Man with an Axe (18 page)

“Was he chewing gum?” she asked.

I had noticed his jaws moving around, but I hadn't imagined that he was chewing gum.

“When he chews that Cloves gum he sho’ been in the strongbox,” she said.

On the way out I bumped into the young doctor again. “Would you say Mr. Butterfield's actually in pretty fair health?” I asked.

“That man's got about twenty serious problems,” the doctor said, “but he's got a very strong constitution. When you consider the abuse he's heaped on that body . . . whew! He's been here for a couple years, off and on. This time he might be here for good. He came here from Detroit General, after he recovered from a little stroke. But he'll be around for a while, I imagine.”

“Does he always talk like that?” I asked.

“Like what? Hard to understand? Well, he had some oral problems a few years ago, but they're pretty much healed up. If you found him incoherent it's probably because he's drunk.” He smiled gently. “At this stage, we don't say much about drinking, as long as it doesn't cause problems for others. It gives him a little purpose, a game, hiding it from the nurse, fighting for the right to drink at least secretly . . . and it cuts down on the narcotics we have to supply.”

“Is he ever sober? Coherent?”

“Once in a while, if there's some purpose to it. Are you from the insurance company, too?”

“Who me? No.” I showed him my identification. “I'm trying to close up an old case in which Butterfield can maybe give me some leads. Has somebody else been asking about him?”

It was the small man, as the nurse had described.

I
was now fairly anxious about Books Meldrim. I had no idea what Buchanan was up to, but obviously he hadn't been investigating Lonzo Butterfield on genuine police business, not that
he had ever been a detective, anyway. But for many years I had known that he had strong ties to Carmine Busoni, though it wasn't anything that I or anyone else could prove to his discredit. For him to be making these kinds of practically open inquiries, however, he must be under some pressure. It seemed to me that the Mob was showing way too much interest.

I
drove back into the city on Woodward Avenue, past all the miserable degradation of that street. It looked like hell. This was Detroit's Main Street, the proud avenue that old Judge Woodward had laid out almost two whole centuries ago, ridiculously wide, and which he had insisted was not so much named after himself but was the road to the woods, to the great forest of the north and hence, wood-ward. Now it was a wretched cavalcade of broken windows, hideous graffiti, trashed stores, and abandoned buildings. But when in my memory, I asked myself, had it actually been pretty? I mean between McNichols and the G.M. Center? It had only been at best a discouraging sweep of ugly stores and dull brick buildings, with occasional bursts of attractiveness, a park, a school.

It wasn't unfamiliar Detroit scenery. In this town you can bet that industrial and commercial interests are always uppermost. There might be occasional, sporadic eruptions of civic pride and cultural values that are familiar to other cities, many of them much younger than old Detroit. But Detroit says, Outta the way! We're busy here! Go play with your trees and cathedrals and museums and landscapes somewhere else. We got work to do and when we're through with this job, you can trash it and we'll build something else.

But now, strangely, as I cut across on neighborhood streets, avoiding the freeways, my thoughts of Vera and Lonzo were interrupted by the realization that Detroit was actually looking a little better these days. Many neighborhoods had been devastated, but
many of them, perhaps most, had been landscaped as a consequence. A brutal landscaping, to be sure, since it was perfunctory and carried out in response to fire and to prevent further conflagrations, but still, it had opened up the city. Maybe this was a normal, natural thing for cities, something that should have happened less violently, but was inevitable.

As I drove, I thought of ail the things that I'd forgotten to ask Vera. Like, why
she
had sought to entice me into this case, if her daughter was in more or less daily contact with me? Somehow, I'd left her daughter out of this, forgotten her, or perhaps it had been some unconscious desire to not involve her. But now that I was thinking about it, I began to wonder just what was the grant that Agge had garnered to research her project. I'd been assuming that it wasn't a total scam, I realized. But who was behind it?

And another question that I needed to pursue was the degree of Books Meldrim's involvement. From what I'd read so far, it wasn't clear that he'd been more than peripherally aware that something was going on at Lonzo's, at Turtle Lake. Did he know more? Did he know the whole story? And what had been his position in the aftermath, in the years since? I was certain that he wasn't telling me everything, but how much was he holding back? I had to get hold of him, soon.

I was driving through some old, partially bulldozed neighborhoods, in the Grand Boulevard-Mount Elliott vicinity, not far from the old Packard plant, which was still functioning as some sort of warehouse complex, when I saw a billboard that advertised housing units in a newly constructed, or reconstructed, residential project. It was jointly sponsored by some citizen's group, it seemed, and a Detroit bank. The offices were not far. I parked the Checker and went into the storefront offices.

I was asking the pleasant fat woman at the front desk about the available units when a lean and Mephistophelian figure issued from a back office, a man of his youthful forties, with tremendous

Italian optics, a beautiful silk suit, and splendidly handsome black shoes. He started to pass me by, but stopped and said, “Say . . . my
man
! Mul! What in the dim-dam-diddly brings you in here? You arrestin’ the sister, here? She didn't do it! Hah, hah!”

He held up his hand, a long, slender palm and extralong fingers, so I could slap it.

“Gregory!” I slapped the hand. “What are you doing here?” We both asked it. He was here because he was the man who had gotten the bank behind this rebuilding project. He was interested in my need for a place to live.

“In a project like this, they always like to have a cop,” he said. “But I don't know . . . Fang of the Ninth. It might be too much. But yeah, come on, I'll show you what we got.”

We hopped into his Chrysler to take a tour. Gregory and I went back to a year or two I had spent at Wayne State, right after I got out of the air force. I thought we had taken biology and German together, but he thought it was political science, with his mentor, Dr. Ravitz. “And that creative-writing course, with the poet, what's his name?” Gregory snapped his fingers as we sped into a newly graded and sodded block. “Levine! Levin. Something like that. ‘They feed they lions.’”

I had no idea what he was talking about. He talked very fast. It was generally nice to be around Gregory because his mind and his mouth ran so fast that he did all the thinking and talking for both of you. All you had to do was smile and nod and occasionally interject a name, or a number, or point out a direction.

He drove toward downtown and showed me a block in which there were seven large old brick houses, all of them either totally remodeled, or nearly so, to provide apartments for four families in each.

“The brilliant new cultural center"—Gregory used phrases like that, which obviously came from a written description—"is only six blocks that way.” He pointed from the front yard of one of the
brick multiplexes, across the boulevard. You could see the gleaming dome of a new building in the distance. “Lot of new building in town,” he said.

It was true. There was a lot going on. He finally found me a place, a four-room apartment on the top floor of a three-story renovated building, with a back porch that gave a view of Canada to the south. It was pretty cheap, too. Gregory was sure he could get me in. I was very pleased and excited, almost enough to forget what had just been occupying my mind. I had visions of moving in within a few days. The apartment was all done, even to the painting.

“You can walk to the Opera House,” he said. He snapped his fingers suddenly, reminded of something. “I saw you! You were walking with some chick, just a few days ago. Young sister.” His eyebrow waved approvingly.

“Oh yeah,” I said. I hadn't seen him, but he must have been at the M'Zee Kinanda concert.

“I thought you were a moldy fig,” he said, accusingly.

“A moldy fig?” I had to laugh. I hadn't heard the phrase in years; it used to mean a retro jazz fan, in the bop era. “You mean like Tommy Dorsey and that stuff?” I said, climbing back into his huge car. “Well, it's all right. But I'm into much wilder stuff these days. I even dig Sun Ra.”

He laughed. “Well, M'Zee is pretty heavy shit—too free for me. It's like Charles Gayle and all that stuff, everybody blowin’ like mad—I keep expecting to see their teeth come flying out the bell of the horn. I like to hear some chords. But I'm glad to see you pickin’ up on some thin’ like that. You know what I mean?”

I did know what he meant. It was a curious thing, I felt, to have discovered this whole vein of music, a world of music, you might say that was so obviously outside the mainstream, but still was so alive and fresh and had an entire audience of enthusiasts that I had not dreamed existed. I managed to get a few words of this
notion out before Gregory whipped it away to play with it like a stolen basketball, spinning it on his fingertips and flipping it over his back and through his legs.

“I know! I know, man! It's so damn hip! I mean, here all these cats"—he waved his hand across his huge windshield, indicating a mass audience of the unhip—"who don't even know it exists! It's like here is this cat over here, all he digs is Mahalia Jackson and the Original Raspberry Boys of Alabama. Then you got this babe, she digs . . . I don't know, Dusty Fucking Springfield. This cat over here, he won't listen to nothing but Poop Doggy Do, and this chick has only got ears for Miles. That's all right! It's great! But the industry, see . . . the industry hates this shit! It's too many goddamn different kinds of fucking music, you understand, my man? What they want is maybe three kinds. Three!”

He brandished three fingers as he wheeled the big Chrysler off the freeway. “The industry wants to make seventy million CDs of Michael Jackson and fuck the rest! So they pretend that they ain't nobody else out there. Oh, they throw in Wynton Marsalis for the fogies and some redneck country-and-western shit for the crackers. They blow the rest of them away with overwhelming advertising for Michael. But you know what?” His voice fell to a dramatic whisper. “Nobody gives a shit. They go on supporting their favorites. They buy the records, the CDs, go to the concerts. It's cool. It fucks the Man! Which is what we got to do. Always.” He looked at me over his photosensitive Italian spectacles. “Begging your pardon, Mul baby.”

“I'm not the Man,” I said.

“Naw,” he laughed in agreement. “You too fucking poor. But you know what, I'm glad you're into this Free Jazz. It's the wildest, most innovative stuff going, and you just know that fifteen, twenty years from now—hell, it's going on right now!—the whole music world is going to be built on what M'Zee and Albert and Horace
are doing right now. Well, not Albert, he's dead, but Horace and M'Zee. And to think that M'Zee is a homeboy!”

“He is?” I was startled. Then I saw. It was so obvious that I wondered for a moment if I hadn't known all along. A case of willful blindness—a state not altogether unknown to me.

“Hell yes,” Gregory said. “We went to school together. You knew him. He was in that German class, with Barry and Donna and Ruth and all them cats.”

“Are we thinking of the same guy?” I was having doubts now.

“Hell yeah! Tyrone. Tyrone Addison. He sat right up front. He put the moves on Ruth, the Jewish bombshell! You remember!”

“Tyrone? Tyrone who went out with Ruth?” I remembered him clearly. I realized that I had never really known his last name. A skinny, mysterious-looking guy. I'd thought he was on dope. “I didn't even know he was a musician,” I said.

“Man, where you been, Mul? The cat was gigging on Dexter Avenue while we were in school! He played with Miles and Woody Shaw! Fool!”

“And that's M'Zee Kinanda?”

“Hell yes!”

“What did he . . . become a Muslim, or something?”

“Aw man, he ran away from some white chick. He was always prowling on them white babes. Blondes with big tits. He didn't chase them, they chased him. He had to beat them back! Then one of them, a married bitch, married to some rich dude, she flipped and ran away from her old man, some kind of foreign dude, maybe he was a Syrian or an Ay-rab, who knows ? Lotsa money involved, see? So her old man comes after Tyrone with a sword, is the way I heard it. Anyways, Tyrone, he splits for L.A., changes his name to M'Zee K. Best thing that ever happened to him. He wasn't going nowhere here. But he got into that bag out there, the John Carter and Horace Tapscott scene. They dug him, helped him out. Best thing that ever happened.”

“But everybody knows he is really Tyrone?”

Gregory looked at me and laughed. “Course, they do! How come you didn't know? Oh,” he said, amused. “Yeah, well, it's like everybody knows, but it ain't something that people talk about to the Man, you understand. It's
known,
but don't go ‘round quackin’ about it. And the press, they don't know, of course—they never know shit. So it ain't like it's gonna show up on the record jacket, you dig.”

“It's an ‘in’ thing,” I said.

Gregory shrugged. “Here we are. This your car? Man, you are poor. Maybe you ain't the Man. I ain't so sure, now, they gonna let you into that fancy new pad.”

I
found Agge Allyson at the archives. “I was just talking to your mom,” I said. She was sitting on a low stool, poking through a cardboard box of files, covered with dust. She looked pretty beautiful. She sat back for a moment and looked at me, then shrugged.

“So?” She went back to the box.

“So how come you fill me full of crap with all that stuff about a grant and writing a history of the department?” I squatted down next to her.