Deadman by Jon A. Jackson Read Free Book Online

Willard. You probably want to call a lawyer. We're taking him downtown, to Homicide. Thirteen hundred Beaubien. Jimmy,” he called into the room, “get some pants and shoes on him. A jacket.”
    He looked back at the woman. She had that dull, resigned look he had come to dread. “You can't come in here like this,” she said, but with no great energy.
    “Well, yes. Yes, I can,” Mulheisen told her. He waved a legal document. He looked around, taking in the disorder, smelling the decay, the disgrace of this wretched place.
    “I'm sorry the house is a mess,” she said.
    Mulheisen shrugged. “You didn't know I was coming.”
    “We was gonna move soon,” she said. “Davey was gonna buy us a house. In Warren.”
    “Well,” Mulheisen sighed. “It would have been a good idea, I guess.” He wanted to say that the girl, the daughter, had kept her room nice. She had tried to make a life for herself, something thatwasn't just a hell. He looked at the girl. She looked grim, her arms folded under her extraordinary breasts. Then she went into her room and slammed the door.
    Afterward, they stood on the street as the cruiser took the kid away. It was really awful out. Dreary, smelly—smoke in the air, as usual, but not something nice like burning leaves, an odor suitable to October and one which Mulheisen remembered well. . . . Nor was it wood smoke, romantic and intriguing. This was the usual wet, noxious smell of smoldering garbage, of wet mattresses and sodden auto wrecks. It pervaded the air of Detroit these days. Mulheisen lit a cigar to defeat it, and he paced slowly back to the car with Jimmy.
    “Sixteen,” Jimmy was saying. “I don't know how you get to be a seasoned killer by sixteen.”
    “It's not young,” Mulheisen said.
    “Not young? Sixteen is not young? My Kirby is twelve, a child. He won't be grown up in four years.”
    “Knights were probably only teenagers,” Mulheisen said. “In most North American Indian tribes you had to prove yourself a man by that age. An old man would be . . .” He paused, looking around at the wreckage of this venerable city, “. . . say, thirty. A sage, a very wise old man would be my age.”
    Jimmy regarded him with good-humored sarcasm: “You feeling sage, old man?”
    “No, but I knew a lot at sixteen. I knew a lot more than people—my parents—gave me credit for. They kept thinking I was only a child. But I was more than a child. We underrate kids. This guy has some growing up to do—too bad he'll be doing it in prison. He'll be pretty grown up when we see him again. But my point is, a hundred years ago he would have been considered a man at his age.”
    “David Pinckney isn't a man,” Jimmy said. “I doubt they'll try him as a man. And Scott Willard wasn't a man. He was only fifteen.He wanted to join the gang, but David just used him for target practice.”
    “Sometimes, you know, Jimmy, you just fall into your life. And sometimes . . .”
    “Fall into your life?”
    “Your life falls together,” Mulheisen amended. “But then it never holds together, does it? Every once in a while it kind of falls apart, or sags awry . . . and all at once you find you can walk through gaping holes. The fabric is torn.”
    “You're not feeling sage,” Jimmy noted.
    Mulheisen shook his head. “I feel strange. I'm thinking I should become a . . .” he hesitated, looking shyly at Jimmy.
    “What?” Jimmy looked over the top of the car, unlocking the door.
    “A disc jockey,” Mulheisen said.
    They got in the car and drove, dodging in and out of spaces to let opposing cars by. “A disc jockey,” Jimmy said, thoughtfully. “Like on the back of a matchbook cover. ‘Big Money in Broadcasting.’ “
    “I'd just play jazz. Older jazz,” Mulheisen said, “from the fifties and sixties. Coltrane . . . Cannonball . . . Horace Silver.”
    “Forties, too,” Jimmy suggested. “Ben Webster, Benny Carter . . . maybe the John Kirby Sextet.”
    “Or a pilot,” Mulheisen