Man with an Axe (15 page)

“Get your head outta your ass,” Hoffa says. “If I go back and try to pretend like nothing happened it'll just happen all over again. Nothing is settled. I see now, what I gotta do is hash this out with Carmine and Tony Jack and the Fat Man. Then I can make my public appearance, but we'll have all this behind us and everything will be copacetic.”

I had an idea. “What's those two kids’ names, the ones who came to see you at the restaurant?” I picked up the phone and called Rackets and Conspiracy. “Andy? Hey, I'm looking for some guys, maybe you heard of ‘em, Angelo Rinaldi, something like that, and . . . Oh,” I says, giving Hoffa the full benefit of my show. “And who was with him? Nicholas Soteri? Mmmm. No, I don't think that's it. Hey, Andy, would I shit you? It ain't them. My guys wouldn't be takin’ no nap in the trunk of the same old Plymouth. Yah, yah, same to you.” I look at Hoffa. “Seems like Angelo and Nick decided to buddy up in the trunk of an ayban.”

“Ayban?” Hoffa was a little dense—maybe it was shock.

“Abandoned auto,” I says. “Carmine and the Fat Man are tidying up the mess. They got rid of the fools. Now all you got to do is come out like the sun and say everything is all right.”

“And end up in an ayban,” he says.

Well, I could see he wasn't gonna listen to sense. What he couldn't see was that if he was hell bent on hashing things out, the only hash was maybe gonna be his ass. But I could see he wasn't goin’ to no TV station without he talked to Carmine first. I had a bad feeling, Mul. It seemed like we was so close. I just felt like if he'd gone to the TV station like we planned at first, things could of worked out. But he wouldn't have it that way. So I said, Okay, I'd see if I couldn't set something up.

One thing I knew for sure, I couldn't be dealing with Carmine and Fats myself. I know you think I'm some kind of outlaw, Mul, but I ain't that dumb. Hell, I already had to deal with Cooze
and it didn't go too well. But it was something I had to deal with and I did it. A situation come up, Cooze went down. Two and two is four. But this was a whole ‘nother ball game. I couldn't be out front on this, no way.

It had to be Lonzo. He didn't like it, natch, but I showed him how it had to be. Hell, he was already in it up to his ears. It was his own fault. Lonzo swore up and down that it wasn't so, that he hadn't brought in the Mob, but he had the contacts, they knew him, he was the logical guy. No matter how it boiled down, the Mob'd blame the spade anyways. If things turned out okay for the Mob, he'd be cool. I explained that his best chance for it to turn out right was to be up front with them, play the simpleminded messenger boy.

The place Hoffa had in mind was up near Cadillac, about three hours’ drive. It belonged to a mug named Cess Morgan, who collected for the numbers for Big Sid, until he got sent up for busting some guy's nose who tried to screw him. You remember Big Sid, Mul. Sid is kind of on the outs with the Mob, lately, but I hear he is getting back in business. Well, anyway, this Cess is a hunter, or used to be. Right now he was in Jacktown for a couple of years. But Hoffa used to know him, ‘cause Cess drove a truck for a while and was in the union and he used to do some strong-arm stuff for the boys. Hoffa thought of him when I said he must know somebody who would do the job. Cess is on the shelf, but Hoffa knows where he hides the key to his cabin, and it sounds about perfect for the job.

Well, here I am, another book damn near all scribbled up. You know I was looking back over it and it don't read too bad. But I'm kinda sad about the way Tyrone looks here. I don't wanta give the wrong impression, Mul. Tyrone is a really good guy. He was under a lotta pressure and the situation at Lonzo's didn't bring out the best in him. You got to understand that a kid like Tyrone is a
artist. He lives for his art. He ain't like you and me and the rest of these birds. He'd do just about anything to see his music played and heard. But he's basically a good, kind kid, don't smoke, don't hardly drink except a beer now and then, and never did no dope that I could see, ‘though he must of experimented now and then, like a kid would do.

You could see what kind of kid he was from the way other people acted around him. Even older folks, like Jacobsen, and hard sunzabitches like Lonzo, they treated Tyrone with respect and love. I ain't shitting you, Mul. I wrote “love” there. And of course Vera, she was crazy about his ass. And it wasn't the sex, I don't think. It was the genius. In a lot of ways he was a kind of innocent kid, just sailing along through life with his eyes wide open but not looking at what you and me would see. He saw something else and it was pretty beautiful.

Well, enough of this shit. See you in book five. Ask Vera.

10

Jimmy Jam

“W
hy do you say Hoffa's in Brazil?” I asked Vera. “Do you mean he's still alive in Brazil?”

“I don't think he's alive,” Vera said. “That was more or less a joke.”

“A joke?”

“A Hoffa joke,” she said. “See, Hoffa was born in Brazil. That's Brazil, Indiana. He told me that. We were talking one day and he told me like it was a joke. ‘Maybe I should run away to Brazil,’ he said. ‘You know, like them bank robbers and embezzlers do. Only I already been there. In fact, I'm from Brazil.’”

She laughed, not an out-loud laugh, but kind of fondly. “He told me all about Brazil, what he could remember. The big joke was that the town doctor, this hick town G.P., had got it into his head that Jimmy's mom wasn't pregnant with him, she just had this tumor. You know how doctors are: they make a diagnosis and you can't get ‘em to change it, no matter what. And, of course, the Hoffas were very worried about it, about this tumor. You know, Is it malignant? Am I going to die? How long do I have, Doctor? She'd already had a couple of kids, so she wasn't some naive little teenager. But then, on Valentine's Day she goes into labor and little

Jimmy pops out! Nothing to it! I wonder what the doctor said when he saw the kid.” She laughed.

“Hoffa told you this? So you must have had some time to talk.”

“A lot of time,” she said. “Quiet afternoons at Turtle Lake. But Jimmy was funny about it. He said when he was a kid they used to call him ‘Tumor.’ I liked him, quite a bit.”

“So he's not in Brazil,” I said.

She looked at me and shook her head, as if despairing, thinking,
Cops.
“Jimmy used to call me Alma. It was a name that Tyrone had made up, when we first ran into him, a kind of alias. And Tyrone was supposed to be Taylor. Well, after a little while at the lake, that was blown, but Jimmy still called me Alma.”

“So where's Hoffa?” I asked, the implacable cop.

“I think Jimmy Hoffa is wherever we want him to be,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“I guess you're kind of literary, or you read a lot, anyway,” she said. “That's what Grootka told me, which is why I pulled that Dickens stunt, but have you read much of Graham Greene?”

I said I had. I liked Greene.

“Good. Maybe you can tell me what book it is where he's talking about how real live characters, people, who when they die they become like fiction. All right, I didn't say that right.” She thought for a minute, then started again, hunching forward on her Japanese couch thing, very intent.

“The person Greene used as an example was Winston Churchill, who was an actual person, right? But after he died he became like a fictional person, like . . . yeah, Don Quixote. That's the example Greene used. Now even I remember that Quixote is famous for not telling the difference between reality and fiction. Real people, if they are remembered at all after they die, become basically fictional, or at least, not a hell of a lot different from fictional characters.”

I nodded. “And . . . ?”

“Well, that's the way it is with Jimmy Hoffa,” she said. “He was a real live person, sure, but he soon became a fictional person that we all know, ‘Jimmy Hoffa.’” She held up her two hands, framing her head, and flexed her forefingers to indicate quotation marks. “TV comedians still tell jokes about Hoffa, twenty years later, but it's really ‘Jimmy Hoffa.’”

“So what's your point?” I asked, obstinately dense.

“The point is,” she sighed, “the real Jimmy Hoffa and ‘Jimmy Hoffa'"—she gestured again—"are one and the same now. Now that the real Jimmy Hoffa doesn't exist. He has no more validity than the fictional one.”

“What an interesting notion,” I said, dryly. “But I'm not interested in"—I made the gesture—'"Jimmy Hoffa.’ You knew the real Jimmy Hoffa. When did you see him last?”

She was surprisingly crisp: “It was on August 8, 1975, about eleven
P.M
. He got in a car with Janney Jacobsen and Lonzo and drove away.”

“What about Grootka? Where was he?”

“He and Tyrone left at the same time, in Grootka's car.”

“So they left you behind, at Lonzo Butterfield's house, at the resort?” She nodded. “Did you know where they were going when they left there?”

“Yeah, they were going up north somewhere. Cadillac, I think. I don't know the actual place.”

“What do you think happened up there? What have you been told?”

“I don't know what happened. That's the part Grootka would never tell me.”

“But what about your husband, Tyrone?”

“I never saw Tyrone again.”

I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. I'd been anticipating meeting Tyrone Addison. I hadn't given it much thought, because
it was not imminent, I felt. And anyway, it's not my way: I try not to anticipate too much. But now, what? I felt confused. My mind was suddenly flooded with a million questions, too many to bother with just one, but you have to start with a single step, as I'm sure Books would have told me.

“You never saw Tyrone again? What about the others? Jacobsen?”

Vera stood up and walked across the room. She was a lithe woman, graceful, in excellent physical shape. She cupped one elbow and gazed out the window. “I saw Grootka, several times. But not Janney,” she said.

“But . . . didn't you marry him? Aren't you Vera Jacobsen, his wife?”

“I was his wife. Now I am his widow, his relict. Makes me sound as if I still belong to him, doesn't it?” She made a huffing sound that might have been amusement. “If anything, he belongs to me. I have everything he ever had, his name, his money, plus his memory. . . . I'm all that remains of Janney, you might say. I married Janney long before I started living with Tyrone and became
his
true wife, but I never divorced Janney,” she said, turning to look at me. “I'm not sure if Grootka knew that, at least not at first. I guess from your expression that if he did know, he didn't tell you.”

“I'm just taking a wild guess here,” I said, “but from Agge Allyson's appearance, whether you were married to her father or not, she is Tyrone Addison's child.”

Vera had turned back to the window, peering down the block. “Still there,” she reported. Then she faced me again. “Would you like a cigarette? I smoke ten a day. It's time for number five, already. I may exceed my limit today.”

She took a cigarette from a pack on a nearby shelf. She lit it and blew out the smoke. She smiled. “Wrong again, bright boy. About Agge, that is. I wonder if Grootka really knew you very well. Agge isn't Ty's daughter. I had her a couple of years earlier. It was
what first caused the split between me and Janney. Agge's dad—and she knows this—is Albert Ayler.”

“You're kidding. Another genius.”

“Yeah. I liked fucking geniuses. Genii.”

She perched on the high bar stool and said, “Dead black genii.”

“So, Tyrone is dead.”

She clapped her hands in approval, but then the ashes from her cigarette fell and she busied herself putting it out and cleaning it up. Finally, she said, “Well, he's legally dead anyway, not having been heard from for twenty years.”

“And Jacobsen? Also dead, then?” When she nodded, I said, “Legally?”

“Yes. A lot of people disappeared in 1975, you know. It was getting like Chile around here. Did you know, one hundred and seventy-six thousand people disappeared in the U.S. that year? Went missing, as the Brits say—I like that phrase. Went missing. I looked it up, the statistic. Heck, thirteen hundred and forty-five disappeared in Michigan!”

“It sounds like a lot,” I said. “Did you really look it up?”

“No. I made that up. I wonder how close it is, though.”

“So,” I said, “Tyrone Addison, Janney Jacobsen—what was his real name, by the way?—and Jimmy Hoffa all disappeared from your view and, I guess, anybody else's, on August 8, 1975?”

“That's right. And many other thousands in the days since, I guess. But everybody's really only interested in Jimmy Hoffa, the famous butt of jokes. It was Janwillem, by the way. He was Dutch. I know Jacobsen isn't a Dutch name, but it was his. I met him in Amsterdam. He was a jazz fan, the way only Europeans are jazz fans. They
adore
jazz musicians. Well, I adored a few myself. Still do.”

A telephone rang, or buzzed, somewhere in back. Vera hopped off the stool and darted out of the room, quickly returning with a cordless, which she handed to me. “It's your buddy.”

Jimmy had made a quick check with the Ferndale cops. They knew of no reason anybody would be surveilling that house or street. If I wanted, they'd send a cruiser by to roust my nosy parkers. “You get that?” Jimmy exulted. “Nosy parkers. That's pretty good, eh? I told the Ferndale guy—Terry Moser, remember him, from Palmer Park?—that was the best one I'd heard in ages. You want them to come around? Oh, I checked with a couple other guys who might know about drug stuff, but that was just a flying chance. I ran the plates and the car is registered to . . . well, guess.”

I hate to guess. I sighed. “Humphrey DiEbola,” I said.

“Close,” Jimmy said. “It's a company car. Krispee Chips. Still doing business at the same old stand. Want me to send the Ferndale Fuzz around?”

“Yeah, send them by. Ask the guy to get I.D.s on both, if he can.”

“You okay? I could send Stanos. He's standing right here. It's on his way home.”

“Stanos lives in Ferndale? I thought you said everybody had to live in Detroit.”

“Nominally, anyway. No, he lives in Hamtramck. For some reason Hamtramck is deemed to be living in Detroit. Don't ask. He's always lived in Hamtramck. But it's not far to Ferndale.”

I thought about it. “I'm in no hurry,” I told Jimmy. “If they don't leave before me, I'll give him a call—what's the number?”

I hung up and went to the window. “This could be interesting,” I said. “Ferndale is sending a cruiser. While we wait . . .” I glanced over my shoulder, “Do you mind if I make an observation? You don't seem very cracked up about the vanishing of the two men in your life. What did Grootka tell you?”

She came and stood near me, looking over my shoulder. “It's been a long time. A lifetime. I made a life for myself.” Her voice was still and collected. The grief must have evaporated long since.

But then she added, “I can still work up a bitch, if you get me started.”

We watched the street quietly and her voice curled around my ear. I say that deliberately. It was almost palpable, although I couldn't feel her breath. A woman's voice in a still room on a quiet afternoon. I was very conscious of her standing just inches away.

“I came back to town. Tyrone and I had an apartment in the area below Highland Park, off Hamilton. Agge was at Janney's. She was normally there. He had a very nice woman who looked after her . . . well, you met her.”

“Kenty's grandmother?”

“Yes. Sena. I went to Janney's and stayed with Agge and Sena. I thought I'd stay there until the boys returned; it's a much nicer place than the other. But they never returned, and not a word from anyone, of course. I was furious. I told myself that whatever happened, I wasn't living with either of these men anymore. Not Tyrone, who was so obsessed with himself and his music that nothing else really mattered; and definitely not with Janney, who had used his money to keep me around as a link with his darling Tyrone, and an occasional piece of ass. No more.”

“You sound like you're still angry,” I observed.

“Only when I think about it,” she said. “Finally, Grootka came by. He'd been to the apartment first.”

I was about to ask what he'd said when the cruiser came slowly down the street. As it passed the driver glanced over at us. He pulled up next to the Continental, a few doors down. Both officers got out, moving cautiously around to either side. No doubt they had already been apprised of the fact that the car belonged to Krispee Chips: it was explicitly a Mobmobile. That means different things to different cops. But it always means caution.

I stepped back to let Vera get a better view. She was intent. The cop on the driver's side approached carefully, his hand on his gun, as if casually resting it there. He leaned over from the rear seat
position and said something. The window came down and they talked. Then the cop stepped back as the driver got out. On the other side a similar scene was enacted. Two young men in casual wear stood on either side of the car. They were white, about twenty or twenty-five, seemingly unresisting, even cheerful. They showed their wallets to the officers. They got back in the car. The cruiser backed up to allow them to pull out, then followed them down the block and beyond our vision.

“Where are they going?” Vera asked me.

“Nowhere,” I said. “The cops just ran them off. I expect to hear from the cops shortly.”

In fact, the cruiser came back down the street within minutes and pulled up in front. The driver got out and came to the door. I greeted him and invited him in. “This is Mrs. Jacobsen,” I said to introduce them. He was a nice-looking fellow, white, about six feet tall with that little reddish moustache that so many cops seem to like.

“They're a couple of wise guys,” he told us, “right out of the movies. Names on the licenses are . . .” He looked at his notebook. “Michael Arthur Simi and Alessandro Gee-ah-cammo Abb—Abba-bob . . . what do you make of that?” He showed me the name.

“Abbaglione? Something like that. Both from Detroit, hunh? Same address? That's—”

“Krispee Chips,” he finished for me. “Must be a finishing school, eh? They have a dormitory, nice gym facilities, I hear . . . swimming pool. Of course, these young men were surprised to learn that they were making the housewives nervous. Sorry ma'am.” He nodded to Vera. “I had to tell them something. But I didn't say where the complaint came from.”

“Did they ask?” I asked.

“No. No they didn't. They said they were just having a talk and they had parked in a quiet place. Didn't mean to disturb the peace. They were leaving.”

“They Americans?” I asked.

“Well sir, they got Michigan driver's licenses, but they don't talk American. European, I'd say. Speak good English, though. Bit of an accent, but not bad.”

I thanked him and sent him on his way. He said they'd keep a rolling surveillance on the house and street, to see if the Continental returned, but I could see that his heart wasn't in it, and I didn't think it called for any encouragement. Wouldn't hurt, though, if they cruised by now and again.