Man with an Axe (2 page)

A heavy white man got out of the passenger side and approached the van, then stopped when he took in Tyrone. His right arm dangled straight down, a huge revolver in his hand, pointed at the ground casually. He seemed totally unconcerned about nearby traffic, or the possibility that customers of the gas station or the help might notice the revolver. He glanced at Vera, then at Tyrone, then back to the car. He walked over to the rear of the Cadillac and a
dark-tinted window rolled smoothly down. A pale face shone in the interior. The man leaned to the window and spoke in an ordinary tone. Tyrone could hear him quite clearly.

“It's just a spade, boss. He got a white whore. You want me to . . . ?” He gestured slightly with the revolver. He leaned closer as the man inside spoke. Tyrone could not hear what was said, but his blood ran cold as the big man straightened up and turned to look at him, with his head tilted to listen to the voice within the car.

The man regarded Tyrone for a long moment, his face blank, mouth open tentatively, as if bemused. With his left hand he fingered the revolving chamber of the pistol, slowly turning it. The oiled clicks were quite audible. Then he nodded, as if to the speaker, and his lips curled in a strange smile. “You're in luck, Willie,” the man called out, hefting the revolver meaningfully. “Hope you find a trick for her.” The man cupped his hand under his crotch and tugged. He nodded toward Vera and then he got back into the car. It roared away.

“Hello? Hello?” a man's voice called distantly from the telephone. Tyrone lifted it shakily to his ear. “Is that you Jimmy? You there?” the man asked, anxiously. “F'chrissake, talk t'me!” Tyrone replaced the receiver and almost staggered back to the car, his legs felt so weak.

He got in the front seat and closed the door and leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Jesusfucking-christ,” he breathed. “That motherfucker was about to . . .”

Vera leaned anxiously across the console, embracing him, saying, “Honey, honey, honey, don't, don't.”

“Let's get the fuck outta here,” came a muffled voice from the rear. They both turned and looked. Hoffa was crouched on the floor, under some blankets. “Get goin’. They might come back. Somebody mighta seen me get inta yer van. Drive!”

“Right, right,” Vera said. She got the van started and they drove on east. They were almost calmed down when they saw the Cadillac parked on the westbound shoulder next to another big car.
The big man was out of the car talking and gesturing to another man. He had put the pistol away, but when he recognized the Volkswagen his left hand went to his crotch again and he laughed to the man next to him, pointing at them as they cruised by, his right hand imitating a gun and his mouth silently opening as if to say, “Pow!”

“Keep going, keep going,” Hoffa said. “Don't slow down, but don't speed. I don't wanta see no cops.”

Tyrone craned around. “Why not?”

“Cops got radios, numbnuts. Even if a cop ain't on the pad, they talk on the radios and other people got radios, too.” Hoffa peeked out from the blanket. “And out here, buddy, I don't know who's on the pad.”

Tyrone looked at the man cowering under a blanket. Then he looked at Vera. She was driving with great concentration, trying not to let on that she was about to flip out. She looked brave, he thought, but he could see she was scared shitless. Strangely enough, knowing she was scared made him feel stronger. He smiled encouragingly at her when she glanced at him.

“Just keep driving, sweetie,” he said in as calm a voice as he could manage. He turned back to their passenger. “Hoffa. We have to let you out now. Not out here on the road, you understand, but on one of these side roads. You dig?”

“Not on your life, buddy,” Hoffa said. He showed Tyrone the barrel of a nickel-plated revolver. “You drop me off out here and those birds'll be on me like crows on a roadkill possum.”

Tyrone nodded his head. He supposed the man was right, though he had no idea why Jimmy Hoffa should be afraid of gangsters—wasn't he a gangster himself? But a lifetime of coping with gangsters in Detroit had left Tyrone with the feeling that their activities were as inexplicable and unpredictable as wild animals. It was better to give them a wide berth and not waste time figuring out what they were up to. “So what do you want to do?” he asked.

“Take me into the city,” Hoffa said. “Where do you guys live?”

“The city's a long ways,” Tyrone said. “We're living in a motel, right now, clear back in Highland Park.” This was not true and he was glad that Vera did not react. Usually she was so stuffy about telling the absolute truth that she would not have let such a falsehood pass. “Must be some place we can drop you. ‘Cause man, it ain't cool ridin’ around out here like this.”

Hoffa nodded. The thinking was sound, he felt. They were a conspicuous couple. With the men in the Cadillac that had actually protected him, but it didn't do to attract attention. A suburban cop might pull this van over for any excuse—a broken taillight, perhaps—and then search the van for drugs. The trouble was, he couldn't think of any place that would be safe. The men in the Caddy knew his ways too well, and they were vicious. He was worried about his wife, Jo, but he believed that while they would certainly be keeping an eye on the house, they wouldn't bother her. It was him they were after.

He shook his head. “I don't know.”

Tyrone looked at him. “You don't know? You ain't got no place to go? Woman.” He turned to Vera. “Shift!” She had pulled away from a light and, as often happened, had forgotten to shift into fourth gear.

“Listen, Jim,” Tyrone said, turning back. “We can't be out here all night. You got any money? Lemme see.” A hand grabbed his guts when Hoffa dumped out the briefcase: a pile of bills in neat little packets. “How much is that?” he asked, deeply impressed.

“That's a couple hunnert,” Hoffa said, “less about fifty bucks.”

“That's more than a couple hundred,” Tyrone said.

“A couple hunnert thous'n,” Hoffa said, almost smiling. “Sorry. I thought you'd see that. The point is, Henry, it don't mean shit if that Caddy comes after us again. I got this"—he brandished the revolver—"but I gotta admit, I ain't famous for no shootin’. I
shoot with my mouth, as my old lady says. So if you can figure out some safe place for me and this bread here, Henry, I'm sure we can work out some kinda appropriate remuneration, if you get my drift.”

“The name ain't Henry. It's . . . Ty-yyyaylor. An’ this here is my wife, Alma.” Tyrone had no idea where “Alma” had come from; it had just popped into his head. Vera glanced at him and grimaced. If he hadn't been so stressed he might have laughed. In fact, he was feeling so damn stressed that he was afraid that if he ever started laughing he'd make like a hyena and never quit.

“Taylor? Is that your first name or your last? Never mind. Okay, Taylor. Any ideas?”

Tyrone thought. “Well, we could go to my uncle Lonzo's, in the Thumb. Uncle Lonzo ain't there. But I know where the key is. Nobody be there. Nobody bother us.”

“Your Uncle Lonzo lives up in the Thumb? Whereabouts?”

“It's a resort. A black resort. It's called Turtle Lake. You ever hear of it?”

Hoffa had heard of it. It was also called Nigger Heaven. It was one of a few such strictly Negro resorts in upstate Michigan. There was a larger Nigger Heaven farther over by the Lake Michigan shore, near Baldwin. But this Turtle Lake was older, closer to Detroit. It struck him as an absolutely ideal hideout. No Mob goon would dream of entering the gates of Nigger Heaven.

“You know a colored fella named Books?” Hoffa asked. “I don't remember his last name. Little guy, kind of dapper. He's a kind of fixer, a bagman. I think he's s'posta have a cabin on Turtle Lake.”

“I know him,” Tyrone said. “He's over the other side of the lake from Lonzo's, by the golf course.”

“I don't want to see him,” Hoffa said. “I don't want to see nobody. And I don’ want Books to see me. Nobody sees Hoffa. Got it? And no phone calls. Got it? You don't tell nobody that Jimmy Hoffa is staying over to your uncle Lonzo's. I'll keep inna house. A
couple days and this'll blow over and Hoffa'll be outta yer hair. And you'll have a coupla grand. That sound like a deal, Taylor?”

“A coupla grand! You gotta be shuckin’, Jim. Ahmo lay my ass on the line for a coupla grand? Shee-it!”

“Awright,” Hoffa responded readily, “make it ten grand.”

“Twenny be more like it,” Tyrone popped back.

“So, make it twenny,” Hoffa easily agreed.

“Hey, it's a deal, Jim.” Tyrone hoped that his voice didn't sound as false as Hoffa's. Once you'd seen two hundred grand, twenty big ones didn't look so big, all of a sudden, especially when you were just talking twenty, not holding twenty. “You get some sleep. It's at least an hour, maybe more on them back roads. You feelin’ all right?”

“Tell ya the troot, Taylor, I'm kinda wheezy. You know? How you doin’ for gas? When we get out a ways you can stop for gas.” He handed Tyrone a couple of fifties. “Get me some Pepto, or Di-Gel, somethin’ like that. I'll be all right. Just a little wheezy. Too much coffee or somethin’.”

Tyrone nodded. Soon he was humming, staring into the darkness of the country road they'd turned onto and patting out an interesting rhythm on the dash. “Oman,” he sang, softly, “omanwitta, gunwittagun.” He reached over and squeezed Vera's leg and grinned at her. She smiled back, happy as a bird in a bush.

Suddenly she gasped, her face stricken. “Oh my God! We forgot Janney!”

“Jeesus!” Tyrone exclaimed. Obviously, he had just as completely forgotten the projected meeting. But almost immediately he was suffused with a certain gladness. As liberated as he might be, he had hated the idea of carrying his wife to a meeting with Janney that would almost certainly have involved her being, in a sense, “sold” to another man. “Oh, well,” he said, blithely, “fuck it. Fuck Janney.”

He glanced at his wife. She smiled and squeezed his hand. And they both felt very good.

1

Absent Head

As to structure, my own form is narrative, which is not every historian's, I may say—indeed, it is rather looked down on now by the advanced academics, but I don't mind because no one could possibly persuade me that telling a story is not the most desirable thing a writer can do.

Barbara Tuchman, “The Historian as Artist”

I
agree, though I am no writer, nor a historian. I am a detective. My name is Mulheisen. My initial impulse was to tell this story in the form of a report, a crime report, but for reasons that I hope will become plain, it seemed more appropriate to simply write it up as a story. Maybe by the end of this narrative I'll know what to do with it.

By now I have talked to just about everybody who was involved that is still available and I have thought about their versions and this is what I have come up with. I think it is probably as close to the truth as we are likely to come to about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who disappeared from public view on July 30, 1975.

Though, after all, this is not just an account of the Hoffa affair. Like every story, its true origins are hidden deep in the past. When we stand in the present, confronted with this or that event, and look back, only the most narrow-sighted can see a single or even just a few paths dwindling into the distance. What any sensible person sees, I believe, is a network of paths and thorough-fares, cutting across one another, spreading out further and further. They've crossed here.

They've crossed here and now they start spreading out again. But if I had to pick one thread that led directly to this account, it would be a Sunday morning in March just past, when I was called to go to a scene on the Detroit River, where a body had been found.

Every winter, ship traffic on the upper Great Lakes ceases when it is no longer possible to maintain a channel through the ice. The closure starts at the Soo—the locks of Sault Sainte Marie—and there are always a few ships racing to beat the ice at the southern end of Lake Huron, make it across the relatively shallow Lake Saint Clair, through the throat (de troit), and thence into Lake Erie and on to the Saint Lawrence and the sea. And in the spring it goes in reverse. As Lake Saint Clair breaks up and clogs the throat, ships are already waiting in Lake Erie.

The ice as it comes down past Detroit can be quite a spectacular sight, depending on the brutality of the winter. This past winter it wasn't too bad, but the ice filled the river for days, bringing down with it all sorts of things. Like smashed docks, fragments of boats. And a well-preserved corpse, which was sprawled across a chunk that was forced into a channel and scared the hell out of some schoolkids who were flinging rocks.

As it happened, the body was discovered downstream from Windmill Point in Grosse Pointe and just into the Ninth Precinct, where I work. It was necessary for a detective to go, because this wasn't just a body, an accidental drowning perhaps. Unless the swimmer had decided that he could swim without hands. Or a head.

There wasn't much to detect. The body had been badly beaten up by the ice. It had gone into the water probably a couple of weeks before, according to Doc Brennan, at the Wayne County Morgue. Ice had complicated his estimation process. But he thought that the usual processes of water invading the cells of the corpse had not been too badly affected by cold and ice. Still, the corpse could have been deposited on ice and only entered the water when the lake broke up,
assuming the body had been placed on the lake, rather than in the river below it. That is, the man could have been murdered—probably a fatal head injury—and the body placed on the lake ice and covered with snow, or perhaps deposited in a shallow ice grave.

It was a male, in good physical condition at demise, aged about twenty-five to possibly twenty-nine. Probably about six feet tall, probably weighing about 185 pounds. Well nourished. Not much physical exercise but young enough to resist the tendency to overweight that would surely have caught up to the fellow in another few years. The doctor said he'd do some tissue studies. He had a young lady in his service who was getting to be a whiz at detecting such things as dietary habits, physical activity, and the like, which could be useful indicators when you couldn't otherwise tell who the person was or where he came from.

So that's how it started, although I couldn't know it at the time. One almost never can detect the beginning, at the beginning. It was the beginning of an investigation, of course, but not necessarily into anything more than an unusually brutal attempt to thwart identification of a murder victim. As a detective, my hopes were slightly raised by the unusual: in the great morass of murders that urban police forces must contend with, the unusual sometimes gives us a chance. It suggests an imaginative murderer. An imaginative murderer is almost always caught.

I have to emphasize that it was only much later that I recognized this as the beginning. I didn't see it then, nor for a long time thereafter. For the most part I thought it began with the discovery of Grootka's notebooks, which I'll get to a minute. As you see, I'm trying to get this properly organized.

I repeat, I am no writer, but after this I make no apologies. The reader isn't interested in apologies, I realize. The reader just wants to hear the story. But when I first started out to “simply write it up,” I quickly discovered that it isn't as easy as it looks if it's going to make sense. I have learned a few things, though, and I hope
in the process I'll learn a few more so it won't be so painful for you, the reader.

First of all, I have the story as I got it from Grootka. He also was—he's long gone now—a detective, a mentor. He did not tell me this story firsthand, for some reason. He left me the story in some notebooks, though even there he didn't simply leave them to me. But I'll get into that later. I think it is important to hear him tell it. The only thing is, this is not exactly the way he wrote it. I had to edit it, although I've retained many of his peculiar usages to give the flavor of the original. I'll discuss that later, too.

Actually, notebook #2 was the first one to come to my attention, but it seems appropriate to open with book #1, even if I came upon it later. It was written in blue ink, in a nice hand, a remarkably legible, almost graceful script. I believe the style was known as the Palmer method, or something like that. Nice big rounded vowel forms, uniform loop tails on the
p, q, f,
and so on, with everything slanting the same way. It was how the nuns taught handwriting in the Catholic schools of Detroit. It was inscribed in dark blue ink with a fountain pen (another interesting touch), in a composition notebook with black-and-white marbled-effect pasteboard covers. I'd used notebooks like this in high school; I think they're called composition books. In the blank label space on the cover Grootka had written: “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”

He had wonderfully acquired the script, but Grootka was one of those who could not spell. It's a problem for many, especially with the English language.

“You knoe the trubbel I yousta hav whith reports so I gess yul knoe how mutch I hait to rite this but I awweeze thawt I shud poot sumthin down in case it ever came down on you. Awltho wye the hell I shud waist my time werryin uhbowt yore but ime dammed if I knoe. Ackshally I awweaze wannid to rite a direy but I cudden figyur owt how to go at it. Deer direy seems like a dumm thing to rite. But then it accurd to me that I cuod juss rite it too you. And
its funney but it seems rite. Innywaze this is abowt Jimmy Hoffa. The labor gye you know. Nun uv this cuod go in the files caws to minny innacent peepel wuod be hirt. (Yeh I know it sowns funny for me to be werreed abowt innacent peepel cawz I youzhally say that thear aint no innacent peepel but in this case thear is.)”

Well, that's an adequate sample of the orthography. I like the way he tries to be consistent, for example, with
cuod
and
wuod,
and he seems to have some idea that the spelling is odd in those kinds of words, but he doesn't quite know what the problem is (although, I should caution that it's never safe to assume anything with Grootka—he could well have deliberately misspelled words to make me labor over the text.) Sometimes he throws in a
g
or an
h,
but I guess he didn't like the effect because later he drops it. It's pretty painful to read, and the literal text is not essential to appreciate what he says, so I won't bother with it from here on out; one may take it as translated from the style quoted (although I can't resist tossing in some of his more creative variations).

“Maybe it won't matter,” Grootka writes, “so you could just tear this up or burn it. It's up to you. As a matter of fact, I know what I'll do. I'll give it to Old Lady Newman [
Grootka's neighbor and landlady, the rabbi's widow
—M.] to keep and that way the only way you'll ever see it is if you ask her, which you would never do, obviously, unless you were investigating the Hoffa case, or maybe the whole shitaree has backed up on you and you need some help.

“Jesus, look at this! I already filled a whole page! If Sister Mary Herman could only see me now! This ain't like writing a term paper!

“But to get back to business, this is about Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters guy. What happened is that when Hoffa disappeared I didn't pay too much attention because it wasn't in Detroit, naturally. It was a suburban case. I figured we'd have some pieces of the puzzle to work out, as usual, but that it wasn't our business. The F.B.I. and the ’burbs could chew on this s.o.b. to their heart's content, because when they didn't find the body right away I figured they
weren't ever going to find it, except by accident, because somebody took some pains to make sure that it wouldn't be found. You know me, Mul: I figured the s.o.b. was bagged and tossed inna trunk of an ayban [
abandoned car
—M.] and that even if we looked in all the aybans in Detroit, the chances were good that it woulda been crushed and smelted at Zug Island the day before. That's the way Carmine and the Fat Man do their hits when they don't want them found. Most of the time they want them found, to send a message. But what the hell's the message here? Jimmy Hoffa's a bad guy? Since when? The Mob loved this s.o.b. If I'd thought about it, I'd have seen that something funny was going on, but I didn't bother.

“Now I've got to backtrack,” Grootka writes. But I see that his prose is even more complicated than I thought; the diction is pretty tangled. I'll try to give you a synopsis. He explains that some time earlier—I get the impression that it may have been more than just a few weeks or months, perhaps even a couple of years, say around 1972 or 1973—he had become acquainted with Tyrone Addison, the well-known jazz saxophonist. A friend of Addison's, whom Grootka doesn't identify, had called and asked him to help Addison because he'd been caught up in a marijuana investigation and he was basically innocent and besides he was a great musician. Cops constantly get requests from friends to help out other friends, and God knows Grootka was one of the most acquainted people in Detroit. Most of the guys usually make at least a pretense of helping, so Grootka looked into it and he says he got the guy out of it. “He wuz a compleat roob,” in Grootka's words. (I confess I like the evocation of Izaak Walton's spelling here.) At any rate, Grootka apparently liked Addison and . . . well, let him explain (these passages are partially edited):

I used to play a sax at St. Olaf's, but I hadn't played in maybe forty years. But I always liked the sound, except I always wanted to play the big horn, the baritone, not the C-melody, which is what I
got to play. So I got interested in Tyrone's music. Well, this is a little complicated. First I liked the stuff he was playing around town and on records. Tyrone was a real hard hopper. But after I got to know him I got into his new stuff, his Free stuff. It's very different music. It ain't like the old jazz. Okay, I ain't going into that now, but it's very serious music. I didn't think I could ever play like that, but Tyrone told me that I could play a lot better than I thought. All I had to do was try. He convinced me to take lessons from him. At first, he loaned me one of his saxes. But then I bought a used Selmer, on his recommendation—a Mark VI.

Mul, it was terrific! I can't tell you. It's amazing how hard it is at first, but then you kind of break through and it gets easy. But then it gets hard again. Then another breakthrough. And so on. Every time you learn something it gets easier, but then you realize that there's so much more to learn! So it's harder again. I kept thinking that I'd practice and learn for a year or two and then I'd play—you know, for other people. I don't know: a recital didn't seem like the right thing, but maybe I could play in the band with Tyrone, when he performed his “Nigger Heaven” concerto, which is this great Free piece he's been working on. I started learning the soprano sax part, because naturally, Tyrone would play the baritone part.

This went on for quite a while. Maybe a year. It was kind of a joke. I'd run into him at Klein's or someplace and it was: “Hey, Tyrone, when we gonna get together and practice? When's the concert?” That kind of thing. I learned my part, but I never did get to play it for Tyrone. Also, I never did really work out an improvisation [
"empravazhun” in the text
—M.] which the score asked [
"axed"
—M.] for.

Then Hoffa disappeared. I didn't pay a hell of a lot of attention. I kind of asked around, like you would, but my snitches didn't have crap on it. They had a bunch of rumors that the Fat Man and Carmine were behind it, but that rumor is an everyday thing, you
know. Even the weather is blamed on the Mob. The annual fish-fly hatch in Saint Clair Shores even. A guy told me, “You notice how the fish flies are worse than ever since the Fat Man moved out there?” I'm not shitting you, Mul. But then another guy says that the fish flies ain't hatching like they used to since the Fat Man moved out to the lake. Yeah.