Hit on the House (12 page)

“Of course,” Mulheisen said. “Say, you ever hear of a guy named Etcheverry, might have been an associate of Big Sid's, or of Tupman's?”

“Etcheverry. No . . . There's a Ray Echeverria, hangs out with Billy Conover. What about him?”

“Nothing. I just heard his name somewhere. He's a dope dealer, this guy?”

“Yeah,” Deane said, “or at least we think he is. We've never been able to make anything on him. He's more of a money man, I think, but the money is dope money. He's a little weird, kind of a skinny guy, tall, wears dark glasses day and night. I get the impression he thinks he's some kind of Latin lover.”

“Ah. Well. By the way, I don't have my notes on the Kouras woman with me. You wouldn't happen to have her address, where she works?”

Eleven

M
ulheisen took a long drag on his cigar and exhaled slowly. Jimmy Marshall had just delivered one of those hateful “good news-bad news” tales: a man named Malfitan had been found; Germaine Kouras had flown. Mulheisen decided to see Malfitan first. They showed him five eight-by-ten glossy photos, including their blown-up picture of Harold Good, and the good-news portion of the tale started to fade.

Malfitan shook his head. “Ain't none of these. This Fogarty, he looked more like Ben Franklin, you dig?” Yes, he had ridden downtown in the wagon with Fogarty and had seen him at night court. He then gave a new, and this time fairly accurate, description of the real Fogarty.

Mulheisen took Jimmy aside and pointed out that according to the docket, both Fogarty and Malfitan had been represented by the same lawyer, one Milton Hyman. Malfitan was not the sort of man to employ an attorney. A quick call to Hyman revealed that, indeed, Malfitan's defense and fine had been paid by the person who purported to be Fogarty. Hyman agreed to come over to the precinct and look at their photo. It took him less than two seconds to put his finger on the photo of Harold Good.

Malfitan was brought back into the interrogation room. Mulheisen had sent out for cheeseburgers and a chocolate malted. The man fell on the food like a grizzly bear. The detective watched in silence, smoking
a cigar placidly. When Malfitan had licked his lips and sucked his teeth to his satisfaction and then looked back at Mulheisen expectantly, the latter said, “We now know that one of these men in these photos posed as Henry J. Fogarty. I'm not asking you if you know his real name, because I can't imagine that he would have told you. But I would like you to simply tell me no if the picture I indicate is not the man you saw as Fogarty.” With that it took five seconds for Malfitan to preserve his code, such as it was, by denying that four of the pictures were Fogarty. The remaining picture was the one Hyman had picked. So that was a step forward.

Germaine Kouras, however, was the genuine bad news. Not only had she gone, but she had told everybody, including her agent and the manager of the club where she worked, that she was leaving the country, possibly for good. She had given up her apartment. A friend said that Germaine had told her she was getting married and she and her husband were going to live in South America, but she'd left no forwarding address nor even the name of the country she was supposedly going to.

All this was determined by early afternoon. Mulheisen was dead tired, almost depressed (not genuinely depressed; he wasn't giving in to that), and it was still raining. At about three o'clock he received a call from Geiger of Narcotics. One of his people had run off a check of the numbers in Frosty Tupman's phone book, using the phone company's listings by number. Geiger wanted to know if any of the names would be useful. Among them, not surprisingly, were numbers for Sid Sedlacek and other well-known mob figures, including Ray Echeverria. There were also dozens of unfamiliar names, which Geiger and other investigators were now checking out. One was of especial interest to Mulheisen: Eugene Lande—two numbers, home and office. Also listed, in the same location, was a number for the Briar Ridge Golf and Country Club.

Mulheisen hung up and dialed the number for Briar Ridge. He was told by a male voice that Mr. Lande was on the course. The man said he expected Lande in the clubhouse in about an hour or so.

It was decided that Jimmy should go to Iowa. He immediately set about getting the authorizations and lining up a liaison with the Iowa
police. Since he'd been working with the airlines already, and since he'd soon be out at the airport, he would make inquiries about when Germaine Kouras had departed and for where.

Mulheisen found the golf course after some difficulty. It was on what he remembered from his childhood as a dirt road that led to farms in the low hills. He'd been taken to the area as early as the first grade, on a field trip to see cows and chickens and, he recalled, a number of enormous and frightening turkeys. Now it was a well-established residential suburb, with paved streets bearing near-farcical names: Bryyerwoode Lane, Calico Circle, Chalkcreek Way. Such names were a silly conceit, borrowed from the presumed glamour of Grosse Pointe and similar older suburbs, where streets were often named Fairbairns or Collie Fields. The developers had turned their backs on the French origins of Detroit (to say nothing of Grosse Pointe itself), on names like Piquette and Saint Aubin and Joseph Campau, which, after all, were simply the family names of the farmers who had settled there in the early eighteenth century.

The golf course had been sculpted out of pasture that bordered a small muddy creek below a bluff that ran along the roadside. Mulheisen thought the stream used to be called Petty Creek (or Petit, perhaps), but signs indicated it was now called Clabber Creek. He wasn't a golfer, but it looked like an interesting bit of real estate. The clubhouse, however, was a simple, low clapboard building painted white, with a couple of pointless cupolas surmounted by cast-iron weather cocks. Not especially prepossessing, which was unusual, he thought. Developers tended to spend on the clubhouse. He had expected something with a lot of glass and timber, perhaps fieldstone, and an enormous fireplace chimney and perhaps a red tile roof. The developer must have run short on cash.

Lande's Cadillac, with its
DOCBYTE
vanity plate, was the only car in the lot, except for a small Toyota pickup with
BRIAR RIDGE GOLF AND COUNTRY CLUB
painted around an amusing coat of arms that featured a golf club and a tennis racket crossed on a shield, along with a setter and a spaniel rampant.

The rain had declined to a mist, and it was growing dark. Mulheisen strolled out onto a sodden cedar-plank deck overlooking the first tee. To his left an empty, leaf-filled swimming pool separated the
fenced-in tennis courts from the parking lot. The course fell away into the mist. Mulheisen could make out some barren willows and alder that evidently lined Clabber Creek, and a few evergreens that dotted the fairway. Lande was due in shortly. Soon it would be too dark to play, if one could imagine anyone playing in this dreadful weather at all. The temperature was hardly above forty-five, and the ground underfoot was not just damp but positively swampy.

From a distance Mulheisen heard the muffled whump, whump, whump of a shotgun, barely audible in the heavy, soaking atmosphere. A pair of ducks in tight jet formation whizzed up out of the gloom and, seeing the dimly lighted windows of the clubhouse, flared out like F-15 fighters and climbed up into the overcast. Mulheisen was amused.

He peered through the plate glass windows of the clubhouse. A faint glimmer suggested that the barroom was open. He let himself into the broad dining area, its tables stacked with chairs, and saw a young man in a sweater sitting behind the bar at the back, glumly sipping a darkish drink and fiddling with a pencil. There was a crossword book open on the bar in front of him. He watched as Mulheisen came across the floor, which was covered with a green indoor-outdoor carpet.

“I'm looking for Gene,” Mulheisen said.

“Still out there.” The young man nodded toward the gloom.

“How long has he been out there?”

“Couple three hours,” the fellow said. He had streaky blond hair and was handsome despite his morose expression.

“By himself?”

The man nodded. “Who else is crazy enough to play on a day like this? He'll be in pretty quick . . . I hope.”

Mulheisen gestured toward the bottles of whiskey on the back bar. “You open?”

The man shrugged. “Why not?”

Mulheisen ordered a large Jameson and took it over to the window. He pulled down a chair and set it where he could look out into the murk—perhaps a hundred feet, anyway. He clipped and lighted up a Partagas Lonsdale. It was not, he knew, the kind of atmosphere that most people would find heartening or pleasant, but he found it most agreeable. It was a tremendous relief from the pressures of the day.
Rather like being in Ontario. After a while he walked back out onto the sheltered deck and gazed off into the dying light with a pleased sigh.

The mist occasionally thickened into a drizzle, then thinned again. The trees were bare, except for the few firs, and he saw that they were not monochromatic but actually a variety of colors. Some were glistening black, others gray, yet others a pale yellow or beige, and down near the creek some low brush was a vivid red. The mist swept softly across the rolling fairway, which was already covered with a thick, dark green turf that would soon need mowing. Wild birds, not city sparrows, hurled themselves off the bluff and sailed down onto the course, where they dove headlong into the thicket that lined the creek. He thought they might be jays, or even kingfishers—his mother would know.

The shotgun bumped a couple more times, and the birds raced about, and then he could hear the rain pattering gently, the trees dripping, and the creek gurgling. There was the sound of a distant city somewhere. He took a great and pleasurable breath and went back inside.

It was OK with him if Lande didn't come in for an hour. It was a fine thing to do nothing for a while, just to sit and draw on an aromatic brown cigar and sip good whiskey while gazing out onto a dripping vista with lights starting to wink on in distant houses.

After a while he called for another drink, and the young man brought the bottle to the table. “You gonna wait for Gene?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Fine.” The fellow set the bottle on the table and said, “Tell him I had to split, OK?”

Mulheisen was astonished. “You mean you're just going to leave?”

“Why not?”

“Well, what do I owe you for the whiskey?”

“Settle with Gene.” And with that he walked out, snatching a windbreaker off a rack on the way. A moment later Mulheisen heard the engine of the pickup start and then a spurt of gravel as it drove away.

“Amazing,” Mulheisen said out loud. He refilled his glass and sat back, puffing on the cigar. “My own club.” He waved the cigar grandly, taking in all he surveyed.

Forty minutes later Lande stomped across the deck, lugging a bagful of golf clubs. He set the clubs on a sheltered rack and entered the barroom. Mulheisen hadn't seen him approach. Evidently he had come off the back nine, which ended at a green on the opposite side of the clubhouse. Under the hood of a parka he wore a tweed golfer's cap, which he took off and slapped against the glistening nylon of his rain suit. He began to unzip and strip off the fancy blue and red rain outfit.

“Hey! Mul!” he cried out. “What the hell are you doing here?” He didn't wait for an answer. “Where's Eric?”

“He had a date,” Mulheisen said, rising and lifting his glass in a kind of toast. He gestured at the whiskey bottle. “He said it was on your tab.”

“Lazy fart,” Lande said. “Ah, screw ‘im. Go ahead. Help yourself.”

He tossed his dripping rain gear onto a table and clomped over to the bar in his spiked shoes to fetch a glass. He returned, poured some whiskey into the glass, and drank it.”

“Ah. Jeez, that's great! I needed that.” He wiped his bristling mustache and poured another, fuller dollop and poured more into Mulheisen's glass. He dragged down a chair, turned it back to front, and sat down with his arms draped over the back. His pale green slacks were spotted with damp and wrinkled, and his black cashmere sweater was matted. Mulheisen thought he'd like to be able to wreck a great sweater like that.

“Whew!” Lande looked weary and drawn, but his cheeks were ruddy. “It ain't a great day for gawf, Mul, but I had a few good shots. I hit a three wood you wouldn't believe.”

Mulheisen cocked his head with interest. “Can you actually play in these conditions?”

“This ain't nothin’,” Lande declared. “You ever play in Scotland? I have. I played the Old Course, at Saint Andrews. Hell, I remember once at Carnoustie it was like playing in a hurricane! Those guys, those Scotsmen, they don't give a rat's ass—they play in any kinda weather. You don't gawf? No? I kinda figgered you belonged to Grosse Pointe, or one a them clubs. No? Not that much of a course, actually. This is better.”

“I heard shots,” Mulheisen said.

“Kids,” Lande said. “They poke around down the crick and jump-shoot the ducks. Say,” he pointed at Mulheisen's cigar, “you got another one a them?”

“No,” Mulheisen lied.

“That's all right,” Lande said. He fished out a pack of cigarettes and lighted up. “So. What're ya doin’ here?” He suddenly looked alarmed. “It ain't Bonny? Nothin's wrong is there?”

“Bonny? No. Why?”

Lande looked relieved. “Nothin’. Oh, she ain't been feelin’ too good lately. It's nothin’. So what brings you out here?”

“I went by your office yesterday,” Mulheisen said. “Miss Bommarito said you spent a lot of time out here.”

“Yanh, she thinks I'm nuts,” Lande said. “Well, yer here. How come?”

“I was just checking out some information on the Sedlacek case,” Mulheisen said, “and the Tupman shooting.” He watched Lande closely.

Lande sipped his whiskey calmly and gazed back. “Tupman,” he said with a snort of contempt. “That piece a shit. Good riddance.” He drew on his cigarette. “Kind of a long way to come to ask about nothin’, ain't it?”