The Blind Pig Page 17

  Tonight it might be a little different, Mulheisen thought. The ATF was along, and they tended to be more serious about these things. Also, they were looking for dangerous criminals, or leads to them. They weren't just shutting down blind pigs whose half-life had expired. Mulheisen had little doubt that the ATF would find no trace of the hijackers.

  “My man Benny says you want to talk to me, Fang,” Brandywine said. “What about?”

  “I was in your place the other night and ran into Mandy Cecil. You seemed to know her. How come?”

  “She comes in from time to time. Just a customer,” Brandywine said.

  “Always with the same people?”

  “I don't know who you mean.”

  “Well, who does she usually come in with?” Mulheisen asked.

  “Let's get one thing straight, Sergeant Fang. I'm here talking to you because Benny says you're a friend of his. But you ain't no friend of mine, you dig? I have myself a little place down on Riopelle and I don't have no trouble there. Nothing heavy going down in my place. So I ain't worried about you. What my customers do is they own business. It ain't mine, it ain't yours.”

  “What about the Cubans? Do they come in often?” Mulheisen asked.

  “I told you . . .” Brandywine mocked a look of theatrical exasperation. “I don't know no Cubans.”

  “You know Mandy Cecil, though,” Mulheisen pointed out, “and she has disappeared. I just wonder if you know anyone else who has disappeared lately.”

  Brandywine finished his drink with a loud slurp and put it down on the bar. Benny, who had withdrawn to the other end, came along and picked it up. “You want another?” he asked.

  “I do, if Dr. Fang here is buying,” Brandywine said.

  “Sure, I'll buy,” Mulheisen said. “Let me have another, too, Benny.” When the drinks were mixed and Benny had gone back down the bar, Mulheisen said, “I'll do better than buy you a drink, Brandywine. I gather that you pull in quite a nice piece of change at your place most nights. How much do you think you'll net tonight?”

  Brandywine glanced at him through hooded eyes. Mulheisen realized that the man wore quite a bit of makeup, including eye shadow.

  “I know what you're talking about, Fang. As a matter of fact, I decided to take a little vacation tonight.”

  “That's smart, Brandy wine. Except that you won't have much income for the night.”

  “Comme ci, comme ça,” Brandywine said, with a toss of his elegant head.

  “In exchange for a little information, I think I could arrange for you to be open tonight,” Mulheisen said.

  Brandywine thought about that for a while, then said, “Make the arrangement.”

  Mulheisen went into Benny's back room and dialed the ATF. Phelps was finally in. He was very excited. He had learned that someone approximating the description of Angel DeJesus had flown out of City Airport at 5:45 P.M. on the afternoon of the hijacking in a leased Apache. Apparently, the aircraft carried two other passengers, who were not named. The flight plan had been filed for Green Bay, Wisconsin, but the aircraft had not arrived at Green Bay. Instead, the pilot had radioed for an amended flight plan while en route, naming Lafayette, Indiana, as his destination. From Lafayette the airplane had been tracked as far as Dallas, Texas, via Memphis, Tennessee, and Little Rock, Arkansas. There was a VFR clearance out of Dallas, naming San Antonio as the destination. From that point on there was no trace of the aircraft. Phelps was very hopeful, however.

  Mulheisen asked him if he still intended to raid the blind pigs. Phelps affirmed that he was. The operation was all geared up and it would be difficult to cancel now, even though it no longer looked like such a worthwhile project.

  “Still, you don't know, Sergeant, it could produce something.”

  “I'd just like one name left off the list, if you can manage it, Phelps. There's a possibility of getting some good information on Cecil, as well as DenBoer and the Cubans.”

  Phelps balked when he heard that it was Brandywine's place, one of his prime targets, but he gave in when Mulheisen pointed out that the City Airport lead had been Mulheisen's contribution.

  “You're back in business,” Mulheisen told Brandywine. “Now, let's have it.”

  “Well, usually she comes in with Mark Spitz, that's what I call him. And another dude I call Po'kchop.”

  Mulheisen gathered from the descriptions that Brandywine meant Vanni and DenBoer. It amused him to think that Brandywine's identification of Vanni with Mark Spitz was shared by a fat, middle-aged white woman who ran a hot-sheet motel.

  “Tell me about the Cubans,” Mulheisen said.

  “They come in a lot, not always all together and not always with Cecil. Fact is, I mostly seen just three of them: Angel, Frank, and Heitor. Sometimes they ask for a room, like they was going to play cards, but they don't play no cards. They sit in there and talk to Mark Spitz and Po'kchop.”

  “What did they talk about?” Mulheisen asked, suppressing his interest as best as he could.

  “I don't know. Revolution, I guess.” Brandywine grinned. “Man, them revolutionaries is bad business. I don't go for no revolutionaries.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Let's face it, baby, I'm Establishment. It may not be up-front Establishment, but it's still business. I see they still ain't no casinos in Havana, and that's gettin’ on to twenty years that Castro been in power.”

  “Tell me about guns, Brandy. Did the Cubans ever ask you about guns?”

  “You mean like ‘Where can I get one?’ That kind of thing? Man, everybody asks where they can get a gun. Sure, they asked. I told them to go see Lorry.”

  Mulheisen felt a little thrill run along his spine. “Lorry the Shoe?” he asked.

  “That's the only Lorry I know about,” Brandywine answered.

  “Did they see Lorry?”

  “You have to ask Lorry that.”

  “Good idea,” Mulheisen said. “Where do I find him?”

  “He ain't been around the last couple of days,” Brandywine said. “Somebody mentioned he was in the Detroit House of Correction, picked up on some chickenshit peddling charge.”

  “So Lorry's a gun dealer, is that it?”

  “That's what they say.” Brandywine yawned. “Anyway, your Cubans, they don't need no guns. They got all the guns they need—I just throw that one in for free, Fang.” He winked lewdly. “Now, some of the brothers, they'd like to talk to them Cubans, too. Lots of people would like to get their hands on those guns.”

  “I know,” Mulheisen said. “You haven't heard anything about Cecil, then?”

  Brandywine shook his head slowly. Mulheisen had to accept that. If there was any news about Cecil, Brandywine would know about it. The only question was, Would Brandywine tell him about it? Well, why not? Mulheisen decided that Brandywine would tell him, providing it didn't involve himself or any of his people.

  Benny came and gave them a couple more drinks while Mulheisen pondered. Brandywine grew restless and wandered across the little barroom to play the jukebox. Soon the strident tones of a Motown group filled the room.

  So, what did he have? He had pretty good evidence that Vanni and DenBoer were involved with the Cubans on the hijacking. But in what way? The Cubans had needed guns, obviously, in order to carry out the operation. Perhaps they had gotten them from Vanni. Mulheisen presumed that Den-Boer had been the go-between, the gun bearer. And now DenBoer was absent. Quite possibly the Cubans had accepted the guns and then had decided to dump DenBoer as well, as a possible threat to their security. If Mandy Cecil was with DenBoer, she would have been dumped, too, whether the Cubans knew she was an ATF agent or not.

  Brandywine was jigging about by himself, next to the jukebox. Mulheisen watched him without paying real attention. He was reminded, inevitably, that all of Vanni's sudden surfacing in the public eye could be due to an attempt by the mob to pressure him on account of his vending-machine operation. Mulheisen felt that he had strayed dangerously from this initial and orthodox v
iew of the whole affair. It was always a mistake to find complexity where none existed, he knew. But for him Mandy Cecil had changed everything.

  “Who else did the Cubans talk to?” he called out to Brandywine.

  The tall black man paused, as if irritated, then posed in a mockery of Thought, with one hand on his hip and a long forefinger poking into his lip. He started to say something, then just flipped his hand. “Just about anybody.” He turned back to the machine.

  “Wait a minute,” Mulheisen said. “Satisfaction guaranteed, remember? I still have time to put you back on the list.”

  Brandywine didn't turn around. “If I open up and I get tipped, you gonna owe me, Fang. We made our deal. You gonna owe me bad.”

  “Ask Benny if I'm straight,” Mulheisen said calmly, knowing that Brandywine already had been thoroughly assured of that or he wouldn't be here. “I'm just looking for a straight end to my deal. But I'll make it easy on you. Angel talked to an undertaker, right?”

  Brandywine smiled his grand, lovely smile. “The way you say it amuses me,” he said. “I'll give you one name, and that's it.”

  “Shoot.”

  Two minutes later Mulheisen was on the telephone to the 19th Precinct. It was his luck that Lt. Del Moser was still there. “I didn't think I'd catch you this late,” Mulheisen said.

  “They got us roped in on this blind-pig raid,” Moser said wearily.

  “Can you get away for a bit? It may not take long,” Mulheisen said. “See if you can run down a Jabe Cook, he's a black undertaker, over on Dexter. There's a possibility that DeJesus or one of the other Cubans may have rented a hearse from him. Check it out, you know what to look for.”

  Mulheisen hung up and dialed the Record Bureau. He asked for the file on Lorry the Shoe.

  “That shouldn't be hard,” the officer assured him. Mulheisen held on the phone. It took almost fifteen minutes. Benny brought another Black Jack Ditch.

  “Hello, Sergeant Mulheisen? Sorry I took so long. It's all in the computer now, so it's supposed to be faster, right? Only, now you have to stand in line for an open terminal. Well, here it is. You want to copy?”

  “Let's have it.”

  “ ‘Lorry the Shoe.’ Real name, Lorenzo Shmuel Feinsch-mecker. How about that?” The officer spelled the name. “Born in Danzig (then in Germany, now in Poland), 1923. Emigrated to U.S. with parents, 1934. Naturalized citizen. Jewish faith. Graduated New York University, 1947, BA degree in Business Administration. Convicted grand larceny, fraud, 1954, New York City. Sentenced eight to ten, served three at Attica, New York State Corrections. Released parole, 1960. Employed by T. J. Kidder Construction Company, same year, a Detroit firm, as bookkeeper, with approval of parole officer. No further notations. He must have gone straight.”

  “I just heard he was in DeHoCo,” Mulheisen said.

  “If you want to wait a few minutes, I'll check with Prisoner Information for you,” the officer said. He was back after a brief wait. “Nope. No Feinschmeckers, no Fines, no Shoes. Any other aliases?”

  Mulheisen couldn't think of any. He thanked the officer and hung up. He went back into the other room to ask Brandywine where Lorry hung out, but Brandywine was gone.

  Benny shrugged. “He said ‘Business calls,’ and split.”

  Mulheisen went back to the telephone and called the 13th Precinct detectives—that was the general area of Lorry's haunts. He got a Sergeant Coleman, who said he knew Lorry quite well.

  “Haven't seen him lately,” Coleman said. He was fairly certain that if Lorry had been picked up he'd have known about it.

  “Do you know where he lives?” Mulheisen asked.

  “I'll ask around,” Coleman said. A few minutes later he was back. “The Tuttle Hotel,” he said.

  “How about meeting me there in fifteen minutes?” Mulheisen asked.

  “We're kind of short-handed at the moment,” Coleman said.

  “Yeah, I know. The Great Blind-Pig Raid. This is important,” Mulheisen said.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Coleman said.

  The Tuttle Hotel was a ten-story affair just off Woodward Avenue. It was an old hotel, surrounded by liquor stores, bars and small, cheap restaurants that offered soul food or home cooking. It was also the present home of Ol’ Earl, but Mulheisen wasn't concerned with that. From the looks of the place the lower floors were reserved for the streetwalker trade. The upper floors would be for the residents, probably most of them welfare recipients or hustlers of one sort or another.

  Sergeant Coleman was leaning against the reception desk talking to the night clerk. Coleman was a tall black man of thirty, wearing a business suit and a hat. He shook hands with Mulheisen. With a thumb he gestured at the fat, balding black man who sat behind the desk with an open copy of Penthouse under one elbow and a dead cigar in his mouth.

  “Buster here sez Lorry's in DeHoCo,” Coleman said.

  “What for?” Mulheisen asked the clerk.

  “I heard he got thirty days for peddling without a license, or some such shit,” Buster said.

  “Who told you that?” Mulheisen asked.

  “His lawyer. He come to pay Lorry's rent. He all paid up till the end of the month.”

  “Lorry has a lawyer?” Coleman seemed surprised.

  “What did the lawyer look like?” Mulheisen asked.

  “I didn't see him. Day man saw him.”

  Coleman nodded. “Let's have the key, Buster.”

  “I don't know about that,” Buster said.

  Mulheisen smiled unpleasantly. “The key,” he said.

  Buster handed the key to Coleman.

  The room was small and neat, but chilly. Someone had turned the radiators off. The bed was made. There was a bathroom with a tub. Clothes hung in the closet—not expensive ones but not raggedy, either.

  Coleman looked through the dresser. He held up a yarmulke and phylacteries. “What's this?” he said. “I didn't know Lorry was Jewish. Hey, Mul, what do you think?”

  Mulheisen was about to stoop and look through a pile of shoe boxes that filled the lower half of the closet. “What is it?” he said.

  Coleman indicated the dresser drawer. A clean white towel lined the bottom of the drawer and on it were a safety razor, an expensive shaving brush and a cup of shaving soap. It gave an image of a quiet, clean man—somewhat at odds with Lorry's public image. Mulheisen stared at the fancy aftershave lotion.

  “And there's a toothbrush and toothpaste in the bathroom,” Coleman said.

  Mulheisen got the point. If a man is going away to jail for thirty days, he takes his toilet articles. Especially if he's got a lawyer who is willing to pay his rent for the rest of the month.

  “Maybe Lorry didn't go to DeHoCo,” Coleman said.

  The two detectives stood and looked around the little room. Then Coleman kneeled and peered under the bed. He straightened up with a grunt, then stood up, dusting his knees. “Give me a hand with the bed,” he said to Mulheisen.

  Carefully they lifted the bed and set it aside. There on the floor was a man-sized package wrapped in a blanket. Mul-heisen bent and flipped back the edge of the blanket and Lorry the Shoe gazed up at him. The mouth was slightly open and the eyes were glazed. Mulheisen flipped the blanket back over the face.

  “Go make the call,” Mulheisen said. He put his hands in his pockets and waited.

  When all the photographs had been taken, the medical examiner unwrapped the corpse. More pictures were taken, this time clearly showing the three holes in Lorry the Shoe's chest.

  The bed was stripped, and it revealed bloodstains on the sheet and mattress. It seemed likely that if the bullets weren't still in Lorry, they might be in the mattress. The medical examiner rolled the body over, finally, and there were no exit wounds, so that took care of that. He opined that the body had lain there for one to three days, but he wouldn't be able to tell until he did the autopsy. He said the lack of odor was possibly due to the cool temperature of the room.

  A man from the Scientific
Bureau was carefully removing the shoe boxes from the closet and opening them, wearing plastic gloves. “Hey, hey,” he called out. “Look at this, Mul.”

  There was a .32-caliber revolver in the opened box. “That explains the stains I saw in the other boxes, I bet,” the lab man said. “Gun oil.” In short order he found two more pistols, a .38 Smith & Wesson automatic and a .38 Colt revolver.

  When the body was carted away, they spread the boxes out on the floor. Out of the twenty-odd boxes, only three of them contained guns, but many of them revealed the telltale stain of oil that the lab man had noticed.

  Coleman squatted on his heels, looking at the boxes and lids. “What's this?” he asked Mulheisen, pointing to some pencil markings inside several box lids. “Some kind of writing.”

  Mulheisen examined each one carefully. In some of the lids a name had been scrawled: “Sid,” or “Vince.” On other boxes there were addresses, usually just partial addresses, but a few complete. “Gratiot and Harper,” read one; another, “E. McNichols Ave.” Yet another said, “Remington Arms.” He assumed that was a reference to a gun, but Coleman pointed out that Remington only made shotguns and rifles and you couldn't get one of them into a shoe box.

  “It could be ammunition,” the lab man said.

  Mulheisen copied down all the notations, anyway, just in case.

  The precinct was beginning to jump. The first prisoners of the big raid were there, yelling vigorously, protesting their innocence. Since most of them were drunk, the protests were half-hearted and almost jolly, in a carnival mood. For the most part they were being charged with loitering, but others were found to possess marijuana, cocaine, speed and heroin. Some were carrying illegal knives and unregistered pistols. Because of the overload, anyone who wasn't drunk and had no outstanding warrant on their record, and wasn't holding some illegal substance or weapon, was kicked out of jail. There wasn't room to sleep them all, not even on the floor.