Man with an Axe (14 page)

“Maybe you're mistaken,” I said. “Maybe it's not what you think. Maybe they're looking for someone else.”

“Don't you have some way of finding out? Can't you call somebody?”

I picked up the phone and called Jimmy at the Ninth. I told him about the guys. He said he'd check and call back. I hung up the phone and looked at Vera. She didn't seem any calmer or more agitated.

“What happened out at the cabin?” I asked her.

“I thought you knew. Didn't Grootka tell you all about it? The notebooks?”

“I don't have all the notebooks. I keep finding them. He's playing a long game, extra innings . . . or maybe, it's ‘sudden-death overtime.’”

“I have one,” she said. “You want it? He said to give it to you if you asked for it. But I just assumed he would have given you a copy. Maybe this means that it's time.”

“Time?” I said.

“Grootka said the time would come, when everything should be given to you. But it had to be done . . .
delicately.
”

“I'd say it's overtime.”

She went out of the room and returned shortly with a familiar-looking notebook.

“Let's drop the games,” I said. I set the empty cup aside and took the book. “Where is Jimmy Hoffa?”

She smiled. “He's in Brazil.”

9

Idiots Avant

Grootka's Notebook #4

So we settled into a cozy little household. You know, Mul, it was a good time for me. It was like a family, except that there was no mama and papa and baby bear. More like brothers and sisters, even if there was some big age differences. Hah! Brothers, all right—Brother Lonzo, he be Brer Bear, and then you got Sister Vera, she be Sister Fox. Just foolin'! I never knew family life, you know, so maybe I'm just imagining things, but it was kind of nice. The people seemed to care about each other, even ol’ Brer Bear.

For the time being we didn't really have to worry about the Mob. The food was good and the music was great. And it ain't often that you get a chance to sit down and talk to a guy like Hoffa, man to man. I gotta admit, I never thought much of the bastard before, but he was kind of interesting.

[
Here Grootka has inserted an addition, a piece of paper that appears to be torn from a spiral notebook of a smaller size, probably one of those notebooks that many police officers carry to make preliminary notes during the day, for their reports. The note is handwritten with a blue ballpoint pen, pressed very hard. This page is taped into the regular notebook with old, yellowed Scotch tape, or something similar
.—M.]

Talking with Hoffa. Me ‘n’ H. kinda grew up about the same, except he had a family, only his father died when he was about six or seven. He was a coal miner, in Indiana. Jim's mother took the kids to Detroit after the old man died and they lived on the West Side. He says the kids called him a hillbilly and he used to get in fights, but he had a good time. He quit school, never went to the ninth grade, he says. He used to work at Frank & Cedar's, the downtown department store, as a stock boy! Christ, how long has that been gone? But, get this, he's one a them guys who says the old days was a lot better, that the city has gone downhill. He didn't come right out and say it, naturally, but he blames it on “the niggers.” Ha, ha! I love that shit. Here's a fuckin’ asshole who starved through the fuckin’ Depression, who used to have to beg for a job and then be grateful for the pennies they threw ya—he even starts a union to fight the bastards, and he says “it was better then.” The man's nostalgic for his youth. You know me, Mul, I ain't much of a union man. I all's thought the union starts out fine, but then it gets in and it turns out to be like the bosses, just one more layer of horseshit. As for the race crap, I don't know that H. actually believes any of that shit, but it gets said so much, just offhand, that a lotta people stupidly repeat it. He's a stupid man in a lotta ways. [
End of insert.—
M.]

He [
Hoffa.
—M.] hated our music, naturally, and I don't think he much cared for butter beans and ham hocks with cornbread and mustard greens. Brer Lonzo was the cook. He's a hell of a cook, Mul. His barbecued pork butt is outta sight. The babe turned out to be kind of nice to be around, too. But gee whiz, that f——in’ Janney, what a f——in’ pain in the ass! He'd be the older brother, the smart-ass who knows everything. Also, Tyrone turned kind of sour. I guess he got kinda tired of all these guys grabbing at Vera's buns, speshly since she didn't seem to mind it so much.

It seems like there's always something to make a good time a little f——ed up. But I had a good time. Me and Tyrone got in
some good practice, him on soprano and me on the big horn, using his instrument, which I appreciated, it's a hell of a horn. But it's a bitch to pick up an instrument so late in life, ‘cause you know you can never get really good on it—I played in the band at St. Olaf's, sure, but that was so long ago. You don't know what a bitch it is to play a E-flat right after a B-flat, in any kind of up tempo. A kid can do it, but old fingers, unh-uh. Tyrone'd get pissed at me, sometimes, ‘cause I had trouble with tempo, but mostly he was pretty good about that. We played his concerto, mostly just two parts, except when we could get Books to sit in on piano, playing the bass line mostly, since there ain't really a piano part for the piece. And also, Vera could take a clarinet or a alto-sax part—she wasn't too bad.

It was hot and we couldn't really go out during the day, but after dark we had a good time. I was staying at Books's, just like before, so I could go to the casino every night, which was sort of my listening post, and usually Tyrone would come by for a while, or Vera. But they couldn't leave Hoffa by himself, so somebody always had to be there. Lonzo usually drove out from the city, but he had to be in town, to do his bail-bond business, which meant he also could keep his ears open on the street. It seemed like the Mob was buying the pitch, that Hoffa was dead. Everything was real quiet.

We couldn't leave Hoffa by himself because he was so antsy. He was worried sick about his old lady and was constantly trying to figure out some way to get a message to her that he was all right. But I told him, if he ever wanted to see her again, he had to be cool. In the meantime, we had to figure out what our next move should be, if it turned out like it looked, that Carmine had simmered down. Because Hoffa couldn't stay there forever, that was for sure. By now, a whole week had gone by. The outside world was still buzzing, I guess, but a kind of quiet was settling over the whole shitaree. Still, I know it was driving Hoffa crazy, because it seemed like everybody on the TV and in the papers was assuming that he was dead. That
has got to prey on a man's mind, I don't care who he is, ‘cause you can't help thinking that if everybody believes you're dead it makes it a little easier for people who want you dead to make you dead.

So after a lotta arguing we come up with a plan, which was if we could get through the weekend, on Monday morning Hoffa could reappear. He disappeared on a Wednesday afternoon. We had a couple more days, is all.

The second big problem was f——ing Jacobsen. It turns out he had a big deal cooking in L.A., to record Tyrone. He got some money together—not that
he
wasn't loaded—to record an album, including the concerto, and he had the musicians all lined up, a studio, but Tyrone had to be there, naturally, in a couple of days.

It's always something, ain't it? Not bad enough we got Carmine on our ass, we got to worry about getting Tyrone to L.A.

This Jacobsen was a weird duck. He was about fifty or so, it's hard to tell, and kind of odd. A businessman, in the printing business. He's got a nice press over on Grand Boulevard. They do fancy stuff, stationery for large corporations, special brochures, class stuff. He's some kind a millionaire, I think, but he's also a jazz buff. You and me are buffs, it don't mean shit, but a rich man's hobbies get promoted. He was crazy about Tyrone. He wants the world to see what a great genius Tyrone is. Also, he wants the world to see that he is Tyrone's patron. He also wants Vera's ass, which it seems to me he must be getting a little of.

The way I had it worked out, if we could get Hoffa out of here on Monday, Tyrone and Vera and Jacobsen could fly off to L.A. and who would give a shit. I would take Hoffa to Pontiac, to a TV station, where he would make a little statement. Of course, we still had to figure out what he was going to say. So Vera suggests we have a rehearsal. She'll be the news babe, me and Tyrone and Lonzo and Jacobsen will be the audience and other reporters. Hoffa wanted to say that he had gone off on his own to

“think about his future,” especially about his “future with the union.”

Sounded great to me, if he didn't get into it too much. The main thing was to give the impression that his absence didn't have nothing to do with the Mob. Just leave them out of it and don't answer no questions from reporters.

But then, next morning I'm sitting at breakfast with Hoffa, the others have all gone off somewheres, and he says he's changed his mind. He said he'd been thinking it over and the way he saw it was he might've been a little quick-tempered, but the real trouble was that the Mob thought they could just about do anything they wanted with the union, especially now that they had Fitz in there. He had always been a realistic guy, he says. He used to figure that he had to do business with the Mob because it just didn't make any sense to pretend that they weren't a major power in the way things operated. He seen that once he was out of the way—when he went to prison—they was just as happy to keep him out of it, because now they could move in, bag and baggage, and Fitz wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful. In fact, he says, since Fitz has took such a taste for shit, he's gonna like it when Jimmy gets back, ‘cause there's gonna be a lot to eat.

“That frigging Nixon was in it up to his frigging neck,” Hoffa tells me. “But now we got Ford. Ford is a schmuck, but I don't think he's in the Mob's pocket. Ford will give me an unconditional pardon, like he gave Nixon—he's in the goddamn pardon business, for chrissake! He knows the gov'mint's got no business in union affairs.”

Hah! He was still thinking the same way. I knew there wasn't no talking to him about this crap and anyway what do I know. I knew Carmine, though, and the Fat Man. Once they got their fat fingers in this pie, you ain't gonna get nowhere slappin’ their fingers. You wanta kick them out, I says, you gotta fuckin’ kick!

We move into Lonzo's front room with our coffee and Hoffa looks me right in the eye and he says, “How do you mean ‘kick'? Do you mean like I think you mean?”

I gotta admit I was a little flip here, but it's just a coupla guys jawin’, right? So I says, “A .45 has got kick.”

Hoffa liked this talk, I could tell. He kind of smirks and says, “Who would you kick?”

“I ain't kickin’ nobody,” I says. “
I
ain't got no kick.”

We laughed at that, but Hoffa was serious, I see that now. He says, “No, I mean, just as a sample, who'd you kick? I mean if you was me?”

And I says, “Just as a sample? Well, you could kick Carmine. That'd be a big enough sample for anybody. But, if it was me? I'd kick the Fat Man, DiEbola. He's the real brains there. Carmine wouldn't know what to do without the Fat Man, so it's almost like kicking both of ‘em. The eastern Mob would be in here running things before you know it. There'd be a lot of hell to pay and some more people would prob'ly get whacked before it was over, but they sure as hell would be out of your damn union.”

I could see that Hoffa liked that idea. He thinks for a while and we go on to some other stuff, but he comes back after a bit and says, “If the Fat Man got kicked, just as a sample, who do you think could do it?”

He was looking at me kind of close and I knew what he was thinking, so I says, “Don't be looking at me, Jim. I got nothing against dropping a fat turd like DiEbola, but if I did it I'd do it for my own self, not for you or nobody else.”

“Well, who?” he asks. “Do you know anybody?”

“You're the tough guy,” I tell him. “You do it. You've dropped the hammer on a man before.”

“Where'd you hear that?” he snaps.

I shrug. Now that I thought about it, I guess I never heard that about Hoffa, hisself, but I says, “Well, that's what they say about the Teamsters. Not so much bustin’ a cap on some guy, but I heard you guys were never shy about breakin’ heads. I heard you wasn't too worried about scratchin’ up your knuckles, yourself.” Hoffa smiles, a little half-smile. He liked that tough-guy shit. “Take a hurt and give a hurt, eh?” I go on. “That's the way you bruisers are. You gotta know somebody.”

He thinks about that for a minute, then he says, “Do you think if we contacted Carmine, he'd meet?”

I could see what he was thinking, so I says, “You don't wanta ask him out here again. These folks here got enough problems without bringing the Mob down on them. They come out here once, on their own, but I'd say they was desperate, then. If they come back, they'll bring a goddamn army with them. You wanta talk to Carmine, set up a meet? Go ahead"—I point to the telephone—"call him. But I'd go for something a little more remote, where there wasn't so many innocent people around. Like maybe the Mo-fuckin'-hobby Desert.”

“I know a place upstate,” he says, “a hunting cabin. It ain't exactly remote. You can drive to it, but it's out in the woods and this time of the year there ain't no hunters or nothing around. Nearest neighbor is, I don't know, couple miles. It ain't my place, it belongs to somebody else. Maybe that would be a good place to meet.”

I tried to talk him out of it. We had a pretty good plan, I thought, with him going to the TV station in Pontiac. No calls ahead, so nobody could set up an ambush, or nothing, just jump in the cars and drive to the TV station and let everybody see that Jimmy Hoffa was alive and kicking and then he'd have to talk to the F.B.I., who would obviously protect him. Why screw around?

Later, when things settled down, he could talk to Carmine, explain the situation, and as far as I was concerned, if he wanted to pop Carmine or the Fat Man then, well, he was welcome to it. But right now . . .

No, no, he was like a kid who gets hold of an idea and he wants to get on with it, right now! The man is hot. He's still pissed because they sent the mugs to deal with him and he still half-ass thought that it was s'posed to be a hit. “You don't know these guys like I do,” he says. “They commit theirselves to a plan, an action, and they carry it out. It's their code. They know the Street and the Street respects ‘em ‘cause they know the Mob always does what they say they'll do. That's why they come out here.”

I blew my stack. “Fuck their code! I heard that shit all my life and I never bought it. Sure, some lamebrains think that way, but mainly the Mob is like any other business, except that it has to rely on too many fuckin’ blood relatives, ‘cause they can't trust nobody, and that's how they're always fuckin’ up and why they don't actually run shit. Hell, if you're hard enough to shoot people you can run the whole shitaree, but these assholes, they're mostly too dumb to read plain English, much less a fucking code.” I hadda calm down.

“Sure, they're dangerous,” I concede the point. “But they're fuckin’ businessmen first. If it don't pay, they don't play. So don't think that some fucking code drove Carmine and the Fat Man out here. They're fuckin’ scared that the Feds are gonna come down on their ass, that someone seen those two fucks diddling with you in the parking lot, and until they know you're fuckin’ takin’ the dirt nap, they're gonna be lookin’ for you. Those bastards had some information and they decided to take a ride and check it out. If you was here, like they expected, they prob'ly woulda tried to parley. But you wasn't here, as far as they knew. They're suspicious bastards, though, so they sent Cooze back. And you see what happened.”