Man with an Axe (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It got to you, didn't it?”

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

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

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

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

The young man showed us a letter from his brother, Pablo “Pepe” Ortega. It was postmarked Detroit, in January. Pepe Ortega
brags to his family about how he has become the manager of Krispee Chips. He is making so much money, soon he will be a millionaire.

The brother tells us that Pepe went to Europe about four years ago. The family, which apparently is middle class, living in Mexico City, heard little from him, but he had written that he was learning to be a chef, in Paris. Then he was in Italy. Then they got this letter. They wouldn't have become worried, but then they got another letter, ostensibly from a concerned friend of Pepe's. The brother did not have the letter, alas. His mother had thrown it away. She thought it was obviously from some girl Pepe had gotten pregnant. It was mailed from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, but no address, no name. Just a message that Pepe's family should contact Mr. DiEbola about the whereabouts of their son. It was important, the letter said.

“Was this letter in English?” I asked.

Mr. Ortega, a very handsome, well-dressed man of thirty, indicated that it had been. When he'd learned of it, his mother—who could read and speak English
“un poco"
—had already destroyed it. She didn't take it seriously, but he wrote to Krispee Chips and received a letter from them. He showed me. It was from a Chris Oresti, designated as office manager. Ms. Oresti wrote that Mr. Ortega had resigned his position of production adviser at Krispee Chips in January, not long after his letter to his family. They had no idea where he had gone, but he was thought to have left Detroit.

This really was too good an opportunity to pass up. With Mr. Ortega and a taciturn detective named Field, I drove to Krispee Chips, which is located down an extraordinarily long block on an otherwise residential street that runs off the river.

Chris Oresti was new to me. She was an attractive and intelligent-looking woman in her late thirties, perhaps early forties. I appreciate people like her. They're bright, competent, and pleasant. Very understanding and quick to anticipate difficulties and head them off. She grasped our purpose quickly.

“Mr. Ortega was a valued employee,” she told me. “Mr. DiEbola thought very highly of him and was distressed when he learned that Mr. Ortega had quit and left, without any warning.” She said that Ortega had simply called one morning, instead of appearing for work, and said he was leaving town. He didn't say where he was going, but mentioned that he would contact them later about his pay.

“But he didn't contact you,” I said.

“No,” Ms. Oresti said. She went on to tell us that Ortega may have exaggerated his role at Krispee Chips. He was nominally carried as a production adviser, but that was more of a ceremonial title that Mr. DiEbola had created for him. He was apparently developing a new line of taco chips, without so many additives. He came and went as he pleased; in fact, you could hardly call his activities at the factory regular employment. Mostly, he worked at DiEbola's house. She thought that, in fact, he had been Mr. DiEbola's personal chef, but she wasn't sure. She wasn't privy to that kind of knowledge of Mr. DiEbola's private life.

Alas, Mr. DiEbola wasn't in. She wasn't even sure if he was in the country. She would certainly take our message asking him to call. She knew it was important.

That was disappointing. But it wasn't as if there wasn't plenty to do. Shootings, robberies, rapes . . . business was brisk. When Field and I got back to the precinct Detective Ayeh asked my advice about a case that was already three months old. If you didn't get something going within a week or two, a case tended to disappear, buried under the eternal blizzard of new offenses, new outrages. But this case interested me, as it had all of us at the time.