Man with an Axe (9 page)

“Well, you know, I don't. I'm not even sure there is anything. But, damn, there oughta be! The cat was a stone genius. I'm not taking Grootka's word for it, though he knew a thing or two about the music. Tyrone was supposed to be pretty hot stuff back in the seventies—hell of a player. He played with Ornette and Charlie Haden, Marcus Belgrave—all them cats. I remember Yusef—you know Yusef? Lateef? Yeah. The man is heavy. Yusef told me once Tyrone could
burn
on the bari, like he reinvented the horn, man. And he could write. Very heavy stuff, but basic. It made you think. But . . . I don't know what happened to him.”

“Drugs, you think?”

“Well, when you're talking about these fellows, it does come to mind. But I don't recall that Tyrone ever was into drugs. Course, that don't mean a damn thing.”

I had to agree. Junkies were notorious for concealing their habit. “What kind of stuff did he write?” I asked. “You saw him play?”

“Oh, hell yes. He worked quite a bit around town. He'd be playing hard bop, mostly, with Joe Henderson and Marcus. I saw him in a really hot group with Woody Shaw and Louis Hayes.” He shook his head, marveling. He was looking through his record and compact disc collection. “Ah, here's something. You might like this.”

It was a CD entitled A
Parvus Fanfare,
by one M'Zee Kinanda. The cover featured a remarkable photograph of a small country church with a few barefooted black children perched on the steps, smiling. Church was not meeting, evidently.

There were fifty-nine minutes of blues-tinged music on the disc, mostly featuring soprano sax and some remarkable drumming. I can't say that the music really grabbed me, although it was interesting. It swung, but only sporadically. Most of the time it was very serious music. Myself, I'll take Ellington any day.

Books insisted I take the disc along. He wasn't interested in it, he said. And he gave me a tape, also by Kinanda. “A little something to listen to on the drive home,” Books said.

Before I left I remembered to ask Books if he'd ever heard Grootka talk about suicide, or about another self on the loose.

“Haw! That's a good one,” Books said, grinning. “He actually told you that? Well.” He shrugged, his face becoming thoughtful. “Grootka could surprise you. If he did have some notions about that, a good person to see would be that conjure man Lonzo Butterfield.”

“I thought you said he was a bail bondsman.”

“Yeah. Conjure man, too. From New Orleans, you know. Look him up. He'd be interesting to talk to.”

One thing about unpleasant weather: it's no fun to drive in. But I took it easy on the way back to Detroit and mulled over the things I'd been hearing. The Hoffa disappearance really was remarkable, more remarkable than I'd ever considered. The thing that stood out the most for me was the way everybody blithely concluded that

James Riddle Hoffa, deposed union leader and well-known crony of infamous mobsters, had been murdered and disposed of by those same old pals of his. I didn't find this so easy to accept. If Hoffa was so buddy-buddy with the Mob, why would they knock him? The Mob doesn't hit people for fun. There has to be a reason, especially when the target is a very visible guy who has a long-standing reputation as a friend of the Mob.

I had long contended that the Mob, considered as a corporate entity, was not one of the better-run organizations. It has a reputation for ruthlessness and constancy, not to say implacability—characteristics of successful corporations (Ford Motor Company comes to mind). The fact was, the nature of much of their business meant that a high degree of personal trust and loyalty, of reliability, was essential. The Mob had often fallen back upon actual blood relationships to ensure this crucial loyalty, even when it meant accepting perhaps a lower standard of performance. In the modern hard-driving and technical world, that factor was often a serious drawback. Still, I figured no mobster could be so stupid, so indifferent to general syndicate approval, as to hit Jimmy Hoffa out of anger or annoyance or even bad judgment. Except maybe Carmine, I thought. But even Carmine wasn't that dumb, and besides he always had Humphrey DiEbola, the Fat Man, to counsel and restrain him. No, I figured there had to be some as yet unknown reason
. . . if, indeed, the Mob had done the number.

What the hell, Hoffa was a pretty rough and reckless guy. He'd stepped on a lot of toes, shot off his mouth an awful lot, had surely ruined a few lives on his road to fame and fortune. There ought to be no shortage of candidates without Mob associations who would want him dead and be willing to do the job themselves. I would sure like to see the F.B.I, file. I wondered if Pedge could help.

And, of course, I was most interested in looking through Grootka's old notebooks, to see what his findings, if any, had been.

I stopped at the precinct, although it was nearly midnight. To my surprise, Maki was still there. He was an old hand; it wasn't like him to linger after his shift. But he said he'd been waiting for a guy to come in and see him, and then he'd gotten sidetracked by some old files.

“You know,” I said, “I've been thinking a lot about Hoffa. He must have made a few enemies, wouldn't you say?”

Maki snorted derisively. “A few? You'da thought the guy was drafting an army of assassins.”

“That's what I was thinking. Take that guy, for instance, the one he stomped at the local . . . the laborer.”

Maki shook his head. “Well, that's one he didn't have to worry about. That was Sam Peeks.”

The name was familiar to me but I couldn't place it. Maki filled me in.

“About a week after his run-in with Hoffa, Sam took his act to his own local. He got maybe a hundred guys to picket their own leaders for not supporting them, not negotiating in good faith. So the president over there, what's his name . . . McKenzie—he's dead now—invites Sam up to the office to discuss his grievances . . .
alone.
” Maki frowned, remembering. “I heard there was over thirty shots fired inside that office. Somehow, all but five of them found their way into Sam Peeks.”

The M'Zee Kinanda tape was pretty good, an improvement over the CD. He had a better bass player, I think, and the horns weren't so determinedly atonal and abrasive. Even haunting, at times.

5

Evening Blues

I
t really is a damn shame to set yourself up for something when a little thought would have armed you against almost certain disappointment. It's common as hell, for instance, for a grown man to get the blues because “his team” has failed. I'm talking about professional sports. How is it, I ask myself from time to time, that a guy can invest so much emotionally in a group of hired men who purport to represent the community, although everyone knows they aren't
from
Detroit? You would have to be more naive than any Detroit child to believe that the average professional player really cares about Detroit. The pro is from somewhere else, has no significant amount of his history invested in Detroit, and is probably hoping to get traded to New York or Los Angeles, where he can get the media attention he “deserves” and make some real money.

And yet, there are these entities called the Detroit
Tigers, Lions, Pistons,
and
Red Wings
that readily earn the devotion of Detroiters (mostly boys and men) for their entire lives. Guys here still talk about Bobby Layne and Gordie Howe, although few are around who were adults when they saw them play. Even profound obscurities like Johnny Lipon and Eddie Brinkman are still mentioned daily. And when the Tigers are doing well, why, the whole
city seems to perk up. But when they're awful, as they often are, the city has got the blues.

Why is this? How can it be? Is it just that most of us have such an unassuageable hunger for community that even a squad of avowed mercenary athletes, all dressed up in the same costume and proclaiming that they are the Detroit team, suffices to bind us into a semblance of unity? Is it because we followed the fortunes of the team on radio and television and in the papers from our youth on, so that even when the names of the individual heroes change the corporate image remains and that image is cloaked in our childhood dreams and heartbreaks and longings, to the extent that at the age of forty, or fifty, or even ninety, we pick up a newspaper and automatically look to see how the Tigers, or the Red Wings, are doing?

How can this be? I don't know. But every cop in Detroit knows that when one of the teams loses a game that they were expected to win, an “important” game—well, look out! More assaults, more robberies, more everything.

The current wrench was the shocking turn in the fortunes of the Red Wings, the Detroit hockey club. Here was a club enjoying one of the greatest seasons in the history of professional ice hockey, yet they were losing the playoffs to a miserable overaged team, the Saint Louis Blues. I was surprised by how sick this made me. I was even having dreams about the Red Wings! And I knew that it wasn't doing the spirit of Detroit in general any good.

You don't have to live in Detroit, either, to feel this pain. You only have to have lived there as a child—or nearby, as I had, and again did, in Saint Clair Flats. It's a rural place, still: the house is an old farmhouse and there's a barn and a few other outbuildings, and the ten acres or so still border the Saint Clair River. I came across old Red Wings’ memorabilia in the attic that night, while I was looking for Grootka's stuff.

Ma had met Grootka once. She had invited him to dinner while talking to him on the phone; to my surprise, he'd accepted. I think she wanted to know who my friends were. The occasion was not particularly memorable, except that afterward my mother had observed that Grootka was “formidable.” When I asked what she meant, she related an incident that had occurred as they were sitting in the backyard, sipping cocktails, while I ran to the store for some herb or spice (probably a put-up job, now that I think of it: Ma probably wanted to grill Grootka about my love life). At one point, she said, a meadowlark had perched on a fencepost nearby and begun its vociferous song. Grootka swiveled his head and looked at the bird, which faltered in midphrase and fell silent.

“I don't believe your friend is a bad man,” Ma had said, “but he
silenced
a songbird with a glance!” Other than that, she'd gone on, “He seemed a perfect gentleman.”

By the time I got home from Books's the house was dark and Ma was gone again, and when I trekked up to the attic I couldn't find Grootka's stuff. There was quite a bit of old stuff up there, neatly stored and not too dusty. I had to wonder when Ma ever got a chance to dust. But there was no sign of the cardboard boxes in which I'd packed away Grootka's notebooks and music.

I fell asleep listening to M'Zee Kinanda and, I must say, I was beginning to like it. In fact, I began to see what all the fuss was about. While I wasn't looking, jazz had moved on. Oh, I don't mean the hyped jazz, the youthful superstars that seem to pop up on television shows. But the music had changed. It had become more daring harmonically and rhythmically, and from what I could hear, the men and women who played it were tremendous technical players. This was nothing new, of course, but there was a suggestion of virtuosity, which made me a little uneasy. Virtuoso music is thrilling at times, as when an Art Tatum appears, although it has a tendency to become boring, too. The nice thing about this music is that an
element of antic goofiness is present, as well. I'm thinking of the Sun Ra shtick: the man from the future, from Saturn, as he called himself—although it was pretty well known that he was originally Herman Sunny Blount from Birmingham, Alabama.

One of the things I especially liked about the music was that, while unabashedly modern, advanced if you will, it didn't turn its back on earlier jazz. It clearly was based on an admiration for what had gone before, in a way that bop hadn't seemed to manage. That is, the boppers seemed contemptuous of their predecessors, although as Books had suggested, perhaps that was more hype than reality. Anyway, this music did not make me feel that I didn't want to listen to Ellington anymore; indeed, its echoes of Parker and Monk and Powell, as well as Ellington and Basie, made me want to get out some of my old records.

But what endeared the music to me was its ingenuousness. It didn't try to be liked. And it didn't take itself too seriously. It was full of self-referential humor, I felt. From childhood I had been very wary of my own tendency to play to others’ liking for me. It was not an attractive trait. I had to learn, in a way, not to be loved—no easy task when you're the only child of overaged parents. This music was intelligent and splendidly performed, but it got that way without trying to be loved, which is my point.

My first thought in the morning was: Where can I buy more of M'Zee? I thought of a jazz shop on Mack. I thought of this while I wondered what had happened to Grootka's notebooks. My mother, as I now realized (this was thought number four, while drinking the last of the microwaved coffee) was in Siberia. Yes, actually in Siberia, in cruel April, to observe the arrival of some rare cranes to the great marshes. I hoped she had remembered her boots; no doubt she had. She wouldn't be back for at least a week, perhaps longer.

Siberia, of course, was the birthplace of one of the Red Wings’ new stars, Vladimir Konstantinov, alias “the Gladiator.” I'd dreamed
about him last night, along with the rest of the Russian Line, skating furiously through a kind of Sun Ra Ice Show Extravaganza.

All of these things were swirling in my mind when I saw in the
Metro Times
(the
Free Press
and the
News
were on strike, still) that M'Zee Kinanda was performing in concert tonight, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Ordinarily, this would simply be viewed as a serendipitous occasion: an opportunity to go see the man himself and hear his interesting music up close. But I also had tickets to the seventh game of the Red Wings-Blues playoff, at the Joe Louis Arena. Even for a cop, these tickets were hard to come by.

The million-dollar question: Since the Wings were in some kind of weird spiral of self-destruction (probably a consequence of relying so heavily on a brilliant front line of ex-Soviet stars—Fedorov, Konstantinov, Fetisov, Larionov, and Kozlov [talk about alien mercenaries!], who were subject to spasms of Slav fatalism, apparently), ought a fan to desert them in this perilous hour and go to the M'Zee Kinanda concert? Or was it not true that since one's presence at the other games had not helped, that one's absence at this game might be a decisive factor that would make victory possible?

I decided to abandon my Red Wings tickets. It was a bold move, one that only a true fan could understand and appreciate. I invited Agge Allyson to accompany me to the M'Zee Kinanda concert and she accepted. This made the sacrifice of the Red Wings tickets easier to bear, as did the eager purchase of the tickets by Maki, for little more than I'd paid for them.

But I emphasize that this was no minor gesture. Much against my will I had found this team occupying my thoughts. Particularly the Russian Line. I had a notion that the Line was constituted of at least two distinct and well-known Russian types: the aristocratic, intellectual, poetic, or even mystical type, as exemplified by the brilliant and dashing Sergei Federov, Slava Kozlov, and Igor Larionov, and the pragmatic, indomitable, tough, salt-of-the-earth-peasant,
tank-commander types embodied in Konstantinov and, especially, the thuggish-looking Vyacheslav Fetisov.

Of course, I hasten to say, these are mere simplifications: I'm sure none of these men were in fact mere exemplars of such a reductive dichotomy. That is, in real life they are certainly more complex, complete personalities. But these categories are sometimes useful. There
was
something dreamy and creative, romantic even, about Fedorov: he fairly swooped about the ice, creating plays, flashing brilliantly across the blue line in his scarlet road jersey like a cardinal (
Cardinalis cardinalis,
according to my mother), a regular Ariel on skates. But then, at times, he would go into eclipse and seemingly brood, despairing, paralyzed, as if in molt.

And no one could deny that the brutal faces and the hard, mean body-checking style of Konstantinov and Fetisov had something of the earthy peasant about it. Chekhov and Tolstoy would have recognized it, I'm sure; and especially would have Gogol. They were hard men, actually former officers of the Red Army, strong workers, untiring, the kind of men who led tank regiments into Krakow. And naturally afflicted with a semimystical fatalism. This seemed to be the current problem. It was as if an overwhelmingly superior Red Army had stalled in the suburbs of Berlin because they knew, deep down, that they were inferior. (Just for a day, of course: the following day they awake with a familiar hangover and without hesitation roll on, crushing all opposition.)

I had dreamed that their brilliant, interweaving ice dance was suddenly thrown into chaotic confusion, not unlike the music of M'Zee Kinanda, which was playing furiously. I feared that they had fallen pray to a despairing belief that they could not win, and so the beloved Red Wings were doomed. I knew this was bullshit, but in my “Russian mood” I couldn't shake it. As rational a person as I like to think I am, I fell back on the petty magic of seemingly ignoring them—in the hope that they would then prosper.

It was all nonsense, to be sure, but I think it's fairly common nonsense among American men, perhaps among Western men generally. (I'm thinking of what I've heard about European soccer fans here.) I took the precaution of programming the VCR to tape the game, just in case.

In the afternoon Agge Allyson and I had gone to the warehouse on Atwater (an apt name) and been confronted with the boxed files. With the help of an amiable clerk we were dismayed to learn that the files were organized on a principle of case histories, which meant that you had to start with a file name and number and then begin to ransack the boxes. It was no use asking, “Where are the Grootka files?” It didn't work that way. It was dusty and dirty and daunting.

Nor was there, for instance, a master file entitled “Riot—1967.” You had to know what you were looking for before you could look. I had some experience with this, of course, but without the assistance of the clerks at Records, it's the old haystack again. Agge took a few notes, but after only an hour or so of cursory poking about, she declared that she needed to rethink her approach. She fell eagerly on my suggestion that we'd better get out of there if we were going to go home, shower, dress, and so on, before the M'Zee Kinanda concert.

The M'Zee Kinanda performance, as often happens, was nothing like I had expected. I suppose I was influenced by the Sun Ra image, although the only comparison was in the music rather than the appearance. Kinanda and his musicians did not wear ludicrous costumes, robes and bizarre headresses from the B-movie space-opera property room, as I'd seen in photos of Sun Ra. (Some of those getups were wildly wacky, suggesting that his mom had whipped them up out of towels and sheets; the headgear often had a suspiciously ex-pantry aspect: you wouldn't have been shocked to detect a handle obscured by the glued-on antennas.) It was this
theatrical tawdriness arid spoofery that had hampered serious appreciation of Sun Ra's music, in fact, and I'll be damned if it wasn't hard to shake.

M'Zee Kinanda and his ensemble were only vaguely suggestive of Africana. There were some stylized masks and fancy drums on the stage, as decorative props, but the players were dressed in a variety of more or less ordinary casual clothing—jeans and sweaters, a tweed jacket, a kind of Nehru jacket, running shoes, for heaven's sake. The woman who played the synthesizer wore something that might be construed as a dashiki, though most would just call it a colorful dress. And most of the men wore a hat or cap of some kind, usually a round one with colorful patterns or brocade, rather like a yarmulke, although the French horn and tuba player wore a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

All the musicians were evidently African-Americans, to use the currently favored term. The titles of the musical pieces were ostensibly African in origin, though even that wasn't clear. I wasn't sure what to think when Kinanda, in his rich, attractive voice, said, “And now we'd like to perform a piece that I wrote a few years ago, entitled ‘Kilwa Kisiwani.’ It's in three parts, reflecting the Indian, Bantu, and Portuguese influence on this medieval trading center of East Africa. The first part opens with a soprano sax interlude, followed by May anna's solo on the Yamaha DX-7 . . .”