Man with an Axe (12 page)

I had an idea of some people I could sing this lullaby to, kind of leak it, who I figured would buy it, but my man Lonzo shakes his
head. He was sure that it'd never sell, not to Carmine and specially not to the Fat Man (who I allus figured was smarter than Carmine anyways) if the story could be pegged to me. It would look more like butter if
he
put it out, and he knew just the chumps to lay it on. It turned out a couple of them were the same chumps I was thinking about, but Lonzo's idea that it was better if he told the story seemed right. As for Cooze, it was the trunk of an ayban for him.

So now, Mul, you're asking all kind of questions, I can prac'ly hear it: What's with Hoffa? What does he think? Why am I trusting a stinking rat like Lonzo? What the hell is going on?

Okay, okay. Don't get your p.j.s in a tangle. I talked to Hoffa, but first I had to get the show on the road. I walked out with Lonzo while the boys were loading Cooze into the trunk of the Caddy and took him aside. “Screw all that shit inside,” I told him, “you get the word to the Fat Man that Grootka is here. And you tell him that Hoffa is dead. We ain't got time for no street rumor. Those boys'll be back within a couple hours, soon's it's dark. I know you sold Hoffa to the man and I oughta blast your sorry ass right here, but this way you got a chance to live. You hear me?”

I swear the sonuvabitch looked me right in the eye—which is never fun with Lonzo—and said, “I never tol’ nobody nothing about Hoffa. When would I have a chance, even if I wanted to git my own nephew croaked?”

I let him talk. He obviously hadda justify himself to somebody, so why not me? He said somebody up at Nigger Heaven had called him and told him that something funny was going on at his place and Grootka was hanging around, so he come up to see. But it never occurred to him that Hoffa was up here and sure as hell not that Hoffa was at his place! The only reason he come flying up to check it out was because I was there.

Well, it sounded good, anyways. I just shrugged and let on that I believed it. The trouble was, if he didn't sell Hoffa, who did? He didn't have no comeback for that.

Lonzo took off for town with Krizmo and Baits, to spread the good news on the right corners and let the Fat Man know what was playing at the Bijou, and they took the late Cusumano with them. I never heard no more about Cooze and neither did you, so you know they must of did a good job on that. Then I sat down for a chat with Jimmy.

Mr. H. wasn't too happy. He'd been on the lam for three days already and he hadn't talked to his wife, or let her know he was okay. That was bugging the shit outta him. The guy really was worried about his old lady—it was pathetic. I didn't know what to tell him. What could I tell him? If he got word to her that he was all right, one way or another it would get out and that could be fatal. It was hard, but there it was. Well, he knew that, I didn't have to tell him.

But the thing was, he claimed it was all a big misunderstanding. If only he could talk to Carmine and maybe Tony Jack [
Anthony Giacalone, an organized-crime figure in Detroit with known associations in the Teamsters union.
—M.], maybe a couple others, it could all be straightened out.

“You want to hire a hall?” I asked him. “Maybe you should go on
Johnny Carson.
”

But no, it was just that Tony Jack had sent a couple of punks to talk to him at the Red Fox, instead of coming hisself, like he was s'posed to. And then they were late, and when they tried to explain he blew up. He knew the guys, a couple of minor leaguers named Beano and Zit. [
Long since deceased.
—M.] The three of them had gone for a little walk away from the parking lot—there's woods around there, where they're putting in some developments, and they walked over that way, he says. Hoffa says the Zit pulled a gun.

“Was he gonna shoot you?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Hoffa says. “I think so. I was yelling at the bastard and he says, ‘Hey, asshole, I'm telling you,’ and he yanks out the piece and he's waving it around. Maybe he wasn't meaning to
use it, but I panicked. I swung my briefcase and whacked the gun hand. He dropped the gun and I took off.”

That was when he ran into Tyrone and Vera. They were just pulling into the parking lot to meet Jacobsen. Hoffa jumps in their van and asks them to help him, which they did. They ended up bringing him up here.

“Why were you carrying a briefcase?” I asked.

“I had some important papers I wanted to show to Tony Jack, but of course Tony didn't show up. Look, you're the hotshot dick, Grootka,” Hoffa says, “you get me out of this. I'm sick of this stinking joint. It stinks, I don't have no clean clothes, there's nothing to do—it was better in Lewisburg [
the federal penitentiary where Hoffa was incarcerated, March
7,
1967, to December 23, 1971
—M.] Between him"— he points at Tyrone—"playing that goddamn sax all day or playing these crazy records, and her"—Vera, natch—"walking around here half-naked, I'm going nuts. You talk to somebody, straighten it out.”

“Well, what's to straighten out, that's what I want to know. What's the deal with Carmine?”

“It's nothing!” Hoffa insists. “He thinks I'm gonna blow on him and Tony Jack to the grand jury in Pontiac. Hell, I never blew on nobody yet, why would I now? I don't know nothing!”

“What does the grand jury want?” I asked.

“It's something about a loan Tony got from the pension fund, a long time ago. What do I know about it? What am I, a friggin’ loan officer? I told the grand jury, I don't know nothing.”

Well, I kept pushing, but Hoffa wouldn't give. He had some kind of deal with Tony Jack and Carmine, I could see, but he wouldn't give me any details, nothing. “Me and Tony and Carmine and Fatso, we're like brothers,” he said. “We been through a lot together. We do a little business, why not? But our deal, we go back a long ways, to we were kids on the street. I can't believe that they
would put out a hit on me. It was just those friggin’ hothead punks Carmine sent.”

“And your hot head,” I said.

“Yeah, and my hot head. Jo says I got to watch my temper.”

Jo is Hoffa's old lady, Mul.

All I can think, Mul, is that maybe it was all a misunderstanding. It seems like Hoffa really was confused. But pissed, too. Mainly ‘cause Tony Jack had sent two punks to talk to him. Things got out of hand and now the Mob was looking to just get rid of Hoffa before they got stuck with the dirty end of the stick. Can you beat that? These guys, they're like high school girls, or opera stars. I know it don't sound like much, but you and me have seen deals that got nasty on less. Naturally, I didn't let on to Hoffa.

“Gee, it don't sound like much,” I says. “I mean, Carmine ain't gonna spring for a hit on a public figure like you, and you being a old buddy, just ‘cause you might let something drop to the grand jury. What the hell, the guy knows you. Right?”

“Right,” says Hoffa. And when I shrug and look all mystified, he shakes his head and says, “Oh, I dunno. I been trying to figure it out. I been thinking . . . why are these guys so down on me getting back into the union?”

And this maybe is it, Mul. Hoffa tells me that he'd come to think that maybe Carmine and the others didn't want him to get back into the Teamsters. The deal was, when Hoffa got outta the can, when Nixon give him a pardon, he didn't realize that there was this special condition, that he couldn't participate in the union until 1980.

“When they let me out they told me there was no special conditions,” Hoffa told me. “I hadda sign a paper, Conditions of Parole, and all it said was that I hadda live in Detroit and report in like anybody else. I told ‘em I could live with that and I signed it. But a day later I find out, when I'm already home, that there's a
special condition. That ain't constitutional, and the stinkin’ Feds know it. You can't have the government screwing around in union business. Now that we got Ford in and this new attorney general, Levi, it'll get thrown out. You'll see. But it looks like Tony Jack and Carmine and them have been listening to Tony Pro. [
Anthony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamsters official who was connected to organized crime.
—M.] He hates me since I wouldn't get him a pension from the fund.”

I didn't know nothing about any of this, but I could see that Hoffa was still boiling about it. What it comes down to, was that the hoods was pretty happy with Fitzsimmons being the Teamsters president now, even if Jimmy had been their fair-haired boy in his day. But as far as they were concerned, Jimmy's day was over. At least, that's what he was afraid of. And he'd reacted when they sent the kids to talk to him, ‘stead of coming their selfs. And then he got to thinking that maybe they didn't want him back so bad that they were gonna make sure he didn't come back.

I dunno, Mul. I can't say I was totally convinced. It's a big deal, putting out a hit on a guy like Hoffa. The guy who did it would have to be either nuts or really confident of who he was. Maybe both. But the thing is, this is what I had. This is Jimmy's story. And it kind of fed into my main pitch, before, that if we could just get the Mob to cool it for a few days and get Hoffa back home, show that he wasn't gonna blow the whistle on them, then maybe everything would be cool.

But you know how it is Mul . . . when all's you want is something simple and all's it takes is for everybody to just be cool, that's when you can't get ‘em to sit still.

Which reminds me. By now, if you're reading this, you must of had Carmine and the Fat Man down for a little talk, or maybe you went out to see them, maybe at the potato-chip
factory. I should of said something before, but maybe it ain't too late, I hope not.

WATCH OUT FOR THESE FUCKERS, MUL!

I mean it, don't get too cocky around them. This is a bad situation. It could mean prison for the whole bunch of them. But I ain't telling you nothing, I guess. The trouble is, Mul, and I hope you don't take it the wrong way, but you never was much of a street cop. I mean, your deal is to study the evidence and ponder the case and talk to the witnesses and all that shit.
And that's good. I mean it.
But when it comes to going and knocking on the Big Bad Wolf's door, for the love of Mike, take some muscle with you and carry a big stick. If I ain't around, and I prob'ly won't be by the time you're reading this, get one a them guys like Stanos, or Dennis, from the Big 4. Don't fall back on Jimmy Marshall, he's a good kid, smart and all that, but he's too much like you, you asshole. Take some muscle. And watch your ass!

8

Hockey Hell

I
went to the hockey game and I came away so depressed that I can't talk about it. What
is
this? I'm watching these splendid men in brilliant red wheeling about the ice as if they own it, as if the other team wasn't there . . . but they don't win. A spectacular pass play culminates in Fedorov ripping a terrific, unstoppable shot to the high far corner of the net, but it
is
stoppable and so is the rebound. The Red Wings outshoot the creaky old Blues almost two to one, but they lose. It's not right. These guys are clearly superior; how can they lose? And beyond that, when they do lose, why do I care so much?

I forced myself to push it out of my mind. I had plenty else to think about. For one thing, the guy from Accounting was back on my butt. Where is my accounting of discretionary funds? And Ahab wanted to talk about his supermarket shooting. I could barely remember the case. I had to put him off; I promised to see him later. And then the kid, Kenty, was back. He'd gotten another transmission on his computer.

It was another little cartoon. Like the first, it wasn't a moving picture, just a series of panels. In this one, addressed as before to “Sgt. Fang Mulhiesen” (I don't know why people can't get the
spelling right, it isn't that hard), we are back on the bridge, as in the first disk, except that now the lone character is a man instead of a woman. This man is little more than a stick figure with an overcoat and a hat and he encounters a couple of much larger men, one of whom has an axe and chops his head off, after which he's thrown off the bridge. It's a fairly simplistic drawing, but perhaps a little more sophisticated than it seems. Whoever is drawing the cartoon does know something about movement.

As the cartoon goes on the scene shifts to a kind of residential neighborhood. Now we see the blond woman again. She runs down a street of detached houses, pursued by three big, dark figures, presumably men in overcoats and hats and carrying large square guns in their hands. Finally, she runs into a house and slams the door, and in the last panel the pursuers are attacking the house with axes and the woman's head sticks out the upstairs window with a balloon attached that says, “Help!”

We watched the thing on the computer in Jimmy Marshall's office. Afterward, I took the kid back to my cubicle and we talked. He said, “I guess she figured her first message didn't get through to you, or you didn't take it seriously.”

“Her?” I said. “What makes you think this is sent by a woman?”

The kid shrugged. “I don't know, it just seemed to me that since a woman was yelling help, she must be the one who made the thing.” He shrugged again. “No big deal, I guess.”

I sat back in my office chair and thought about it. It was true that I hadn't taken the first transmission seriously. It wasn't a legitimate complaint. Presumably, someone was just playing around with a computer and, having come across my name, perhaps in the newspapers, had sent the cartoon to someone on the Net who might be likely to take the thing to the precinct. It was a gag. Of course, the police have to take gags more seriously than would, say, an insurance officer, or a schoolteacher. But we don't always, obviously.

I looked at the kid. He was a smooth-faced, innocent-looking, ordinary black kid in baggy pants and shirt, except that he wasn't wearing Air Jordan sneakers that cost about one hundred and fifty bucks a pop. Instead he had on some kind of boot with a CCM label. That being a manufacturer of hockey equipment, I wondered if he was a Red Wings fan. I thought he probably wasn't, being an African-American, boots or no boots—maybe he just thought they looked cool; but then I wondered if that was a racist notion. I knew black men who were hockey fans. But not many boys. I asked him, “What do you think of the Red Wings?”

“The Red Wings suck,” he said, bitterly. So he was a fan. I felt a little warmer toward him.

“Why do you say ‘her,’” I asked. “The last transmission was signed ‘Gaffer Hexam.’ Do you know who that is?” When the boy shook his head, I told him, “It's a literary character, from a novel by Charles Dickens.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, with a look of interest, “like in
Tale of Two Cities.
”

“That's right,” I said. “I wouldn't have got it myself, except that I just happened to reread this novel recently. Gaffer Hexam is a river scavenger, a guy who picks up floating stuff in the river that runs through London.”

“The Thames,” Kenty said, pronouncing the “th” as in “thumb.”

“I think they say ‘Temz.’ But yeah, that's how he makes his living. At the beginning of this book he recovers a body, which everybody thinks is the body of a young man who is the heir to a fortune. But it turns out that the body is that of a man who only resembles the heir, who has been the victim of a robbery and murder plot that nearly succeeded. But the funny thing is, the author—Dickens—doesn't seem all that interested in that side of the story, after a while. He's got too many other stories to tell us about, so the
central murder mystery is kind of pushed aside. Life goes on is the message, I guess.”

Kenty looked interested, but I didn't want to test his patience; he was a true child of the computer age, with the attention span that implied. Still, people always seem to be interested in a story, so I went on. “You'd think for a novelist that a murder would be the main focus, wouldn't you? But Dickens just pushes it aside, pretty quickly, so he can tell us all about a bunch of other people. I guess Dickens got more interested in Lizzie Hexam's story.”

“Who's Lizzie?” Kenty interrupted.

“Sorry. That's Gaffer's daughter. She also works the river with him in his skiff.” Kenty nodded. “Anyway, the idea is that Gaffer starts the story rolling, but then he sort of fades into the background—he dies, and you kind of get the impression that Dickens kills him off, just to get rid of him. But Lizzie's story does become important. It kind of drives the last several chapters, and lots of other characters are caught up in it. But what does all that have to do with this . . . ? What is this thing? I mean, what do you call it?”

Kenty looked confused. “What is it? It's just a thing somebody sent to my E-mail address, but it wasn't for me, it was for you.”

“This is E-mail? Hmmm. So now I've gotten my first E-mail. Second, really. Well, what does it mean? Maybe what our person here is saying, is that somebody has been killed, thrown in the river, and she knows about it and the killers are now after her. But,” I concluded lamely, “so what? It's only a cartoon. Do you get a lot of this stuff? Things just popping into your E-mail?”

“Nope. Mostly I get people on the Net, people I talk to, mostly about games, that kind of stuff. Sometimes you get folks playing jokes, or they leave stupid messages, but this seemed different.”

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

Kenty shrugged. “I ain't no detective,” he said. “You are . . .
or you s'posed to be. To me it sounds like somebody is scared and they need help.”

I tried not to sigh. “This kind of thing happens all the time, Kenty. Not exactly this, not misdirected E-mail, but this basic situation. People get worried because they think someone is trying to hurt them. Sometimes it's true. We have to take it seriously, to a degree, but that degree is based on the message. Here we have a somewhat mixed message. It seems to be a serious threat, but it's in the form of a crude cartoon that isn't even sent directly to the police but to a . . .”

“A kid,” he said, with a serious nod.

“Well, yeah, a kid.”

“So you don't take it too serious,” he said. “But what if that's her only way out? What if she has a computer but can't get out, or is afraid, or somebody won't let her? But she can send a message on the Net?”

I had kept the first disk. I located it in my desk, somehow, and got Kenty to pull up the material on a computer screen in Jimmy Marshall's office. As I'd recalled, it was just a series of panels depicting threatening events that would, or perhaps could, befall the blond woman. But there was no explicit message of help. We looked at the second disk, saved it, and copied it onto the first one, so I could keep it.

Kenty was sitting at the desk, his fingers idly riffling across the board, not unlike a pianist. He had called up the cartoon again. “See that?” Kenty said, pointing at the screen. “There's a number on her house.”

So there was. And in fact, by backtracking we were able to find a street sign. I had missed all that. Well, it wasn't exactly jumping out of the screen. The kid looked at me, as if to say, And you call yourself a detective?

I got out the address telephone book and looked it up. “Vera Jacobsen,” it read. The name rang as pure as a silver bell. It's hard
to describe the feeling that a detective can get, sometimes, when he stumbles on something like this. It resonates deep in the marrow.

The address was in Ferndale, not more than six or seven blocks from where I'd been earlier, visiting Becky Berg.

“You live around here?” I asked Kenty. “Come on, I'll give you a ride home.”

“Nah, that's all right,” he said.

“What are you, afraid? Don't want the homies to see you riding in the cop's car? It's just an old Checker, it isn't like a real cop car.”

I don't know why I was pushing it; I guess I had some notion of wanting to see Kenty's house, his setup. It was a neat, well-maintained brick house on Three Mile Drive, off Mack. His grandmother came to the door, a round-faced woman with gray hair cut short, wearing a clean but wash-worn blue pajamalike outfit that made her look like Chairman Mao—she even had his fat cheeks. She was alarmed to see Kenty with a white man, and she quickly pegged me as a cop.

“This boy been in trouble?” she said, quickly. She grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him inside. Kenty tolerated her handling with a roll of his eyes.

“No, Ma'am,” I assured her. I showed my identification. “He was just helping us with some other citizen's cry for help. Trying to warn us, you might say. May I come in?”

She let me in, and I was about to explain that I was just interested in Kenty's layout when I realized that she would never believe that. She would think I was looking for drugs in his room. I said that I was interested in the house. I was looking to move and I'd considered this neighborhood.

“You?” she said, skeptically, looking me up and down.

“Yeah,” I said, looking her up and down. “Are there any places for sale around here?”

She shrugged. “Go ahead, look around. It's a nice house. Sure, there's places for sale, up by Forest.” She frowned at me, assessing my worth, then said, “This for a single man?” When I nodded she pursed her lips, as if to say, I thought as much. “The church"—she pronounced it
choich
—"is fixing up some houses to sell below Mack, but I don't know. . .” she faltered, but then decided to take a chance and went on, “if you would qualify.”

“Well, I've got a steady income,” I said.

“I mean, I don't know that the church is wantin’ to sell these homes, which they been fixin’ up, to um,
single
folks. Single men, anyway. There's lots of single women who have families and need the housing, but . . .”

“What church would that be?”

“That's the Penile African Baptist Church.” She gazed at me as blandly as any Chinese emperor, daring me to smile.

“The Penile Church,” I said.

“Penile African Baptist, on Joy. You'll find it in the book.”

I thanked her and started to leave. Kenty said, “You want me to go with you?”

I didn't understand.

“To see the lady?” he said.

“Oh. No. I couldn't do that,” I said. I did want him to go with me, for a couple of reasons, one of which was to find out what this church was, but also because he might be helpful, and then . . . well, I'd enjoyed his company. But it wasn't something I could do. You can't take a kid with you on police business.

Which reminded me, in the car, of Grootka's warning about the dangers of this investigation, as old and stale as it was. I had not, of course, called in the Fat Man—who was now generally known by his real name, Humphrey DiEbola, if for no other reason than that he was no longer fat, but also because he was now
the
Man, his boss Carmine having been put away by assailants unknown,
though widely believed to have been Ms. Helen Sedlacek and her lover, Joe Service. That is, the reason I hadn't called Humphrey in was that . . . well, let's face it, the material that Grootka had left me just wouldn't support that kind of action. It was a barely legible manuscript written in old school-exam books, hardly a document that one could rely on for an indictment. I hadn't even told Jimmy about it, and so how was I going to go to him, or to the Big 4, and ask for backup? It just wasn't in the playbook. Still, I had an uneasy feeling that Grootka's warning oughtn't to be ignored. He wasn't easily spooked. This had an edgy feel to it, and the feeling was getting edgier. Too, Grootka was not wrong in saying that I was not really keen on the outside aspects of detective work. I was never one to think of a gun first. It always seemed to me that a detective probably should not be in a situation where the only option was a gun. If he was, he'd probably made a mistake, not done his thinking first, as he should have.

With that in mind, I stopped by the Fifth Precinct, which is also the shooting range, and spent an hour getting rid of a couple pounds of lead. It was good exercise and I was gratified by the approving comments of Sergeant Bell, the range instructor, who noted that my scores were up. He wondered if I'd quit something.

“Quit something? Like what?” I asked.

“Usually the first thing that improves a guy's scores is, he's quit smoking, or even drinking,” Bell observed.

Now that I thought of it, I realized that I had not had a drink in several days, which may have been the first time that had happened in some time. But it had not been volitional: I simply hadn't felt like drinking. How odd that I hadn't noticed. Also, I hadn't had a cigar for a day or two. I felt like one now, however, and on the way to Ferndale I lit up an H. Upmann “Petit Corona.” It tasted very good and got me all the way to the little white house with the picket fence.