Man with an Axe (10 page)

I don't know . . . it didn't sound particularly
African
to me. It sounded like wild and beautiful Free Jazz. The percussion was terrific, but it was mainly a bop drum kit, as far as I could tell, and the drummer sounded a lot like Roy Brooks, an old Detroit player and drum teacher, who was pretty familiar to me. It wasn't Roy, it was a younger man, but it sounded like him.

The tunes, or whatever you call these musical pieces, were wonderful. They weren't tunes, in the sense of “My Funny Valentine,” but they weren't ragas or fugues or concertos, either. They
were fairly brief, somewhat evocative tone pieces, or mood pieces, with definite melodies, some of them even a little bluesy. There seemed to be a basic simple structure, a theme or a melodic phrase, and a general but fluctuating rhythm, with a lot of improvisation. But I think I'd have to listen to a lot more of it before I'd like to describe it further. And I plan to hear a lot more of it.

The audience definitely loved it. The audience seemed more familiar with the music than I was, certainly. It was a mostly African-American audience, young but not very, and evidently a bit upscale, judging from the dress and the cars in the Art Institute parking lot. There seemed to be at least a minority academic element in the audience: beards and conservative suits, horn-rimmed glasses.

I was happy to take up Agge's suggestion that we go to the reception after the concert. It seems that she knew one of the musicians, or a friend of one of the musicians, and she thought we could at least meet Kinanda and shake his hand. I was all for it, although these scenes often seem a bit uncomfortable or awkward to me—but then I'm not averse to social awkwardness: you can often learn something from such situations. It isn't always clear just what is supposed to be happening. Are the musicians really interested in talking to their fans and admirers? Or is it an obligatory thing? Or maybe they're just happily greeting their old pals and other musicians who have come to pay a little compliment, a courtesy. Anyway, as a cop, I'm naturally curious, not to say nosy. I want to know what's going on, what different kinds of people are like. I don't mind seeming awkward.

Kinanda was a pleasant man about my own age, tall and good-looking, with a graying beard that made him look distinguished, an effect aided by horn-rimmed glasses that he hadn't worn onstage. He had, as I mentioned, an especially fine voice. Agge's friend introduced us.

“So glad you could come,” Kinanda said. “Did you enjoy the program?” He seemed genuinely interested in our reaction. “You're familiar with the music?”

“I'm just getting into it,” I told him. “A friend introduced me to it and I like it. I like it a lot.” I started to say that my listening background was in hard bop, but he interrupted, asking the name of my Virgil—that was his phrase. I started to say “Books Meldrim,” but that didn't seem quite appropriate, and for the life of me I couldn't remember Books's real name. I ended up stammering out, “Buh—, uh, a guy named Meldrim.”

Kinanda frowned. “Is he a musician?”

“Sort of semiprofessional,” I said. “He plays a little jazz piano . . . Teddy Wilson style, maybe a little ‘Fatha’ Hines.”

“Books Meldrim? Why, I know Books. Is he still . . . around?” This last was phrased as one might say “still alive.”

“Sure. I don't know if he plays in public anymore, but he's still kicking, still in good health. I saw him last night, as a matter of fact.”

Kinanda seemed interested. A young woman came into the room, a gallery of the Art Institute actually, a kind of reception area. They were serving wine. The young woman wrapped herself around Kinanda, perhaps seeking warmth, as she was inadequately attired (if you take clothing as essentially a form of shelter, rather than decoration; she certainly didn't need clothing for decoration). “Baby, you were bewitching,” she declared. It seemed an appropriate appreciation. The music had been bewitching. Kinanda tolerated the frankly erotic embrace with a graceful reluctance. Not obviously insane, he didn't, apparently, want to cool the young lady's ardor or affection, but he was also not comfortable with her demonstrativeness. He may have been conscious of Agge's sniff of disapproval.

I should say something here about Agge. She was looking rather stunning herself. I never knew you could wear a T-shirt with
an evening gown. She certainly perked up when Kinanda managed to fend off his sultry assailant long enough to ask, “Is Books still hanging out with Grootka?” I know it caught my attention.

“You knew Grootka?” I asked.

“Knew?” Kinanda said. “Do I detect a past tense? Yes? I'm sorry to hear it.”

“It's been a while,” I said. “Four years, anyway.”

Kinanda pursed his lips. “Line of duty, I suppose?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Although he was supposed to be retired.”

“Hard to imagine Grootka retired.” But he didn't ask for details and I didn't volunteer them. “You are a policeman too, I suppose.” I admitted I was. “Mulheisen,” he voiced my name, almost to himself, as if committing the name to memory.

“How do you know Books and Grootka?” I asked. But Kinanda had turned away, happy to talk to the young woman and several other people who were eagerly demonstrating to one another how familiar, even intimate, they were with the celebrity of the moment. “My man!” they exclaimed and, “Brother!”

My old friend Jimmy Singleton suddenly materialized. Jimmy will occasionally run a blind pig, for a few weeks at a time, until its natural half-life expires. “Mul, what you doin’ here? You dig this shit? I didn't know. It's cool, eh?”

“What happened at the Joe?” I asked, referring to the Joe Louis Arena, the home of the Red Wings.

“Blew ‘em out,” Jimmy said. “Six-two. Yzerman scored two goals, the Russians got all the others.”

Blessed relief. My sacrifice had paid off. I was shocked at how good it felt.

“Do you know these guys?” I asked, meaning Kinanda.

“Known ‘em for years,” Jimmy said.

“Kinanda says he knew Grootka.”

Singleton nodded. “Yeah, he would.”

“Well, Grootka knew everybody,” I said. “But is Kinanda, or was he, a local guy?” I was puzzled: Grootka's unusually wide acquaintance could hardly extend to, say, New York, or Chicago, which is where I presumed Kinanda was based.

“He used to play around here, in a previous life,” Jimmy joked, “but he made his name in L. A. He usually has a couple of the home cats in his band.”

“Ah, that explains it. I guess he likes the Detroit sound.” Although, I thought, what is the Detroit sound?

“You mean that hard edge?” Singleton said.

“Yeah.” I thought I knew what he meant. It was a legacy, I thought, of a couple generations of Detroit players, dating back to the twenties with the McKinney's Cotton Pickers, through boppers like Wardell Gray, and up to and including Roland Hanna, the Jones boys, Barry Harris, Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, Kenny Burrell, Louis Hayes, Pepper Adams, Donald Byrd, Marcus Belgrave, and Geri Allen. It was a straightforward, technically brilliant style that was devoid of sentimentality, but not unemotional.

Reflecting on the music I had just heard, I found a definite affinity. This music was not mainstream, certainly not bop, but there was that same wry, unsentimental edge that said “Detroit” to me. The only thing I missed was a lack of a strong tenor or baritone sax presence. The only sax in the lineup tonight had been a soprano, played virtuosically by a young black woman named Karen Tate. She was a terrific player who doubled on clarinet and bass clarinet, but she didn't blow with that characteristic Detroit edge. I mentioned it to Singleton.

“The man didn't blow,” he pointed out.

“You mean Kinanda? I thought he was a piano player.” The tape Books had given me had listed Kinanda as a keyboard player
and composer, but there had been some mention of “saxes.” I'd heard some powerful saxes on it, but I'd gotten the impression, as I had tonight, that Kinanda was a pianist.

“He also plays sax,” Singleton said. “Damn good, too. Tenor and bari. I guess the music didn't call for a big horn.”

The featured composition had, in fact, been an extended series of reflections on a theme, presumably about African life, except that the composer didn't bother to tell us anything about the theme, just the somewhat evocative titles of the relatively short pieces that made up the suite: “Kilwa Kisiwani,” “Victoria Nyanza,” and so on. It wasn't unusual: music lovers are used to titles that are vaguely evocative without being very descriptive of the music itself, as in Schubert's “Trout” quintet.

When I saw an opportunity I approached Kinanda again and asked him straight out what the composition was all about.

“It's about jazz,” he said, promptly. “Music and instruments. Keyboards, drums. Music is always about that. But we give it other names sometimes, maybe because we think it should be
about
something . . . something out there.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the city. “Tchaikovsky got together an orchestra and wrote a piece about Napoleon and the invasion of Moscow, but it's really just orchestral music, no matter how many cannons are fired.”

“But what do names like ‘Kilwa Kisiwani’ and ‘Victoria Whatever-it-was’ mean, then?” I persisted.

“Oh, yes.” Kinanda looked thoughtful. He didn't seem in the least put out by my impertinence. “You know what? I think at the time I had some idea . . . maybe some memory or image of visiting Tanzania. I had been there on a State Department-sponsored trip a few months before. So I had that thought. But"—he shrugged, as if in apology—"I can't say that the pieces, despite their names, are
about
Tanzania. I was taken to see Lake Victoria, so I remembered
the African name, which is really a holdover from colonialism—Victoria Nyanza/Lake Victoria.”

“So you're saying,” I pushed on, “that music can never be about something other than itself?”

“Well, it's just music, you see. It's purely abstract. Of course, once you add words . . . a
song
can be about something other than itself, than music. A hymn, for instance, is about God. And Bach's Mass in B Minor is about God, or about religion, at least. But I don't think that a Bach fugue is about God, although I guess some would say that God is in the details. But for me, it's about something else—rhythm, harmony, tonality. I have written music that was about places and people, events. But ‘Kilwa Kisiwani’ probably evokes an ancient African capital only for me.”

Agge had listened to this with great interest. “What did you write about people?” she asked. “An opera?”

Kinanda screwed up his handsome face. “No, not really. It used some lyrics, some narrative . . . it's never been recorded, or even performed. It was an early work. But"—he brightened—"you know, I may do something with it yet.”

“Does it have a name?” Agge said.

“Well . . . ah, I think I'll have to rename it—
if
I rewrite it.” He turned to me. “Are you a player”

“A jazz player?” I shook my head. No one had ever asked me such a thing. “No, of course not.”

“Of course not? Does that mean you don't play at all?”

“Well, I took piano lessons, as a boy. But no, I never thought of myself as a player.” Now that I thought of it, I wondered why I had never attempted to play anything other than my lessons. Why not a jazz tune? “I don't know why I never tried it,” I said. “It never occurred to me.”

“There are two kinds of people,” Kinanda said, his voice taking on a certain pontificatory inflation, “players and auditors.”

“I would be an auditor,” I affirmed. “I love music. But there are people, you know, who don't seem in the least interested in music. A third type. I wonder what they would be called.”

“Idiots,” Kinanda said, decisively.

“What was Grootka?” Agge said.

As one, Kinanda and I said, “Player.”

I think at the moment I was taking Kinanda's dichotomy to be one of those great generalities that people often invoke, and that what he meant by player was an activist, a doer, as opposed to someone like myself, who was more an observer. Although I hasten to say that I don't subscribe to these gross dichotomies: I've never been content, for instance, to merely observe; and there is no doubt that Grootka was a crocodile of a watcher.

“There are certain kinds of players, however,” Kinanda said, “who probably should have stayed auditors.”

6

Fine and Dandy

“
I
believe that Lao-tse says somewhere that you should govern an empire as you would cook a little fish,” said Books Meldrim. He was cooking a little fish. Several of them, in fact. Bluegills. We were on the deck of his house on the Lake Erie shore. I nodded and smiled and sipped some more of the excellent champagne he had provided, a Moët & Chandon, not too brut.

“I'm not familiar with Lao-tse,” I said. “He was a Chinese philosopher, I guess, but what period”

“You heard of Lao-tse! Very early, pre-Christian. He wrote the
Tao-te ching.
Lately, folks call him Lao-tzu.”

“Oh,
that
Lao-tse.” I was embarrassed.

“He may be just a myth,” Books said, as if to comfort me, “though usually there's something to a myth. Anyway, the
Tao
certainly exists. It's a basic text, good for rummaging through. And I have to admit"—he smiled as he turned the fish on the portable grill—"that's what I do, rummage. I never really studied it. I get these pithy quotes that sound like good rules for living. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Even Charlie Parker quoted from Ellington. It's knowing that it's a quote, not something you invented your own
self, that's important. A feller gets to believing what he stole is what
he
made is when he gets into trouble.”

I felt like saying “Amen,” but thought that might sound phony. I contented myself with my cigar and watched the sun continue to fall into the great lake of the Eries, scene of fierce battles among the Hurons and Chippewas, the Potawatomis and the English, and the Americans and the Canadians. It looked peaceful enough now, with a scattering of clouds to the west, black and blue and red and gold. A few large seagoing ships were barely moving out there. Gulls were stroking their steadfast way home. It was pleasant, indeed, and the fish were as well governed as an empire, according to Books: “Not overdone.”

I had come down at Books's invitation. He'd said he wanted to show me something and he also wanted my reaction to the M'zee Kinanda concert. I was happy to comply, especially if it meant a fish feast on the deck. And especially since Books condescended to play the piano. His house was small, but very cunningly and beautifully designed and accomplished. It featured, for instance, heavy glass doors that essentially opened the living room onto the deck, which in turn gave onto the jetty itself. On a warm night like this, with little breeze, a pianist could comfortably sit in the living room, as on a stage, and perform to a gathering of dozens, sitting on the deck chairs or the seats built into the railings—it made the lake itself an extension of the house. But I was the only fortunate auditor this evening.

“When I had this house built I was a little worried about these windows,” Books confessed, talking while he rummaged through sheets of music, in the manner of all musicians.” ‘Cause I know how the wind can howl off that lake in the winter and I didn't want my piano ruined. But the carpenter got these good insulated doors and he put them in so they seal tight.”

He arranged some sheets on the music stand and peered at them. “I got this piano out of the old Graystone Ballroom, many, many years ago and I spent a lot of money getting it restored. It's a
great piano, a Bechstein. It was just thrown into a basement corner, a waste. This was before the Graystone's reincarnation as a rock palace in the sixties, so I figured the piano must have been left over from the heyday of the big bands. I like to think that it may have been played by Fletcher Henderson, or the Duke, maybe ‘Fatha’ Hines, or even
God Himself
—Art Tatum. Ahh, here it is.”

I was sprawled on the rail seat, smoking and enjoying the first really warm evening of the year. The piano under Books's fingers suddenly blossomed into sound that filled the air. It was almost miraculous, like watching a bud unfurl into an apple blossom, rich in not only color and texture but aroma. The tune was simple, a plaintive blues, but Books had a remarkably soft touch, seeming to prod the keys gently, barely moving his fingers. It raised the hair on the back of my neck. For a moment I had the peculiar impression that the piano was alive, filled to the bursting with music, and when Books pressed gently it released these sounds into the air.

I told him at the end, when his long, thoughtful exploration of an idea had evaporated on the evening air, that I was amazed by his ability. I could tell he was pleased, but he was also genuinely rueful.

“I wanted to be a player,” he said with a sigh, “but I just didn't have what it takes.”

“Oh, you're wrong,” I insisted.

“No, no . . . I know what it takes. For one thing"—he held up one slender hand—"the Lord didn't give me the hands. Too small. A feller can learn to play within these limitations, in jazz anyway, but it's a limitation. I'm sure I could have made a living in the clubs, maybe even cut a few records, but I could never be first-rate with this span.”

“You're too hard on yourself,” I said.

“Maybe. I envy the people who aren't. Like Grootka. He never worried about being first- or second-rate. I talked to him about it. ‘That kind of thinking is bullshit,’ he'd say. And he was right. It
is bullshit. It's giving in to vanity and ambition, social pressure, other people's opinions. I know it, but I can't help it. I never pursued the piano, except for my own uses. I can't help admiring those who push ahead with their own agenda—they get things done. Even if you're somebody like Grootka, who couldn't play a horn for shit. But he didn't care—if he was even aware. He enjoyed it, so he went at it, full speed and damn the rocks.”

“Though, sometimes, the consequences are terrible and someone else has to clean up the mess,” I observed. Books nodded agreement.

“I got something for you,” Books said and disappeared into the interior of the house, returning shortly with a neatly wrapped parcel, about the size of a book. “Open it when you get home,” he said. “And here's a little tape to listen to. It's Kinanda, from a jazz festival that a friend of mine taped off a broadcast in San Francisco. I think you'll like it. He calls it ‘A Fine and Dandy Lion,’ after the old tune, which a lot of jazz musicians have used as a basis for other tunes. The chord progression is conducive to blowing, I guess, but as you'll see, Kinanda doesn't stick to the chords . . . he blows them away.”

I really had no idea what he was talking about. He tried to explain what a chord progression was, but it was either too simple or too complex for me. I guess there are people, perhaps most of us, who are introduced to music at home and at school, take a few lessons, learn something about harmony and so on, without ever really penetrating its secrets. Basically we just
like
music. That is, it's important to us, more or less, but it's not important the way it is for those people who become musicians. We don't
breathe
music. I nodded and said “Unh-hunh,” and promptly forgot what a chord progression was.

I listened to the tape while driving home and it was great. It sounded kind of familiar. It was a blues, all right, and I'd heard it
recently . . . and then it hit me: it was the blues that Books had played when I was sitting on his deck. I hadn't recognized it because it was a much more complicated exploration of the basic theme, plus it heavily featured a baritone sax.

T
his was what was in the package. A notebook, or composition book, as I've already described. I put it here because this was actually book #2, although it was the first one to come to my attention. Like book #1, it was written in blue ink, in a nice hand, and I've edited it for ease of reading, retaining a few of Grootka's usages for effect.

Grootka's Story

I walked quite a ways, not really dressed for it, in my street shoes and a suit. The day had warmed up a little by now, but it was pretty breezy and anyway, I never was a guy for shorts and sport shirt, and I didn't bring none with me. So maybe I looked a little funny to the farm lady when I knocked on the door.

[
I could imagine. Say you're an Amish farm wife, probably cooking pies or something in your kitchen, wearing an apron over your floral housedress, with the characteristic babushka, or scarf, on your head, and suddenly you hear this pounding on the front door. It's out in the country. Usually, people drive up into the barnyard, or whatever, and honk their horns or get out and halloo and you go out to greet them. You don't expect someone to come walking up to the front porch and pound on the door, certainly not a big, mean-looking Detroit police detective. No wonder she wouldn't come out. Grootka says she peered through the muslin curtains (I assume they were muslin—isn't that the see-through stuff that your mother hung on frames to dry?) and talked to him through the door. I don't know the life of these people—I get the impression that they're very chary of strangers, especially the womenfolk.
—M.]

She won't let me use the f——g [
The dashes are G.’s curiously delicate usage
.
Sparing my sensitive eyes, I suppose, but you will notice later that when he's excited he forgets the
f——ing
dashes
.
—
M
.
] phone, to call Books, and by now it's pushing noon. I don't want to walk all the way back to the f——ing resort, but it looks like I got to. She did let me get a drink of water from the well, which they got a little hand pump out by the side yard and you can sit down on a bench under a big maple or oak tree, I don't know which it was. I was sitting there when I seen a big car pull up at the gate to the resort.

This gate is just beyond the farmer's driveway and it's the way a lot of the resort people go in and out to avoid the prick on the front gate. But the farmer insists that they gotta keep the gate closed, to keep his cows out of there. It's a barbed-wire deal, a kind of loose fence that goes across the road and the pole fits into a hoop at the base of the regular fence and another hoop slips over the top of the pole—you got to pull the gate kind of tight to do it—and it works fine, except that once in a while some jerk don't bother to reclose it after he drives through, so then the cows wander in and the kids have to go round them up.

Anyways, the guy who gets out to open the gate is a white guy, wearing a golf shirt and fancy slacks, big black shades. I knew him right away and I wondered if he made me, but he didn't seem to even see me. A course, I was sitting under the tree, in the shade, and I suppose he didn't expect to see nobody there anyway. It was Cooze, a boy from Buffalo that Carmine liked to use from time to time when he had a problem, a real asshole and a guy who I always thought oughta give thanks every morning if he wakes up ‘cause nobody blew his f——ing head off yet. Cusumano is his real name—Valentino, God help us, which is why he goes by Cooze. So I know that Carmine must be in the car, and maybe the Fat Man too, since I can tell from the way Cooze is acting—not being a smart-ass, just taking care of the gate like a normal guy would do—that
he's not on his own. But naturally, the windows of the Caddy are tinted so the peasants can't ogle His Holy Eminence when he's out riding around. Cooze hops back in the car and off they go, not bothering to rehook the gate, naturally.

Now where could these high and mighty Crime Lords be going? There must be something damn important in Nigger Heaven to bring them all the way up here. I thought it over and it seemed to me that it had to be Lonzo. He was the only one of these guys who was connected at all. I mean, there was probably twenty tinhorn drug peddlers and thieves down there, but none of them was likely to attract the exalted attention of the big bosses, actually bring them driving up to a Negro resort. Not even Lonzo, really, so he must be onto something f——ing huge, and since they were shrewd enough to use the back gate either somebody was showing them the way or they knew the place.

So I had to get my ass back down to Lonzo's, which was about a mile away on a bad road. I seen a old Schwinn bike leaning against a barnyard fence. It was one of them fat-tired kinds, with a lot of chrome and handlebar tassels—some kid's dream. I figured one a the Hamish kids had earned this bike the hard way, bucking hay and shoveling cow shit. I ran to the house and pounded on the door, but of course the old lady ain't coming out for me. So I yelled that I was a cop and I had to borrow the bike, but here was a fifty-dollar deposit, which I would bring the f——ing thing back, don't worry. And I stuffed a fifty in the doorjamb and I jumped on the bike and went pumping away.

This was not the road to hell. They didn't have no intentions, good or otherwise, of paving it and even with fat tires it wasn't so easy to get going in the sand, especially since them old Schwinns didn't have no fancy gears. It was just stand up and crank that mule. But it was better than walking by God and I got down to Lonzo's in about ten minutes and sure enough, there's Carmine's

Caddy sitting in the driveway. I hauled the bike into some bushes down the road and decided to hunker in myself, to wait and see what might be going down. What the hell was I gonna do anyway, bust in wavin’ the Old Cat [
Grootka's nickname for his revolver, an enormous old .45 caliber Smith & Wesson.
—M.] and arrest everybody? For what? And anyways, I'm outta my precink.

I don't know if you ever sat in the bushes in the summer, Mul. It's innarestin’. I don't know if I ever did, but it seemed to bring back something. These were pretty thick bushes out back of the house with just a weedy field beyond and then some woods, honeysuckle bushes, I guess, and a few little poplar or willow saplings, but I don't know bushes much. There was a lot to see, though, if you're just taking a squat in the bushes on a summer day with nothing to do but observe nature—ants taking a regular road they got, but very busy, hauling pieces of trash like a bit of seed or a part of a dead beetle. A spider is hanging in a web. A robin flies in once in a while. It was pleasant and cool, the leaves rattling in the wind. I was comfortable, leaning back against a sapling, the sun kind of flickering green and gold, and there was that musty old cool dirt smell. So I kind of drowsed, sitting there waiting, about a hundred feet up behind the house. There were only a couple houses on this ridge, so far, none of them close and there wasn't nobody about.