Man With An Axe: A Detective Sergeant Mulheisen Mystery Part 12

A very heavy dark woman of middle age, wearing slacks and a vaguely medical smocklike overshirt, was pushing a cart of medicines and drinks in the corridor. She had a name tag that identified her as Mrs. LoRhetta Butler, Nurse's Aide. I asked her who had brought Mr. b.u.t.terfield a new tape.

"He got a new tape? Oh, I'm so glad. That poor man, he didn't have but two or three tapes," she chattered as she bustled in and out of rooms, dropping off gla.s.ses of apple juice or shaking out an aspirin onto her broad hand and offering it to a patient with a paper cup of water, or waiting while another swallowed his medicine. "And somebody stold one and then he dropped another one and I"-she giggled embarra.s.sedly and covered her mouth with her hand-"stepped on one and broke it! So he didn't have nothing to listen to on that little old Pakman, or whatever it is. Here, honey." She stood over an ancient old lady with perhaps ten strands of white hair on her shriveled black head, her face an absolute raisin of wrinkles, while the old lady drank some pink fluid from a tiny paper cup. "It must have been Miss Vera brought it," the aide concluded.

I was pleased to think of the austere Mrs. Jacobsen visiting an old reprobate like Lonzo. According to the aide she didn't come often, or rather she came frequently and then wouldn't come for weeks, but then she'd reappear regularly again, every other day. I thought it must have to do with her movement in and out of Detroit. Not very many other people came, just an occasional, very occasional old acquaintance.

"Mostly trash," was the aide's contemptuous dismissal. "Jailbirds, they look like. Course I know he was a bail bondsman. But 'cept for that other po-liceman, Miss Vera the only white person who comes."

"What other policeman?"

"You a po-lice, ain't you? Unh-hunh, well, there you are. He come a few days ago. He didn't even talk to Lonzo, just looked at the visitor book and axed me about who come to see him. I knew it was some po-lice business, so I didn't say nothing."

"You mean you didn't tell the policeman anything, or you didn't say anything to Lonzo about it?"

"Wasn't anything to tell. I ain't got no business tellin' no police about Miss Vera. So I didn't say nothin' to him and I didn't say nothin' to Lonzo."

I was a little puzzled. "Well, why are you saying something to me?" I asked. "I mean, if I'm a po-"

"You a real po-lice," she interrupted.

"You mean the other guy wasn't a real policeman? What was he?"

"He was almost a po-lice," Mrs. Butler said, "but I didn't trust him. He was the insurance po-lice. He called hisself a 'vestigator!" She laughed, a genuine mirthful laugh. "He some kind of 'gator, that's for sure! Asking about Lonzo's visitors! What's it to him? And then he axed if I knowed Mr. Meldrim. Hah! That's what he was really innarested in."

"And do you know Mr. Meldrim?" I asked.

"Sho' I knows him. I see Books Meldrim come visit Lonzo every month, also he pays the bills. Least, he signs the bills. I think they go to a bank. But I knew Books when he had a little business on Dexter Avenue." She laughed, remembering and not unfondly. "I useta buy my dream books from Books Meldrim. And he useta play piano at the Liberry Bar, oncet in a while."

"I thought you said only trash came to visit Lonzo."

"'Cept for Mr. Meldrim and Miss Vera," Mrs. Butler corrected herself. "And you." She looked at me with a c.o.c.ked eyebrow, as if to suggest that she might be willing to change her mind about my status if I wasn't careful.

"But you didn't tell any of this to the other policeman. Did he show any identification? A name?"

"He didn't show nothing. He said he was from the Condamental 'Surance Comp'ny. But one of the other girls, she from over on Mack? She tole me she seen him at the Ninth Precink. That's way over on Chalmers, ain't it? Choichnya, I calls it, so many houses been flattened, like that place in Russia, Garage-nee. He didn't give no name. Little fellow, real nice suit. He might of been a po-lice oncet, but that was some time ago. Vonda says he is the chief of police over there."

"Very neat?" I asked. "Patent-leather hair?"

"That's him."

I told her I thought she was a very acute observer. She didn't know what to make of that. I a.s.sured her it was a compliment.

"Compliments are nice, but I'll tell you about that little rat and it ain't no compliment. He is a nasty little rat."

If the man she was talking about was indeed Captain Buchanan, commander of the Ninth, who fit her description perfectly, I quite agreed with her a.s.sessment. But I didn't say so. I started to leave, but I thought of something. "How long has Lonzo been like this?" I asked Mrs. Butler.

"Like what?"

"Well, he's very infirm. Has he been here long?" I wanted to get an opinion from her about his prospects, but didn't want to just come out and say, How long would you guess that he's got?

"This prob'ly just one of his bad days," she said. "I don't know, I ain't hardly looked at him." We were standing by his door and she peered in. "Well, he don't sound so bad to me."

Lonzo was asleep, his mouth open, the headset still on his head, and snoring loudly.

"Drunk," she said. "He been in the strongbox again. Miss Vera must of brought him something besides a tape." She sniffed. "Didn't you smell that?"

I stuck my head in and sniffed. Now that she mentioned it, there was a faint whiff of vodka.

"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 b.u.mped into the young doctor again. "Would you say Mr. b.u.t.terfield'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 const.i.tution. 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 b.u.t.terfield 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 b.u.t.terfield 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 h.e.l.l. 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 a.s.suming 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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.t-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 d.a.m.n hip! I mean, here all these cats"-he waved his hand across his huge windshield, indicating a ma.s.s 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 f.u.c.king Springfield. This cat over here, he won't listen to nothing but p.o.o.p 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 s.h.i.t! It's too many G.o.dd.a.m.n different kinds of f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.k the rest! So they pretend that they ain't n.o.body else out there. Oh, they throw in Wynton Marsalis for the fogies and some redneck country-and-western s.h.i.t 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. "n.o.body gives a s.h.i.t. They go on supporting their favorites. They buy the records, the CDs, go to the concerts. It's cool. It f.u.c.ks 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 f.u.c.king 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-h.e.l.l, 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.

"h.e.l.l yes," Gregory said. "We went to school together. You knew him. He was in that German cla.s.s, with Barry and Donna and Ruth and all them cats."

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

"h.e.l.l yeah! Tyrone. Tyrone Addison. He sat right up front. He put the moves on Ruth, the Jewish bombsh.e.l.l! 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?"

"h.e.l.l 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 t.i.ts. He didn't chase them, they chased him. He had to beat them back! Then one of them, a married b.i.t.c.h, 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 s.h.i.t. 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 c.r.a.p with all that stuff about a grant and writing a history of the department?" I squatted down next to her.

"It's no c.r.a.p," she said. She didn't look at me, still pretending to page through some files.

"It's c.r.a.p," I said. "A history of the force! What a joke! I should have known better. I did know better, but I let myself be persuaded. What was the name of that foundation again? The one that gave you the grant?"

"I don't believe I said." She stood up. "It's the Alpha/Alpha Foundation. The director is a Mr. Toscano."

"Where is this Alpha/Alpha Foundation located?" I asked. "How did you hear about it?"

"I didn't hear about it. They heard about me. You don't apply for one of their grants. They have a network of academics, to whom they pay a stipend to keep an eye out for likely candidates for their grants. They're in Grosse Pointe, but I was interviewed at Wayne."

It sounded interesting. I had never heard of such an arrangement, unless it was in le Carre novels about the recruitment of spies from Cambridge. Agge a.s.sured me that it was not unusual. She didn't seem very upset by my anger at her behavior.

"What did I do? I didn't send you any computer warnings of cries of 'wolf.' I told Ma not to do that. I told her it was nonsense."

"So you're sticking with the story that contacting me was just an accident, that you are really working on a history of the force?"

"Of course. Really, Mul. . . . I suppose I shouldn't have mentioned to Ma that I ran into someone who knew Grootka. She was always obsessed about that old Grootka. I hardly remember him, myself, though he seems much more interesting now."

I could hardly believe this. I had made a policy out of not accepting coincidence, especially where a murder had been committed. But what could I say in the face of this practically cheerful declaration?

"Ah, tell me again how you happened to get onto this notion of focusing on Grootka's activities," I asked her, "as a lens on history, so to speak."

She dusted off her hands and placed them on her hips. She was very young, I saw, as if for the first time. Perhaps it was having met her mother, but I was conscious of her being so very much younger than me that I lost all interest in her, in a romantic way, as it were. Especially when she popped her forefinger into her mouth, girlishly, thinking for a moment.

"You know," she said, after a suitable time, "it really wasn't my idea. It was suggested to me, by Mr. Toscano."

"This is the director of the Alpha/Alpha Foundation? He's the one who came to interview you at the university? What's he like?"

"He's very pleasant, though I'd say he isn't very used to these interviews. Most of the questions were asked by his a.s.sistant, Miss Sedgelock. Mr. Toscano just occasionally interjected. But it was he who suggested the Grootka approach."

"That's interesting," I said. "Grootka is pretty well known in police circles, although not so much anymore, but I'd say he was practically unknown otherwise."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Agge said. "He's still pretty well known on the Street, as you guys like to put it, and in a certain milieu."