Man with an Axe (13 page)

I don't know what I'd expected from Vera Jacobsen. If she was the woman Grootka had talked about, I guess I was thinking of a middle-aged busty blond stripper. She didn't much answer to Grootka's description. This Vera was as ordinary looking as a woman could be. Her graying hair was cut boy-short, which perhaps contributed to the impression of handsomeness, rather than feminine beauty. Her face was plain and not very wrinkled, with a smooth brow and firm mouth. The famous bosom had deflated, for another thing. She looked to be about fifty years old, perhaps more, her face rather browned in that way that we associate with yachtswomen and golfers, people who have spent all their lives out of doors. She was about five-seven, lean and lithe, a golfer. She wore jeans and an expensive-looking cashmere pullover, running shoes. An intelligent, open, alert face, none of the bosomy, flower-child/earth-mama-cum-sexpot image that Grootka had sketched. But, somehow, I felt that this was the woman in the notebooks. This is what happens to us when we grow up, I thought.

“You must be Mulheisen,” she said. “It's taken you a while.” The statement was flat and declarative. I nodded. “The kid finally convinced you to look into it, I guess.”

“Do you know Kenty?” I asked. She ushered me into a very sparsely furnished living room. There was a folded-up wooden bed, one of those Japanese things, with a colorful pad. There were a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs, strangely attractive for such simple things, and there was a piano, a music stand, a clarinet on a stand, and against the wall a modernistic Scandinavian stereo system of some sort. There were exactly three pictures on the three walls that didn't have a window—small, abstract paintings of seascapes, presumably, being simply blue shading to a straight horizon, then a subtly different blue shading to deep sky. The three paintings were not the same and yet, somehow, how could they be different?

“I know who he is,” Vera Jacobsen said. “I gave him his computer. I don't think he knows that.”

“How mysterious,” I said, unable to repress a tone of pleasure, I guess, because she smiled complicitly.

“It's nice to be able to do something for somebody, once in a while,” she said.

I glanced around the room. I didn't feel in any hurry. “These your work?” I gestured at the paintings. She nodded. “A bit more to this than the cartoons.”

“You can't do this on a video screen,” she pointed out. “But I had to do something to get your attention. It was time.”

“So you're not really in danger?”

“Of course, but I've lived with it for a long time. I try not to let it depress me. Grootka said it would take something serious, preferably with a literary twist, or historical maybe, to get you to pay attention. ‘You might have to paint him a picture,’ he said.”

“No kidding, Grootka said that?”

“In those words. ‘With a naked lady,’ was his suggestion, but I couldn't quite do that.”

“And when was this?”

“By now you should have guessed,” she said. “Would you like coffee, or would you like a drink? By the way, you can smoke your cigar, if you want.”

“No thanks, I just had one. But the coffee sounds good.”

She went into the little kitchen toward the rear and quickly returned with two cups on saucers, brimming with hot coffee. “I just made this a little while ago. It's Ethiopian. Cream? Sugar? Me neither.” She set the cups down on a kind of bookshelf that also held a small plant with thick, fuzzy leaves. She brushed the plant with a flickering look of dissatisfaction. “I'm not much of a gardener,” she said.

“How's the clarinet?”

“I'm not much a player, either.” She waved her hand dismissively. “I like to keep up with the music—well, I have to. In my work.”

“Your work?” I asked. “Do you play professionally?”

“Oh no, but I produce. That is, I produce records. CDs. It's just a little outfit, you've probably never heard of it: Hastily Improvised Productions, otherwise known as H.I.P. It's all avant-garde stuff.”

She was right; I hadn't heard of them, but I said I was interested. “Who do you record?”

“I doubt if you've heard of any of them,” she said. “They're mostly European, but we occasionally get onto some wild tenor player from Montana—there's a guy out there now, somewhere, who used to play in Detroit, but we haven't been able to interest him in a recording session yet. Chuck Florence?”

“Never heard of him,” I said. “You ever record M'Zee Kinanda?”

“Oh no, he's too big for us. But . . . who knows, we might be able to get him to ‘guest’ on somebody else's session.”

“Where do you do this?” I looked around.

“Not here,” she said. “This is just my Detroit pad. I used to live here years ago, but now I'm mostly in Santa Barbara. Are you familiar with the business? Well, it's not what it sounds like, I guess. Being a record producer doesn't mean you have an office at RCA, it's just a telephone in Santa Barbara, and here, too. A recording tells the caller where I am. I try to put together the artists and we rent a studio, usually in L.A., but also here, or New York, wherever's convenient. But, you didn't come here to talk about . . .”

“No, it's interesting,” I said.

“Do you play? No? I guess I knew that. But you are a fan.”

“You know a lot about me,” I said. “Was this from Grootka?”

“Mainly. He thought very highly of you, perhaps too highly. I don't mean that in a bad way.” She had seated herself, or perched,
on a high stool against one wall. It was another indication that this was not a room for relaxing, although she didn't seem ill at ease. She held her cup in both hands and sipped carefully from it. I'd already burned my tongue.

“I don't mean that you aren't worthy of his esteem,” she amended, “but that his esteem prevented him from being as open with you as he would have liked. He thought you were a bit above him, you see.”

“You learned all this from a few hours of . . . ah, of being together up at the lake, at the resort?”

“Oh, no, we kept very close contact over the years,” she said, looking at me with surprise. “I kept waiting to have it all come out, but Grootka kept saying, ‘No, no, not yet, the time isn't ripe. We'll let Mulheisen decide, when it suits him.’ And then, of course, he died . . . well, you were with him. After that, I wasn't sure what to do. But obviously, now, things are coming to a head.”

“They are?”

She looked at me kind of funny, but said, “I'm sure you see the problem. How to approach you in such a way that you wouldn't get all alarmed and go official on this. That was Grootka's feeling, as well. He wanted to avoid an
official
response, because he felt that the situation was too . . . too delicate, I guess. Too many innocent people stood to get hurt, if the official response didn't properly protect them, which he felt that it wouldn't. He felt that there had to be a way, which you—the great Mulheisen—would be able to figure out, to deal with this so that the little guy didn't get hurt.” There was a delicate balance in her tone of skepticism, if not scorn, and genuine concern.

“That's what this is all about? These messages, this crypto-whatchamacallit? To avoid an official investigation, because the Mob might. . . . I mean,
cartoons
?” I shook my head, wondering. “You know, it has just occurred to me, Grootka was some kind of radical,
maybe like these militia people. He was in the police, but he didn't trust the police. He really felt . . .” Thinking about his stated desire in the notebooks to just let the case fade away, I was momentarily unable to go on.

“But then later he felt that if it was necessary, that maybe I would handle the situation—”

“Discreetly,” Vera finished the sentence for me.

“No, I was wrong,” I said, “he wasn't a militia-type radical, he was more like a kid reading comic books, believing in Batman. You know, I was just telling someone the other day about this image I have of Grootka, walking down the street, a gun in each hand, keeping the peace.”

“Agge. Yes. It was an appropriate image.”

“You know Agge, too?”

“Yes, she's my daughter.”

“Agge is your daughter? Are you sure?”

I was a little revved up, but this blurted gaffe eased the tension. “This is my day for revelations,” I said. “How about Kenty? What's your relationship there?”

“I'm not his grandma, if that's what you're thinking. I was looking for a way to communicate with you, and I heard about Kenty, through Sena, his grandmother. She used to work for me, sort of. Cleaning house, you know. But she came to be more of a friend. I gave her my old computer, for Kenty, because I was getting a new one. I don't think she knows about Kenty giving you my message, and I don't think he knows that the message came from me. Is there anything else you need to know?”

“Yes, of course there is. Can we sit down? Is this a couch?”

She showed me how to set up the Japanese thing. It seemed comfortable. And when I had another cup of coffee she explained.

“Grootka kept in touch, over the years. I mean, after what happened at Turtle Lake. His theory was that while the Mob might be happy not to make waves as long as the issue was still current,
later on someone—he thought it would be the one he always called the Fat Man, Mr. DiEbola—would be concerned that some loose ends had been left, well, loose. And they would send someone to tidy things up, so to speak.”

“And did they?” I asked, then stopped myself. “No. No, wait a minute. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. What do you mean ‘everything was smoothed over'? You mean at the resort, where you and your husband had taken Hoffa.”

“Well, sure. What else?”

“But what was smoothed over? From what I've read in Grootka's memoir, he had shot and killed a Mobster named Cusumano and got a couple of Lonzo Butterfield's boys to dump the body for him. What happened to Hoffa?”

“Oh dear,” she said. “I thought you'd read all of the notebooks. How much do you know?”

“Not enough. And frankly, I'm getting a little annoyed. You know, this is blatant criminal—”

“I'm sorry. You'll have to go,” she said. “I'll have to think about this. I'll call you later.”

She looked grim and determined and began to tug at my arm. I unconsciously rose to my feet before I rebelled, but she began to push me toward the door.

“Hey, hey, wait a minute,” I said. “This won't do.”

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, still pushing, “but you've got to go. I have to think. This isn't going right.” She had backed me right up to the front door.

I brushed her hands away. “I think you better come with me,” I said. I reached for my cuffs.

That stopped her. She suddenly backed away, her eyes wide with fear. She held up her hands, warding me off. “Now wait a minute,” she protested. “Grootka said—”

“Grootka said a lot.” I dangled the cuffs before her. “Maybe too much. I'd like to hear more.” I advanced toward her.

She backed into the Japanese thing and abruptly sat down on it. “Would you like some more coffee?” she asked, looking up innocently.

“Sure,” I said, laughing. “Why not?” I leaned against the wall and crossed my legs, waiting, tossing the cuffs nonchalantly.

When she brought the coffee she handed me mine and carried hers to the window. She looked out on the street as she sipped and talked. “You have to be careful when you listen to Grootka,” she said.

“Now you're on the road to wisdom,” I said, “as—” I started to say
our mutual friend,
but finished with, “Books Meldrim would say.”

“Yes, Books.” She looked thoughtful. “He's a nice man, isn't he? He warned me about playing too many games with you. He said you would tire of it. But I guess I just got caught up. And then, these guys showed up.”

“What guys?”

“Those,” she said, pointing out the window with a finger alongside her cup.

I went over to look. Parked in front of the house was my Checker. There were other cars parked in front of other houses. I didn't see anything. “Where?” I asked.

“In the maroon Continental,” she said.

I looked down the street. The glass of the Continental was tinted. I couldn't see anybody.

“They're just sitting inside,” she said, calmly. She didn't seem that concerned, but maybe she was always this cool. “They've been coming by for a couple of days now. I saw one of them get out and stretch. He went for a walk around the block, then got back in. He's a young guy, about . . . oh, I don't know. I don't judge people's ages very well anymore. He looked like he was maybe twenty-five, or twenty-eight. Dark hair. Wearing a kind of leisure outfit.”

“You didn't recognize him? No? You say you usually live in Santa Barbara. What's that address?” I took it down in my notebook, while I continued to ask, “How long have you been back in Detroit?” I jotted down “week.” “And they showed up when?”

“I first noticed them about three days ago.”

“But they didn't approach you? And you haven't had any threats, in the mail, phone?” I put the notebook back in my coat pocket. “Well . . . what do you want to do?”

“I thought you would tell me. You're the cop. You're the genius, according to Grootka.”

“Let's leave Grootka out of this, okay?” I said. “We're here, he's not. I need to know if you feel threatened, if you want to leave. I don't really have anywhere to take you. I don't know of any place that would necessarily be safer. I can't lock you up as a material witness, or any—”

“What?” she said.

“Unless you are a witness for the Hoffa investigation. And, of course, you are. Would you like me to call the F.B.I.? I'm sure they would be delighted to talk to you. And, of course, they'd protect you. They're famous for it.”

She wasn't having anything to do with the FBI, as I had expected.

“Well, I guess if you aren't worried, I'm not,” I said.

“I'm not exactly
worried
,” she said. “I'm more scared to death. Those guys are after me.”

“Do you think they want to hurt you?”

“I don't know. Why don't they come in? Why doesn't someone contact me, ask me something?”

She turned and looked at me, putting down the cup. She still didn't look particularly upset. I was reminded of her striptease act outside the house at Turtle Lake. She was a cool customer, to be sure.