Man with an Axe (7 page)

A woman had gone into a supermarket, around nine P.M., and pulled a gun, attempting a robbery. Three customers had responded by pulling their own guns, and all of them shot at the would-be robber, at least one of them killing her. Pretty amazing, even for Detroit. It made the national news, for the usual fifteen minutes, or seconds. And it was later noted by a few more serious editorialists.

Inevitably, the incident was seen as symptomatic of a gun-obsessed society.

For the investigators it was more interesting that one of the other pistol-packing customers happened to be a woman who knew the dead woman or, more germanely, knew the robber's husband. Knew him all too well, it turned out. This was a coup for one of the precinct detectives, young Ayeh, he of the keen eye and hawk nose and better known as Ahab. But, alas, the business came to nothing, since the bullet that killed the woman turned out to have come from the gun of one of the other customers, a man who had no relationship of any kind with the victim. Indeed, it was difficult to prove that the woman who knew the husband had even fired her piece.

Like everything else, all the information about this case was on a computer file. I'm not tremendously handy at this, but even a cursory scan through turned up at least one interesting fact: the supermarket was way the hell and gone over on Eight Mile Road, a couple of precincts away from where the victim lived. Ayeh said that he had noticed that and he had ascertained that Mrs. McDonough, the victim, had gone to the store separately from Miss James (the once suspected killer.) Both their cars had been parked in the store parking lot. The husband, Ted McDonough, had been home asleep (he worked the night shift at FedEx, at the airport). Ayeh had also ascertained that Mrs. McDonough was pushing a grocery cart that contained breakfast cereal, a half gallon of milk, toilet paper, shampoo, a plastic container of chocolate-chip cookies from the store bakery, and a half gallon of chocolate swirl low-fat frozen yogurt. She had not paid for these items when the shooting broke out, although the cashier had rung them up, which was how Ayeh knew exactly what was in the cart—it was on the scanner printout receipt.

I hadn't known any of these details. They seemed very intriguing. I agreed with Ayeh that if Mrs. McDonough wanted to rob a grocery store she wasn't likely to do it in her own neighborhood, where she was well known. But would she actually buy things
she needed? Frozen yogurt? If your purpose was robbery, why bother with these items?

And sure, if Miss James wanted to kill her lover's wife she might have followed her to the store, or she might even have been tipped off that Mrs. McDonough was going to attempt such a thing, perhaps by the husband. Though it seemed a bit too convenient that Mrs. McDonough's gun was unloaded—she actually fired no shots herself. But was this the whole story? Could it possibly be the whole story?

“Where did Mrs. McDonough's gun come from?” I asked Ayeh.

It seems she had bought it herself, a month earlier. A legitimate purchase, over the counter, from a legitimate dealer. It was registered, although she was not licensed to carry it on her person. It could be transported in the trunk of a car, from the police station where it was registered to her home, and to and from her home to an approved firing range or gun club. Mrs. McDonough didn't belong to any gun club.

The fact that Miss James had not, in fact, killed her rival had stymied the investigation. But I wondered if it couldn't be jump-started again. For one thing, it certainly looked like Mrs. McDonough—"What was her first name?” I asked Ayeh. “Mildred,” he answered—had actually shopped for groceries and was planning to pay for them: she had more than enough money in her purse. I asked Ayeh to find out, if he could, whether that grocery list corresponded to needs or preferences in the household: i.e., did they usually buy Honey Bunches of Oats and Swan's Neck toilet paper? Were they out of or low on those items? Did someone in the house like chocolate-chip cookies and/or low fat chocolate swirl frozen yogurt? In short, were these usual, regular purchases?

The other thing was, could there be any normal or reasonable excuse or cause for Miss Ardella James to be in that neighborhood at 9:08
P.M.
? For this Ayeh had a reply. Yes, Ardella James
had been at a record store on Eight Mile Road, which had obtained an old blues recording for her. She was a fan of Etta James, who she liked to tell people was a cousin, although there was no evidence that they were related. Ardella was a blues collector, in fact. The record shop had previously obtained unusual or hard-to-find records for her. She didn't like CDs. She liked vinyl. “She says it has a better sound,” Ayeh told me. “The surface noise is a problem, especially on older records, she says, but the recording is fuller or something. It didn't make sense to me. She picked up the record—paid twenty-five dollars for it!—some time between eight-twenty and eight-forty. The store closed at nine. Then she showed up at the Food Fair at nine. She hadn't done any shopping there. She apparently had just come into the store.”

And no one else, none of the other people present, could be linked to either Ardella or Mildred. The man who actually shot her, whose bullet had killed Mildred, was Albert P. Fessel, age sixty-six, a retired baker. He lived in the neighborhood, was married, in good repute, and had a permit to carry the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. He used to own a bakery on Chene Street, about a mile away, but had given it up when he was robbed for about the twentieth time.

I remembered the bakery. I remembered the man, I thought. He made wonderful raised donuts, incredibly delicious and appallingly fattening. I suppose I had eaten several hundred of them in my lifetime. Could this be the same guy? Ayeh assured me that Al Fessel was indeed a lightly colored African-American of about five feet and eight inches in height, weighing about two hundred and thirty or forty pounds, with a neatly trimmed mustache and sparse, gray hair cut very close to his round skull. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses. No known or even suspected relationship with the deceased.

Al Fessel claimed that he thought the woman was going to kill him. She had a gun in her hand and she shot at him at least twice, he was certain, at the time.
At the time.
Later, he supposed that he must have been mistaken, since the checkout clerk said that

Mrs. McDonough had only waved the gun and hadn't fired it. But somebody had fired, and Al Fessel had thought it was her. “Must of been someone else, then,” he'd told Ayeh. “And he knew,” Ayeh said, “'cause he'd been shot at plenty.”

All this was interesting, certainly, but I thought something was amiss. I wondered if there wasn't a fundamental misstep here. How did we know, for instance, that Mildred McDonough had been intending a robbery? I kept returning to the fact that she'd had more than enough money in her purse to pay for her groceries. The more I thought about it, the less Mildred looked like a would-be robber. I discussed it with Ayeh and he agreed to go back and talk to the clerk. Though where it would get us, I didn't know.

In the afternoon Mr. Luckle called back. (His name
was
Luckle—it was often misspelled and mispronounced, he said. I could commiserate, having been called Millhowzen, Mulhouser, Millhozer, Mullice, and even Malice.) He said he had important business with me and he hoped that I could come down to headquarters, to Internal Investigations, “So that we can clear this matter up,” he said. “Would four o'clock be convenient?”

It was neatly performed, but I was familiar with this dance routine, having used it myself many times. Obviously, something was
vermischt,
to use an old NATO term (which I think must have meant, once, “screwed up, messed up, perhaps missing"). Four o'clock wasn't at all convenient but I motored on downtown compliantly.

Mr. Luckle was one of those truly white men, apparently quite hairless, who seemed devoid of blood. You couldn't really imagine him bruised. Where would the bruise blood come from? But to give this ghostly pale man credit, he seemed pleasant enough and he also wasn't noticeably on the prod, as most cops fear when dealing with Internal Investigations. He seemed as puzzled as anyone about the funds that Grootka had presumably misappropriated. They amounted to $4,017.39—enough to be concerned about but not enough to fuel
a scandal, considering that the figure encompassed more than thirty years of detective work. Still, it couldn't be ignored. Mr. Luckle wasn't the kind of guy who ignored any misdeed.

I was willing to help, though hardly eager to devote my time to a painstaking search for legitimate payouts by Grootka, especially since the man was safely dead and anyway his reputation had never exactly been honorable. But Luckle changed my mind.

“Your name is on several of the chits,” he said.

These “chits” were mere slips of paper on which Grootka had scribbled a sum—anywhere from five dollars to fifty dollars, never any more—and a name, plus a signature (usually his own, but sometimes “Mul,” or “Mullein,” or something not really recognizable, but which Luckle seemed to believe was an approximation of my name). I had not signed any of these chits. I was willing to swear it. The names were those of informants, or so it appeared: Shakespeare, Red Hen, the Sparrow, Homer, Pudokyo (I remembered him: a sex pervert whose penis got longer every time he lied), Motor Mouth, Caruso (and Mario Lanza), Dickbreath, 33 1/3 (a.k.a. ElPee, a notorious ear bender), the Turdle, Books. Many of them were familiar to me, although I reckoned that most of them were dead. I couldn't recall seeing any of them lately. Books was very dear, in more ways than one: a good old friend both of Grootka's and later, mine, and also the recipient of several hundred dollars. Luckle believed that there was more missing, since the chits accounted for only a portion of what the department had actually appropriated for this purpose. But at least this much was nominally accounted for.

I didn't see what the big deal was. Mr. Luckle readily explained.

“These chits are in no way adequate accounting for departmental expenditures. Since their originator is no longer available for clarification and/or restitution, his associate—you, Sergeant Mulheisen—will be held accountable for any funds you are unable to justify.”

That was pretty clear. Unless I could explain a bunch of barely legible scraps of paper, the department was going to make me pay up. I gave Mr. Luckle my most vulpine grimace, but it didn't seem to faze him. Armed punks have cowered in corners before that grimace. Luckle didn't blink and, to be sure, no blood rose to his cheeks. It was a lot of malarkey, of course, and the Policemen's Benevolent Association wouldn't stand for it, but it looked like a hassle. I said I'd give it my best shot.

Since I was at headquarters I went by Records with an idea that I'd look into Grootka's cases, make a list of his informants, and justify it that way. It didn't work. For one thing, most of Grootka's cases were precomputer, and while some of that stuff has been logged onto computer tape, or whatever they do, a lot of it hasn't and never will be. It's just too expensive and nowadays the government is so strapped for operating funds that we can't be spending it on things that don't show an immediate payoff. These files were, in fact, more neglected now than they would have been had computers never been invented. It's a long story and a boring one, about the unanticipated drawbacks of a major technological transition, so you won't hear it here. The upshot was that if I found it so important to ransack Grootka's files I'd have to do it myself, and be prepared to spend a few dusty days in dark caverns.

But then, of course, there was Ms. Agge Allyson.
She
might be interested in spelunking Grootka's dark past. Hell, it was her vocation, so to speak. When we met tomorrow I'd suggest it.

Records had actually packed up many of these records and were storing them in an old warehouse down by the river. I recognized the address. It wasn't very far from where Grootka had once found a corpse and called me in to help investigate. He'd identified the corpse as Books Meldrim, one of his “music students,” as it were. It seemed ludicrously appropriate that the body of Grootka's work, so to speak, was now immured in an adjacent warehouse.

4

Dining with the Dead

A
fter Grootka's death I'd searched his apartment thoroughly. It was a nice apartment, a ground-floor back in an old town house, a style of building that had been constructed in Detroit in the twenties and thirties to house upscale management types in the auto industry. They were typically three stories (any higher and the code required an elevator) and built within walking distance of major trolley lines. They were usually solid brick with a fairly grand foyer that featured marble walls, terrazzo tile, and an ornate central staircase that led to a gallery on the next floor, which connected more humbly by a narrower staircase to the third floor. So the third floor often featured more actual floor space than the two lower stories, because there was no great yawning open stairwell.

Grootka's building was a couple of blocks from the Detroit River, out Jefferson Avenue east of the Belle Isle Bridge. His main-floor apartment was spacious, with a large living room, a couple of bedrooms, a large kitchen and bath, even a good-sized pantry. In the original layout, his part of the building would have been the kitchen and living quarters of the servants, the front rooms being reserved for the gentry. That was where the rabbi had lived and his
widow still resided. Grootka kept his quarters very well, although I suspect that Mrs. Newman, the rabbi's widow, actually cleaned the place for him.

The bedroom that he slept in was dark, the only window opening onto the central airshaft. Grootka used to tell me that he liked its darkness, that he had difficulty sleeping with any kind of light. “Anything comes for me in the night, it better come with a flashlight, and ghosts don't carry flashlights.”

The room was furnished military style: a simple iron bed frame with a thin stuffed mattress lying on a lattice of flat metal strips fastened by springs to the frame. I had slept on a bed just like this in the air force; we called it a rack. In fact, Grootka's rack could have stood up to inspection in any barracks I'd ever lived in. The two blankets were rough gray wool, evidently from a military surplus store. He made the bed in a military way, too, with the blankets tucked under the mattress, hospital corners, and one of the blankets stretched tautly over the pillow as a dust cover, rather than under it in the white-collar inspection style. To my knowledge, Grootka had never been in the military, so this style may have reflected some orphanage-inculcated habitude. Perhaps the desire for utter darkness stemmed from this experience as well.

There was a single dresser, made of pine and painted gray. The top drawer contained socks neatly rolled and tucked in pairs, both silk dress socks in gray, black, and navy blue with red clocks on them, and dark wool socks also rolled and tucked. Other drawers contained neatly folded white boxer shorts, T-shirts, dress shirts, a couple of old well-worn wool V-neck sweaters. In the closet were hung three double-breasted wool worsted suits, in brown, gray, and blue, along with two silk ties in solid colors and several pairs of casual slacks. His usual tie, as I'd told Agge, which he wore just about every day, was red and it was never untied, just loosened and slipped on and off; normally, it was hung on a spindle of the chair by the bed—

I remember having seen it there, but he'd been wearing it when he died and it had been packed up with other items from the morgue. There were three pairs of dress shoes, in brown, tan, and black, very good shoes, evidently made to his last. (He had been buried in his police uniform, but as far as I knew, the funeral director had not required shoes.)

In a hall closet near the entry, I'd found a couple pairs of rubbers, including six-buckle arctic galoshes of a type I hadn't seen in years. Under the bed was a pair of carefully lined up leather slippers, very expensive and well cared for. Another pair, rather cheaper ones of boiled wool with rubber soles, very likely the ones he used when he came from the bath, were in the bathroom, along with an old, somewhat threadbare blue terry cloth bathrobe hanging on a brass hook on the door.

It was an interesting apartment. Even one who lives very simply, as Grootka appeared to, leaves a surprising amount of things. Some nice paintings, or prints, were hung in the living room and in the other rooms. So Grootka had been interested in abstract art. Possibly more interesting to my colleagues were the dozen or so guns, stashed all over the place—behind books on a shelf, under sofa cushions, in the liquor cabinet, in an otherwise empty box of Sanders’ chocolates on the coffee table. One of them, a .32 caliber revolver, had been of use to me in the scene with the killer, and another, a small silver-plated revolver, had discharged three fatal shots from Grootka's hand into the killer.

Almost as interesting, however, was the music room. It was a rear bedroom. It was bare except for an upright piano (battered, but in good tune), a stool, a music stand, and two gleaming saxophones on separate stands—a huge baritone and a straight soprano. A large sash window looked out onto a rear porch that was little more than a walkway with stairs going up and down and beyond that a small courtyard and a gate. (This was the way Grootka used
to “sneak in,” to avoid his supposedly matrimaniacal landlady.) The window was heavily curtained and barricaded with a mesh grid. There were pictures on the walls, pushpinned reproductions of what looked to me like a nineteenth-century American seascape (gray and placid, with sails in the distance) and an Eakins scene of rowers on the river: perhaps they gave the musician a scene to look at, or into, while practicing scales.

And there was quite a lot of sheet music in this room, including some very complicated-looking scores, ultramodern stuff, some of it by composers with European-sounding names. There were several folders of handwritten music featuring a blizzard of notes and some odd-looking notation that could have been computer generated. Did Grootka play this, on the piano, on the saxes? He did, according to the neighbors, some of whom grimaced when they recalled the fact, not because he didn't play well, they said, but because the music itself was “awful.” ("Why couldn't he play ‘Danny Boy'?” one of them said. “He could play as good as that guy on
Lawrence Welk")

I wasn't familiar with this music, but then I'm not a player. The handwritten stuff had numbers rather than words where one might expect a title, and the stuff on the accordion-folded computer paper may not have been music at all, but it was titled “Nigger Heaven: A Suite for Quartet and Six Others, by T. Addison.”

There was an excellent stereo or high-fidelity system in this room and many long-playing records and a surprising number of compact discs, mostly classical recordings, but many jazz recordings from a wide range of music—Louis Armstrong to Anthony Braxton. I was frankly astonished. I kind of knew that Grootka liked jazz, but before I saw this if you'd asked me I'd have said he was probably a Tommy Dorsey fan. There were no Dorsey boys here.

The most attractive neighbors shared the back porch: a handsome woman of middle age with a strikingly beautiful daughter of
about sixteen or seventeen. They were genuinely grieved at the death of their dear neighbor, Mr. Grootka, whom they seemed to remember as a kindly, helpful, and (I gathered from some unspoken gestures or sentiments) protective older man. They were not the ones who disliked Grootka's musical performances. A youthful gay lawyer upstairs and a somewhat older bachelor managerial type on the top floor, both of whom had bedroom windows that opened onto the airshaft, were not so appreciative.

Much more significant than neighbors, now that I recollected it, were Grootka's notebooks. I don't know why, but I'd completely spaced them out. Three boxes of mostly pocket-size dime-store notebooks, filled with pencil scribblings, usually containing miscellaneous items like business cards or ticket stubs, each secured with a rubber band. That was why I'd spaced them out, no doubt: just a peek into those miserable scribbles was enough to make your guts turn to cold, gelid coils. There were also some larger notebooks, but I'd ignored them at the time.

It appeared that Grootka, who was not an overly methodical man, had nonetheless evolved a familiar method: he kept notes on cases in separate notebooks. I hadn't examined them at all closely, but I'd gotten the impression that the method was a familiar one: basically, a main notebook would contain the day-to-day notes. Then there would be a number of satellite notebooks, each one dedicated to a single case and containing information about that case alone. I had found all these notebooks jumbled in a couple of cardboard boxes stored in the rather spacious pantry of Grootka's apartment. But what had I done with them?

I'd seen the system before and I'd even tried it myself, for a while. But then I'd gotten in the habit of restricting all my notes to the actual files in the precinct or the bureau. I kept a daily notebook, of course, just to jot down stuff as it occurred. My daily logs were filed in my office file cabinet. As soon as I got back to the
precinct I consulted the appropriate aide-mémoire now to see what had happened to all of Grootka's property. To my surprise, I discovered that I was in possession of most of it.

Getting old, I thought. I had totally forgotten that I'd been named conservator of Grootka's estate by the court, in the absence of any known relatives or even other interested parties. It isn't usual for the investigating detective to “inherit” a subject's petty goods, but it isn't unheard of. A home or an automobile, now . . . the state is sure to take an interest in the estate. But it doesn't want to be bothered with books and records and kitchen utensils. Paging through my logs I was reminded that the musical instruments had been donated to St. Olaf's orphanage. It seemed to me that his clothes had gone to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Other than that—and, I almost didn't remember, a Seiko wristwatch, probably worth five hundred dollars, that I'd given to his friend Books—Grootka had accumulated very little of value. He'd had a fairly new Buick, which the state had claimed and one of the guys had been tipped to buy at auction. And he'd left a savings account, though I doubt that it had amounted to more than a few thousand. But Grootka's notebooks and music were stored in my attic, I was pretty sure.

Would there be anything in there about
selbstmord?
I was willing to bet that there wouldn't be. Somehow, it just didn't seem the kind of thing that Grootka would notate. It would be like keeping a dream journal—just a little too flaky for a no-bullshit bastard like Grootka. (Well, that's what he used to say: “Hey, I'm just a no-bullshit bastard, but. . . .”)

Thinking about all this, I remembered that Agge, the History Honey, had asked where was Grootka when Hoffa disappeared. Possibly there was something in his notebooks. Another reason to look.

I couldn't remember Grootka ever saying anything about Hoffa. Which was odd, come to think of it. I remembered the furore. Everybody was checking their traps, trying to get a lead. Not a dick
in Detroit, but wanted to know what had happened to the bastard, hoping to get lucky and make a name.

I stuck my head out into the hallway and bellowed, “Maki!” A tall, bony, red-nosed detective with rubbery red lips stuck his head out of the squad-room door. Maki was a nice guy. Been on the force forever.

“What do you know about Hoffa?” I asked.

“They found him!” he declared, with a red rubber grin.

I stared at him. His eyes were beady, blue, and a little watery. He was not known to be a joker. “Where?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Jeffrey Dahmer's autopsy!” he guffawed, and his head vanished.

I sighed and returned to my desk. Apparently the world had gone completely loopy.

A few seconds later, rather sheepishly, Maki appeared at my door. “Mul, I'm sorry,” he said, abjectly, “it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I don't know what got into me.” He laughed a little, thinking about it. He was embarrassed now.

“I know, I know,” I placated him. “But seriously. . . . What do you know about Hoffa? Did you work on the case at all?”

“Hoffa? Seriously? Sure. Sure, I worked on it. Didn't you? I just did the usual.”

“No,” I said. “I wasn't a detective yet. What usual?”

“Oh, I don't know. . . . I checked out some alibis, tried to locate some possible witnesses, snitches . . . that kind of stuff. I didn't try very hard.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it was Hoffa,” Maki said, almost apologetically. “He was not exactly a policeman's pal, you know. Anyway, everybody knew the Mob whacked him. It was bound to happen. You fool around with those guys, eventually they dump on you, especially if you aren't one of them. Right?”

I shrugged; it happened. “Did you know him?”

“Hoffa? I met him once. I was on the West Side, then. I went to check out a tussle over at the local, Two ninety-nine, Hoffa's local. He beat some laborer up. The guy was protesting because the laborers’ union—A.F. of L., you know—was on strike at Zug Island and the Teamsters didn't honor the picket line. So a bunch of them went over to the local and stood around, yelling, calling Hoffa a labor traitor, and finally he came out with some of his heavies. There wasn't much to it. The guy got his ass kicked. Or, I should say, his nuts. Hoffa kicked the guy in the nuts. Really stomped him. Pretty nasty stuff. Nothing came of it, though.”

“No?”

“The guy never pressed charges. It was kind of iffy, anyway. But the thing I remember is Hoffa chewed our asses. You know, the old rant about ‘Where were you when I needed you,’ and ‘Who do you think pays your salary.’ The man was abusive. And a crook. You never saw him, hunh?”

No, I'd never seen Jimmy Hoffa, live. He was all over the press and the television, of course. Hoffa was not a hero of mine, although I certainly didn't share Maki's dismissive attitude. I had been brought up to respect unions. In my home, men like Eugene V. Debs and Walter Reuther were revered. Others, like George Meany and Hoffa, were viewed with mixed feelings. They were allowed some respect for being at least chosen, whether honestly or not, to lead enormous bodies of union workers. There was no denying in Hoffa's case that an overwhelming majority of his constituents supported and even loved him. Doubtless, there were some, perhaps many, disaffected and even anti-Jimmy Teamsters; but it seemed that the great majority were more or less enthusiastic supporters. You can't ignore that.