The Blind Pig by Jon A. Jackson Page B

door was opened by someone he had 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.
    The Adamsons didn't go to church, but they didn't party, either. They didn't read any books, as far as Mulheisen could tell. They watched their new color television a good deal. They didn't get a newspaper. They had no close friends, just a few other couples whom they saw once or twice a year. Mulheisen was appalled by their life. After the door closed behind Bobby, Mulheisen said “Let's go” to Maki and they went to arrest the boy.
    When Bobby was brought in, he denied that he was BobbyParenteau, which was not unusual, but he persisted in this denial long after being confronted with overwhelming evidence: fingerprints, visual identification and, finally, an admission of his identity by his parents. In fact, to date he had still to admit that he was Bobby Parenteau. Whether he maintained this curious fiction during the trial was something that interested Mulheisen.
    He noticed that the canny defense attorney, Marv Epstein, had seen to it that Evelyn Adamson and her tiny baby boy were seated in the front row, where Judge Brownlow could not miss seeing them.
    It was three o'clock before Mulheisen testified. Except for a couple of Coney Island hot dogs and a bottle of Stroh's beer, he had eaten nothing since breakfast. He was edgy and tired on the witness stand. His testimony was largely confined to a description of the crime scene and his interrogation of the defendant. Nobody was interested in Mulheisen's coup as an investigator.
    “When you were questioning the defendant, did he seem sane to you, Sergeant?” Wilde asked.
    “Objection,” said a bored Epstein. “The sergeant is not a qualified psychologist.”
    “I