Hit on the House (23 page)

“Theoretically,” he said dryly, “but not in practice. Of course, I entertain all offers; I don't necessarily accept. Are you making an offer?”

Her eyes glittering, Helen slipped to her knees before him. “I don't know what I can offer, . . .” she said with a sly smile. She reached out and opened his robe and caressed him.

Joe bent forward and took her by the arms and drew her into an embrace. They kissed for a while, deeply, and he whispered in her ear, “Oh, you have a lot to offer, sweet little Helen, but I have a feeling that you have even more to ask.” He held her closely clipped head in his
hands, loving the way that it felt in his strong fingers. He kissed her eyes. Her hair was a tiny patch of silky fur, lovely to the touch.

“I'm my Papa's boy,” she breathed and slipped down between his knees.

“Ah. I see.” He held her small skull tightly. Afterward she was warm and alive in his arms. So fine. He had never felt anything quite like it. But at last he shifted her to one side and looked into her face. “I think I know what you want,” he said. “I have to tell you right now that I'm not in Hal's line of work. I'm a finder. If you want me to find something for you, I'll do it. But if you want me to perform anything more, ah, terminal, . . . put it out of your mind.”

She raised her naked face to his. Her lips were a pale pink, and the little black cap of hair suggested a bird, a chickadee perhaps, or a goldfinch. “Oh, that's fine, buddy,” she crooned, “I wouldn't want you to go too far . . . to do my job. But if you could help . . .”

Joe didn't say anything for a long moment, then, “It's been done. Sometimes the people I find are dealt with later by my clients. That's not my concern.”

“You know,” Helen said, “Carmine didn't even come to Papa's funeral. That was unusual. The official word was that he was ill. He sent a wreath and a card. Mama was disappointed. It's a good thing he didn't come. I wouldn't be lying in your arms right now. I'd be in jail. Can you put me next to him?”

“Maybe we can help each other,” Joe said. “Do you know a man named Gene Lande?”

Helen sat back abruptly and wrinkled her nose. “Lande? Sure, I know him. Why?”

“What is he, some kind of leper, or something?” Joe asked. “Everybody gives me this look when I mention him.”

“He's a good golfer,” Helen said, “a big hitter, and almost a machine around the green. He has a beautiful swing, not big and glamorous, but compact and powerful. Really good. Is that better?”

“Gee, you sound like you dig the guy,” Joe said. “I'm getting jealous.”

“Only his swing,” she said. “Do you play?”

“Never,” he replied. “Do you?”

“I carry a five handicap.”

“Is that good?”

She shook her head in mock rue. “I only know three or four women who can play with me. Mostly I play with guys. Usually I beat them.”

“Maybe you can teach me,” Joe said. “It can't be all that hard.”

“If you've never played, it's too late. I don't know anybody who ever took it up as an adult and was good at it. Papa used to take me when I was just a kid. He never could play worth a darn himself, but he was crazy about the game. He was so proud of me when I won the junior girls municipal tournament. I was thirteen.”

“Papa's boy,” Joe said, watching her.

Helen smiled. “That time, anyway.”

He took her in his arms again and kissed her, long and sweet. “What should I call you?” he wondered. “Hel?”

“Oh, I'll be hell, all right,” she whispered, “but call me Buddy.”

Twenty

“A
re you sure the Sweet Home is the right place for your friend, Mul?” asked Carlotta Bledsoe. She was a trim woman of thirty with light brown skin and a taste for extremely large spectacles that covered half her face.

Mulheisen was puzzled. “Why not?”

“It's very unusual,” she said. “We've never had a white woman here. Folks tend to take their loved ones to their own people.”

Mulheisen had never given a thought to this aspect of it. The Sweet Home Funeral Parlor was the only private mortuary where he knew the people. His father and Doc Bledsoe had been fishing pals for many years, and Mulheisen had known Carlotta since childhood; it had not occurred to him that there was a racial dimension here. In funeral parlors? But now that the idea had been presented to him, he could see that it was bound to be, given the ornery nature of man, although it still seemed bizarre.

Carlotta's suggestion only gave a momentary check to his scheme, however, which was to move Bonny from the hospital mortuary to a private one. He hoped it would flush Gene Lande out of hiding. The suggested impropriety of placing her in a—what? a “black”? a “non-white”? (even the terminology seemed laughable)—funeral home seemed irrelevant beside the ethical implications of—to be blunt—using her corpse as a decoy.

He thought he'd considered all the arguments—foremost was that
if Lande had indeed been the assassin in the Conover and/or the Tupman massacre, almost any action was justified in securing the arrest of such a dangerous man, in the interest of public safety. Beyond that, if Lande weren't dangerous to others, he might be dangerous to himself or in danger of being harmed by others, including the mob.

There was a further, compelling consideration: the hospital was prepared to send the body to the Wayne County Morgue as unclaimed. Legally they couldn't hold it much longer, even if they had the space and the inclination. Mulheisen had spent too much time at the morgue to bear the thought of Bonny on one of its slabs. He was not a sentimental man, but the morgue was not the place for someone he cared about.

He had been thinking about Bonny a lot, naturally, and some of his thoughts had not been comforting. He found he could still not shake his self-assumed lifelong obligation to look after her, starting with that day on the playground in the sixth grade. Well, it wasn't over . . . yet.

No, no, he would not permit Bonny to be removed to the county morgue. He bullied the hospital into releasing the body into his custody, and it was transported to the Sweet Home, Carlotta's misgivings notwithstanding. The hospital would of course inform Lande of the disposition of the body, if he called, and they said they'd try to notify Mulheisen if that happened. The body was not to be embalmed, he told Carlotta, but held in storage until further instructions. Carlotta consented to this.

In the meantime Mulheisen, Jimmy Marshall, and other detectives from the Ninth Precinct ransacked Lande's office, his home, and the golf club but found little of interest. There was no documentation, for instance, on the shipment of computer equipment to Grand Cayman Island. Alicia Bommarito insisted that Lande himself had handled it. “It was personal,” she said, “something to do with the golf-resort deal he was working on.” What that deal was she didn't know; Lande had never discussed it with her.

At Lande's home there was nothing of immediate interest; some personal papers in a filing cabinet might yield something eventually, but Mulheisen was not disposed to take the time now to analyze them. He stood in the Landes’ bedroom, gazing at the inevitable champagne
decor. The large bed was unmade; a heavy satin bedspread and some of Lande's soiled clothing lay on the deep pile of the champagne carpet, but otherwise everything was quite neat and orderly. Presumably Lande had not slept here for several days.

It was curiously moving to look upon the intimate personal belongings of a woman whom one has . . . well, loved. Bonny's clothes hung in the closet; shoes were lined up primly, the ones she used frequently, anyway—there were a lot of shoe boxes. With a sigh Mulheisen knelt and went through them all. There were nothing in the boxes but shoes, Bonny's shoes. He rose and looked about. Her toiletries were carefully arranged on the vanity. They looked useless. They were useless now. Throw them away.

On a pale, Scandinavian-style dresser was a photo of Bonny in a bikini, reclining against the windshield of what appeared to be a large cabin cruiser. Dimly visible through the glass of the windshield, peering over the boat's wheel, Lande's goofy mustache bristled behind Bonny's head, his grin glowing in a shaft of light. Bonny looked great, almost as spectacular as in the famous centerfold. From the way she looked—the hairstyle, her face—Mulheisen thought the picture may have been taken as recently as a few months earlier, perhaps when the couple was in the Caymans for Christmas.

Mulheisen picked up the photo and stared at it. No doubt about it, Bonny was a beautiful woman. And then in the background he noticed a familiar landscape—the distant shoreline of Ontario. At least it looked like the shoreline he had seen a thousand times—it sure wasn't a tropical setting. He supposed the boat could have been anchored in one of the many little bays of either Peach Island or Harsen's Island. And it was probably taken last summer, evidently a hot day, considering that Bonny was practically falling out of her bathing suit.

Mulheisen took the picture with him.

At Briar Ridge there was no sign of anyone having been near the place in days. There were again some potentially interesting files in the little office, but nothing to grip Mulheisen's attention. He walked out onto the deck. It was a sunny day at last. He looked out over the course. It looked great, but he supposed that the fairway grass was getting a little high. It would need mowing soon.

Back in the precinct by the end of the afternoon, Mulheisen found that there was no further sign of Eugene Lande, and he was considering a full-scale manhunt instead of the cautious effort he had thus far put forth. But he wasn't depressed by any means. He felt confident even if he couldn't say why. He was glad that Buchanan was safely out of the way, with the Big Four engaged in his defense. And he was glad that Bonny was at Sweet Home. There was one setback, however—Sergeant Maki reported that Lande did not and had not owned a boat. Certainly there was no boat registered in his name in the state, no insurance company had insured such a boat, nor could any of the yacht clubs or boat liveries in the Detroit-Windsor area say that he had ever kept a boat. So the picture must have been taken on someone else's boat; not an unlikely conclusion, since someone else had taken the photo. Who the photographer was, however, was not evident. The enlargement had been made from a snapshot, at a photo shop in a mall near the Landes’ home, and paid for by Lande. It had been originally developed at the same shop, from film brought in by Mrs. Lande the preceding September. End of story. Mulheisen abandoned this avenue of investigation—if it weren't Lande's boat, it was not likely he would be hiding on it.

About eight o'clock Mulheisen wrapped up a meeting with his detectives, advising them that if nothing had developed by tomorrow morning, he would push for a full-scale manhunt. He was tempted to stop in at one of his favorite watering holes on the way home, but he drove on. It was a warm night, and it occurred to him that the Tigers would be opening the baseball season in a couple of days. This thought lifted his spirits. Baseball was not, after all, a thing of great consequence, and for this he was grateful. He longed for something of no great consequence to occupy his mind, if only temporarily, something nonetheless quite fine and pleasurable after this long, bitter spring.

The protest signs were gone from the site of the development when he turned down his road. He wondered if this were good or bad, but his mother was not home to enlighten him. She had left a message on the refrigerator, concerning the presence of a cold meat loaf that could be warmed in the microwave, with a PS—“I'm at Eastern Star.” He had just decided on a cold meat loaf sandwich instead and was
slathering the thick slice with ketchup when the phone rang. It was Carlotta.

“Your man was here, Mul,” she said, “just a few minutes ago. My, he's a handful, isn't he? He came in here ranting and raving about how I had to release his wife's body to him and I told him, ‘Fine, you get me Mulheisen on the line,’ and I held out the phone to him, but he said he didn't have to go through no police to get his wife. So when I started to dial you myself, he split. I followed him outside, and he jumped into one of those little Japanese pickup trucks and peeled away—I mean, he burned rubber. I didn't get the license number—it was all covered with mud—but the truck had a sign, or a logo, on the door. It was some kind of coat of arms or something—it was all mud splattered, too, so I couldn't see what it was for sure, but I think I saw the word
Briar
.”

Mulheisen thanked her and apologized for the disturbance, which she verbally waved off, then he immediately called the young pro Eric Smith. He told Mulheisen that he had occasionally used the truck, but several days earlier the head grounds keeper, Dennis McMillan, had come by his apartment to get it—no reason given. He had assumed McMillan needed it for maintenance work at the course.

McMillan was home. “Yeah, the boss drove me by Eric's. I drove the pickup back to the club, and the boss drove me home. I thought we were going to get back to work on the course, but the boss said to hold off for a few more days. Jeez, I don't know how much longer we can wait. We gotta jump on those greens and get after that fairway grass before it goes to hell. The guys on the crew don't mind—they're getting full pay doing nothing—but we gotta do something about the drainage in front of number eight . . . all this rain—”

“Where is the truck usually kept?” Mulheisen interrupted.

“Out to the equipment shed,” McMillan replied. “It's over between five and thirteen. You take the little road that goes down the hill—about a quarter mile down the road from the clubhouse if you're coming up Briar Ridge Drive. There's a little white gate there, says
GOLF COURSE, PRIVATE ROAD
—you can't hardly see it ‘less you're looking for it.”

Mulheisen thought he could End it, but he didn't recall seeing an equipment shed. Was it visible from the road?

“Oh, no,” McMillan said, “it ain't even visible from the clubhouse. Actually it's more like a lodge or a cabin. It's tucked back along that clump of woods that separates the thirteenth fairway from the fifth. It's a real pretty building, fieldstone and timber. Part of it is a shelter and a snack bar—they sell sandwiches and beer there in the summer. The boss seen one like it in Scotland and had it built a couple years ago. The equipment shed is tacked onto the back end.”

Mulheisen called Jimmy. Yvonne told him, with no attempt to conceal her annoyance, that Jimmy had gone to the store for her, and “couldn't it wait until the morning?” Mulheisen told her it couldn't, she should send Jimmy to Briar Ridge as soon as he returned.

It was already dark when he found the gate, after first driving by it. It was securely locked. There were recent-looking tire tracks going in. Mulheisen clambered over the fence and began to walk down the graveled road. There was a glow in the sky from the distant city, and there were even a few stars. He stumbled on, down a steep rutted and muddy grade. After a few minutes he reached flatter ground, and a moment later he crossed Clabber Creek (or, as he thought, Petty Creek), on a bridge made of timbers and railroad ties. A few paces on, however, he was afraid he'd got lost. But then he realized that he'd been deflected by a path used by golfers in golf carts, and he backtracked to find the road again as it passed behind an elevated tee. He walked on, more cautiously now, wondering if it wouldn't be a lot smarter to just go back to the car and wait for Jimmy. But then he thought he perceived a darker patch in the night.

Must be the lodge, he thought, and stepped off the noisy gravel, turning toward the trees for a few paces. He eased the Smith & Wesson out of its hip grip and stood quietly. It was pitch-black unless you looked directly upward—he could see tiny stars through the budding leaves. A bird was calling oddly, a kind of nasal
beenp;
he thought it might be a snipe, but he didn't really know. There was no other significant sound, just the distant background static of Yvonne's Greater Detroit Urban Zone. He took three more steps and ran full length into the side of a rough wooden wall. He nearly dropped his gun, stumbling backward until he fell flat on his butt.

Instinctively he felt his nose with his free hand. It wasn't broken,
just bumped. His seat was getting wet on the damp earth, however. He scrambled up. At that instant a brilliant light blinded him.

“Mul!” rasped Lande's voice, “what the hell took you so long?”

Lande was holding a heavy-duty flashlight and a sawed-off shotgun. “Just drop the gun there, Mul,” he said. Mulheisen looked at the shotgun for a long second and then bent to place his .38 on the ground. Lande opened a door in the wall and turned on a light switch. “C'mon in,” he invited.