the tiniest hole makes of the sack an hourglass, with its ceaseless flow of sand. Yes, that was it: It was a kind of philosophical juxtaposition, life versus time. It made her uneasy, even a little ill, to think that she couldn't stop those grains trickling out—one had to eat, one had to live. But there must be a way, if only she knew what it was. Why hadn't Joe told her? Was it part of the old plot, how men keep women down? She tried to console herself with the notion that this was only temporary, that soon she'd get on with the business of making this money work, once she figured out how to keep it safe and also take care of such obligations as Joe's medical care.

It was here in Salt Lake, involved in this busywork, that she read about what had befallen Joe, in the Butte paper that she picked up every day at the newsstand downtown. She was greatly relieved to hear that he wasn't dead; she realized that she had been masking a considerable measure of grief with anger and resentment. To be sure, it didn't sound like he was likely to ever recover his amazing energy and delight in life, and she was sorry to think that he would be a kind of vegetable henceforth, but at least he wasn't dead. Nonetheless, it imposed certain obligations on her and the resentment revived.

She made her first payments to St. James Hospital from Salt Lake City, to secure Joe's treatment. This act was an eye-opener in itself. She walked into one of the large banks downtown and simply asked one of the ladies sitting at a desk for a cashier's check for $50,000. She carried a vanity case, part of a complete set of luggage that she had just purchased, filled with small bills. She was taken aback when the woman, an officer of the bank, pointed out that not only would she have to identify herself, but she would have to file a Currency Transaction Report with the Internal Revenue Service for any—
any
—transaction over $10,000, even the purchase of a simple money order.

Helen was appalled. “But how can this be?” she demanded. “I have all this cash. I have obligations in other states. How am I to take
care of them? I can't send fifty thousand dollars in cash through the mail!”

“What is the source of this currency?” the woman asked, clearly very interested.

“None of your business,” Helen retorted.

“Actually, it is my business,” the bank officer replied. “This bank would be subject to severe penalties if we accepted undocumented currency in amounts of this sort.”

“Well, what amounts can be accepted?”

“You can purchase a money order or cashier's check in an amount less than three thousand dollars, without any report, but not more than one in a day.”

“Jeez,” Helen muttered, counting out $2,995 in small bills. As she left the bank, the woman stood at the window and watched her walk across the street to their competitor. She called her superior. “I think I just encountered a smurf,” she said, referring to the well-known practice of drug-related money washers. They stood at the window for several minutes before they observed Helen leave the other bank, swinging the vanity case lightheartedly as she proceeded down the street toward the Zion National Bank.

“Well, you can call the FBI or the DEA,” the boss said, “but she hasn't done anything illegal.”

The following day Helen returned and the woman saw her purchase another check for $2,995 from a different teller. This time she did call the FBI. An agent arrived in time to see Helen leave the bank across the street. He thanked the officer for identifying her and set off in pursuit. The bank officer never heard from the FBI again.

After a few days, the house having been secured, Helen loaded $500,000 into two suitcases and checked them as baggage as she flew to Los Angeles. She had never been to Los Angeles before and she was thrilled, at first. She spent a few days smurfing the money and shopping in Beverly Hills. By that time she had decided that Los Angeles
was not as pleasant as she had initially thought. It was warm and the sky was milky, but it was expensive and not really nice. It seemed about as fragile a place as Detroit. In fact, it was Detroit-by-the-sea, in many ways—sprawling, frenetic with cars, not really visible except from a low-flying airplane: No part of it seemed to stick up much above expressway level. There was a terrible juxtaposition of poverty—shattered buildings and automobiles, people standing about idly—and sheer glitz, a chromed approach to luxury. She flew to Denver.

Now her main project was to find a better way to turn her money, so it could begin to be put to use. She had already smurfed $100,000 for her own use and had invested it with a brokerage (plus another $50,000 for Joe's medical bills), but it was really a lot of work, accumulating that much money in $3,000 increments—visiting some fifty banks and savings and loans. It wasn't an easy life. She wanted to contact someone in the criminal world who could help her, but not in L.A. She had in mind just walking up to, say, a crack peddler on the street and saying, “I've got quite a bit of money, in cash . . . do you think you, or perhaps your boss, could give me a little advice on what to do with it?” But after thinking about it for a couple of minutes she realized it was too dangerous. Maybe it would be easier in Phoenix. It wasn't.

In the end she called Roman Yakovich, the Yak. He told her everything that Humphrey had told him.

“Roman, that's great! It just happens that I've been having a little problem, about money. I'm sure he could help.”

“I dunno,” the Yak said. “Mr. Diablo has always been okay to us, but I dunno. You oughta be careful.”

“Why? Whatever for?”

“He says he forgives you for everything, but I dunno,” the Yak insisted. “He's pissed off about Joe.”

“He doesn't blame me for Carmine, does he?”

“He says he don't, but I dunno. He says you should call him. ‘Tell her to call Uncle Umberto,’ he says.”

“Thanks, Roman. I know it's late, so I won't ask you to wake Mama, but tell her I'll be home for Christmas. Maybe even Thanksgiving, if I can.”

The next day she flew to New Orleans and checked into a fancy hotel. It was about ten
P.M.
when she called Humphrey.