Man with an Axe (16 page)

When he'd gone I agreed with Vera that her suspicions had been well-founded. Of course, it was possible they were watching some other house . . .

“Oh, don't be ridiculous,” she snorted.

“Well, tell me what Grootka said.”

“He didn't say much, that's for sure. I was pretty distraught at the time, of course. He just tried to calm me down, while letting me know that Ty and Janney weren't coming back. I don't know.” She looked pensive. “I don't suppose it's much different for war widows, or women whose husbands have died in a plane crash. No.” She shook her head, matter-of-factly. “It can't really be any different. I'd been worried, but Grootka was pretty straight about it, pretty firm. I suppose I should have been grateful—at least I didn't waste any more time waiting.”

“What the hell did he tell you?” I demanded.

“He said it hadn't gone right. He was sorry, but they wouldn't be coming back. He said I shouldn't ask any more questions. There wasn't anything useful he could tell me. He'd brought Tyrone's soprano sax. That was all he could save.”

“He said that? All he could save? What does that mean? A fire? A wreck?”

“He wouldn't say. I think he said, All he could save. I can't be positive now. It's what I remember, but maybe I just put it that
way to myself. It was what I had of Tyrone. And I don't have that. I gave it to Grootka. He was grateful, as I knew he would be.”

I was aggravated. I think that's the best I can say. Not quite angry, because I had no real object for my anger, but more than peeved. “He never gave you any hint? No word about Hoffa? Did they meet with Carmine?”

“Nothing. He just gave me some money, a pretty nice amount, which he said was from Tyrone, and the sax. Said it was all he had for me. Yeah, I think now that it was, ‘All he had.’ Not ‘saved.’ Yeah, that's it,” she said. “He said, ‘This is all I have for you.’”

“How much money?”

“It was about ten thousand dollars, in fairly large bills, in a roll. I knew it wasn't from Tyrone—how could it be?—but must have been from Janney. He liked to carry a roll, sometimes, though I never saw one with that much cash. So anyway, I knew Janney was dead, too. He wouldn't give Grootka any money for me.”

“And Grootka didn't say what had happened? Didn't explain?”

“When I asked him what happened he said, ‘Sorry, babe. Things didn't go right. Nothing went the way it was supposed to. They ain't comin’ back.’ And he never would tell me any more about it.”

“That was it?”

“That was it. Once in a while I'd bump into him in a club where there was some good jazz and we'd talk. Usually, after one of those times, he'd call me back in a day or two, say how good it was to see me, and all that. And then if I asked about what had happened, insisted that I deserved to know, he'd say that maybe it would all come out someday. In the meantime, I should keep my mouth shut. ‘For how long?’ I'd asked. And he'd tell me how it was best left up to his good friend Mulheisen. Old Mulheisen would figure it all out when the time came.

“Then one day about four or five years ago he called and said he'd like to come by. He brought this notebook. It was all wrapped up, just like that. He said I should keep it in some safe place, maybe even a safe-deposit box. He said you would come for it one of these days. When you needed it. But in the meantime, if I got into a jam, or if I noticed people hanging around, strangers—like those two guys—then I should try to get in touch with you. But he was pretty spooky on this point. He said there were people in your department, or bailiwick, whatever it is, who couldn't be trusted. I shouldn't just go and make a complaint, because then there would be this formal investigation and all kinds of hell might break loose and you would certainly get bumped off the case. He gave me your home phone number, just for emergency, but I lost that a long time ago.”

“Where did you keep the notebook?” I asked.

“In the refrigerator. That's why it's in that plastic zip bag. I took it out a couple of days ago, to see if it had been damaged.”

“Did you read it?”

“I tried. Well, yeah, I read it. A long time ago. The handwriting's not bad, though the spelling is bizarre! But I got through it.”

“What did you think?”

“It's bullshit.” She was firmly dismissive. “It's all Grootka's bull. Something happened, sure, but I'll bet it wasn't what he tells. How much of this stuff have you read?”

“Four books like this,” I told her. “I presume this one picks up the story where the last one left off, which is when they are arranging to meet Carmine.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Why not?” I asked. “Why don't you tell me your version, so I can compare?”

Here I can confess that the “Prologue,” which I've provided as a simple narrative of the events before I was exposed to the notebooks, and before Grootka came onto the scene, is a reconstruction
of events
as seems likely to me.
This reconstruction needn't be taken as literal truth or fact, but it seems to me to be the most plausible scenario. It is based largely on the story I was now told by Vera Jacobsen. There's no point in repeating her version, which doesn't differ remarkably.

We compared notes, and her major objection was to Grootka's depiction of her doing a striptease to entertain the Mob guys and distract them from searching for Hoffa.

“My God!” she exclaimed. “They came in there, leering and snuffling, eager to find out what was going on. They'd heard something for sure, but I had a feeling that they didn't really know anything. Anyway, what were they gonna do? Look under the bed? Well, if they had, they'd have found Jimmy, because he was under there. But they were mainly just trying to bluff Lonzo into giving the guy up. I got fed up and grabbed my towel and went out back to catch a little sun. We had a nice little sunning place back there, out of the way, but handy so I could hear Tyrone if he wanted me. And then this maniac, Grootka, pops up out of the bushes! He's waving a rod and his eyeballs are popping out, gawking at my tits!”

The image was amusing, with its suggestion of Grootka priapically “waving a rod,” especially as Vera unconsciously massaged her left breast (I realized that even at fifty-eight, or whatever she was, she was not beyond seductiveness.) But then I recalled with a start that a man had died.

“Yes,” she nodded, sobered herself. “A thug. Never a more apt word,” she added, an edge of derision creeping back in. “And, of course, at first we thought Janney'd been shot.”

This was a point I hadn't gotten clear from Grootka's text. Had Janney been there all along? Or had he just arrived? With Carmine, for instance?

No, no, she assured me. Janney had been there earlier. A couple of days earlier. He had come up to talk to Tyrone about the
recording gig, in L.A. On that occasion, now that she thought about it—"It was all so long ago, it's not easy to remember the exact sequence"—it seemed that Janney had left to go back to town without knowing about Hoffa's presence. Yes, she was pretty sure of it, now. Hoffa had stayed in his bedroom.

“And he had returned when?” I asked.

“Just at that time, just when Carmine and Humphrey had left. I went back in the house and Janney must have come walking up the driveway when that Cooze guy saw him. Cooze would have killed him, but Grootka shot first.”

And Lonzo, I wondered? When did Lonzo get wind of Hoffa's presence?

Vera didn't know. He just showed up one night. She thought that he hadn't known about Hoffa being there, beforehand, but somebody had told him that his nephew and his wife were staying in his cabin, and they hadn't asked permission. “Although I thought Tyrone had,” she declared. “He said he had. But I'll tell you what,” she mused, “Lonzo was always after my ass. If he knew I was up there, he'd be there like a shot. It had happened before, and maybe Tyrone didn't tell him because he knew he'd come sniffing around . . . not that Tyrone paid much attention to other guys’ interest in me.”

They couldn't hide Hoffa from Lonzo, of course, but she said he was cooperative and he did keep his boys out of the house. In answer to my next question she said she did not think that Lonzo had informed to Carmine. “If he had told them, they wouldn't have been poking around,” she said, logically. “They'd have just grabbed Jimmy and probably shot the whole bunch of us on the spot. But they didn't really know.”

“So who told?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Janney, of course. Trouble was, he didn't know for sure, and he was too chickenshit to come with them in case it didn't turn out.”

It seemed that Jacobsen had long been dealing with the Mob in one way or another. Besides his printing business, he had gotten involved in a nightclub and various other enterprises that had brought him into contact with the Mob. He wasn't exactly a Mobster himself, or even a Mob wannabe, she thought, but more of a guy who was intrigued and excited by Mobsters and liked to hang around them, to pretend that he was “connected.” He had a kind of innocence, or perhaps it was his European posture, that may have led him to think that he could flirt with the bad guys and not get dirty.

There was an edge of bitterness in her voice now, and she seemed aware of it. “Grootka,” she said, as if clearing her throat. “If only he hadn't stuck his big nose into all this. What did
we
do wrong?” She looked at me, but I had no answer for her. I knew Grootka. “We didn't do any wrong,” she insisted. “We were just trying to help. If Grootka hadn't come along, maybe Hoffa would have gone home, eventually, and everything would have been all right. He'd probably be alive today, and so would Tyrone, and Janney.

“But,” she said, crossing her arms and assuming a firm, no-nonsense expression, “it didn't happen that way. Now I've gone on to other things, a different life. I'm not unhappy with it. But I can't help feeling that Grootka screwed everything up, and I just wish I had him here right now to give him a piece of my mind. You knew him, you were his friend.” She looked at me with a curious expression.

“I wasn't exactly his friend,” I protested.

“Exactly,” she agreed. “You couldn't be his friend. He chose you. Like he chose Books, or Tyrone. He decided you were somebody worth wasting his time on and so he imposed himself on you. He used to reconstruct my sentences, when I spoke to him. ‘What you mean is,’ he'd say, and come up with something I would never
say. But it was close enough to what I meant that it wasn't worth struggling against him to correct it. He was always doing shit like that. The guy was oblivious to other people, in a way. All he knew was his own point of view, which he assumed everybody else was interested in and would naturally accede to.”

“You put it so well,” I said.

“No, I don't.” She sighed. “He was a complex man. He liked people, like you and Tyrone, Books. I think he liked me, too. And those he liked he tended to think a little too highly of, if you know what I mean. Maybe it's an extension of his egotism: if you were his friend you must be great, or if he was going to waste time on you, you must be something.”

I was interested in her analysis and quite in agreement. “Did he choose you?” I asked.

“I suppose so. He used to praise me, not just to my face, but to other people. It could be embarrassing.”

“I know that one,” I said.

“And then he'd hit on me.”

“Hit you?” That didn't sound like Grootka, brutal as he could be.

“No, no—hit
on
me. He'd want to fuck.”

“And did you?”

“Oh, sure. You want to know what it was like? No? Well, it was . . . vigorous. Yes, that's it. It wasn't bad. Very vigorous and I had my pleasure, which I think he liked the idea of, although he acted like he didn't care if I got off or not.” She shook her head, not quite ruefully.

“But eventually you left Detroit,” I said. “You started producing records. How did you get into that?”

“It was a natural development form Janney's business. Not the printing business, which I sold, but he had independently produced jazz recordings before, in Holland and here. I knew something
about it, I was well acquainted with the jazz scene . . . it was natural. I've done well with it.” She was matter-of-fact, but you could see she was proud of the accomplishment.

“Where did you get this name, Hastily Improvised Productions?” I asked.

“It makes sense,” she explained. “I specialize in Free jazz, improvised music.”

“Does that sell? I mean, do you make a living at it?”

“It's all right,” she said. “I don't think you can get rich producing art in America, but if you work hard you can do all right. Anyway, I have plenty of money, enough for me anyway, and I can help out Agge, but she never needs help.” She said this with an edge of pride.

“She seems quite competent,” I agreed.

“Oh, she'll do well. She always has. She's one of those kids who just . . .” And I was treated to a long and happy exposition of the merits of Agge Allyson. I wondered if my mother had ever bored her friends with my triumphs.

11

Kiss Your Axe Good-bye

Grootka's Notebook, #5

We pulled outta Nigger Heaven about 11
P.M.
, a little over a week after Hoffa dropped outta sight. We was gonna drive up north, and it wasn't a good idea driving in daytime on the interstate, ‘cause somebody could of recognized Hoffa. So we took two cars, with Hoffa and Jacobsen and Lonzo in Lonzo's car, and me and Tyrone in my car. We stayed pretty close together, but not acting like we was together, and in a couple hours we were driving through Clare, which is a nice little town up where the woods begin. It's off the interstate, and from here we hadda drive about forty miles to find another back road.

[
Here Grootka provides a map, which is of questionable value and not worth reproducing. It is possible to pinpoint the exact location of the cabin, however, using the map and internal evidence of the notebooks
.—M.]

The way we set up the deal was, Carmine and the Fat Man [
Humphrey DiEbola.
—M.] would go to a motel in Cadillac that Hoffa knew about, that same night. When we were ready we would call the motel and tell them where to meet us. My plan was we would get into the hunting cabin, look the terrain over, and sometime
the next day we'd call and it would only take them about a half hour, maybe a little more, to come out and meet. But I sure as hell didn't want them showing up with a bunch of goons, and I didn't want ‘em coming before we was ready.

The cabin was all right, if you don't mind being out in the middle of a goddamn wilderness, which ain't my idea of paradise. It was down a dirt road, about a quarter of a mile from a county blacktop. It was completely in the trees, not on a lake or nothing, so there wasn't no neighbors. Cess Morgan must of been a complete pig, Sister Mary Herman would have straightened him out, but we got the place cleaned up. Anyways, it's down this road, which is almost roofed over with trees, which are these hardwoods, I don't know what kind, but a lot of leaves and it's cool, although later, when it got hot, there wasn't a lot of breeze around the cabin. But it never got too hot.

It's just a hunting cabin, pretty primitive. One room with a sink and a table and cupboards on one end. The sink has a hand pump, so you got running water, more or less, right in the house. Pretty modern for ol’ Cess and his hunting buddies, I guess. And he even built a bathroom on the back, instead of the old shitter, which was still over by the edge of the clearing. The toilet you gotta pour a bucket of water in the cistern to flush. But it works okay. Better than a outhouse, anyway. And there's a propane tank for the kitchen range, which is pretty nice, and a space heater that would run you out of there in below-zero temperatures. But it's a hunting cabin, so it has to have a little stone fireplace and, naturally, Mr. Jimmy Hoffa loves a fuckin’ fire, so we gotta make a fire because it's a little cool at night, and anyway, a fire is always nice. With a little Jim Beam, naturally.

Oh yeah. No electricity. No phone. He had these kerosene lamps with glass chimneys that I kinda liked. Kind of a nice light and it gives off a faint odor that ain't actually too bad.

This clearing is about, oh, the size of a couple of house lots in town, and then the woods start. The road makes a couple jinks, so you can't see very far down it. In the morning, me and Lonzo took a long walk around the woods. There wasn't much to see. It was just woods, pretty big trees. From driving around and all, it looked to me that this was the only house in about a square mile. There was a farmhouse further down, near a crossroads, but too far away to be any concern. The cabin sat in a state forest, there wasn't any logging going on, no farming, no ponds or lakes to attract summer folks. Only good for one thing, and that was for about two weeks in November when guys come up from Detroit to hunt deer. It was probably not even legally Cess's, was my guess. [
It belonged to a relative of Morgan's, who was apparently unaware that the cabin still stood and was in use for hunting.—
M.]

It looked pretty simple to me. I figured Carmine and the Fat Man would drive out with a stooge or two, to meet Jacobsen, who would be waiting at the end of the road. They would not know that I was even anywhere around. I would of sent Lonzo to meet them, but I thought him being a Negro it might attract attention from passersby, in case there was any, which you never know. Anyways, Jacobsen would hail them down when they come down the blacktop and get in the car with them to ride back on the dirt road. About halfway to the cabin, which is a furlong, if I remember my days at Hazel Park raceway—about halfway down the backstretch. You can't see the road or the house from there and I would have Lonzo's car parked across the road, so nobody could drive right up to the cabin.

Lonzo would be there, at the car. Carmine or the Fat Man could go up to the cabin on foot. Whichever. Lonzo and Jacobsen would let the guys know that the woods was full of Hoffa people, but they didn't want no trouble. Course, they don't know I'm even there. Tyrone I didn't want to get in no trouble, so I had him take
my car and drive to a little town, I think it's called Faraway, and make the call to the motel in Cadillac that would start the show. Then, if everything is on, he should make sure the tank is full of gas and drive back to let us know. I'd wait for him by the road. Then he should go on down the blacktop, not toward Cadillac, the other direction—toward Faraway, and then at noon (or whatever time we agree on) he should turn around and drive back. By that time Carmine and them should be there. If there was nobody at the cabin drive, that meant Carmine and them had already gone up and he should park in a place we found about a hundred feet down the road, but off where you wouldn't notice the car unless you was looking for it. From there he could watch the road to make sure there wasn't no surprise reinforcements coming along five minutes behind. If somebody did show, or it didn't look right for some reason, he should blow his horn—his car horn, not the soprano sax he brung along.

If he heard trouble—I mean shooting—I told him to wait right there by the car for fifteen minutes. Don't come in to look around. If I or somebody didn't come along by then to tell him it was all right, there wasn't anything he could do to help us. He should take off and just keep going.

“To where?” he asks me.

“To San Francisco,” I told him. “ ‘Cause if this don't go right, they're gonna be looking for Tyrone Addison for a long, long time. They won't quit.”

But I didn't expect nothing to go wrong, really. Carmine or the Fat Man would play it cool on this first visit. They'd want to get a good look at the situation. Then, the second trip would be the dangerous one. Which is why I told Hoffa to do his best to not blow his top, to keep his cool and just talk it out with them. I didn't want no second meeting.

“Talk
at
Carmine,” I told him, “but remember that you're talking
to
the Fat Man. He's the one you gotta convince.”

“I thought just one of them would come up to the cabin,” he says.

“That's what we say, but they'll say no, they both gotta talk to you, and Carmine ain't going up there by hisself. So we give in, but no hoods. Just them two. Anyways, maybe you should come down from the cabin, to greet them.”

“Won't that be dangerous?” he says. “I'm not scared, but what if—”

I knew he wasn't scared and I told him so, and it was damn dangerous. One a them hoods might have a fucking tommy gun or something and start chopping wood. But I didn't think so. Anyways, they didn't have no reason to be afraid of us, I figured, so they wouldn't be throwing too much muscle around when they didn't know the lay of the land. I thought it would be all right if he came down from the cabin, but stopped just where they could see him. That'd be a few hundred feet maybe, too far for a decent pistol shot, but close enough to yell hello and wave for them to come up. And wait for them.

That seemed okay to Hoffa. “I'll hold my hands up, waving,” he says, “but showing ‘em that I ain't armed. I'm welcoming them. And don't worry, I won't lose my temper. This is important for me, for my family, and for the union.”

“That's the stuff,” I said. But I was bullshitting. It didn't look good to me at all. I figured it would all go wrong, every fuckin’ step. Something stupid would happen and everybody would get killed. But, what the fuck, it looked like an interestin’ mornin’. Hell, maybe we'd get lucky and it'd go at least half-right, which is: they come, they look the place over, maybe even get far enough to see Jimmy waving hello, and then for some reason say they gotta come back.

I'm figuring on that, at least. They'll want to control the play, not let Jimmy set the table. There was a good chance that they
wouldn't even be at the motel, or only the Fat Man would be there. In other words, stall for time, try to figure out where this was all going down, see if they couldn't load the dice somehow.

If they wasn't at the motel, or didn't wanta drive out and meet, wanted Jimmy to come to them, or one of us, probably Lonzo, to come and set up a “more convenient” meeting—maybe one of them is sick, say—then Tyrone would tell ‘em politely he'd have to check and would call back later that afternoon. Then he should come back and we'd figure the next stage.

So we had a nice night. I had Lonzo checking around outside, on guard duty, then I took over. Tyrone and Jacobsen alternated taking a long walk around, but keeping out of sight, in case anybody came along. They were armed, but what was the point? Neither one a them had ever fired a gun in their lives, they admitted, but it might help if they at least showed a gun. I gave them each a .32 auto, little throw-down guns that I'd picked up here and there, over the years, which they could carry in their pockets without too much trouble.

But me and Lonzo were heeled. I offered him a .45 auto, but he comes up with a Llama 9 mm, which he likes. He's got some extra clips for it. Plus he brung a 12-gauge pump from home. Me, I've got the Old Cat plus a few other miscellaneous pieces. So I figure we're okay for a first meeting, anyway. I offered a piece to Hoffa, but he says, “No way. This is s'posta be a peace conference, not a war council.”

We was sitting around the fire, having a snort of bourbon, smoking a coupla stogies, and I axed him what he's gonna tell Carmine and the Fat Man. He's gonna have this all talked out by afternoon, he says. He's gonna stay clear of the details of any kind of deal they got with Fitz, but he wants them to know that he's got nothing against ‘em, they always been able to work together and he wants to go on working together, but he knows in his heart that Fitz
is not doing the union any good. The membership is disillusioned when they see the kind of shit Fitz pulls, and he don't blame nobody, but when the membership starts droppin’ everybody has got a problem, ‘cause pretty soon you ain't got no union. So they gotta work out their differences, but he thinks they'll see that it's worth their while to have a strong leadership back, and he'll go on TV and tell the fucking world that he's okay, no problem, nothing to do with the Mob, he just had to get away and try to figure out, for himself and for the union, what the future needed, and he decided that it needed him to be back running the Teamsters. Amen.

“Good luck,” I told him.

Later I went out with Tyrone and he brung along his soprano. We both played on it, in the woods, but it seemed a little eerie and I got thinking that maybe it would attract attention, so we quit. It was dark as hell in them woods, so we walked down the drive to the blacktop, where at least you could see the sky, which was crawling with stars, I never seen so many.

I'd been thinking about Tyrone, where he fit into all this. I told him that no matter what happened tomorrow he hadda get the hell outta this. He and Vera fucked up the minute they picked up Hoffa. I knew they had got some idea that somehow they was gonna make something out of this, some money, big money, which would help them get a record out or something. But that was bullshit. There was no way that getting involved could do anything but screw him and Vera. My advice, I said, was to just take off, once he done what I asked him to do.

“You mean just split?” he says. “But what about you, what if you and the guys need help, need a car?”

“We got a car,” I said. “The only reason I insisted on bringing two cars was for this. I told you the plan there, in front of everybody, but that was bullshit. You split. Once you come back and let
me know that the deal is running, you split. You ain't no use to us after that, anyways. If everything goes fine I'll ride back to the city with Jim and Lonzo and Janney. They'll be a little pissed at you taking off, but I'll explain to them what I'm telling you now, that I told you to go. Not only that, I gave you the money.”

“Hoffa's money?”

“Yeah. I took it out of his bag, a few days ago. There's two hundred thousand dollars. I left him with two grand, wrapped around some funny money that Books got for me. You take it.”

He argued, but he was just a kid. What could he say against me? Then I told him the toughest part. He hadda forget about Vera. I knew it was hard, I said, but it had to be.

“There's no way out of it,” I told him. “You guys fucked up. No matter what happens now, Tyrone Addison is dead. You seen too much and you don't have no power, nothing to protect you, nothing to offer. You can be dead dead, or you can be fake dead, but after tomorrow there ain't gonna be no Tyrone Addison no more, so you can forget about that part of your life.”

“What about you?” he says. “You blew that guy away, that Cooze.”

“I'm Grootka,” I said. “They don't fuck with Grootka. I'm more trouble than I'm worth. Plus, they think they know me. They figure they can deal with me. I'm in their world, part of their plans. You ain't. You're a jive-ass nigger bopper, no offense. You ain't nothing to them but danger. So at best, if everything goes down like good grits, you don't have no future. And Vera don't have no future with you.”

This was what he really couldn't take, and you can't blame him. But he must of known, they both must of known. If he cut loose from her they prob'ly wouldn't bother her. The Mob don't take chicks seriously. If she became a problem, sure, they'd zip her shut in a heartbeat. But if Tyrone fades and she steers clear, keeps
her mouth shut . . . they might survive. I explained it to him, over and over. He wouldn't buy it.