Man with an Axe Read online

  Grootka lived alone in an apartment on Van Dyke, not far from the Detroit River. He claimed he spent most of his time trying to avoid his landlady, the widow of a rabbi, whom he believed was trying to entrap him into marriage. But the thought of anyone, much less a nice Jewish widow, wanting to marry Grootka required imagination. More than imagination: a willing suspension of disbelief. Grootka had been raised in a Catholic orphanage, St. Olaf's, I think, and whether he was a good Catholic or not, he was definitely a Catholic: he was still having nightmares about nuns, by his own account, as late as a week or two before he died. (In fact, I think he had a superstitious fear of nuns, or it may be of ghosts—this man who was otherwise as fearless as a badger.)

  And now, in two days, two different people had asked me seriously about Grootka—not just “Hey, remember how that asshole Grootka used to stick a cigarette in his nose and blow smoke out of his ears—how did he do that?” but real, genuine questions. Ms. Agge Allyson seemed sincere, once you got past the notion of someone actually funding a history of the police department. But why would a Mr. Luckle from Accounting be interested? I didn't even know there was an Accounting office in the Detroit Police Department. Well, that's not quite true. I knew there was an Accounting section, but I thought that was part of the Racket and Conspiracy division. I decided to call my old buddy Andy Deane at R&C.

  “Lucky?” Andy said. I could just about see Andy's freckled face wrinkled in confusion. He resembled a middle-aged Huck Finn. “The only Lucky I know is some kind of gink over at Internal Investigations.”

  “He said ‘Luckle,’ but maybe it's the same gink. Is this Lucky a major gink? A dinky gink? A rinky-dink gink?”

  “That'd be your elemental finky gink,” Andy said. “They're mostly finks in Eye-Yi.”

  “Hm. Well this Lucky gink was asking me about Grootka.”

  “Grootka? What about Grootka?”

  “That's what I said,” I said. “He said he was from Accounting, or something like that, and that he was inquiring about funds that Grootka may have expended for informational services . . . something like that.”

  “Something like that, hunh?” Andy was being wonderfully informational today. “We're talking about music lessons, right?”

  Music lessons were what one might waggishly call payments for information—squealer stipends, fink funds. I told Andy that Mr. Lucky seemed keenly interested in Grootka's music tuition. But these funds were, to say the least, discretionary. Plus they were awfully petty—chump change. Half the time, the detective paid them out of his own pocket. Still, there was usually a bit of small change around for this purpose. I had no doubt that Grootka would have exploited this resource, no matter how miniscule, to the max. Well, if the department was looking for restitution I could give them his last known address: Section VIII, Lot 2707, Mount Elliott Cemetery.

  I said good-bye to Andy and turned my attention to more pressing concerns. Namely, a real live criminal named Humphrey DiEbola, currently residing in Grosse Pointe Shores. It occurred to me, just now, that the first time I'd seen DiEbola, I was with Grootka. We were walking down one of those gloomy, echoing hallways at 1300 Beaubien, the Detroit Police Headquarters, when we approached a small flock of twittering lawyers surrounding a very large and red-faced man who was walking resolutely along, apparently ignoring them. He stopped at our approach, however, and said, with a beaming smile, “Grootka! An honest face, at last!”

  That had been good for laughs. At the time, I'd been assigned to Homicide, assistant to Grootka. Nobody else wanted to work with him. But we got along, after a fashion. I spent four years there, with Grootka. It was a record. Guys would come up to me and congratulate me, shaking their heads. But I liked it, pretty much. The man taught me a lot. He taught me things that I don't believe I would have gotten from anyone else. On this occasion, he introduced me to Humphrey DiEbola, who was known far and wide as the Fat Man. Later, when DiEbola ascended to the boss's position, the nickname vanished in the wind. And, in fact, DiEbola himself went on an amazing diet that trimmed him dramatically down to where the nickname would have been inappropriate, anyway.

  I was interested that DiEbola seemed genuinely pleased to see Grootka. “I known him a long time,” Grootka explained, when we walked away. “Hell, I knew his old man. Another one a them mean-ass Lucanians. He called hisself Gagliano, but I think it was just the name of the village up in the hills that he come from.”

  I was puzzled: how did a son of “Gagliano” become a DiEbola? Grootka laughed. “He made it up, just like the old man—or maybe that's what the old man told him his real name was. It sounds kind of like gentry, see? Like he was the duke of Eboli, in the old country. Eboli is a larger town, down by the coast. These guys come over here and maybe, if they're around their paisanos in New York, they go by names that they were known by in the old country. But then, like old Gags, you set off for Detroit to make a name for yourself, you can call yourself anything you want.”

  Grootka had known most of the older mobsters. They were all immigrants, he said. “Throwbacks,” Grootka called them. “They all look alike, kind of short, dark, round-faced—like Humphrey—they got these wide, thin lips. It ain't that usual Medatrainyun look, that thin eagle face like Carmine. These are some ancient people. Gags told me some of them live in caves. Maybe they're the missing link.” They were very tough, he said. Gagliano had been one of the tougher ones, but he and Grootka had gotten along in the peculiar fashion of cops and robbers—a kind of grudging respect.

  In many ways, Grootka's experience had been similar to theirs: poverty, a rough upbringing. Gagliano, for instance, had run away from home as soon as possible, getting to New York in his teens. Like many, he had gone back when he had made some money, to play the role of the gentry. But like most of those, he hadn't been able to bring it off.

  “It's tough,” Grootka observed. “You go back in your flashy suit and Florsheim shoes and you find out they still ain't as good as what the real gentry got, and then they wear out. You buy some land and they cheat you—you pay too much, the land's no good, the well is dry. Pretty soon you knock some peasant babe up. You're just about out of money, ‘bout the time the Florsheims wear out on that stony ground. It's time to go back to America, now or never. You're gonna be a peasant if you don't watch out. Gags got out in the nick of time. He brought the kid with him, but not the mother. Maybe she was too ugly or a witch—he believed in love potions, they all do. He hooked up with one a these Sicilian babes in Detroit, she raised the kid like it was her own—Umberto prob'ly thinks she's his real ma. Gags got careless doing a hit and got his own ass wiped when the kid was only about six or something, I don't remember. The kid grew up with Carmine, I think the mothers was sisters, not the real mother, but the step. Umberto was always Carmine's fat cousin. Except he's smarter than Carmine. But the way things were laid out—it's Fate, see, and these mopes believe in Fate like it was the Blessed Virgin—Umberto (he calls himself Humphrey, after Bogart!) ain't never going to be boss, unless he's very patient. Which he is.”

  Grootka was prescient. At the time, Humphrey was just Carmine's lieutenant. But now he was the boss.

  For some time now my chief concern had been with Humphrey and his minions, especially one Joe Service (actually, not a regular hand of DiEbola's, but a favored contractor). Lately, I had managed to bring down Service—he was currently recovering in a Colorado hospital—but Humphrey himself was another matter. He seemed untouchable. ‘What I wanted was an entrée into the big man's field of operations. Every week I spent at least a few hours sifting through old files and trying to make pieces fit, but so far nothing seemed to work.

  I was getting weary of this pursuit. Another part of me wanted nothing more than to just be a harness bull, as the old movies have it. Just work the precinct. By contrast with the complex strategies that would be needed to bring down a Humphrey DiEbola, the day-to-day chase-and-file grind of the precinct looked like a vacation. But it's never a good idea to think that you can t
ake things easy.

  I must have been thinking out loud: Jimmy Marshall knocked on the doorjamb of my office. Jimmy used to be my assistant; now he's my boss. We get along fine. It's a good thing to train the man who becomes your boss. He tends to do things the way you would do them. Now Jimmy had the headaches and I had the pleasant task of commiserating with him and encouraging him. At the moment Jimmy had the unenviable task of informing me that I was in violation of basic police department regulations. To wit, I was not living within the Detroit city limits, as required by chapter 3, section 48, of the police manual.

  This was not news. But it was an embarassment. For many years it had become commonplace for officers to reside outside the city. The issue had become an open scandal in the last few years, since the extraordinary transformation of Detroit had become so pronounced. Between the 1980 census and that of 1990, there had been a population decline in Wayne County (which comprises just about all of the city), of about 220,000 people. Almost all of these were whites. There had been a corresponding decline in the number of police officers, most of whom were also white.

  Presumably, to forestall this defection of white officers, not much was said when a white officer moved to Warren or Royal Oak, or, in my case, back to my original home in Saint Clair Flats, which is in Macomb County. But it was expected that the officer would maintain at least an accommodation address—i.e, an “official” address in the city. After a while, though, quite a few of the officers neglected even this, including, I confess, me. Nothing was said, but it had been in the back of my mind, and I knew that one day it would become an issue.

  I agreed with the basic principle here: a police officer should reside in the community where he or she has power and responsibility; to do otherwise is to court disaster. The citizenry are always skeptical (to say the least) about the responsiveness and empathy of the police power. A healthy community cannot afford a police force that is not resident in the community where it hopes to function. I knew this and understood it, but I wasn't easy with the popular notion that this problem was a consequence of simple racism: i.e, that the whites (including the police) had left Detroit out of racial hatred. There is no denying that race was a huge factor; it's just that I thought there were other, not unrelated, economic and psychological aspects. It's not worth splitting hairs about, however: it was race.

  My excuse—or really, not an excuse, but merely a reason—was that I was only temporarily absent and, anyway, it was merely a matter of convenience. I expected to return to the city, oh, just about any time now.

  I'd had an apartment in the city, years before. It had been fun, for a while. But then other guys had begun to exploit the situation, asking me to list them as roommates and so on. And then they had taken to using the place as a trysting site. I finally got fed up with it and, since my mother didn't seem to mind. . . . Well, let's be ckar about this: at one time I thought my mother was happy to have me move back home.

  In those days, not so long after the death of my father, she was still in a conventional-widow mode. She wore black dresses and pinned a hat with a veil to her gray hair when she went to teas, where she conspired with her Eastern Star cronies about marrying their daughters and granddaughters to me. When I recollect this, it's shocking. I wonder if it shocks her.

  She had never been very impressed with my police career, to say the least. It had quite stunned her, I gather. But then she began to develop new and compelling interests. Bird-watching was the key. She became obsessed with birds, which led to a more serious concern with the environment, and travel. Soon, she was hardly ever at home. And she began to get younger as I grew older, curiously enough, transforming herself from a conventionally maternal woman, a widow in corsets, into a slender, somewhat unisex athlete who traipsed about in Gokey brogans when she wasn't dashing about in spandex. She bought a mountain bike, and rode it! Correspondingly, she lost any interest, it seemed, in my marital status or career aspirations. She didn't have the time.

  For my part, I had become conscious of the racial implications of Detroit's transformation but, as I say, not totally convinced of a racist character. On the surface, I felt, it had an overwhelmingly racist quality, but I'd always been a little suspicious of the conventional view of racism. I had a gut feeling that many seemingly racist behaviors might be more accurately attributed to a variety of other, more complex, factors. For instance, leaving aside the racial composition of Wayne County, there was the fact was that there had been a considerable decline in the earning power and income of all Detroit residents, generally. When people are poor things get dangerous. It wasn't safe, no matter who you were. In short, it had become an increasingly less attractive place, and as a consequence, the nearby suburbs, particularly just north of the city, in Oakland and Macomb Counties, seemed more attractive. But who could afford to move there? Only white people, particularly since (and here is really where racism came into play) black people were largely discouraged to do so, especially by the realtors, who probably told their consciences that they were simply acting in a businesslike manner. I'm being a little facetious, but not completely. Realtors widely believe that white people don't like black people—they don't look beyond conventional notions—and so they exacerbate real racism (i.e., deeply held notions of some white people about the inferiority or undesirableness of blacks) by adopting an economic racism to protect their business interests.

  No doubt the problem was much more complex than this, but I won't dilate on it. For now, my problem was to accommodate to the new reality. My boss was under pressure to bring his department into compliance with the regulations. Specifically, that meant enforcing the residency requirement for white officers. Jimmy was not accusatory. But he was the lieutenant. I was the sergeant. It was time for me to move to town or resign.

  “So, I'll move to town,” I said. “I knew it was coming. I'm sorry I didn't do it on my own.”

  “Good. Thanks, Mul. But.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “It has to be soon. No delays. They're talking ninety days.”

  “Ninety days. You got it. There's lots of vacancies in town. Rents are low. Shouldn't be a problem. What else you got?” He was carrying a sheaf of papers.

  What he had, he said, was a “grounder,” which is what one might call a nonjob. Some kid was getting a weird transmission on his computer and he was worried about it. He thought it might be criminal in some way. But it didn't seem criminal, on the face of it.

  The transmission was a message, from some kind of cover name or alias, it looked like. Somebody named Hexam. Gaffer

  Hexam. The transmission featured a crudely animated cartoon, or “graphic,” that depicted a woman being killed. She was being killed in a series of buffoonish ways, as if it were a Road Runner cartoon, except that the cartoon wasn't anything like as slick as the Road Runner. A sort of generic stick-figure woman with exaggerated pyramidal breasts and a cloud of white or blond hair, in a triangular skirt, stalks jerkily along a city street, a business district of tall buildings, arms swinging. A huge chunk of concrete, part of a building, falls on her. Her hands and feet stick out from under the concrete slab. In another sequence, the woman is walking on a bridge over what appears to be the Detroit River, judging by the skyline in the distance; in fact, it seems to be the Belle Isle Bridge. She stops to talk to a much larger figure, a man in a dark outfit of some kind—a cloak, or maybe just a long overcoat. Suddenly, the man's arms fly up—there's no other way to describe this—and then the woman tips over the railing of the bridge and disappears. In the third and final sequence, the woman is smashed by a speeding limousine that flattens her. After that, a question mark rises on the screen, followed by the words, “Where? When?”

  The kid had recorded this on a little square disk. He seemed like a nice enough boy, about sixteen, a student, tall and gawky but nice looking. “It seemed kind of weird,” he told me. “You see weird stuff on the Net sometimes, but this seemed so direct.”

  “Is there any way of checking back, through the channe
ls or something?” I asked. I wasn't familiar with the system, as you can tell. The kid, whose name was Kenty, didn't think it could be traced. Or maybe it could be, but it would be very difficult and time-consuming and if it wasn't of any interest to the cops then he sure wasn't going to waste time on it. But he thought it might be interesting because it had what seemed to be a specific person's name attached and it bothered him because it had been sent directly to his E-mail.

  The “graphic,” as the boy called it, was directed to “Sgt. Fang Mulhiesen [sic], 9th Precinct.” Directed in the sense that the opening panels of the “graphic” carry a title or heading as above. And the closing panels also carry a heading: “by Gaffer Hexam.” It was a mystery to me. But I said I'd look into it. Just the utterance of that fateful cliché seemed to sink the boy's heart, and mine too. He muttered something about “Let me know” and “I'll see you” and left. I sighed and set the disk aside.

  “Why would a ‘disk’ be square?” I asked Jimmy. He shrugged. “A disk is a round thing,” I said. A blank look. “If it was meant for me, why send it to him?”

  “It got to you, didn't it?”

  “Yeah, it got to me, but why not send it direct?”

  “How would you do that?” Jimmy asked. “What's your E-mail address?”

  I thought about that. What was there to say? “Oh well, what else have you got?”

  We had a young man who had come all the way from Mexico, looking for his brother, who was last known to be employed at Krispee Chips, a potato-chip factory in this precinct. This young man did not speak English and we had no Spanish speakers in the precinct. He had been to Missing Persons, downtown, but they had sent him out to us. Communication was difficult, but somehow, with the help of a couple of other officers, we pieced together a little information. We were interested in his story because Krispee Chips is an important feature of Mob presence in Detroit. Humphrey DiEbola is the C.E.O. It is believed that innumerable aliens are cycled in and out of the country through Krispee Chips, as putative employees. These are almost always Italians. We'd never heard of Mexicans at Krispee Chips.