Hit on the House (17 page)

“Oh, stop it,” Mulheisen said. “I'm sick of you people. You think you can just kill people. It doesn't work that way. Maybe back when
you were in tribes or something . . . Anyway, it's not so easy. These people are obviously pretty dangerous. What are you, a hired consultant? Give me a break.”

“You know nothing!” Her eyes flashed, and she shook her wealth of black hair stormily, striding on.

“Your father and his associates,” Mulheisen said sarcastically, “seem to think that their business only concerns them, and they'll take care of it when things go wrong. But that's not what happens. Other people get involved, like this Hal Good. Or sometimes people just get blown away because they're in the line of fire—like those young lawyers slumming with Tupman. And now you come on with this Old World vendetta crap. Grow up.”

“I knew you wouldn't understand,” she said. “Everybody knows better than to talk to a cop.”

“That's the problem around here,” Mulheisen said. “Everybody thinks he knows better than the cops, that he—or she—can do better than the cops. But believe me, Helen, that's weak thinking. It's just foolish cynicism. It plays well in Detroit because we all like to believe we're tough, we've been through the mill, we've seen it all, we can take it and dish it out. It's just ignorance.”

The woman shrugged, striding on. “OK. You're right, of course. I'm not a Sicilian like Carmine, after all. I was born here. I went to school here. But I loved my papa. You didn't love him. I know what a Serb has to do. I was Papa's only child. I wasn't his son, but a daughter can do what a son would have done. It isn't enough for me to hear that Hal Good is dead. It doesn't satisfy here.” She pounded her fist against her breast.

Mulheisen glanced at her, fascinated. What a difference, he thought, between this woman and Bonny. But they both seemed to be ready to kill Germaine Kouras. He shook his head.

“What?” Helen Sedlacek demanded, observing his quizzical expression.

Mulheisen was thinking of a note his mother had left on the refrigerator door a couple of days earlier. A developer was proceeding with a trailer-court project down the road from them, despite bitter complaints from the neighbors and environmentalists. The note had
read: “Mul—the bastard is going ahead with it. Meeting at 7:30. Bring grenades.”

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking how bloody-minded women can be.”

“You're too soft, Mulheisen,” she responded. “It isn't just all testosterone, you know.”

“Do you know a man named Eugene Lande?” he asked.

“Lande? Sure. Smart little prick,” she said. She laughed. “He designed my computer system and installed it. Cheap, too. Great guy. Why?”

Mulheisen was amazed. Lande—a great guy? Was there something he didn't know? “How did you happen to hire Lande?”

“I don't know. Somebody suggested him. His bid was a lot lower than anybody else's.”

“You never knew him before?”

“No. He's a real screwball, come to think of it.”

They had returned to Tom's Oyster Bar. Helen stuck out her hand and shook his firmly. She looked up at him resolutely. “You're a well-meaning man, Mul,” she said. “'Thanks for finding out about this Hall Good. I appreciate it. I really do. It goes a long way toward making it better.” She actually patted him on the shoulder, then turned away with a simple “Thanks again.”

Fourteen

“. . . B
ring grenades.”

Cora Mulheisen was outraged. The little maple-lined road on which they lived was being raped. A developer had bought the estate of the late Sarah Goldkette, a lifelong neighbor of the Mulheisens’, from her grandchildren, who had lived in California and/or Arizona most of their adult lives. The developer was said to have paid “a cool million” for the forty-acre property, which was located about a quarter mile up the road from the Mulheisens. The old Goldkette farmhouse would be torn down and replaced with a convenience store and lots for a hundred mobile homes. Outrage!

The Mulheisen home was itself an old farmhouse. A man from Ohio had built it in 1892, thinking that his sweetheart would soon join him; but she died, and after a few years another farmer, named Jabez Cooke, a black man from Ontario who had been employed by the Ohio man, bought the property and built a small cabin near the river. Cooke built a good-size barn, which still stood, and a few smaller buildings—a henhouse, a toolshed, an outhouse, and so on—which were long gone. Grampaw Cooke raised onions and other garden crops and kept a few cows and chickens and pigs. He had never lived in the main house. He had been a lifelong bachelor, reputed to be a great fisherman and a trapper of muskrats. In 1921 Mulheisen's father, then an engineer but eventually the water commissioner, bought the property, granted Grampaw Cooke a lifetime lease, and had the old farmhouse renovated to
accommodate himself and his wife. Grampaw Cooke lived in the cabin by the river until he died, in 1934. Mulheisen had not, of course, known the old man, but the cabin survived until 1962, when it was swept into the St. Clair River during a great spring flood caused by an enormous ice jam.

Grampaw Cooke was a legendary figure to Mulheisen. In his lonely but otherwise quite happy childhood he had often lingered in the cabin, imagining himself to be a runaway slave, very bold and adventurous, a famous hunter and trapper and all-around outdoorsman. The cabin became his bunk, as he called it, and it was variously situated on the Arctic Circle, the Missouri River, the upper Amazon, and even the Congo—regardless of season, for the season was dictated by young Mul's reading. Thus, it mattered not if a frozen Saint Clair River could only rarely be transformed into the great gray-green greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees.

Mulheisen still possessed a few old artifacts that had belonged to Jabez Cooke—a couple of rusted traps, an old cracked cane pole that had been made in Mobile, Alabama. They were in the attic now, next to the pile of goods that included the picture of Bonny Wheeler.

There were now Detroiters in the six farmhouses that lined the opposite side of the half-mile-long road, all of which had been converted into more-or-less gentrified country homes, nominally preserving the familiar style of the midwestern farmhouse—two storied, with wide front porches and sash windows—but lately sporting such California modifications as carports, crank-open windows, sliding glass doors that opened onto redwood decks in backyards that featured hot tubs and even swimming pools. Though Cora Mulheisen laughed derisively at these innovations, she had not denounced outright this relatively benign form of domestic evolution. But mobile homes!

All forty acres of Mulheisen property fronted on the Saint Clair River, now controlled by the federal government and maintained as part of a national wetlands system. Somehow the Goldkette property had not been included in the same scheme. Cora Mulheisen felt it should have been and that the proposed mobile home development had a suspect waste-disposal system. She was not opposed, in principle, to the introduction of lower-income housing to the area, but she did loathe
mobile homes—instant aluminum slums, she called them—and she reckoned that the potential traffic and the impact of that many people on a fragile ecosystem would be disastrous. She was particularly suspicious of the notion that one hundred mobile homes could adequately dispose of their domestic waste through the developer's system without contaminating the river and the wetlands project and, inevitably, the lake below. Current zoning laws did not prohibit the development. Indeed, there was federal money involved—a different agency, of course. Cora Mulheisen's plan was to pit the agencies against one another, in the hope that the wetlands project would win.

This was going to be a bitter fight. There were community meetings, picket lines, letters to be written to the editors of newspapers, to congressmen, to environmental groups. Mulheisen felt he should support his mother in this, but he couldn't find the time or energy. She had plenty of both, however.

Jimmy Marshall was not sympathetic to Cora Mulheisen's crusade, although Mulheisen tried to convert him with the environmentalist views he had acquired from his mother. The way Jimmy saw it, a rich old white woman was trying to stop poor folks from moving into an area where they could give their kids access to the river and the great outdoors.

When Mulheisen told him his mother was working to get the wetlands designated the Jabez Cooke National Wetlands Reserve, Jimmy riposted, “First and last nigger in those parts.” But privately he knew that Mulheisen and his mother had no animus against black people, nor against poor people of any race. They just hated to lose their isolation, and they hated the developer, who had no altruistic notions of providing homes for the poor. If regulations permitted it, the developer would build a high rise or some other yuppie-oriented development.

The fact was Detroit was moving out. It had always been doing so. In Mulheisen's eyes it should never have been situated where it was in the first place. Militarily it must have made sense to control the straits, but the native peoples had never seen any reason to live in this low, marshy area. When they occasionally met at the straits, it was always on an island—Belle Isle, Peach Island, Harsen's Island—or on the
higher Canadian side, which was more healthful. Only commerce-minded Euro-Americans could seriously contemplate building a settlement there. After the village burned down in 1805, it would have been a good time to abandon the site. But, alas, along came Judge Augustus B. Woodward with his mind full of L'Enfant's plan for Washington—another city, like St. Petersburg, built on a swamp (visionaries are perhaps by nature swamp drainers, cloacally obsessed)—and it was used for Detroit.

Still, it was mainly social issues—racism, mainly—that prompted the population shift beginning in the mid-twentieth century.

Mulheisen himself was gloomily contemplating a reverse migration, back into town. Not right away, of course, no matter what happened with the development. He would wait until his mother died. She was seventy-nine, but a vigorous woman. She looked good for another twenty years, or more.

Mulheisen was expressing some of these thoughts at dinner, at the Marshalls’. Jimmy and Yvonne had purchased a house in the Chandler Park area, just off Outer Drive. It was their dream house, a well-built brick home with three bedrooms and a fenced yard in the back. To their horror they had recently discovered that drug pushers were operating practically on their corner. Their eight-year-old son, Kirby, was scared. Kids in his school had been caught with crack and even pistols. Yvonne had promptly enrolled him in a Catholic school. Then she had organized a neighborhood watch group, mothers and fathers patrolling the streets at night and warning off the pushers. But lately the pushers had become more insolent, threatening the neighborhood patrols with guns, occasionally slashing the tires of the cars of the more active parents, even shooting at houses.

Mulheisen had arrived with a bottle of wine. He and Yvonne Marshall greeted each other politely. She was a large, striking woman who tended to dress in gorgeous African gowns. She had a master's degree in social science, and Mulheisen was frankly intimidated by her. She seemed to be accusing him of something. Tonight she was wearing a wildly patterned robe with a lot of red and orange to it, along with several necklaces of colored beads and one of silver with many dangling, obscure shapes attached. Her hair was pulled back severely and then
allowed to explode behind her head in a great black and silver bush. Her earrings were immense—silver bangles in intricate shapes that clanged as she moved.

The children were attractive—the girl, Tanza (short for Tanzania, where Yvonne had been a Peace Corps volunteer), who was six, and Kirby, who seemed very bright, an impression underscored by his heavy, black-rimmed glasses. Mulheisen had brought Tanza a picture book by Ezra Jack Keats, which was well received, and Kirby a box of baseball cards, in which the boy politely feigned interest. They were presented to Mulheisen in their pajamas. Tanza surprised him by throwing her arms about his neck and kissing him on the cheek. “Goodnight, Fang!” she cried with a giggle. Then Kirby gravely shook his hand and said, “Thank you and good night, sir.” As they went up to bed, Mulheisen overheard Kirby admonishing his sister. “You dope!” he said, “that's not his real name.”

Dinner, as always with Yvonne, consisted of a curious mixture of strange grains—dark rice, barley, oats, or perhaps it was ground garbanzo beans—and chopped vegetables—green peppers and onions and carrots—along with tiny fragments of grayish meat that could have been anything but was probably goat or lamb. Mulheisen could never quite figure it out. It didn't taste bad, but it didn't taste good enough for him to overcome his suspicions. There was the inevitable yellowish paste (more garbanzo beans?) with a strident flavoring that he just couldn't be enthusiastic about—neither sweet nor sour, hot nor bland, just strong. One was supposed to dip into this with a piece of flat, tasteless bread and then dip the whole thing into a lurid, streaky liquid that reminded Mulheisen of transmission fluid. It was very hot. All of it was presumably Tanzanian cuisine, though perhaps not. Mulheisen gulped the wine, as did Jimmy, but Yvonne did not.

Afterward, drinking coffee in the living room, Yvonne impatiently brushed aside Mulheisen's arguments about the threatened development in Saint Clair Flats. “You just don't realize how most people have to live, Mul,” she said. “I don't just mean in the rest of the world, but right here. We are fighting for our lives here, and for our children's lives.”

“Oh, now, honey—” Jimmy began, but she cut him short.

“It is nothing less,” she insisted. “If I was a young African-American boy growing up in Detroit, I would be scared to death. You know my cousin June—she lives in Highland Park?—her neighbor's boy was shot two weeks ago. He was just walking home from school, and some other boys were driving by, and they shot him. He's all right, but he could have been killed. And do you know what it was? They thought he was some other boy who wore the same kind of jacket and was in a rival drug posse, or whatever they call it.”

Mulheisen didn't know what to say. He knew it happened. He had investigated similar cases, although it wasn't his usual area of responsibility. There were task forces assigned to such crimes, but since he was unofficially the chief detective in the precinct, many of the cases came his way, at least initially. It was a tremendous problem, an overwhelming problem, and he couldn't see any clear way out of it.

“It's not just a crime problem,” he said. “It isn't just a matter of busting the pushers, breaking up the drug trade—although that has to be done—but it's unemployment, bad schools . . .” He started to recite the all-too-familiar litany but stopped. What was the use? The whole society seemed in peril, on the verge of anarchy. Still, as daunting as it seemed, he wasn't ready to give up. It was his city, after all. He felt that his job, and Jimmy's, were important; if he could just do it, that would contribute to a solution. He wasn't going to take on all the city's problems, however.

Yvonne snorted contemptuously. “Well, something's going to happen, I can tell you that. This reminds me of ‘67. There'll be riots again, you know. But,” she drew herself up, “this time we aren't going to fall back on the same old sorry half-assed patch up of the good-ol'-boy system. This time we're going to figure out what has to be done, and we'll do it! If the whole bunch of you folks have to go.”

“If you mean white folks,” Mulheisen said, “most of us have already gone.”

“Yeah. You ran to the suburbs and left us here to clean up your shit.”

“Jesus, hon,” Jimmy said.

Yvonne turned on him. “Hell, he ain't my boss. But you're right, Mul. Most of you did go, but you didn't let go of the money and the
power. Or am I supposed to believe that you turned it over to us, and we trashed it?”

“No, I don't mean that,” Mulheisen replied. “It's not as if somebody just said one day, ‘OK, we got what we wanted, now it's your turn.’ It happened over a long period of time. You know that. Those who could get out, got out. Maybe they were racists, maybe the real estate scammers scared them out, but maybe they were just ordinary folks who thought they'd like to bring up their kids in a better environment. Maybe you'd like to get out, too.”

“You got that right,” she responded. “Maybe I could move to that trailer court in Saint Clair Flats. But you know they aren't taking applications from people like me.”