Deadman (19 page)

“The brain is so enormous, you see. It is a large organ, but its extensions, through thought and memory and so on, are as vast as the universe. We have mapped the physical brain pretty well, by now. If there is injury here"—he tapped the left rear of his skull, approximately where the major injury had occurred to Service—"we know that it affects the motor capability here.” He lifted a presumably dead right hand with his left and waved it. “It should be gone forever, but it recovers. Sometimes. Whatever was in this region"—he tapped his head again—"is presumably destroyed when the tissue is destroyed. But is it? No. So the information is spread out throughout the brain? Hmm. Maybe. Like every other field, in brain studies there are contending factions. One group says the brain is like a complex mosaic. Another says it is more like a field, a gestalt. The mosaic concept is useful, but so is the field. Me? I don't know. I'm watching Mr. Deadman. He makes remarkable recoveries, but he is holding something back, I think.”

Mulheisen went in to see the patient. He was sitting up, staring at nothing. As usual, the pretty little nurse was there. She had been talking when Mulheisen entered, but she stopped in midsentence and after puttering about for a few seconds, she left. Joe Service shifted his eyes to meet Mulheisen's. He seemed to smile. His head was still well wrapped in bandages, but more of it was exposed, and clumps of hair were beginning to hang out through apertures. He looked forlorn, as gormless as a wet hawk, but the eyes still shone brightly.

Did this man have memory? Mulheisen wondered. And if he didn't have any memory, or only imperfectly remembered his crimes, was he still culpable? If he couldn't remember killing a man, could he be held accountable? The act was not altered, but the actor was. What then? It was something to think about.

“Have you ever been in Iowa City, Joe?” Mulheisen asked. He watched the eyes carefully. No apparent response. “Did you ever meet a man named Hal Good? It wasn't his real name. His real name was—” and Mulheisen drew a blank. He couldn't remember the real name of the man from Iowa City, who had been a contract killer for the mob, a man who had been a respectable lawyer in that small city in Heartland, U.S.A., and had misused his position to become a heartless killer. It was embarrassing. “Well, it doesn't matter what his real name was. You would have known him as Hal Good. Somebody tracked Hal Good down and killed him, Joe. Hal Good killed Helen Sedlacek's father. Somebody killed Hal, then somebody—probably Helen—killed Carmine, the man who hired Hal to kill her father. It's like an endless series—A leads to B, which leads to C . . . But it has to stop sometime, Joe. I mean to stop it.”

Mulheisen stepped over to the window and looked out. There was a pretty decent view of the mountains to the west. He gazed out at the scattered fluffs of clouds that drifted toward them from beyond the mountains. He felt that he could watch this scene for a long time. Without looking at Joe, he said, “What is the nurse always talking
about, Joe? Does it bother you?” He glanced sideways at the bed. There was no response from Joe. “Talk, talk, talk. I hate hospital rooms. You must. You've got to get out of here, Joe.”

On his way out, Mulheisen stopped to talk to the nurse. He explained to her that her “Deadman” was still in danger from the same people who had put him in the hospital in the first place. The police were not capable of guarding him, he told her, so it fell to her and the rest of the staff to keep their eyes open, to report any suspicious behavior around Deadman, any unusual inquiries about him, any visitors. He advised her to contact Jacky Lee if anything happened.

Cateyo accepted all this warning with great seriousness and gravity, Mulheisen was pleased to see. But then she smiled and said, “I'll take good care of him, Sergeant Mulheisen. Nothing can happen to him.”

“What do you mean?” Mulheisen said. “You know nothing about this man, Miss Yoder.”

“I know quite a bit about him, Sergeant. He's a good man.”

“Joe?” Mulheisen gestured with his head toward the room he'd just left. “You don't know Joe Service. This man is a thief, a spy, a betrayer. I think he has killed other men, but I can't prove it. His friends, his associates, are drug peddlers and murderers and corrupters. They aren't good people. And now they're mad at Joe. They want to kill him. They have unlimited resources. They will kill him, eventually. But not on my watch.”

“And not on mine,” she snapped back, the color rising in her cheeks. “And you're wrong about Pau—Joe. He's a good man. Christ was hung with thieves. He associated with people everyone thought were bad. Saul of Tarsus was a persecutor, a spy, a betrayer.”

Mulheisen wanted to laugh, but he didn't. Instead, he just looked at the young woman for a long moment, then nodded and walked away. He stopped at the work station and asked for the head
nurse. He tracked Nurse Work down a few minutes later and waited while she finished talking to another young nurse before he drew her aside. “What's with Cate Yoder and Deadman?” he asked.

Nurse Work allowed that Cateyo seemed inordinately attached to the patient. “It happens, sometimes,” she said, “but Miss Yoder is a good nurse, one of our best. I'm confident that she won't let her feelings interfere with her care of the patient. In fact, it may help.”

Mulheisen told her Cateyo's remarks.

“Religious people see everything in terms of their religion,” Nurse Work said. “It doesn't mean anything, any more than . . . well, than a doctor using sports metaphors in describing a patient's prognosis.”

“I hope you're right,” Mulheisen said, “but I'm going to give you my card. If anything unusual happens I want you to call me collect, in Detroit. Will you do that?”

She took the card and slipped it into her uniform pocket, saying she would call. Mulheisen left. He felt uneasy.

15

The Gates of the City

F
lying east out of Salt Lake City, Mulheisen realized a simple truth: The modern city is similar to ancient cities. He had taken this route for no particular reason, except that it happened to be quicker in this time slot, and anyway, he thought it would be more interesting to take a different route home, instead of the Billings-Minneapolis route he had come out on (it had nothing to do with the gut-wrenching fighter-jet take-offs and landings on the Butte-Bozeman-Billings run, he told himself). Out of Salt Lake, a much bigger jet climbed out powerfully and majestically over the Wasatch Front, nonstop for Detroit. Mulheisen settled back with his insight about ancient cities and soon recollected a visit to Mexico City, many years before.

In those days he always took his vacation. He had long since quit doing that. He might take an occasional day or two, if he were out of town anyway, and sometimes he took a few days to visit an old friend who had moved to Reno. But he rarely took a formal vacation anymore. But someone had told him that Mexico, D.F., had purchased the old Detroit Street Railways trolley cars, and it occurred to him that he would like to see the Gratiot Avenue car that he used to ride with his father when they would go to a ballgame downtown.
This was a very special memory, involving straw hats and men smoking cigars and the first sight of the green field within the tiered walls of Briggs Stadium. So he flew to Mexico City.

He liked it very much, although it was a mess, of course. There were already many too many people. But the city seemed quite livable in the regions that he explored. And he did get to see the old Gratiot Avenue car and ride on it. Unfortunately, it did not go very fast, as it used to do when the motorman got out toward Seven Mile Road and Eight Mile Road. In Mexico City it stopped on every block and it was loaded with people. But he rode it a couple of times anyway and enjoyed it. They hadn't bothered to paint it, apparently. It was still the same pale color with dark green trim. They had painted over the lettering, but “D.S.R.” had bled through, faintly.

One day he got off the trolley and was walking along a big street (he couldn't remember its name) when a voice called out, “Hey, Yank.” He turned and confronted an old Mexican man sitting on the steps of a very large building that housed the national health insurance agency. The old man was dark and wrinkled but dressed in a neat and clean suit of yellowed linen. He had evidently taken off his shoes, but now he slipped them back on. He had no socks. He stood up. He was about five feet four inches, including his panama hat. “I knew you were a Yank,” he said, in very good English.

“You must have spent some time in the States,” Mulheisen said. It was very bright here in the street and hot. He wondered how long this conversation would take and if it meant only handing over a few pesos (the peso was worth much more at this time).

“Yes, I have been in many cities of the United States,” the old man said. “Not just Texas cities or California cities, but also in Chicago, Illinois, and Dayton, Ohio, not to mention Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Have you been in those cities?”

“Yes,” Mulheisen said, “but it is hot. Would you like to go to a
cervezeria
?”

“No, I can't leave here, but I would appreciate something to
drink, if you don't mind.” He gestured at a vendor of soft drinks, not far off. Mulheisen went to get the old man a bottle of warm citron drink.

“Why can't you leave here?” Mulheisen asked when he had brought the drink.

“My daughter works here. I need to see her.”

Hundreds of people were entering and leaving the building constantly. The old man watched them out of the corner of his eye while he talked to Mulheisen.

“How long have you been here?” Mulheisen asked.

This was the fourth day, the old man said. He said he had been a schoolteacher. He taught English. He was also a poet and a short-story writer. He had a collection of his short stories and poems with him, in an old and cracked leather briefcase. They were typed with a very faintly inked ribbon on blue-lined school exposition paper for a three-ring binder, with many “xxxx” markings on several words in each paragraph. They were written in English and had titles such as “The Aged Crone at El Pastor Fido Home.”

“That's where I live,” the old man pointed out. “It is a retirement home, as you would say. It is an infamous place.” The home was located outside the city. The old man had gotten a ride with a market farmer part of the way, then walked the rest. He walked home each evening, after the offices closed.

“Some of these stories have been rejected by
The New Yorker
and
Esquire,
even by
Playboy
magazine.” He showed Mulheisen the printed rejection slips. “The stories are too risqué for Mexican magazines. They are about prostitution, one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. This is a terrible country for censorship. Sometimes the American editors send me five dollars, which I have told them to hide within the sheets of the story, for there are thieves in the post office.”

“Does your daughter know you are waiting?” Mulheisen asked. “Did you call her to tell her that you were coming?”

The old man smiled forbearingly. “You Americans.” He chuckled. “Not everyone has a telephone. The home would never allow me to use their telephone, even if I could pay and if Daisy had a telephone.”

“You could have written to her,” Mulheisen pointed out.

“I don't know which office she works in, or where she lives. She won't tell me. But I will see her today. This is the last door where she could go in.”

Mulheisen didn't know if the old man had ever intercepted his daughter, but he had seen Helen Sedlacek this morning at the Salt Lake City airport. As a policeman he was used to the drill whereby you monitor airports, bus stations, and train stations to intercept wanted criminals, but he also knew that the tactic didn't often succeed, since most people drove cars. Modern cities were too porous when the police were dealing with auto traffic. But he realized now that when it came to air travel, a great hub such as Salt Lake City was like the walled cities of yore. They had just a few gates, and one could watch for travelers there, in just the way that the old man waited patiently for his daughter to go in or come out of one of the four great doorways of the national health building in Mexico City.

At Salt Lake he had just caught a glimpse of Helen on the conveyor system. She was going in the opposite direction. By the time he hopped off the conveyor bearing him toward a different wing of the huge complex, the wing where the gateway to the east was located, and doubled back, he could not find her. But what he soon learned, however, was that she must have gotten on a plane to the north. That was where that gateway lead, the same one he had come in on. She was flying to Butte, perhaps, or Spokane, even Seattle.

Mulheisen found the gate where the next Butte-bound flight boarded and showed his identification. A helpful young woman from Delta Airlines checked the passenger list and found no “Helen Sedlacek” or any similar name. The plane hadn't boarded yet. Mulheisen
cruised the other gates without success. He didn't see her in any of the little shops or snack bars, either. So, he had missed her, this time.

For several minutes he wandered about, wondering if he should interrupt his flight to make a more protracted search, perhaps with airport authorities. But he realized that it would take too much time, and anyway, he didn't have a warrant. Indeed, he had no grounds whatsoever for detaining her if she were unwilling to be interviewed. She was a suspect, that was all.

On the plane east, he pondered the situation and decided that she was probably not just passing through Salt Lake. That would be a mere coincidence. If a person were starting out from any place in the United States, the chances that they would pass through Salt Lake City and have to change planes there were not high. Not remote by any means, but not high. On the other hand, if she were staying in the area, she would be bound to travel in and out of a handful of gates that served an enormous region. It seemed to him that the odds were quite good that she was in the area. The question was, how long would she remain?

Jimmy Marshall was at Detroit Metropolitan to pick him up. When they got past the preliminary foolishness—"Where'd you leave your horse?"—Mulheisen explained his notion about watching for Helen at Salt Lake City. Marshall thought it was a total waste of time. The region served by that airport was larger than Europe. If Helen Sedlacek were using a different name, it would be a matter of physically monitoring the gateways. Jimmy Marshall couldn't imagine that the Salt Lake City police, or any other agency, had the personnel to spare on this scale to aid the Detroit police, particularly since they had no arrest warrant.

“Not yet, anyway,” Mulheisen said. He explained about the shotguns Jacky had retrieved from the cabin on Garland Butte. Mulheisen had brought the guns back with him, along with ample latent fingerprints from the house, which could be compared with known
prints of Helen Sedlacek and the prints found in Iowa City. As for Joe Service, he had no prints on record, as far as they knew. But if Joe Humann was Joe Service, he would now.

If there was any kind of forensic evidence linking Helen to any felony, Mulheisen felt that the airlines—there were only a handful—could be pressured into at least a computer monitor of their reservations system, a kind of flag on the name “Helen Sedlacek,” maybe even any “Helen S——” flying into or out of Salt Lake City. When people used a false name, they didn't usually falsify it much, especially amateurs. “Let's find out what Helen's mother's maiden name was,” he suggested. “Also, wasn't she married once? I seem to remember something about that. What was her married name? It doesn't seem likely—I suppose divorced women don't like to use the name of a man they rejected, or who rejected them—but a running woman may be desperate enough.”

Back at the precinct—more greetings of “Where's your boots, podner?"—the file revealed that Helen had been married before, but the name wasn't indicated. A check at the Wayne County records produced a birth certificate and Oakland County found a marriage license. She was born to Mary Kaparich and Sidami Sedlacjich. She had been licensed to marry Ara Koldanian.

Mulheisen was intrigued. A Serb marries an Armenian? It seemed unusual. There were a lot of Armenians in the Detroit area, mostly on the west side, he thought—Dearborn, the downriver communities. They were hardworking, enterprising people, in his experience. Like the Serbs, they were Eastern Orthodox, but he assumed there were significant differences in the two churches. Marshall agreed to run the two names past the airlines and also to set up an interview with Koldanian: He might have something useful to tell them about Helen.

There was also about two weeks of phone calls to return and reports to be updated, developments on old cases to review, and . . .
About five o'clock, he looked up to see Jimmy leaning against the doorjamb, smiling wryly.

“So, Mul,” Jimmy said, “you ready to move to Montana?”

Mulheisen shook his head. He was tired and ready to go home. “It's all right,” he said. “It's fine. I liked Butte. It's kind of a cranky, interesting old industrial town. But to live there or work there? Nah. Everything's so open, you're so exposed to the elements. I don't think so. It'd be colder than a brass jockstrap in the winter, I bet. Also, the newspaper is a pretty decent rag, but it doesn't cover the Tigers much, and it's hard to get good cigars. Nice country, though.”

“What about the women?” Marshall wanted to know. “What'd you think of those cowgirls?”

“Cowgirls?” Mulheisen laughed. “I'll tell you one thing, though, it seems like those women are a lot freer than around here. They're ready to jump out of their clothes at the drop of a hat.” He recounted the incident at Antoni's sauna and Sally McIntyre's cheerful shucking of her jeans at the hot springs. Marshall was deeply impressed.

Sometimes when Mulheisen looked at his mother, he just about didn't recognize her. It seemed to him that she had once been older, fatter, bulkier. She wore flowery dresses once upon a time. She had a bosom once. The name Cora didn't seem odd, in those times; it seemed normal among her friends, Hazel and Grace and Mabel.

He had been only a little boy, of course. His father was still alive, still going off to work every day in his brown or blue or gray suit, wearing a fedora and an overcoat. A pleasant man, he wore wire-rimmed glasses and smelled faintly of Old Spice aftershave lotion. He was the half of the salt-and-pepper shaker set that had disappeared. A grandma-and-grandpa set. He would be salt, maybe. His mother
would be pepper, though evidently not a very hot pepper, just darker than salt.

She was thicker then, and not only did she wear a flowered housedress but even, and always, an apron. Her hair was longer then, but already gray, in a bun on the back of her head, and she wore wire-rimmed glasses, too. She smelled of talc and a perfume that he believed was called White Shoulders, though perhaps it was just lilac water.

In the intervening years, his mother had become younger while undeniably getting older. Her face was more lined, but she had become leaner, tanned, her bosom had disappeared, and her hair was quite short and a more steely gray. She wore contact lenses most of the time, but when she wore glasses, they were one of several pairs in Italian frames and never, never wire-rimmed. It appeared that she spent quite a nice sum on sunglasses. She wore slacks, bulky sweaters, boots (usually colorful rubber ones, or sturdy hiking ones), running shoes, a startling variety of stylish but clearly sturdy and protective jackets, anoraks, and parkas. She seemed to have a lot of gear: bicycles, binoculars, helmets, special gloves, backpacks, cameras. And she talked knowledgeably and interestedly about all of it.

How all this had happened, Mulheisen didn't know. It had been gradual. Her round face had leaned into this finely wrinkled but leathery one so slowly that he hadn't noticed how. For one thing he didn't see a lot of her, generally speaking. For days, even weeks, their only communication was via notices attached to the refrigerator with magnets. Even these magnets had changed; where once they were bunnies and ducks, now they were embossed with old railway emblems, or the logos of environmentalist organizations.