Hit on the House (14 page)

Mulheisen sighed. “Yeah, I'm the well-known softhearted cop. But,” his voice hardened, “there's another side to me.” He stood up. “Don't forget it.” And he walked out into the rain. It felt better on his face than he could have imagined, very refreshing after the colloquy in the clubhouse. It was simple and honest, wet and cold.

Lande followed after turning out the lights and locking the door. “Hey, wait up, Mul! Why'ncha come over, cheer up Bonny? We could pick up something on the way.”

“Go home,” Mulheisen said, “I am.”

“Wait up!” Lande crunched across the gravel in his golf shoes and
opened the door of the Cadillac. He sat down in the driver's seat and shucked off his soggy golf shoes, then slipped on a pair of wing tips. “We could go to Fazio's,” he said, “pick up some stuff and take it home. Bonny'd love to see ya.”

Mulheisen looked down at the eager, pleading face and uttered a short laugh. “You're too much, Lande. Go home!”

Lande looked up at him uncertainly, then laughed. “Yeah, yer right. Bonny says I don't know when to quit. That's my big failin’. I push too hard.” He tied his laces and stood up. “Hey, thanks for everything man.” He stuck out his hand, and as soon as Mulheisen unthinkingly took it, he knew the grip would be fierce. Lande's hand was powerful, and of course he couldn't resist cranking on a larger man's. Mulheisen attempted to resist at first, just to avoid the crush, then he angrily wrenched his hand free.

“Hey, sorry man! Don't know my own strinth,” Lande said. “But seriously, I ‘predate you talkin’ to me like this, man-to-man. A lotta guys don't, you know? It helps. We oughta get together more off-ten. Whataya say? I think we could be pals. Hey, I could teach ya gawf. I'm a helluva teacher. I'm a scratch gawfer, ya know. I even beat Eric . . . once in a while.”

“I've got to go,” Mulheisen said. And all the way home he thought of the things he should have asked Lande but hadn't. He was still screwing up, he thought.

Twelve

A
mtrak's Zephyr pulled into Mount Pleasant, Iowa, at 8:40
A.M
., right on time. Joe Service had been awakened in good time by Mr. Alonzo Johnson, who knocked softly on the door of suite A/B. He had risen and bathed and shaved, and Mr. Johnson had brought him a bottle of champagne, nicely chilled, along with a carafe of coffee. Joe was grateful. Three days earlier he had ridden into Oakland from Los Angeles on the Coast Starlight, and it had not been fun. That train had been overcrowded with noisy people. There had been a long wait at the dining car, and there were no vacant seats in the lounge. The Zephyr was a much better ride. For one thing he'd spent the night in San Francisco, a city he liked, and he'd been able to provision himself properly. He had boarded the Zephyr with one bag and a newly purchased canvas carryall filled with fresh sourdough French bread, various cheeses, several bottles of wine and Perrier water, and a plastic sack full of fresh fish.

After establishing himself in the suite, Joe had slipped down to the galley and conferred with the chef. This was a large black man named Walker who at first was not inclined to listen to Joe. But Joe pressed a significant amount of cash into his hand, as well as the bag, filled with sea bass.

“It's the morning catch,” Joe explained. “I bought it right off the boat. Now I understand you are serving sole for dinner, and I know from experience that it is very good, but I just had this yen for sea bass.
There's plenty for you, if you like that sort of thing . . .” There was enough for the whole galley crew, in fact.

“That's all right, bro,” Chef Walker said. “I grill it with my own special sauce, kind of a Cajun sauce that I learned in New Iberia. Just let the maître d’ know when you come in.”

Next Joe had gone to Mr. Johnson, a very pleasant gentleman, and placed fifty dollars in his hand, along with six bottles of French champagne and six bottles of California chardonnay. Joe explained to him that he needed at least two bottles of the champagne daily, before breakfast and with lunch. There was also the Havarti and the Cheshire, a Brie and a Wensleydale, all of which needed to be refrigerated. He would nibble on them en route, along with a bunch each of red and green grapes, a melon, and some oranges. Alonzo Johnson cheerfully agreed to place all of these provisions in the cooler and to bring them to him as required.

Joe went up to the lounge for the run up to Suisun Bay and the Sacramento River. He enjoyed the cormorants and herons flying up as the train ran smoothly and swiftly past the mothball fleet of World War II warships. The train was not overcrowded, and Joe reveled in the peculiar, smug sensation that he always felt when a two- or three-day train journey commenced.

Later they began to climb up into the Sierras, and Joe relaxed in his spacious suite with magazines and an excellent caper novel by Donald Westlake. He detrained for a minute at Truckee, relishing the mountain air and ogling a party of attractive women on the main street, a young sultry blonde and her eagle-eyed mother and a strapping six-foot blonde with her slim and sexy mother. There was no time to pursue adventure. He reboarded and dined on Chef Walker's splendid version of bass, with garlic and onions and a hot, spicy wine sauce. The sauce was really too much for the bass, he thought, but it was good. He drank a bottle of .the chardonnay.

The Rockies were great the next day, especially the stretch through the Glenwood canyon and then the run through the Moffat Tunnel before they thundered down into Denver. But he spent most of his time in his suite, cleaning guns and joyfully reflecting on his successful liaison with Jizzy. She had shown him more than the expected forwarding
telephone number for Hal Good. There was an actual street address in Iowa City. Joe could hardly believe it. Surely this couldn't be Good's home address? Well, he would check it out, but it seemed awfully lax for a presumably competent professional hit man.

As for Jizzy . . . well, Jizzy had been superb. He would remember her fondly for days, even weeks. Maybe some day, when he had amassed enough capital and could live on his investments and give up this goofy life, he would give her a ring and they could get together.

On the morning of the third day, in Mount Pleasant, Joe apologized to Mr. Johnson for leaving the suite in such disorder. There was a bottle each of champagne and chardonnay left, and he commended them to Alonzo, along with another portrait of Ulysses S. Grant.

It was a cool spring day in the farm country. All the snow was gone, but the plowmen were not yet in the wet fields. Joe thought about renting a car, but there was none to rent, a possibility that had not occurred to him. He abandoned the new canvas carryall against the wall of a bar, walked out onto the highway, and stood there with his one remaining bag. Within minutes a stout young farm lad wearing a Simplot cap and driving a splendid four-by-four Jimmy pickup truck with jumbo wheels stopped for him. He wasn't going far, but he got on his CB radio and started calling. Within seconds a trucker northbound on the same highway, just a few miles south of them, responded. The farm lad explained that Joe was going to Iowa City and would be left at milepost 67. “I'll be looking for him, ten-four,” the trucker said.

Joe thanked the farmer when he dropped him off and took up his stance next to milepost 67 in the fresh breeze, delighted to be in this excellent and accommodating country. Sure enough, about eight minutes later an enormous semi rig came howling up the line, and as he roared by Joe, he blasted his air horn twice. The wind of his passing nearly knocked Joe down. Crestfallen, he stared after the huge truck as it echoed away up the next hill. Then he laughed. Not ten minutes later a salesman in a new Buick stopped. He was headed for Cedar Rapids, on the other side of Iowa City. He had all his clothes hanging on a rack across the backseat, and Joe had to put his bag under his legs in front. He also had to listen to the salesman's philosophy of life, which seemed largely a condemnation of “niggers, hippies, an’ dope-a-dicks.” All the
while the tape deck screamed out songs by Barbara Mandrell. Still, in less than forty minutes he was in Coralville, a kind of suburb of Iowa City.

Here Joe was able to rent a car, a Ford Escort, and he drove over to Iowa City, where he quickly found Black Street. The street ran up a hill off the Iowa River. The house he was looking for turned out to be a simple white frame house next to a park. There was a driveway on one side, with an unattached garage. In the drive was a four-by-four Blazer. A fifteen-foot fiberglass launch with a huge outboard motor sat on a trailer next to the garage, covered with a blue tailor-made canvas cover. Joe parked the Ford next to the little park and watched a buxom blond woman throw a Frisbee to her even blonder four-year-old girl. Joe got out and leaned against the fender in the pleasant spring sunlight. Inevitably the Frisbee came his way, and Joe picked it up, spinning it back to the woman. Eventually she walked back with the child, a very pretty young girl, and said, “Hi,” with a broad smile.

“Hey, are you a student?” Joe asked her.

“No,” she said.

“I'm looking for a buddy, from the navy,” Joe said. “He gave me his address, but I lost it. He said he lived on Black Street. His name is Hal?”

“Hal?” the woman said. “I don't know any Hal. What does he look like?”

“About my age,” Joe said, “kind of slim, a little taller than me. Fair hair?”

“There's a guy sort of like that who lives over there,” said the woman, pointing to the white house with the boat. “I don't know his name. He's a cop, I think. Is your friend a cop?”

“A cop? No way. Maybe your husband knows him.” Joe walked across the street with the woman to the gate of her little house.

“Husband? I seem to have misplaced my husband,” the woman said, sizing up Joe in a frank, amused way. She had a narrow, attractive face with a small, expressive mouth and nice blue eyes. She had a way of standing with a hand on her hip. The little girl squinted up at Joe with the same blue eyes, but with a slightly sidelong look that was endearing.

Joe leaned on the picket fence. “Well, maybe we could have a beer or something.” He grinned pleasantly.

“Some other time,” the woman said. She nodded at the little girl. “I've got things to do.”

“Well, thanks anyway.” Joe strolled off to a little shopping plaza a block away and looked up Hal Good in the telephone directory. There was no listing; He returned to the car and drove downtown to the police station, where he asked for a driver's license application. He asked the uniformed woman in the license bureau if Hal was around. She didn't know any Hal. There wasn't any Hal Good on the force. Joe took the application and the driver's manual and left.

He went to a nice older restaurant on Governor Street, not too far from where Hal was supposed to live, and was pleased to discover that the woman from the park was his waitress. She smiled in a friendly way and recommended the ravioli. It was very good, as was the Italian wine. It was a relaxed kind of place, frequented by older students and professors, as far as Joe could tell. It wasn't very busy. The waitress, Rita, chatted with him in a cheerful, mildly flirtatious way, and so he pleasantly passed the time until dark.

He drove back to the park and changed into a dark blue jogging outfit of sweatpants, sweatshirt, and running shoes. Over the sweatshirt he wore a dark windbreaker, and after a moment's reflection he slipped a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver into his pocket. It was the Bodyguard Airweight model, and despite its appellation it was a little heavy, but he had never found anything to recommend a lighter caliber in his line of work, and this gun had a shrouded hammer to prevent snagging in the pocket.

He walked down through the weeds and alder brush until he reached the back of the property he had scouted. There was a heavy wire fence and a doghouse in the backyard but no sign of a dog. He had noticed the doghouse earlier. Where was the dog? In the house? Perhaps Hal had once owned a dog but no longer.

He sat in the bushes for a long time, two hours by his watch, until a convertible came along Black Street and turned into the driveway behind the Blazer. A man got out of the passenger seat, and a woman
got out from behind the wheel. The man fitted the Fat Man's admittedly limited description of Hal Good. The woman was very young, perhaps a teenager, with long dark hair, wearing jeans and a man's sport jacket that was too big for her. The man carried a bag of groceries, and the girl, two cartons of Mexican beer in bottles.

There were no welcoming barks from a dog when the couple entered the house. That was good. The lights went on, and through the curtained windows of the kitchen Joe could see the man and the girl, evidently making supper.

Joe sat quietly. After a while, when it was well into the evening, he saw the waitress, Rita, return in a Volkswagen and park across the street. She hauled out the little girl, who seemed to be asleep, and carried her into the darkened house. The lights came on. Joe stood and stretched. All along the quiet street there were lights in the little frame houses. People came out and walked their dogs. Across the street he could see Rita occasionally passing a window. He decided that the applicable epithet for her was
statuesque
. The mild traffic noise of the town ebbed and waxed, ebbed and ebbed some more.

The lights in the house Hal and his girlfriend had entered were still on in the kitchen. He saw the couple standing by the window where the sink must be. Washing up, he thought. Finally lights went on upstairs. There were no more dog walkers. A group of boys who had been tossing a football under the streetlights at the end of the block wandered off.

A man came out onto the porch of a house across the street, two doors from Rita's, and stretched. He lighted a cigarette and crossed over into the park. He walked no more than twenty feet before stopping to urinate, then he walked home. In all this time not more than five cars had come to park on the street, all of their occupants bustling into their houses.

Joe wondered if the girl would leave. He walked around quietly and carefully to ease his boredom and to keep from getting chilled. When the time rolled around to midnight and most of the lights on the street had gone out, he decided that the girl must be spending the night. That complicated things. He went back to his car and changed into his
usual pants and shirt and a sweater and drove away. It would have been nice, he thought, to have caught Hal at home in the afternoon, alone.

He went to a bar uptown that was filled with college students. The beer was excellent, and he had a good chance to pick up a lovely girl who seemed to think Joe was a young professor or something, but he kept his senses and took the opportunity to call the Fat Man in Detroit, just to report his progress.

The Fat Man was very excited. “Joe! Where you been? Carmine's about to flip. That crazy Hal blew away five guys last night. Talk about a loose cannon!”

“In Detroit?” Joe was puzzled. The behavior of Hal with the girl, his casual manner, didn't strike Joe as that of a man who had boldly shot down five men less than twenty-four hours before. It was possible, of course, but mystifying. Joe explained that he had found Hal—or at least someone who looked like Hal was supposed to look and was living in the house with the address that Hal had given the answering service. There was a girl at the house, Joe said, but he guessed under the strain of present circumstances he'd just have to go in, girl or no girl.