Man with an Axe (5 page)

And the tan, I thought. She was more the tan. The café au lait. Hard to equate that with black, somehow. “Sure. The black people, the African-Americans. He was respected. And liked. But Paradise Valley was just the beginning. He worked the city, the whole city. What we call the Street.” Don't tell her about the Kid. “The Street people liked him, generally, even the bad guys. He was tough, but he wasn't a brute. He didn't bullshit you.”

“He beat up that one guy,” she said.

“Who? Oh, the guy, when he first went on the Street?” I laughed. “That
was
bullshit. He never did anything like that, I'm pretty sure. He probably caught some guy shaking down a paperboy, gave him a rattle, and let him go with a warning and the notice.”

“Catch a nigger by the toe? If he hollers let him go?”

I suppressed a sigh. It wasn't like that, but how could you explain? “I wouldn't say that. Grootka wasn't one of those.”

“One of what?”

“He wasn't a racist.” Maybe I should tell her about the Kid. No. Well, you had to try. “Grootka was hard on everybody, white or black. Polish-American, African-American . . . ‘Americanus kentuckianus’ he called the hillbillies, with an emphasis on the ‘anus.’ But when I say he gave him a rattle, I don't mean . . .”

Well, what do I mean? Of
course
he gave him a rattle, and probably a knuckle or two. “It's just . . . to
me
, to another cop, he would say he decked the guy and gave out the notice—'Grootka's in town.’ He's maybe overdramatizing it, that's all. It's like that famous bank-robbery line. You know, ‘Die on a dark day.’”

Agge hadn't heard that one. I was surprised. Surely someone would have told her. It was the main Grootka story. Crap mostly, but there had to be something to it. I had to tell her.

“Grootka goes into a bank to cash his paycheck, something like that. It's crowded. Then he notices a guy in front of him has a very large leather briefcase, a satchel, and it's exactly like the one a guy in the next line has, and another guy in another line. This is too much coincidence for Grootka. He looks around, sees another suspicious character standing over by the counter where they have the extra forms, deposit slips, that kind of thing. This guy, he's eyeballing the whole scene closely and he also has the same kind of satchel, plus Grootka is almost certain he's armed. He checks out the rest of the room. It looks like four guys, that's
the whole gang. So he draws his own piece—he always carried this cannon, a huge .45 revolver—and jams it in the back of the guy in front of him.

“'Blink and you'll die on a dark day,’ he says. The guy on the right sees this and hauls around with his satchel. Grootka clubs him with the barrel of the gun. Grabs the guy in front of him around the neck, for a shield, waves the cannon out at the end of his arm at the guy at the deposit-slip counter, freezes him and the guy in the other line. Beautiful piece of work, really. He was famous for it. But I think the ‘dark day’ line was made up by a reporter, Doc Gaskill, who used to hang out at Lou Walker's Bar.”

No point in telling her that Grootka had shot the guy at the counter, blew him away in front of thirty or forty lunchtime patrons. Fortunately, the dead man had been found with a gun in his hand. But good Lord, shooting an armed man in that kind of a crowd. I'd screwed up the story anyway. Was it the guy in front of him he told not to blink? Or did he yell it? Or whisper it? Something like that. All bullshit anyway. Grootka never made up a line like that in his life. Gaskill more likely. But it could have been Grootka. He could surprise you.

“He could surprise you,” I said. She seemed impressed. I watched her carefully jot down the legendary line.

“What did he do during the riots?” she asked.

I thought she'd forgotten that line of questioning. “That was thirty years ago,” I said. “I don't remember.”

“Oh, you must remember something.”

I pondered. “Nothing comes to mind. It couldn't have been anything significant. I guess he just ran around like everybody else, trying to hang onto what was left of the city. I don't recall him ever talking about the riots.”

“What did you do?”

“I stayed home.” Pretty much. I went fishing.

“You weren't interested?”

“It wasn't historical, yet.” Shouldn't have tried that. Too flip. “Well . . . I mean . . . I wasn't interested in the situation that much. I lived outside of Detroit. About ten miles, or so. Still do, more or less. But it was very rural in those days. I didn't make much connection with the city. My dad worked for the city—he was the water commissioner—but I didn't really pay that much attention. I was enrolled at Michigan at the time, but it was summer vacation. I was probably thinking about school.”

This was annoying. Why was I babbling away like this? And what did she really want? I couldn't believe all this interest in Grootka. He was a guy who, in his lifetime, most people wanted to avoid. Now that he was long and safely dead, no one could really be interested in digging him up.

“So . . . is that it?” I said.

“It? About Grootka?” she said. “Why, no. Not at all.”

I subdued a sigh and tried to look easy. “Ask me anything,” I said, “I'm easy.”

She looked frustrated. “Well, what was he like?”

“Grootka was a hard man. Tough. Mean. Not very pleasant, most of the time. He was almost never a fun guy to be around. Difficult, annoying. He's never going to buy the drinks. He was bright, he was direct—so in that sense he was kind of an antidote to the timeservers, the smarmy, lying, back-stabbing, whining, conniving . . . well, the usual kind of stuff one runs into in public work. Organizational work. I'm not being a critic. I'm a bureaucrat, too, like my dad; our life, our civil life, depends on organization. Everybody claims to hate bureaucracies, but without them we couldn't function. There's good ones and bad ones. When you have a lot of people working together, as in any large corporate activity, you get a lot of friction, and therefore it is necessary for there to be a lot of oil if the organization is going to function. I understand this, but

I'm not sure Grootka did. Grootka was not an organization man. There was no oil in the man. He was more like gravel.”

She nodded. Some people, not just women, are not as attractive at first as they become later, once you've had a chance to look at them. Agge was immediately pretty, and the more you saw of her the prettier she got. In fact, you began to see that she was beautiful.

I wanted to think of a good story about Grootka, for Ms. Agge Allyson. I presumed that her search for a historical character—say Grootka, for the sake of argument—was based on the notion that the individual can function as a kind of lens through which we can view the period in question. The idea, as I understood it, is that a fellow human being enlists the interest of readers . . . after all, we are more interested in other people than we are in abstract ideas. But to be really effective in the telling of history, it seemed to me, the chosen person ought to somehow represent, or embody, some significant historical event or, perhaps, an idea or principle. Now, how did Grootka fit into this concept? Grootka was about as unusual, as unrepresentative as I could easily imagine any cop to be. How did writing about him say anything about the Detroit police force?

When I offered this question to Ms. History, she nodded almost enthusiastically throughout my lengthy explication and then said, with a flip of her hand, “Exactly! But, of course, it doesn't matter.”

“It doesn't matter? Then what the heck is the point? If it doesn't matter, then why bring it up? Why bother with Grootka?”

Her face suddenly lit up, glowing a pleasantly pinkish brown. “It doesn't matter that he isn't
especially
representative. Who is? On the other hand, just about anybody is, in some sense. The point is, Grootka's interesting, and he is, after all, a cop. Whether you think so or no, all cops are more like other cops than they are like . . . well, schoolteachers. The reader is interested in his amusing adventures, and in the meantime, I can tell the history of the force.”

“But,” I protested, “when you hold up before your reader the spectacle (or is it spectacles?) of Grootka, won't he or she be tempted to believe that this is a typical policeman?”

“To an extent, yes,” she conceded. “That's an inescapable consequence of writing about an individual as a member of a group. But if I do my job right the reader should see that Grootka is not every cop. Anyway, what is this Grootka? Some kind of monster? Everyone holds within herself an essentially human character, and as different as individuals might be, they aren't usually
so
different that they don't exemplify in some way the basic human experience.”

“The basic human experience,” I said. “What would that be?”

“Oh, you know . . . like nowadays anyone watching TV or reading the paper sees the word ‘Detroit,’ and they think: Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Well, we know that most cops don't have anything to do with that, but still . . . it happens on one's watch. Possibly, it has something to do with one's experience. So Kevorkian is relevant to any Detroit cop today, and vice versa. But that doesn't mean any cop is
deeply
relevant.”

I could only gaze at her.

“You're pursing your lips,” she said. “What is it?”

“The Germans have a word,
selbstmord,"
I said. “It means suicide, but somehow I've always felt that it said a little more. It seems to say ‘self murder.’ As if one went out looking for one's self and, finding it, then murdered it. A more complex and dramatic notion, perhaps, than passively inhaling a gas or taking a jar of soporific pills.”

“There you are,” Agge said, obviously pleased.

“I'm not thinking about Dr. Kevorkian, not
deeply,"
I said. “I'm thinking about Grootka. But when you mentioned Kevorkian it reminded me of Grootka using that word. I don't know where Grootka picked up any German, but he meant it in the sense I was
just mentioning. He said there was someone going around being him and he had to get rid of him.”

Agge looked at me as if she didn't believe me. “Somebody was going around pretending to be Grootka, so he had to track this guy down and . . .
kill
him?”

“No, no, not
pretending,"
I said. “Somebody was
being
him. I made the same mistake when he told me about it. It wasn't a case of someone impersonating him or resembling him, it was another
him.
So, of course, he had to kill this other Grootka.”

“Of course,” Agge said, with an uneasy laugh. “Why?”

“It seems obvious. If another you is walking around, who knows what he or she might do? And whatever this other self did, you would be, in some sense, responsible. You would have to kill this other you in defense of your primary self, so to speak. Eventually, I imagine, the other self might come looking for
you.
No, no.” I shook my head. “Two selves would never do. Can't be tolerated. The question is: How did Grootka come to think this?”

“What happened?”

“I'm not sure. It was several years ago, at a time when I was no longer working with Grootka. I don't think anyone was—he didn't like partners, found them difficult to work with, and the feeling was mutual. It was not long before he retired . . . which was a whole ‘nother set of problems, believe me.”

“Do you think he was cracking up?”

“It sounds like it, doesn't it? But thinking back, I don't know that I felt that way at the time. It seems to me that he was pretty functional, he seemed okay.”

She wanted to know, naturally, how this peculiar problem was resolved, but I couldn't satisfy her. As far as I could recall, it wasn't resolved. I didn't see much of Grootka at about this time and when I did more or less resume our previous relationship, the question
had disappeared. Presumably he had worked it out. History Lady wasn't satisfied with this. It seemed such an unusual situation, calling for extraordinary measures. Surely Grootka must have worked it out. You just don't suggest one bright morning, she pointed out, that an alternate self is loose on the planet and has to be eliminated and then, some unknown but evidently not lengthy period later, pretend that the situation had never occurred.

“Oh, I don't know,” I said. “I think that is what happens a lot of the time. Problems pop up then fade away. They seem remarkable on Monday, familiar on Tuesday, boring on Wednesday, and hard to remember on Thursday. Anyway, I wouldn't know how to find out what happened to this one.”

“Really? I thought you were a detective.”

I sighed openly. “I could look into it,” I said.

“Great. When could we meet again?”

I thought about that. It seemed like a pleasant enough prospect. At present I was not urgently locked into any investigation. In fact, I'd decided to take a few weeks, even months, and just work at the precinct, clearing up back cases, helping out. In short, instead of rushing about focusing on major investigations, as I'd been doing until recently, I had now envisioned a lengthy period of simply pulling duty. There was no reason not to incorporate this little historical project into my unpressing agenda. And, of course, the prospect of seeing this young lady was not oppressive.

I figured I'd have to locate the files on Grootka, such as they were. That might take some time. But, what the heck . . . “Why not tomorrow?” I suggested.

“Terrific. And while you're at it, maybe you can find out what Grootka did on the Hoffa case.”

“Hoffa? The Great Mystery. As you say, who didn't work on that one? Sure, why not?”

3

Come Out

“I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.”

—Daniel Hamm, from Steve Reich's “Come Out,” 1966

I
t puzzled me, all this interest in Grootka. The man had been dead for . . . well, how many years, now? For the first time I realized it had been a good while. Four years, anyway. He had never interested anybody so much when he was alive, at least, not since he had retired. Well, that was not true: a killer is always of interest. People want to know what he's like, if he's different from the rest of us because he has killed a man. As an occupational group, cops have a high rate of killers among us. Still, even among cops, the killer is unusual. I used to hear about so-called killer cops more, it seems. There was a guy, Steve Something, who was supposed to be a killer cop. He'd killed fourteen men, all legit. That's what I heard. But later, when I tried to verify this, nobody seemed to remember the guy. They'd “heard of” him, but they “never took it seriously.” And finally, I just couldn't track down this myth.

But I remember well, when I was in uniform, an older cop pointing out Grootka with definite awe in his voice. “See him?” the sergeant said. “That's Grootka. He's a killer.” And it was a little scary. It meant: One of your colleagues is a killer, he has killed another human being. And: You may be called upon to kill, like this man. Scary. Later, I found out that it was even scarier than I'd suspected.

I hadn't worked with Grootka long before he confided to me that he was, in fact, a multiple killer. Well, I knew he had killed at least one bank robber (some said two, but I never checked it out for some reason), but one early morning, after sitting over a drink in a blind pig, on our way back to the shop, he obliquely referred to having killed another man, a mafioso. The conversation at the blind pig was one of those supercynical cop macabre routines. The guy who ran the pig, Jimmy Singleton, told about seeing a movie where murder victims are substituted for wax images in a museum—an early 3-D thing, I think. That launched Grootka on a long ramble about bodies being encased in freshly poured concrete, dissected, ground into burger, dumped into sausage-making vats, immersed in acid baths . . . it went on and on. But later, as we were driving home, he observed, “Of course, the usual way is to bag ‘em up and dump ‘em in the trunk of an abandoned car. That's the way the Mob does it.” Then he snorted a crude approximation of a laugh and said, “It works. If the bastards only knew that was how I got rid of Raspa.” He wheezed with laughter.

Raspa was an old-time thug, Grootka told me—before my time. His death had never been reported. “I don't even know his real name,” Grootka said. “He was a real primitive, one of the guys from the old country, from Lucania—that's down in the south of Italy, somewhere. Hill country. I guess they're like hillbillies down there. Raspa could hardly speak any English. These guys, they came over here and they were like wild animals, they would do anything. Yanh, they were dago hillbillies, like these Paducah types we got. Peasants. You got a village up there, maybe five or six hundred people, half of them never been to the next village. They were hard men, full of superstition, real killers. Most of ‘em was bandits back there, but kind of like folk heroes, like Robin Hood or some fuckin’ thing, ‘cause they're against the landowners and the gentry. They believe in witches and elves, the evil eye, that kind of shit. You could never get in their heads.”

I enquired how it had happened. Grootka shrugged. “It was him or me. I hadda blast him.” He waved a hand cavalierly. It wasn't so much a confession as a kind of drunken boast. “These guys are—whatchacallit—disposable. They don't have no real family or nothing, no attachments, see. Nobody gives a rat's ass what happens to them, beyond a certain—you know—'Did he get the job done?’ If he didn't, if
he
got popped instead, then it's ‘Fuck ‘im.’ I threw his ass inna car trunk that got crushed and sold to Zug Island for smelting. I got the idea from them, from Umberto's old man, in fact. It's a good way to get rid of bad rubbish. Anyways, it saved the taxpayers a lot of grief and money . . . prob'ly saved a few taxpayer lives down the road, too.”

Grootka's own words, more or less. Who Umberto or his old man were, I had no idea, then.

I don't know if I believed him at the time. I think I must have been a little loaded myself. Anyway, I forgot it until the Galerd Franz case. This was a weird, complex case involving a rapist-murderer who reappeared after a long absence. I won't go into it except to note that Grootka had confided to me that he thought he'd killed Franz once already, twenty years earlier. Obviously, he was wrong, but I think Grootka genuinely relished the opportunity to kill Franz “again.”

Another significant aspect of this case was that Franz had accused Grootka of the rape-murder of a young girl, Mary Helen Gallagher. Several people have asked my opinion of this charge by Franz. I think a lot of them believed that Grootka was capable of the crime. To be sure, he was a violent man, no doubt a troubled man, and who knows what were the sexual complications of that mind. But I do not believe that he killed Mary Helen Gallagher. If Galerd Franz hadn't suggested it, no one would ever have thought it of Grootka, and Franz was a psychopath.

It makes a difference who you kill, I'm sure. It even makes a difference who you
say
you killed. I never gave it a thought, at the time, though I occasionally reflected on it, later, after Grootka died.

(He died in the act of saving my life, by the way, which is something that I won't pass on to Ms. Allyson.) But here is the chief significance of this rambling discourse: Grootka set a trap for Galerd Franz, and incidentally inveigled me into the investigation, by the technique of using an abandoned car as a crypt. So you can see, when I reflected on his earlier confession it had the ring of authenticity.

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 take things easy.