Clandestine

portly, and wearing identical gaudy hand-tooled shoulder holsters encasing .45 automatics with mother-of-pearl grips. They looked up when they heard my footsteps and smiled identically.

I knew I was going to be the audience for a cop comedy act, so I raised my arms in mock surrender and said, 'Whoa, pardner, I'm a friend.'

'Never thought that you weren't,' the more red-faced of the two men said. 'But how'd you get past the desk? You one of Milwaukee's finest?'

I laughed. 'No, but I represent one of the finest insurance companies in Los Angeles.' I fished two business cards out of my coat pocket and handed one to each cop. They responded with identical half nods and shakes of the head.

'Floyd Lutz,' the red-faced man said, and stuck out his hand. I shook it.

'Walt Kraus,' his partner said, extending his hand. I shook it.

'Fred Underhill,' I returned.

We looked at one another. By way of amenities I said, 'I take it Will Berglund called you about me?'

By way of amenities, Floyd Lutz said, 'Yeah, he did. Who choked Johnny DeVries's sister, Underhill?'

'I don't know. Neither do the L.A. cops. Who sliced Johnny DeVries?'

Walt Kraus pointed to a chair. 'We don't know,' he said. 'We'd like to. Floyd and I were on the case from the beginning. Johnny was a beast, a nice-guy beast, don't get me wrong, but seven feet tall? Three hundred pounds? That's a beast. The guy who cut him had to be a worse beast. Johnny's stomach was torn open from rib cage to belly button. Jesus!'

'Suspects?' I asked.

Floyd Lutz answered me: 'DeVries pushed morphine. More correctly, he gave it away. He was a soft touch. He could never stay in business for long. He'd always wind up on skid row, sleeping in the park, passing out handbills and selling his blood like the other derelicts. He was a nice, passive guy most of the time, used to hand out free morph to the poor bastards on skid who had got hooked during the war. Floyd and me and most of the other cops did our best not to roust him, but sometimes we had to: when he got mad he was the meanest animal I've ever seen. He'd wreck bars and overturn cars, bust heads and fill skid row with dread. He was a terror. Walt and I figure his killer was either some bimbo on the row he beat up or some dope pusher who didn't like a soft touch on his turf. We checked out every major and minor known heroin and morph pusher from Milwaukee to Chi. Nada. We went back over Johnny's rap sheet and checked out the victims in every assault beef he ever had—over thirty guys. Most of them were transients. We ran makes on them all over the Midwest. Eight of them were in jail —Kentucky to Michigan. We talked to all of them—nothing. We talked to every skid row deadbeat who wasn't too fucked up on Sweet Lucy to talk. We sobered up the ones who were too fucked up. Nothing. Nothing all the way down the line.'

'Physical evidence?' I asked. 'ME's report?'

Lutz sighed. 'Nothing. Cause of death a severed spinal cord or shock or massive loss of blood, take your pick. The coroner said that Big John wasn't fucked-up on morph when he was sliced—that was surprising. That was why Walt and I figured the guy who sliced him had to be a beast or a friend of Johnny's—someone who knew him. Anyone who could slice a guy like that when he was sober had to be a monster.'

'Did Johnny have any friends?' I asked.

'Only one,' Lutz said. 'A chemistry teacher at Marquette. Was. He's a wino now. He and Johnny used to get drunk together on the row. The guy was nutso. Used to teach a semester, then take off a semester and go on a bender. The priests at Marquette finally got sick of it and gave him the heave-ho. He's probably still on skid; the last time I saw him he was sniffing gasoline in front of the Jesus Saves Mission.' Lutz shook his head.

'What was the guy's name?' I asked.

Lutz looked to Kraus and shrugged. Kraus screwed his face into a memory search. 'Melveny? Yeah, that's it —George 'The Professor' Melveny, George 'The Gluebird' Melveny. He's got a dozen skid row monickers.'

'Last known address?' I queried.

Kraus and Lutz laughed in unison.

'Park bench,' Kraus said.

'Slit trench,' Lutz rhymed.

'No dough.'

'Skid row.' This sent the two detectives into gales of laughter.

'I get the picture,' I said. 'Let me ask you something: where did a skid row bum like Johnny DeVries get morphine?'

'Well,' Floyd Lutz said, 'he was a pharmacist by trade, before the dope got him. I always figured he was using George 'The Gluebird's' lab to make the shit. We checked it out once; no go. Beats me where he got the stuff. Johnny was kind of formidable in a lot of ways; you got the impression that maybe he was hot stuff once.' Lutz shook his head again, and looked at Kraus, who shook his, too.

I sighed. 'I need a favor,' I said.

'Name it,' Kraus said. 'Any pal of Will Berglund's is a friend of mine.'

'Thanks, Walt. Look, Will told me that maybe Johnny DeVries and his sister were involved in a drug robbery at the naval hospital in Long Beach, California, during the war. They were both stationed there. Could you call the provost marshal's office there at the hospital? A request from an official police agency might carry some weight. I'm just an insurance investigator—they won't give me the time of day. I—'

Lutz interrupted me. 'Are you fishing in the same stream as us, Underhill?'

'All the way. A big load of morph was stolen, I know that, and that would explain where Johnny got the stuff he was pushing.'

Kraus and Lutz looked at each other. 'Use the phone in the skipper's office,' Lutz said.

Kraus jumped up from his desk and walked to a cubicle partitioned off and festooned with Milwaukee Braves' pennants.

'All the particulars, Walt,' Lutz called after him.

'Gotcha!' Kraus returned.

I looked at Lutz and popped my next request: 'Could I see DeVries's rap sheet?'

He nodded and went to a bank of filing cabinets at the far end of the squad room. He fumbled around in them for five minutes, finally extracting a file and returning to me.

I was getting nervous. Kraus had been on the telephone a long time, and it was only 6:00 A.M. in L.A. His protracted conversation at that hour struck me as ominous.

The manila folder had 'DeVries, John Piet; 6-11-14' typed on the front. I opened it. When I saw the series of mug shots clipped to the first page my hands started to shake and my mind recoiled and leaped forward at the same time. I was looking at the face of Michael Harris. Every curve, plane and angle was identical. It was more than a basic familial resemblance; it was purely parental. Johnny was Michael's father, but who was his mother? It couldn't have been Marcella. With shaking hands I turned the first page and went into double shock: John DeVries had listed Margaret Cadwallader of Waukesha, Wisconsin, as next of kin when he was arrested for assault and battery in 1946.

I put down the folder and suddenly realized I was gasping for air. Floyd Lutz had rushed to the water cooler and was now shoving a paper cup of water at me.

'Underhill,' he was saying. 'Underhill? What the hell is the matter with you? Underhill?'

I came out of it. I felt like a madman restored to sanity by a divine visitation; someone viewing reality for the first time.

I made my voice sound calm: 'I'm all right. This guy DeVries reminded me of someone I knew as a kid. That's all.'

'You holding out on me? Man, you look like you just got back from Mars.'

'Ha-ha!' My laughter sounded phony even to my own ears, so to forestall anymore questions, I read through John DeVries's rap sheet; scores and scores of arrests for drunkenness, assault and battery, petty theft, and trespassing; a dozen thirty- and forty-five-day incarcerations in the Milwaukee County Jail; but nothing else related to blood. No further mention of Maggie Cadwallader, no mention of Marcella, no mention of children.

When I finished I looked up to find Walt Kraus staring down at me. 'I pulled some tails and got what you wanted,' he said. 'The robbery was big-time, off an aircraft carrier bound for the Pacific. Forty-five pounds of