The Blind Pig Read online

  “Just you and twelve Cuban revolutionaries,” Mulheisen said dryly.

  “They're harmless,” Mandy said. “They get all fired up and talk about overthrowing Castro, but it's all talk.”

  “Why are they so mad at Castro? Wasn't Batista as bad, or worse?”

  “Who knows?” Mandy said. “It's all just a lot of politics. They were all with Castro, once upon a time. I think they're angry because Castro brought in the Russians. Angel was a pilot for Fidel, but he flew his MIG to Miami when El Presidente, or whatever he calls himself, executed some so-called traitors that were friends of Angel's. And Francisco rowed to Key West in a rubber dinghy because he didn't like the Russian railroad technicians that came in. He was an engineer.”

  “Some of those guys didn't look old enough to even remember the revolution,” Mulheisen said.

  “They're all quite young,” she said. “Angel's got them all fired up. Him and Heitor.”

  “That's the Bolivian?”

  “Yes. Heitor Casabianco. He claims he fought with Che. He says that Che broke with Fidel because Castro had perverted the revolution. They devour every word Heitor says.”

  “You're sure they're harmless?” Mulheisen asked.

  Mandy laughed. “Whoever heard of a Cuban revolution in Detroit? They dream about getting aid from the CIA, or from right-wing groups, but that's just silly because they're farther left than Fidel.”

  “This is Pingree Park,” Mulheisen said. “Named after one of our most illustrious mayors.” He directed her around the block to his old Checker, parked across the street from Benny's blind pig. It was almost four in the morning and people were still going in and out of Benny's place.

  Mulheisen no longer felt so tired. “You're a fascinating lady, Mandy,” he said. “Why don't you come in for a drink?”

  “I thought you'd never ask,” she said. She parked the car and locked it.

  The crowd in Benny's had swelled considerably. They found themselves a semiprivate corner of the bar. Mulheisen started right out with “Why do you have a gun?”

  “This is a tough town,” Mandy said. “Besides, I got in the habit when I was in the Army.”

  “You ever have to use it?” he asked.

  “I've had to show it a few times,” she said. “Like tonight.”

  “You know I'm going to check you out in the files first thing,” Mulheisen said.

  She seemed unconcerned. “I'd have thought you already did.”

  “No. I looked up Vanni. No record,” he said. He sipped at his Wild Turkey. “Just how close are you and Vanni?” he asked suddenly.

  Mandy looked at him in surprise, then laughed. “Why, Sergeant! You're jealous!”

  “I am not,” he retorted.

  “And you hardly know me,” she mocked. She sipped at her drink. “We have a little something going, that's all. It isn't anything heavy. Jerry's not the type to get involved.”

  “How about you?”

  “I've tried it a couple of times. It was pretty hard to take when we broke up.” She laughed suddenly. “I'm sorry. It all sounded so corny, like something we used to tell boys in high school—'I don't want to be hurt again!’ “

  They looked at each other with guarded amusement for a moment, then smiled. Mulheisen ordered another round of drinks. They didn't speak until the drinks came, then Mulheisen abruptly asked, “What's Vanni's involvement with the mob?”

  Mandy looked exasperated. “Really! You are something, aren't you?” She shook her head. “As far as I know, he has no connections with the mob.”

  “Then why all this flourish of trumpets? Someone's being awfully obvious.”

  Mandy stood up and put on her jacket, then picked up her purse. “Got me, dearie. That's your job. Well, ciao."

  “Hey, wait a minute. How about dinner tomorrow?”

  She glanced at her watch. “You mean tonight? I can't tonight. Tomorrow night. About eight. Pick me up. But call first.”

  Mulheisen curiously felt both annoyed and elated after she had gone. He had a couple of more drinks to celebrate this strange mood and was feeling quite cheerful when Benny came in. “Benny, old chap! How goes it?” he sang out.

  Benny looked at him suspiciously. “How long's he been here?” he asked the bartender. He shook his head disapprovingly when he was told and then motioned for another round with a fatalistic gesture. “Mul, you ain't driving home tonight.”

  “No?” Mulheisen said.

  “You're drunk,” Benny said.

  “An officer is never drunk,” Mulheisen assured him.

  Benny warned him to keep his voice down. After the drink was downed, he managed to convince Mulheisen that coffee would be in order. For this they went next door to Benny's house. The house was much more spacious than it appeared from the outside. While the coffee was brewing, Benny showed Mulheisen where he might put in the dining room, if he decided to do that. Some rooms would have to be combined and expanded, obviously. Benny thought that the living-room fireplace might be profitably remodeled with an ornate mantelpiece and a marble hearth.

  Over coffee, Mulheisen asked about Brandywine. “He say anything about Mandy after we left?”

  “A little,” Benny said. “I guess she comes in there a lot.”

  “Who with?”

  “I don't know, Brandy didn't say.”

  “What about those Cubans?” Mulheisen asked.

  Benny didn't know what he was talking about. Brandy-wine hadn't mentioned any Cubans. Mulheisen dropped it.

  After another cup of coffee Mulheisen asked what time it was. “Going on six,” Benny told him.

  “Good God! I've got to be in court at ten-thirty.”

  “You better crash here,” Benny said. “I got plenty of room. I'll see that you get up in time, have a good breakfast, and you'll be all set. You don't want to be driving clear out to St. Clair Flats now.”

  Mulheisen protested, but Benny was adamant. The room was small but the bed was comfortable, and thirty seconds after he had crawled between the cool crisp sheets Mulheisen was out cold.

  Nine

  Mulheisen was awakened at nine o'clock by a stocky, middle-aged black woman who wore a housecleaning turban and a flowery cotton housedress with a plain white apron.

  “Aagh,” he groaned and clapped his hands over his eyes.

  “You havin’ a dream,” the woman said matter-of-factly, “but it's over now. Benny said I s'posed to get you up at nine, and it's nine. You gone be all right?”

  Mulheisen groaned again, sitting upright. “I don't know,” he said thickly. “It was a good dream and a bad dream.” It had been two dreams, actually, running more or less simultaneously. In one he had his arm around Mandy Cecil's waist and was about to kiss her; in the other—and already he could not remember which dream came first—they had been shooting at each other.

  “You wants to remember your dreams,” the woman said as she placed some folded clothes on the dresser. “I always looks mine up in the dream book, so's I can get my number for the day.” She turned to go out. “I done washed your clothes, but I ain't got your shirt ironed yet. You wants a shower, it's right down the hall. Breakfast be ready in ten minutes.” She closed the door. Mulheisen could make little sense of what she had said. He got up slowly, uttering low grunts of solace to himself. His head hurt, his mouth tasted like bile and his tongue had been attacked by some primordial fungus. He felt his throat and it seemed to him that it was swollen; he should have had his tonsils out long ago, he told himself again.

  He wondered who the woman was. Benny's housekeeper, he supposed. Incredibly, she had washed and dried his underwear and socks while he slept. She must get here pretty early, he thought. He peeked out into the hallway and saw the bathroom just a few feet away. Naked, he flashed over there and quickly got into the shower. He was recovering nicely under the warm spray when he heard the door open and the woman's voice said, “I finished your shirt. They's a razor and a toothbrush there for you.” The door closed.

&nbs
p; A few minutes later he was back in the bedroom dressing. The woman had brushed his coat and pressed his pants. His change and other pocket items were arranged neatly on the dresser. Fortunately, he told himself, he'd had the wit to put his .38 under his pillow. Perhaps that was why he had dreamed about guns and shooting, he thought, and wondered if the form of a pistol pressing against one's head could induce the image of that pistol in the mind and, thus, dreams of violence. He laughed at himself.

  A few minutes later he sat down to hot buttermilk biscuits, grilled ham and fried eggs with hash-brown potatoes. There was also orange juice, milk and hot coffee. The biscuits were soft and fluffy and Mulheisen wolfed down more than a half dozen of them with copious butter and homemade rhubarb preserves. “You make these preserves?” he asked the woman.

  “Who else gone make ‘em?” the woman replied. She sat across from Mulheisen, smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Occasionally she got up to fetch more coffee or more biscuits. Mulheisen couldn't tell if she was surly or was just one of those self-contained, self-sufficient women. He watched her with mild interest. She wasn't cheerful, but she wasn't sullen, either. She wasn't exactly indifferent, but she didn't seem to value Mulheisen's esteem. Irrationally, Mulheisen found himself wanting to be ingratiating, to gain her approval. But smiles and friendliness had no effect on her.

  As he finished his coffee he decided that he had detected a family resemblance between her and Benny. He knew that Benny wasn't married, so maybe this was a sister or a cousin. But he hadn't the temerity to ask. He saw that it was ten o'clock, anyway. Time to get moving.

  “Well, I've got to be going,” Mulheisen said, standing up. “Thanks for the swell breakfast. I guess Benny isn't up yet?”

  “Hunh!” the woman snorted. “Be three o'clock ‘fore Benny gets up. Grown man, sleeping all day!” She huffed off into another part of the house. Mulheisen shrugged and went out, struggling into his coat.

  It was a warm, sunny October morning with a high, milky overcast that made the sun weak. All the maples in Pingree Park were brilliant yellow and red, although some of them had already lost most of their leaves. There was the quiet peacefulness of midmorning, when all the working people are gone and few others are abroad. Squirrels raised hell in the piles of raked leaves in the park. Mulheisen suddenly felt very good, despite his lack of sleep and his frustration with the Collins alley affair. Obviously, the shower and the good breakfast had helped, he thought, as he drove downtown. As for the sleep, he wondered if it wasn't true that one only needs a couple hours of sleep, providing it is deep sleep. He had definitely slept well last night. It was only in the waking moments that the dreams had come. He pondered that, as he often had: do dreams really occupy only a few seconds of one's sleep? And then he turned his mind to more immediate matters.

  He was due in court at ten-thirty, to testify for the prosecution in The State of Michigan v. Robert Parenteau. In every respect this case was more significant than anything he was now handling. The Parenteau case had been a minor triumph for Mulheisen. And yet he had very little interest in it anymore. He wished it were done with. Logically, he was committed to seeing the case through the justice system, but emotionally, he no longer cared what happened to Bobby Parenteau. For Mulheisen it was enough that he had caught Bobby, even if it wasn't really the killer that he had caught. It was the same boy, all right, and yet it wasn't.

  Four years ago a dozen or more high school kids had gathered in the basement recreation room of the Parenteau home on Detroit's East Side. They were celebrating Bobby Parenteau's seventeenth birthday. About an hour after the party began, Bobby left the basement room and returned with his father's World War II souvenir, a smuggled-home Colt .45 automatic pistol. He opened fire from the basement steps and emptied the magazine. One girl of fifteen was killed by a bullet in the head. Four other teenagers were wounded, only one of them seriously—a bullet in the neck destroying part of eighteen-year-old Frank Witt's larynx.

  And then Bobby had vanished. He disappeared for four years. Within a very short time the case was effectively dropped, though not officially, for lack of evidence and interest. There were just too many murders and other violent crimes clamoring for attention. And this was no burglar shot in an alley, no Wild West shoot-up in a tavern with the only casualty a jukebox. This was a fifteen-year-old blond girl named Lily Vargas with half her face blown away, and a kid named Frank who now talked like a throat-cancer patient after two years of extensive therapy. And three other kids with puckered circular scars that they didn't like to talk about. And yet the case had been allowed to molder quietly in the back files. Mulheisen very correctly assumed that he would not have much longer to play around with Vanni's dead burglar. For all he knew, there might be a homicide case waiting for him at the precinct even now.

  He turned off Gratiot near the police headquarters and a few minutes later found a parking place near the courthouse. He went to the police detail office and was told which courtroom the trial was being held in. When he got there he found that the case had not yet been called. There were just a few spectators, despite the case's notoriety, and a full complement of reporters.

  The assistant prosecutor was Ray Wilde, a thin young man who wore glasses that were light-sensitive so that they changed from clear to dark when worn in bright sunlight. For some reason, however, the glasses never got quite clear, so that Wilde always appeared to have dark circles around his eyes. He was glad to see Mulheisen, always a good, dependable witness.

  “Something fishy's going on, Mul,” Wilde told him while they waited for the judge to appear. “Epstein is pleading Bobby guilty on a reduced charge of unpremeditated, which we'd worked out, but now he's also going to argue that the boy had diminished responsibility during the shooting.”

  “Can he do that?” Mulheisen asked. “I thought that required a ‘not guilty’ plea.”

  Wilde made a wobbly gesture with his splayed right hand and grimaced. “It's iffy, Mul. Bobby refused to plead insanity, you know, and the psychiatrists were divided. But Epstein apparently feels that he has sufficient evidence to sway the judge. Brownlow's soft on this kind of argument. He's always saying crap like, ‘The Law is a living thing. It isn't cut and dried.’ “

  “So Bobby may end up at Northville instead of the pen,” Mulheisen said thoughtfully. “Well, honestly, Ray, I'm not sure that the kid wasn't nuts. The pen isn't going to be good for him. If I thought that the state hospital could actually help him . . .”

  “I wouldn't be surprised if he got three years’ outpatient at Lafayette Clinic, Mul. Those four years on his own will count big with Brownlow.”

  Mulheisen was startled and looked at Wilde questioningly, but the prosecutor shrugged.

  Just then the prisoner was brought in. Bobby was now a tall and good-looking young man who wore dark-rimmed glasses. He had His hair cut neatly and wore a blue suit with a conservative tie and well-shined black shoes. He looked like a candidate for the Junior Chamber of Commerce's “Young Christian Businessman of the Year.” But then, Bobby had never been a rebel. At the birthday party there had been no marijuana, no hard liquor and only a modest quantity of beer. No one was drunk. Bobby had no history of psychiatric disturbance. He was slightly above average on his IQ tests. He played the outfield and won his letter at Southeastern High School.

  At the party Bobby had not argued with anyone. He had a girlfriend there, but she had not been shot at. Nor had there been any suggestion that he was jealous of her. Indeed, outside of insanity, no one could even begin to suggest a motive for the shooting.

  Of considerable interest was the way that Bobby had lived during his four years as a fugitive. In effect, he hadn't hidden at all. One day Mulheisen had happened to be driving down Lenox Street and passed Bobby's parents’ home. On impulse he stopped. He went to the door not knowing what he would say when it opened; he couldn't very well say, “Remember me? I was just wondering if you'd heard from Bobby.” But he didn't have to. The door was opened by someone he h
ad never seen before. The woman told him that she and her husband had purchased the Parenteau home more than three years ago. She seemed not to know what had occurred in her basement, and Mulheisen didn't tell her. As far as she knew, she said, the Parenteaus had moved to the West Side, to Redford, she thought.

  Curious, Mulheisen had found the Parenteaus listed in the telephone book, living in Redford. Out of what he later described as plain old orneriness, he drove out to Redford and asked around the neighborhood. The Parenteaus were well liked. They were a pleasant, middle-aged couple living in a neighborhood that housed mostly younger couples. The old man worked for Chrysler, the Mound Road plant. Occasionally their daughter visited them, with her husband. The daughter was very pregnant.

  Mulheisen found that interesting: the Parenteaus didn't have a daughter. They had only one child, Bobby.

  The next day a policewoman named Sandra Lewis called on Mrs. Parenteau. Officer Lewis represented herself as a door-to-door cosmetic salesperson. She sold Mrs. Parenteau some cologne and they talked a good deal about Mrs. Parenteau's daughter, and about baby showers. Officer Lewis obtained the address of Mrs. Parenteau's daughter.

  That evening Mulheisen and Maki sat in Mulheisen's Checker, parked a few houses down from a small tract house in a new housing development out beyond Fifteen Mile Road. The owner-occupants of the house were listed as Robert and Evelyn Adamson. Adamson had been Mrs. Parenteau's maiden name. According to neighbors, the Adamsons were quiet, reclusive people. They didn't seem to go out much, they never had people over, except occasionally their parents. Mr. Adamson seemed very nice, the neighbors thought. He mowed his lawn and sometimes worked on his car, a recent-model Plymouth.

  Mulheisen saw the Plymouth drive up and Bobby Parenteau got out. He went into the house carrying a lunch bucket. For a long moment Mulheisen considered that he held the future of this boy in the palm of his hand. Apparently, the boy was a good worker, employed at Chrysler, a job his father had gotten him. He had bought this house with his father as co-signer, and he never missed a payment. He had married a girl he had met at Chrysler and they were expecting a child in a few months.