The Blind Pig (9 page)

“Well, it just occurred to me that the first two shots that Bobby fired were aimed at Frank Witt. Only one of them hit him, the second. Then Bobby emptied the gun randomly at the rest of the crowd. Now, for no good reason . . . nothing that I can put my finger on, really, it struck me that Witt is a homosexual.”

“He is?” Wilde said. “I never heard anything about that.”

“No, nobody's mentioned it,” Mulheisen said, “but I'm certain that he is. There's a possibility that he and Bobby may have had a thing, a relationship. Maybe Bobby wanted to break it off and Witt didn't. Maybe Bobby was horrified—his four-year history indicates that he isn't a homosexual, apparently. But young men will experiment.”

“Yes, yes, I see,” Wilde said thoughtfully. Then: “Mul, do you really think I should go into this? Won't it be opening a can of worms? I mean, we're in trial, right now! I suppose I could get a temporary adjournment, but Brownlow won't like it. Anyway, what would the consequence be?” Wilde was thinking out loud.

So was Mulheisen. “It may not change things,” he conceded. “Well, I just thought . . . you know, the idea hit me. I guess it doesn't make any more sense to shoot a bunch of kids over a homosexual affair than for any other reason. Well, think it over, Ray. Give me a call if I can help on anything.”

•    •    •

For once, Mulheisen got home before dark, to the white-painted clapboard house in St. Clair Flats. It was an old farmhouse and he had always lived in it. It was in good repair, with neatly painted shutters, surrounded by maple trees with a large oak in the back yard. Beyond the oak was an old barn that was now a garage and workshop. Beyond the garage, the low fields covered with tall brown grass sloped imperceptibly to the St. Clair River. A huge ore freighter was downbound in the channel as Mulheisen pulled into the driveway. Through some trick of the terrain, the channel was not visible and the freighter seemed to be sailing through a hayfield.

There was a lot of mail in the box, including a couple of postcards from his mother, postmarked Galveston, Texas. She seemed to be having a good time and was looking forward to seeing the nearly extinct whooping cranes.

Mulheisen got himself a cold bottle of Stroh's from the refrigerator and went up to his bedroom. He sat down near the window, where he could look out at the ships traveling up and down the Seaway. He had put on an Erik Satie record and he listened to the gentle tinkling of the piano as the light failed and the ship's lights grew stronger. He thought of smoking a cigar and actually got one out, but not lit, before he fell asleep.

Ten

At approximately 5:10
P.M
., just as rush-hour traffic was beginning to pile up, two patrolmen from the 15th, or Conner, Precinct were approaching the station, northbound on Gratiot Avenue, near the Detroit City Airport. They were disgusted to see a locomotive of the Detroit Terminal Railways pull across Gratiot, blocking traffic at one of the busiest intersections in the city, just south of Conner Avenue.

Later one of the patrolmen said that the train had looked a little unusual to him, since there was a single boxcar in front of the engine and a whole string of loaded auto-carrier cars behind the engine. But mostly he was surprised that the railroad would choose this moment to transfer these cars. Usually they tried to avoid tying up street traffic during peak periods.

The patrolmen became even angrier when the locomotive pulled out of sight, into Gethsemane Cemetery, and stopped. Its long train stretched back across Gratiot. A tremendous traffic snarl began to build as the train continued to stand. Finally, after five full minutes, the patrolmen pulled their squad car out into the empty southbound lanes and drove over to the tracks. They intended to issue a traffic violation
to the train, which was their duty after five minutes of blockage. For this purpose the engine number was required. But just as the passenger patrolman got out and walked down the track toward the locomotive, the train began to reverse. The patrolman ran back to the squad car.

As the train rolled by he noticed the number—1013—and also that the boxcar on the front was no longer attached. The driver of the squad car took advantage of the situation to cut across the tracks, diagonally across the avenue, behind the fleeing locomotive, in order to sneak into the precinct driveway ahead of the piled-up traffic.

“Did you see that engine?” the driver said to his partner. “There wasn't anyone in the cab.”

“Sure, there was,” the partner said. “You just didn't see him. He must have been standing on the other side of the cab. But he really did move out, once he made up his mind! I'm gonna write the son of a bitch up, anyway.” He gestured at the sluggish Gratiot traffic that still had not begun to flow normally. “Arrogant bastards, who do they think they are?”

The train was now headed south, toward the Detroit River. Rush-hour drivers on the Edsel Ford Expressway were startled to see a dozen or more large auto carriers go thundering overhead on the overpass, highballing like a through freight. The Big 4, under the command of Dennis the Menace Noell was just coming up on the Conner exit on the expressway. “Lookit that son of a bitch go!” Noell exclaimed. “He's going into them Chrysler yards in a hell of a hurry!” He motioned the driver to speed up.

The Big 4 cruiser wailed down Conner. Near Mack Avenue, they could see the train flying along, at better than forty miles per hour, beyond the ball diamond. The train disappeared from sight behind some factory buildings. “Step on it,” Noell yelled. “That fucker's a runaway! No engineer'd take her into this section at that speed!” He snatched up the radio microphone and told dispatch that they were pursuing a runaway train, southbound on Conner, and anticipating an emergency.

At Vernor Avenue he ordered the driver to turn and try to intercept the runaway, although, as he was to say later, there was really little he could do about it—"What am I gonna do? Jump on it and wrestle it to a halt?”

There was very little traffic on Vernor, a one-way artery westbound. The railroad barrier had automatically descended two blocks west. The driver of the Big 4 stood the Flyer on two wheels and fishtailed past a car waiting for the light, the driver of the car gaping in terror. The runaway train poured through the crossing before they reached it.

Noell yelled and signaled the driver to turn south on a narrow service drive that paralleled the tracks. They ran up alongside engine number 1013 at forty-five miles per hour. There was no one in the cab. Looking down the track, Noell saw that they were rapidly approaching Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, and smack in the middle of the track on which the runaway was rolling there was a long string of auto carriers, loaded with new Chryslers.

“Dispatch, Big Four,” Noell shouted into the microphone, “we've got a derailment.” He said it before the derailment actually occurred. “Give me every wagon you've got, plus the fire department. This is a code eighty-three!”

The Flyer dropped back as the train thundered across Jefferson Avenue, streaming past the cars patiently waiting at the barrier, and poured into the Chrysler yard.

And then the crashing started. The cars piled into the standing cars and began to jackknife and flip over, many of them crashing into buildings adjacent to the track on Jefferson Avenue. It was a scene that no Hollywood film director would dare to reenact: it would be too expensive. Hundreds of brand-new Chrysler automobiles were dumped out of their containers and junked instantaneously. The smaller boxcars in the yard were crushed and, finally, the impact sent a huge auto carrier arcing through the air, clearing several tracks to sprawl sideways, rolling over dozens of parked cars belonging to employees. There was a great cloud of dust and the air was filled with the clamor of shrieking metal.

The confusion was extreme at first. Dennis Noell was in immediate charge of the scene, at least for the first half-hour, since he was the ranking police officer present. To him belonged a great deal of the credit for the extraordinarily rapid recovery from catastrophe at the scene. He immediately notified dispatch of the existence of a disaster and said that he was initiating S.O.P. No. 1, the departmental disaster plan. He established a disaster headquarters in a building next to the Chrysler train yard. The other detectives from the Big 4 crew went to work directing traffic on Jefferson and Conner until squad cars arrived. Noell ordered the area blocked off, and policemen and firemen began to scramble through the wreckage, looking for bodies, while several ambulances stood by. At first they didn't find much.

A brakeman was found, pinned under the wreckage of a boxcar that had been toppled off its track. He was very lucky. There was a slight depression, formed by the grade of the track itself, and the brakeman had fallen in there, so that the car had merely trapped him instead of crushing him.

Shortly afterwards, five bodies were discovered in a wrecked Lackawanna boxcar. This boxcar had been coupled directly behind the locomotive, and when the collision occurred, the locomotive crashed through the boxcar, telescoping it and reducing it to kindling before the locomotive itself left the tracks and collided with yet another boxcar. The dead men were severely mangled. With some difficulty it was determined that they were, respectively: the engineer, who should have been driving 1013, the fireman and the two brakemen assigned to the train. The fifth man wore a private-security-service uniform, but his pistol was missing from its holster.

By the time Mulheisen arrived on the scene the district inspector, a calm, middle-aged man named “Ike” Weinberg, had taken over the command post from Dennis Noell. Weinberg detailed Mulheisen to question the terminal signalmen in the yard tower to find out how the accident had happened.

The signalmen were puzzled themselves. When last heard
from, 1013 was on the next section up the line, under the control of the Vernor tower. They had tried to contact the Vernor tower, but there was no answer.

“Ten thirteen should have been on break,” one of the signalmen told Mulheisen. “Usually they knock off until street traffic dies down a bit. Then they'd come back into this yard and pick up the rest of the car carriers and take them out to the Grand Trunk yards to be broken up for different through freights.”

Mulheisen tried to ring Vernor tower, but there was still no answer. “Must of knocked down our phone lines,” said one of the signalmen.

“What happens when a runaway comes through a section, normally?” Mulheisen asked.

“Well, the tower would notice it. They'd see it on their display board. See here?” The signalman indicated his own electronic board, where colored lights indicated open tracks and the presence of cars and moving trains could be clearly seen. “All the tower man has to do is hit this button, and as soon as the train passes over this switch an electronic impulse will automatically trip the brakes on the locomotive and stop the train.”

“Why didn't they do that in the Vernor section?” Mulheisen asked.

“I don't know,” the signalman said.

Mulheisen went back to the district inspector. “I think I'd better go over there,” he said, after he'd explained.

Surprisingly, it didn't take more than a few minutes to drive to the Vernor tower. When he arrived he noticed right away that the door to the tower was unlocked and hanging open. He drew his .38 and proceeded slowly up the stairs. The tower wasn't very tall, and long before he reached the control area he knew something serious was wrong. There was blood on the stairs. It dripped slowly down in a substantial stream.

Three men lay on the floor of the control area. All of them were lying face down, side by side, and all had been shot in
the back of the head. Their blood had spread to the stairwell and then down the steps, one by one.

Mulheisen immediately called the district inspector. He explained what he'd found, then said, “That runaway was deliberate, Inspector.”

Weinberg couldn't make any sense of it. Who would murder a tower crew and set a train on a runaway course with the train crew locked into a boxcar? Weinberg told Mulheisen to take charge of the murder scene and he would dispatch the necessary investigation team, along with the medical examiner, as soon as they could spare somebody.

A few minutes later, the district supervisor learned that a boxcar had been stolen from the Cadillac Gage Company, on Conner Avenue, just a few blocks from the 15th Precinct station house. The company was within the area controlled by the Vernor tower. The boxcar had been loaded with wooden crates containing Stoner rifles, which were manufactured by Cadillac Gage. The company had discovered the theft when one of the regular security men had gone from his front-gate position to the rear gate (where a spur railroad line entered the factory grounds) to find out why the rear-gate guard was not responding to routine calls. He found the guard post abandoned and the gate locked, but the newly loaded boxcar, which had been parked next to the loading dock, was gone.

It was nearly seven o'clock before Mulheisen and two detectives from the 15th found the missing boxcar. It was sitting empty in Gethsemane Cemetery. Company officials said that 2,400 Stoner rifles had been in the boxcar, along with half a million rounds of ammunition. The shipment was bound for a U.S. Marines camp in California, part of an experimental program to replace M-16s in rifle companies.

In short order the scene was invaded by federal agents of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, as well as the FBI. The men of the Scientific Bureau were on their third major crime scene of the evening, taking photographs, checking
for fingerprints, and even making plaster casts of vehicle tracks in the dirt alongside the empty boxcar.

Frank Zeppanuk, from the Scientific Bureau, told Mulheisen that he had a nice print of the tread on a double-tandem truck. “It's nothing unusual, Mul. Probably ten thousand tires like this in the city, but none of them have quite these characteristics, because of stones they've been driven over, little cuts, gashes, things like that. Trouble is, unless you find the right tire right away, it won't do much good, ‘cause continued driving will change the characteristics again.”

“It's hopeless, then,” Mulheisen said.

“Probably,” Zeppanuk agreed, “but at least you know that the guns were almost certainly loaded onto a heavy truck, probably a semi.”

Mulheisen thanked him and joined Lt. Del Moser, a detective from the 15th. Mulheisen explained what he'd learned from Zeppanuk and suggested that Moser detail some of his men to question nearby residents about heavy trucks that may have been seen in the cemetery.

Moser, a swarthy man with dark eyebrows and a hooked nose, took a long look around the darkened cemetery. Gethsemane was an old cemetery. The headstones loomed about them, dimly visible in the half-light of the commercial signs on the surrounding buildings and from the lights of traffic on the busy streets. A rear gate led out of the cemetery, onto French Street. French crossed Gratiot within a couple of blocks, and a few blocks later it passed over the Edsel Ford Expressway, with entrances onto the freeway both east and west. A truck leaving the cemetery had good routes for fast egress. It could be halfway to Chicago by now.

Mulheisen suddenly remembered his dinner date with Mandy Cecil. Well, he'd have to call and cancel. He left the scene crawling with officials from half a dozen jurisdictions and drove to a pay telephone booth near the City Airport. There was no answer at Mandy's apartment. He tried the
Vanni Trucking Company, but there was no answer there, either. Disappointed and a little anxious, Mulheisen went back to the cemetery.

Moser had mustered several detectives and begun to canvass the neighborhood surrounding the cemetery. To the north there was nothing but the airport. A service road ran along the Detroit Terminal tracks around the perimeter of the airport and the hijackers’ truck could have gone that way, but there were no exits into the airport itself, nor were there any good escape routes. Obviously, the best bet was through the neighborhood to the south of Gethsemane.

Mulheisen left the other detectives to canvass and went to call the cemetery corporation, to find out if there had been any funerals there during the day and what employees, if any, had been present. He learned that there had been no funerals that afternoon. As it happened, only a maintenance man had been present, except for possible unknown visitors to the grave sites, and he had gone home promptly at four- thirty, well before the activity had begun near the back gate.

Mulheisen was now at a loss as to how to continue. Moser and his crew were handling the canvass; Homicide was busy at the Vernor tower site and at the Chrysler yard; Robbery was busy at Cadillac Gage; and everywhere there were ATF agents, FBI agents, and God knows who else. Weinberg had informed Mulheisen that there would be a big meeting at police headquarters in the morning and he should be present. By then, it was hoped, everything would have been pretty well sorted out and the various agencies and departments could organize a proper approach to the whole case.