The Blind Pig Page 18

  The detectives were in and out, booking people, interrogating them, going back to the street for more. Mulheisen could hear Dennis Noell bellowing at some hapless arrestee. “What the hell you mean it ain't yours? You were carrying it! Speak up! What's that? Louder! You found it? Oh, Lord.”

  Mulheisen telephoned ATF and told the duty agent about Lorry the Shoe. Phelps was not in, of course; he was out on the Great Raid. In the meantime federal agents were getting closer to the DeJesus flight. They had tracked the airplane as far as Falfurrias, Texas, where it had landed near an abandoned ranch, picked up fuel that had been left there and flown on. Mexican authorities were expected to cooperate.

  Mulheisen sat and thought about the flight. Obviously, the Cubans could not have removed the guns from Detroit. Or could they? He had put out an alert for Vanni's missing truck, but that was almost twenty-four hours after the hijacking. A truck could travel a long way in that time. He wondered if highway weigh stations kept a log of every truck that passed over its scales; he wondered how long it would take to collect and review those logs. He decided it wasn't worth it, yet. That was the kind of effort you went to when all other leads had evaporated.

  But the fact was, he just had to face it. He didn't have any leads. He felt like a blind man; there seemed to be an awful lot going on around him, but he was damned if he could see a thing.

  He was interrupted in his musings by the telephone. It was the state police. A trooper had been to the DenBoer cabin on Duck Lake. It was all shuttered and closed up for the winter, and no sign of any visitors.

  After that Mulheisen sat in his cubicle, oblivious of the growing melee around him, ruminating and casting back over his notes. He decided finally that Lorry the Shoe was the closest he had come to an authentic lead. Obviously, Lorry was dealing in guns. Obviously, he had a pipeline through the mob, to keep him supplied. Presumably, he had some kind of relationship with Vanni and DenBoer. But what? Did Vanni supply Lorry with guns, or was it a two-way street?

  And what about John Doe? Could he have gotten his gun from Lorry? Mulheisen tried to visualize that. In these days of airport security checks, gunmen didn't travel with a weapon. There were all kinds of arrangements for gun drops, at airports, at hotels, any place that meant that the gunman could be armed as quickly as possible. If Lorry was the armorer, that would probably mean a trip to John Doe's hotel, on Gratiot.

  Mulheisen came to his senses and scrabbled through the notes he'd made. On one of the shoe-box lids there was the notation, which he'd copied, of “Gratiot and Harper.” As far as he could tell, that was reasonably close to John Doe's hotel. If only, he thought, I'd gotten to Lorry quicker. But he hadn't. That left some of the other addresses to consider. “E. McNichols Ave.,” for instance. That wasn't much help. McNichols was a long street, sometimes referred to as Six Mile Road. And then there was “Remington Arms.” Just for kicks, Mulheisen reached for the city telephone directory and checked to see if the Remington Arms Company had an office in Detroit. He couldn't find a listing.

  So that was that. Perhaps a cryptographer could go over Lorry the Shoe's notations and decipher them, but Mulheisen couldn't see anything there. He was blind again.

  Of course—a little thought popped up—"Remington Arms” could be an apartment building. Mulheisen smiled. It was a terrible pun. But builders aren't immune from making puns. Just for fun, he told himself, I'll check the street directory for E. McNichols, see if anything rings a bell.

  Ding!

  “21000 E. McNichols, Remington Arms, caretaker Lasater, R., apt. A.”

  Mulheisen stared at the address. There was something familiar about it, but he couldn't say why. Suddenly it came to him. He reached for the telephone directory again and thumbed through it rapidly. Then he found it: “DenBoer, L., 21000 E. McNichols_____732-1771.”

  Eighteen

  The manager of the Remington Arms was a thin, ascetic-looking fellow with long hair and a thin beard. He was about thirty. What was going on in his apartment, however, was not ascetic at all. There were about six each of young women and men, the record player was going full blast, and every table and counter top was covered with empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. Mulheisen thought he smelled marijuana, but he didn't say anything about it. He cheerfully accepted a can of beer and tried to talk to the amiable manager, R. Lasater, over the din of Z.Z. Top.

  Mulheisen finally gave up trying to outshout the record player and flashed his badge, inviting Lasater outside. Lasater didn't seem concerned; he smiled dreamily and came out into the hall. The relative silence was a palpable relief for Mulheisen.

  “Don't the other tenants complain? It's four in the morning,” Mulheisen said.

  “These are the tenants,” Lasater explained. “We're just celebrating the release from jail of O. Dzelo.”

  “Who is O. Dzelo?” Mulheisen asked skeptically.

  “He's a great thinker and leader,” Lasater said cheerfully. “He was just released from jail in Maracaibo, after three years. He's the leader of a worldwide revolution of the mind.”

  Mulheisen wondered if he was being put on, but he knew from experience that it didn't pay to react negatively. “Far out,” he said, smiling. “Can I help?”

  “You are helping,” Lasater smiled back.

  “I take it this isn't an armed revolution,” Mulheisen said.

  “Oh, no, man. O. Dzelo isn't into petty arms,” Lasater assured him.

  Mulheisen assumed that O. Dzelo also eschewed non-petty arms, from Lasater's tone. “Sounds interesting,” he said. “You don't have any literature on the movement, do you?”

  “O. Dzelo isn't into books,” Lasater said. “He says, ‘Don't codify me.’ “

  “Far out,” Mulheisen said. “Say, what about one of your other tenants, Leonard DenBoer? Is he into O. Dzelo, too?”

  Lasater shook his head sorrowfully. “ ‘Fraid not, man. I talked to him about it, and he came to a couple of our meetings. He seemed to enjoy the exercises, but I don't think he really tried to develop the techniques. I think he really just wanted to meet the chicks. In fact, a couple of them said he was hassling them. So he doesn't come around much anymore. Talk about arms, he was always into arms. We call him Generalissimo—all in good fun, of course.”

  “Of course,” Mulheisen said. “Did you ever see any of his friends here—South American types?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lasater said. “Nice guys. One of them, Heitor, knows all about O. Dzelo. He said he even saw him once in Valparaiso. Yeah, they used to come by quite often. Haven't seen them lately, though. Haven't seen the Generalissimo, either.”

  “Unh-hunh,” Mulheisen grunted. “Well, the problem is, Mr. Lasater—”

  “Just call me Rick.”

  “Right, Rick. Nobody's seen DenBoer for a couple of days and his family is kind of worried. I rang his doorbell but there was no answer, and he doesn't answer his phone, either.”

  “Well, I'm pretty sure he isn't home,” Rick said. “He hasn't been around for days.”

  “Maybe we could go up and take a look, eh?” Mulheisen said.

  “I don't know, man. Aren't you supposed to have a warrant or something?”

  “Not if I have reason to believe that something has happened to the man,” Mulheisen said.

  “Well, look, man, I've got this party going and everything, and . . . hey, you look like an all-right guy, and uh . . . okay, I guess I better go up with you.”

  Mulheisen followed him up the stairs to the next floor. It was a modern apartment building, flimsily built out of dry-wall and almost nothing else. The music from the basement apartment was highly audible throughout the building. At the door Lasater turned and looked Mulheisen right in the eye in a very sincere way. “I just want to know one thing, man,” he said. “Are you a narc?”

  “No way,” Mulheisen said, shaking his head. “I'm just trying to find DenBoer.”

  Lasater watched Mulheisen's face carefully, then nodded, apparently satisfied. “All right, then.�
� He opened the door.

  It was a very ordinary apartment. A living room with drapes drawn across the picture window. A kitchen with a dining area, a bathroom and a bedroom. The furniture was cheap modern and the floors were carpeted with shag, except for the kitchen, which had vinyl tile.

  The bedroom was considerably more interesting than the other rooms. For one thing, it was painted a solid, flat black.

  “Far out, eh?” Lasater said.

  Mulheisen nodded distractedly and went directly to the cluttered desk near the bed.

  “Uh, hey, man, the Generalissimo isn't here,” Lasater noted. “How about you look around and I'll trip on back downstairs, okay?”

  “Sure,” Mulheisen said. “I'll stop to see you on my way out.”

  Lasater said that was fine and left, closing the door behind him. The din of the music was hardly diminished.

  In the bedroom there were bookcases full of paperbacks—mostly on war, especially World War II—and more books were stacked on the floor. Among them were Mein Kampf, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the Warren Report and a pictorial series on great generals of World War II. There were other, more interesting items, to Mulheisen's mind, such as a pamphlet reprinted from an article originally published in Guns & Ammo: The Stoner 63 Weapons System.

  The bed was rumpled and unmade, and littered with old copies of Shooter's Bible and Military Small Arms of the Twentieth Century, along with well-thumbed copies of Guns & Ammo.

  The desk was a mess, awash with jumbled papers and magazine articles, maps and duplicated drawings. The drawers were open and papers spilled out of them. It looked as though it had been hurriedly rifled. Mulheisen squatted down and leafed through the debris. Much of it was duplicated material. It included diagrams of wooden crates containing rifles, with notations on size and weight.

  Mulheisen hunched closer. The jumbled mess was a veritable gold mine, he realized. In short order he found duplicated lists of names, including DeJesus, Morazon and Casabianca. Another duplicated list grouped the names into three-and five-man teams, labeled “A,” “B,” and “C.”

  Best of all, however, was a little stack of duplicated sections of a Detroit street map. The area included a sizeable portion of the East Side, with the marking “A” superimposed next to the Vernor tower, “B” next to the Cadillac Gage Company and “C” at Gethsemane Cemetery.

  Mulheisen stood up, smiling. It was all here. The whole plan. All he needed now was a dispersal diagram. He knelt and rummaged through the debris again, methodically separating the different material into piles. It took at least twenty minutes, and when he was through he had found no escape route. He emptied all the drawers and organized that material into stacks, without finding anything useful.

  At last he turned back to the original map and scanned it closely. There were the superimposed letters which corresponded to the team letters, but that was it. And then he saw a small “1,” lost in a more or less blank spot on the map, behind the Detroit Terminal Railway lines. At first he had taken it to be an original part of the map. Now he found a tiny “2,” near the City Airport, and a “3” on the Edsel Ford Expressway.

  Mulheisen felt that the “2” was obvious—it indicated the escape route of the aircraft flown by DeJesus. Evidently, from what the ATF had been able to find out, DeJesus had taken at least two others with him, probably one or more of the other leaders, Morazon and Casabianca. There was a chance, of course, that he had taken Mandy Cecil, or even DenBoer, but Mulheisen couldn't think of any good reason why he would.

  As leaders of a movement, it wasn't unreasonable for DeJesus or Morazon or Casabianca to leave the country as soon as their part in the raid was over. But, surely, all of them wouldn't leave, Mulheisen thought. One of them must stay with the guns. The guns were all-important. That made them number “1” on the map, he guessed. And “3” would indicate an escape route for the others, the “soldiers.”

  Looking at it this way, Mulheisen was fairly certain that the guns, and at least one of the leaders, would be where the “1” was. But the blank area on the map was quite large, a district of several blocks. As far as he could remember, that was just a vast jumble of factories, some of them still operating, but most of them shut down and abandoned. It would be damn near impossible to find anyone in there, he thought.

  He noticed, however, that the “1” was located almost on a line with the end of Canfield, the street on which DenBoer had been brought up, and near where Vanni, Mandy and DenBoer had played as children. Mulheisen reached for the telephone.

  The duty agent at ATF was excited, but not by Mulheisen's call. Three of the Cuban hijackers, the “soldiers,” had been spotted in Chicago and arrested. Phelps was on his way to the airport at the moment, to fly there and interrogate them.

  “You better stop him,” Mulheisen said. He quickly explained what he'd found. The agent agreed that he had better stop Phelps and hung up.

  Mulheisen sat back on his heels and looked about the black bedroom again. There was a pile of Penthouse and Playboy magazines on the floor to one side of the bed, which was covered with black satin sheets. Mulheisen tried to figure out what it all meant. A womb? Some kind of negation of life? He didn't know. The guy likes black, is all he could come up with. It wasn't necessary to know DenBoer—he had only to know that something was wrong.

  Mulheisen walked downstairs. The party was still rocking along in the upper decibels. “This place is going to be crawling with cops in a few minutes,” he told Lasater, “including federal agents. If I were you, I'd wind it up. Sorry, Ace, but that's the way it bounces. Oh yeah, I'd flush that pot, too.”

  He went out to his old Checker and drove off. He knew he should wait for Phelps, but he just couldn't see it. The idea that kept hammering at him was that Mandy Cecil was in trouble; possibly every minute was crucial.

  Every city has industrial areas that have been abandoned. At night they have all the gloomy and forbidding ambience of a Victorian London slum, with their myriad lanes and barricades, passageways that end in a pile of fallen brick and plaster, their sudden and empty courtyards echoing with one's footsteps. When the original industry moves out, the successors are invariably poorer, temporary, and they don't maintain the premises. Sometimes demolition is started, then halted. Hippies move in, paint up after a fashion and open obscure enterprises that are soon abandoned.

  In this complex all of these things had happened at one time or another, but now it was dark and deserted again. Mulheisen drove along trying to figure out where someone could enter the complex. There were blocks and blocks of buildings, with a tall heavy mesh fence surmounted by barbed wire. All the gates were securely locked. He knew that the neighborhood children must have a dozen “rabbit holes” into the place, but what he was looking for was an access for vehicles.

  He drove down several streets that dead-ended against the fence. Then he found a dirt lane that slipped past a corner of the fence and dwindled into a track that skirted an abandoned spur of the Detroit Terminal Railway. It was a kind of service drive, he supposed, now long out of use.

  It was very dark back here. No streetlights, just the distant glow of the city. The track ran into an area completely surrounded by hulking shadows of derelict factories. Once, obviously, machines had hummed and crashed and men with lunch pails had hurried along these oil-soaked loading docks. But now it was silent. A habitation for rats and owls.

  He stopped the car and got out, taking a large six-celled flashlight with him. The dirt lane was littered with pieces of sodden paper and half overgrown with weeds. By the light of the flash, however, he thought that he could discern recent tracks. Perhaps not. He switched off the light and stood still.

  A faint wind caused something to creak, high up in one of the buildings. There was a rustle of trash blown against weeds. Something flapped, a piece of torn tarpaper, perhaps. He could see a little better now. It was an hour before dawn, at least, but the general night glow of the city beyond the silent walls faintly il
lumined the decayed brick walls. He looked straight up and saw stars, not a common sight in the city.

  He took a few steps down the lane and his feet seemed to make an ungodly noise on the gravelly dirt. He paused a moment, then walked on, occasionally flashing the light to see if there were any tire marks.

  He wandered into dozens of courtyards, their pavement broken and grass growing in the cracks. He went down narrow and pitch-dark lanes, stumbling over a piece of forgotten machinery or an empty oil can. Occasionally he scared a rat and the rat scared him. He walked on. The courtyards led into more courtyards, more loading docks. There were culs-de-sac littered with bales of wire and scraps of sheet metal. There seemed to be puddles everywhere, but he didn't recall that it had rained in the past week.

  Finally, he knew that he was lost. This did not bother him especially. Soon it would be daylight and he would find his way out. But a great and terrible loneliness began to oppress him, wandering in this Stygian maze. He began to feel a little crazy.

  Why had he come here? What had he hoped to find? A gang of Cubans standing guard over a pile of guns? The body of Mandy Cecil? He didn't know anymore. He felt an edge of panic and suppressed it. He wanted to shout, but he knew that it was impossible to yell. The sound would merely be lost, as he was, and that would be too horrible to know.

  He blundered down another lane and into yet another courtyard. Steel steps went up onto a loading dock. He mounted the steps and walked quietly along one side of a warehouse, next to several sliding doors, some of which were open. And then he stopped. There was some kind of vehicle backed up to the dock.

  It was a shiny black hearse, looking not at all out of place here. Mulheisen stood very still. His mind was clear now. No more confusing panic and vague fears, no more craziness. He listened for a long time. He heard an owl flap into some lofty window. The buildings creaked and groaned. But mostly he heard the steady, gentle rush of the city that lay away beyond the walls of the deserted industrial citadel. The sound was quite distant, like a great river far off.