Man with an Axe (20 page)

14

No Mister Nice

T
here was no answer at Books Meldrim's number. This was more than a little unsettling. I had a strong desire to march into Buchanan's office and confront him. But what would I say? Why were you poking around Lonzo Butterfield? What's your interest here? That wasn't going to get anybody anywhere. Nor could I descend on Humphrey DiEbola, the erstwhile Fat Man. For one thing, I couldn't approach him on my own; I needed the backing of the department, at least. Which meant Jimmy Marshall, my lieutenant, not to say the support of my captain, Buchanan. But really, it needed the authority of the F.B.I., the U.S. marshall, the county prosecutor. All of these people.

Of course, if you are Grootka you don't need any of these people. You just strap on the Old Cat and go to work. But that was just the problem, wasn't it? Grootka had interfered, deeply, in the lives of several people and then when it had come to a small war, had grinned and waved and walked off, kind of like Ronald Reagan getting on Air Force One. “Oh, Mulheisen will take care of it.” He had more or less said just that.

But this wasn't looking after Books. And I had a feeling that someone ought to, if only to warn him that sleeping dogs were up and about.

I didn't need any help to do this. I could drive down to Books's Lake Erie hideaway and be there in an hour, maybe less. It took less.

Books's car was parked in the drive, which was a treacherous little lane that led down from the road toward the lake, very narrow, with no way to turn around. It brought one to a point below the house, actually, and then one had to climb stairs to the deck. I peered into the house from the sliding glass door and realized immediately that there was trouble. All the books were thrown on the floor. Many other things had been tossed on the floor, as well, including flour, houseplants, clothes. Somebody had done a job.

The door was ajar and although I hadn't noticed any other cars about, nor any signs of other people—the neighbors were weekend and summer folk, not regular residents—I drew my gun and entered. I stepped away from the framing doorway and listened. What I heard was that well-known silence that says,
Nobody home.
I called for Books. No response. Then I moved through the house, carefully.

I'm not an admirer of the two-handed-squat approach when searching room to room. I like to be alert, but erect, not planted. I keep my hat in one hand and my gun in the other, close to my waist, where it can't be batted away and possibly lost. The hat can always be waved or tossed as a distraction. Stillness is helpful, listening. Move quickly, stop, listen. There was nothing to hear.

Room to room and the whole house had been tossed. Trashed. It was a mess. They had even thrown jars of mustard into the open box of the grand piano. That kind of violence evokes fear for the inhabitant. But no sign of Books, no nice Mr. Meldrim. Finally, I went back on the deck.

I stood there amid the disarray—I hadn't noticed when I came up that the deck itself had been savaged, chairs kicked over and a railing splintered—and felt . . . well, I started to say depressed, but it felt more like despair. I had failed in the one thing that was essential: to protect. It didn't matter that I was still almost totally
baffled by this case. (Note that I said “still,” as if I were confident that the case would yield its meaning eventually, if not its solution. This is true arrogance.)

It was not a bad day. I sighed and stood there on the deck, in this great silence broken only by a faraway gull and the gentle lapping of water against the shore and the pilings of the dock. Unconsciously, I took out a cigar and lit it. The sun was not shining, but the sky was light, a familiar kind of pearly lakeside luminescence that made it impossible to see a true horizon. The lake was slaty gray and gently undulating, cold and grave. The air wasn't really cold, just that dull, breezeless chill that can seem almost unnoticeable until your nose and fingers get numb.

I had an incongruous thought: the Red Wings were playing the Blues tonight. I actually considered trying to attend. What an amazing thing the human mind is! It crawls out of a depression to take refuge on the ice of a hockey rink! Or maybe it was only the well-known salutary effect of the H. Upmann's tobacco.

I descended the steps to the little dock and walked out to the end, noticing a freighter seemingly motionless at the very limits of visibility. I looked down at the little boat tethered at the end of the dock. The blue canvas of the protective cover was drawn over the boat, but not over the outboard motor, which was in the upright position, with the propeller in the water. Evidently, Books had been fishing but hadn't restored the motor to its horizontal position. And then I noticed that the cover wasn't really tightly drawn about the boat. A brisk wind would strip it off, exposing the interior. It wasn't like Books to leave it like that. I clambered down the two or three steps of the wooden ladder to the point where the soles of my shoes were just above the water and leaned out. With the cigar clenched in my jaw and clinging to the ladder with my free hand, I flipped back the loose canvas with the snub-nose of my .38 Chiefs Special, fearful of what might be underneath.

Books Meldrim lay there, on his back. His brown eyes were open and he held an old long-barreled revolver on his breast. He looked up into my eyes and said, “I was hoping it was you, Mul.”

I swear I could have kissed the old bastard. Instead, I said, softly, “You bastard. Just taking a little nap on the bosom of the deep, Books?”

His eyes were pretty bleak, but he smiled. He clambered up and I helped him onto the dock. He stood next to me and looked up at the deck and the house. “You left my door open,” he said. “That's no good for my piano.” He pronounced it “pee-yaner.”

Books had gotten a good look at the two young men who had come to the house. He'd seen them drive up, noticed the Michigan plates and their manner, and had spent an hour of terrified hiding. His last resort was the boat. I knew from his description that the two men were almost certainly the two I'd seen outside Vera's house in Ferndale. I called the border patrol and put a watch on the tunnel and the bridge, but the men had had plenty of time to get back to Detroit, so I didn't expect too much.

I helped Books straighten up much of the mess and encouraged him to notify the police, but he brushed that notion aside. He made coffee and we each had a hard jolt of brandy. His fear, anxiety, and then anger were yielding to depression, I could tell, but he was tough and fought it down. He looked about, at the stains on his rugs and walls—he had thoroughly cleaned the mess out of his piano.

“The gen'amens did a number on me, didn't they?” he said, mildly. “I'm surprised they didn't take a dump on the davenport.”

“You'll get it all straightened out,” I said. “I'll help you.” I sounded agreeable, and I meant to be supportive—the man had been through a hell of a deal—but my depression had long since changed to fear, then to relief, followed by a rising anger. I recognized the signs; it was nothing unusual. I remembered a very pretty little cousin of mine, Sarah, who used to come visit me in the summers
from California. One day she was dancing in the kitchen while my mother was making cookies. My father had gone down into the basement, which at that time was really only a root cellar, reached by a trapdoor. The trap was open and Sarah, dancing about, singing merrily, had heedlessly tumbled into the hole. I remember my mother's shouts of horror and then relief when my father issued out of the cellar holding the little blond girl, who was dazed but then laughed to see my mother's fright. My mother had struck the little girl, not very hard and not across the face, but then she'd tried to cover up her violent reaction with a justified anger, raging about Sarah's thoughtlessness. It was soon apparent that the slap had only been a frightened reaction, a kind of release of tension.

I felt some of my mother's anger now, listening to Books prattle away. I knew he was just working off his own excess anger and fear, but still.

“Thank you. Yeah, we can fix it up, but it'll always be there, a little faint stain. Well . . . it is time to wind this up. Time to quit playing games, playing Grootka's game. You remember the last time you were out here and I said you should cook a little fish as you would rule the empire?”

“Yeah, yeah. Lao-tse, wasn't it? Govern an empire as you would cook a little fish?” I wondered if he was going to slow down anytime soon.

“It works both ways,” Books said. “But that's a concept that wouldn't make a lick of sense to Grootka. If a .38'd kill you, why not use an elephant gun and be sure? That'd be Grootka. Well, I'm ready.”

And now it was my turn. “You're ready? Well, I'm glad. What the hell do you people think is going on here, anyway? You saw those guys—they didn't drive all the way down here to trash your house and scare you. If they'd found your ass it'd be floating in Lake Erie now. Don't you know that?”

“What's got you so goosey?” he said, eyeing me curiously. “Wasn't nobody trying to shoot your ass.”

“How do you know?” I retorted. “I get my ass shot at twice a week. Part of the job. How come you didn't tell me that M'Zee Kinanda was really Tyrone Addison?” That was what was bugging me.

“Ah, so that's it,” Books said. Then he assumed an annoyingly pious expression and offered, “If the man wants to be known as M'Zee Kinanda, that's his right. It ain't my business.” He started muttering and putting things away, pretending to ignore me.

“Don't give me that crap. This whole thing's been a put-up job from the start, leading me around by the nose, feeding me a little info here, withholding it there, ‘here read this notebook, here's a tape’ . . . it won't do. Not anymore. I've had it.” And I had. I was angry.

“All right, all right,” the old man said, holding up his large, slender hands placatingly. “I'm sorry about that. I just didn't know how to go about it, how much you should know, what I was supposed to reveal . . . Grootka said—”

“Oh, don't give me any more of that Grootka crap,” I interrupted. “Give me the goods. I want to hear it. What do you know? I know you weren't up north with those guys—or do I? All I know is what I read in Grootka's notebooks. Which reminds me, are there any more of them? I want them, right now.”

“That's what those fellas were after, I expect,” he said. He'd dropped the philosopher cloak, I saw, although I suspected it was one that he would prefer to wear as closely as his skin from now until he croaked.

I was momentarily arrested. “Did they get it?”

“I don't have any more,” he said. “Course, they don't know that.”

I waited a beat or two. “Well, that might be something,” I said. “Now tell me a story.”

I sat back and lit a cigar. Forty-five minutes later we were en route to Detroit. His story was not vastly different from the one that
had slowly accreted in my mind. Books, naturally, played down his role when it was likely to appear criminal, but played it up when it looked admirable, particularly if it seemed wise and sagacious. I didn't mind. It was a good story. You know it.

He had not gone to Faraway, or wherever we should call the cabin in the north, he said. I believe him. Grootka had returned and told him the whole story. Books had helped him write it up. “Except that he wouldn't let me actually write it, and the man couldn't spell ‘hockey,’” Books lamented. “Had to be in his writing and in his spelling. Otherwise, it was no good.”

“But what,” I said, and then repeated, with menace, “
what in hell
was the point?”

“Grootka didn't give a damn about Hoffa,” Books said. “So in a way, you had to ask, why not just let it drop? Him and Lonzo got out okay, Tyrone and Vera got out okay, I stayed clear right along. . . . Sure, a couple of guys died, but people dying every day.”

“Not all of them are Hoffa,” I said.

“That's right,” Books readily agreed. “Nobody gives a rat's ass about ol’ Janney, he was a foreigner and a oddball, anyway. Who gives a hoot for some jive greaser like Cusumano? I don't believe I ever even saw the guy before and he sure was a killer, hisself. But there's Hoffa. Hoffa is like Pharoah.” He pronounced it “Fay-row.”

“Pharoah? What the hell are you talking about?” We were fast approaching Windsor, and I was looking for the tunnel exit.

“Pha-roah don't ever die alone. When Pha-roah dies, a lot of people got to die. He ain't going into that pyramid alone. Pha-roah ain't taking the sun boat without company.”

“Don't get philosophical on me, Books,” I warned him.

“I ain't being philosophical. That's the truth. That's just the way it is. Pha-roah don't die alone. We all are just lucky it was as few as it was.”

I had called ahead, and Customs waved us through. Stanos was waiting for me on the other side. We pulled into the parking
lot and he stood up from lounging on the trunk of his Olds Ciera. He was tall and rangy, with a raw face that was all nose and chin and bumps but had somehow weathered from ugly, acned youth into a cruel but not wholly awful maturity. He looked meaner than two dogs tied back to front.

“My good Lord,” Books breathed, looking at him. He'd heard me calling for Stanos to meet us. “It's like a young Grootka. Ain't it? I never thought to see anything like that again.”

“The world is round, Books. He's not as smart as Grootka, but he's got time.”

Stanos leaned into the car. He was wearing a gray suit that looked like he'd stolen it from Grootka's closet. It flapped open to reveal a shoulder holster that carried a gun as big as the Old Cat. “You must be Books Meldrim,” he said. He extended his arm across me to shake Books's hand. He had a husky, gravelly voice that still carried an element of youth in it, kind of cocky, but sort of indifferently happy with the day. “Glad to meetcha.”

He stood up and rocked on his heels, swinging his long arms restlessly and smacking a fist against an open palm. “Well,” he said, “nice day for somethin’. You ready to go knock some fucking wop heads?”

I let him stand there for a while until he came down off his high horse. Then I looked up. “It's not like that, Stanos. I just want to go by Krispee Chips and talk to Humphrey.”