Man With An Axe: A Detective Sergeant Mulheisen Mystery Part 2

Good Lord, why was I babbling on? I shut up and tried to look indifferent. Maybe it was the unb.u.t.toned shirt. It is very hard not to stare into an unb.u.t.toned shirt when it is so well filled. Impossible, perhaps.

"If Grootka was your partner, surely you talked about the riots?"

I thought about it. I sipped at my coffee and discovered that it was cold. I signaled the bartender for another cup and gestured at the history girl. She looked puzzled. "Would you like more coffee?" I asked. "A drink? A beer? A little cognac?"

She settled for coffee, and I felt composed enough to tell her a quick little tale about Grootka.

"Grootka told me a lot about his life, his career," I said. "Mostly about the forties and fifties. He seemed nostalgic for that period. It was a better period. And it's funny, too"-it had just struck me-"I had a similar nostalgia." It had not previously occurred to me, this shared taste. Perhaps it accounted for our getting along as well as we did.

Agge Allyson alarmed me with her raised eyebrow. "Oh no." I was strangely eager to correct any misapprehension. "I'm not anything like that old. Grootka was much, much older than me. Twenty-five, thirty years, anyway. But it's odd . . . you see, my parents were fairly old when I was born. My mother was nearly forty, I think. She's eighty-some, now. My dad died, oh, twenty years or more ago. But growing up with them, with their outlook . . . even as a child I had a notion of the twenties and the thirties, a sense of familiarity. It was almost as if I'd experienced the period, because that was what my parents talked about. I knew about comic strips that hadn't been published in decades, big bands that had sunk into total obscurity long ago. Did you ever hear of the Ray McKinleyWill Bradley band? No? Or radio characters like Ish Kabibble or Joe Penner? Joe Penner said, 'Wanna buy a duck?' on the radio."

She laughed, a soft, gurgly laugh. It would convince any man that she found him genuinely amusing. The shirt rose and fell and I looked away.

"The forties and fifties were yesterday to my folks," I went on. "They had just happened. The twenties and thirties had a little more distance, but they weren't ancient history. Maybe"-I had a sudden thought-"maybe that's why I was always so interested in history. Like you."

She smiled encouragingly and asked what I meant.

"History is practically my main interest," I informed her. "After work, that is. I'm interested in Detroit history, Michigan history. Your project sounds intriguing," I said, "but I'm more interested in earlier periods, although I'm not caught up in this current craze for the Civil War. Are you? No? The Civil War is interesting, sure, but it's become kind of faddish. I'm more into Pontiac's Rebellion. Or, if we're talking recent history, the labor struggle. I'm interested in that. And the War of 1812! The naval action on the Lakes."

"Grootka," she said, with mock severity. "Postwar to the seventies. Don't get me sidetracked into discussing Pontiac. I did my thesis on Pontiac's Rebellion and the opening of western migration."

"Really?" Amazing. "This isn't some 'great man' theory, is it? I thought that was pa.s.se."

"No, no . . . although I'm not so dismissive of that notion as prevailing att.i.tudes. . . . Obviously, unusually powerful or forceful individuals have an impact on events. But this is more a variation on the Annalistes . . . let's say Annalistes avec personnalite: find an ill.u.s.trative individual or circ.u.mstance, not necessarily the famous and familiar one, and then . . . but what about Grootka?"

"Okay. Grootka." I paused for a moment, then dove in. "I have a picture of Grootka, a mental picture, of him striding down a street, a gun in each hand. Everybody scatters. Yeah, that's Grootka. Cool and unflappable. Just walking down the street, keeping the law." I laughed, to show her I wasn't serious. "He really wasn't like that, of course. But . . . sort of like that."

Shut, up. Ga.s.sing away like a shot Zeppelin. I looked at this chick. What was she about? Pontiac and the opening of the West? And now she wants to write history about Grootka? Nice shirt, though. But she can't figure out if she wants to show it or hide it. Are they all like that? Once in a while you meet one who doesn't seem to care. That one you better get close to. This one . . . who knows?

"'Keeping the law,'" Agge said. "What does that mean?"

I had to give this a little more thought. What did it mean? It was something about Grootka. The way he was.

"Was he intimidating?" she asked. She had velvety brown eyes, full dark lips.

"Grootka was very intimidating," I said. "Intimidation was his basic wardrobe, like the gray suit, the same red tie-he always wore the same tie, never untied it, just slipped it on and off. He liked to 'invade your s.p.a.ce,' as they say these days. He'd stand very close to you, too close, and put his big face into yours. His breath wasn't bad, though usually there was a faint odor of booze-you could feel the heat of it. Obnoxious as h.e.l.l."

"A big man?"

"Oh, yeah. About six-four, six-five, something like that. A big raw-boned man. He had a face . . ." Jeez, how could you describe that battered, ravaged face? It looked like-what was his line?-like his face caught on fire and they put it out with a pitchfork. I settled for: "A very menacing face. Pockmarked skin, drawn tight over the bones-like parchment that had shrunk. He had huge hands."

I could see that face, the thin lips, the curious hair-mouse colored, or no color, really. As if it were artificial, doll's hair . . . too thin, too wiry, too spa.r.s.e to be a wig, the bony skull showing through. Small, flat ears, pulled back, irregular-as if they'd been added on from different bins, or reconstructed.

"So, his basic technique, as a policeman, was to intimidate people?" she asked. For some reason I was not displeased by her expression of disapproval.

"It's not uncommon," I said. "Though Grootka was better at it than most."

"Is it so effective?" Agge asked.

"Amazingly so. Grootka told me when he was on the street, in uniform, they put him out on Hastings. That was the heart of the old ghetto. They called it Paradise Valley. It was a tough place. He said he grabbed the first guy he came to and whacked him over the head with his stick. 'I'm Grootka,' he tells the guy. 'Tell everybody. Grootka's in town.' He meant, you know, that he was in charge. He says it worked."

"So that's where you get this image," she said.

"You mean of Grootka 'keeping the law'? No, no. Well, maybe in part. But the image really seems a later development. But don't get me wrong. The people liked him."

"You mean the black people? Because you are talking about black people, aren't you, when you talk about Paradise Valley?"

And the tan, I thought. She was more the tan. The cafe au lait. Hard to equate that with black, somehow. "Sure. The black people, the African-Americans. He was respected. And liked. But Paradise Valley was just the beginning. He worked the city, the whole city. What we call the Street." Don't tell her about the Kid. "The Street people liked him, generally, even the bad guys. He was tough, but he wasn't a brute. He didn't bulls.h.i.t you."

"He beat up that one guy," she said.

"Who? Oh, the guy, when he first went on the Street?" I laughed. "That was bulls.h.i.t. He never did anything like that, I'm pretty sure. He probably caught some guy shaking down a paperboy, gave him a rattle, and let him go with a warning and the notice."

"Catch a n.i.g.g.e.r by the toe? If he hollers let him go?"

I suppressed a sigh. It wasn't like that, but how could you explain? "I wouldn't say that. Grootka wasn't one of those."

"One of what?"

"He wasn't a racist." Maybe I should tell her about the Kid. No. Well, you had to try. "Grootka was hard on everybody, white or black. Polish-American, African-American . . . 'America.n.u.s kentuckia.n.u.s' he called the hillbillies, with an emphasis on the 'a.n.u.s.' But when I say he gave him a rattle, I don't mean . . ."

Well, what do I mean? Of course he gave him a rattle, and probably a knuckle or two. "It's just . . . to me, to another cop, he would say he decked the guy and gave out the notice-'Grootka's in town.' He's maybe overdramatizing it, that's all. It's like that famous bank-robbery line. You know, 'Die on a dark day.'"

Agge hadn't heard that one. I was surprised. Surely someone would have told her. It was the main Grootka story. c.r.a.p mostly, but there had to be something to it. I had to tell her.

"Grootka goes into a bank to cash his paycheck, something like that. It's crowded. Then he notices a guy in front of him has a very large leather briefcase, a satchel, and it's exactly like the one a guy in the next line has, and another guy in another line. This is too much coincidence for Grootka. He looks around, sees another suspicious character standing over by the counter where they have the extra forms, deposit slips, that kind of thing. This guy, he's eyeballing the whole scene closely and he also has the same kind of satchel, plus Grootka is almost certain he's armed. He checks out the rest of the room. It looks like four guys, that's the whole gang. So he draws his own piece-he always carried this cannon, a huge .45 revolver-and jams it in the back of the guy in front of him.

"'Blink and you'll die on a dark day,' he says. The guy on the right sees this and hauls around with his satchel. Grootka clubs him with the barrel of the gun. Grabs the guy in front of him around the neck, for a shield, waves the cannon out at the end of his arm at the guy at the deposit-slip counter, freezes him and the guy in the other line. Beautiful piece of work, really. He was famous for it. But I think the 'dark day' line was made up by a reporter, Doc Gaskill, who used to hang out at Lou Walker's Bar."

No point in telling her that Grootka had shot the guy at the counter, blew him away in front of thirty or forty lunchtime patrons. Fortunately, the dead man had been found with a gun in his hand. But good Lord, shooting an armed man in that kind of a crowd. I'd screwed up the story anyway. Was it the guy in front of him he told not to blink? Or did he yell it? Or whisper it? Something like that. All bulls.h.i.t anyway. Grootka never made up a line like that in his life. Gaskill more likely. But it could have been Grootka. He could surprise you.

"He could surprise you," I said. She seemed impressed. I watched her carefully jot down the legendary line.

"What did he do during the riots?" she asked.

I thought she'd forgotten that line of questioning. "That was thirty years ago," I said. "I don't remember."

"Oh, you must remember something."

I pondered. "Nothing comes to mind. It couldn't have been anything significant. I guess he just ran around like everybody else, trying to hang onto what was left of the city. I don't recall him ever talking about the riots."

"What did you do?"

"I stayed home." Pretty much. I went fishing.

"You weren't interested?"

"It wasn't historical, yet." Shouldn't have tried that. Too flip. "Well . . . I mean . . . I wasn't interested in the situation that much. I lived outside of Detroit. About ten miles, or so. Still do, more or less. But it was very rural in those days. I didn't make much connection with the city. My dad worked for the city-he was the water commissioner-but I didn't really pay that much attention. I was enrolled at Michigan at the time, but it was summer vacation. I was probably thinking about school."

This was annoying. Why was I babbling away like this? And what did she really want? I couldn't believe all this interest in Grootka. He was a guy who, in his lifetime, most people wanted to avoid. Now that he was long and safely dead, no one could really be interested in digging him up.

"So . . . is that it?" I said.

"It? About Grootka?" she said. "Why, no. Not at all."

I subdued a sigh and tried to look easy. "Ask me anything," I said, "I'm easy."

She looked frustrated. "Well, what was he like?"

"Grootka was a hard man. Tough. Mean. Not very pleasant, most of the time. He was almost never a fun guy to be around. Difficult, annoying. He's never going to buy the drinks. He was bright, he was direct-so in that sense he was kind of an antidote to the timeservers, the smarmy, lying, back-stabbing, whining, conniving . . . well, the usual kind of stuff one runs into in public work. Organizational work. I'm not being a critic. I'm a bureaucrat, too, like my dad; our life, our civil life, depends on organization. Everybody claims to hate bureaucracies, but without them we couldn't function. There's good ones and bad ones. When you have a lot of people working together, as in any large corporate activity, you get a lot of friction, and therefore it is necessary for there to be a lot of oil if the organization is going to function. I understand this, but I'm not sure Grootka did. Grootka was not an organization man. There was no oil in the man. He was more like gravel."

She nodded. Some people, not just women, are not as attractive at first as they become later, once you've had a chance to look at them. Agge was immediately pretty, and the more you saw of her the prettier she got. In fact, you began to see that she was beautiful.

I wanted to think of a good story about Grootka, for Ms. Agge Allyson. I presumed that her search for a historical character-say Grootka, for the sake of argument-was based on the notion that the individual can function as a kind of lens through which we can view the period in question. The idea, as I understood it, is that a fellow human being enlists the interest of readers . . . after all, we are more interested in other people than we are in abstract ideas. But to be really effective in the telling of history, it seemed to me, the chosen person ought to somehow represent, or embody, some significant historical event or, perhaps, an idea or principle. Now, how did Grootka fit into this concept? Grootka was about as unusual, as unrepresentative as I could easily imagine any cop to be. How did writing about him say anything about the Detroit police force?

When I offered this question to Ms. History, she nodded almost enthusiastically throughout my lengthy explication and then said, with a flip of her hand, "Exactly! But, of course, it doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter? Then what the heck is the point? If it doesn't matter, then why bring it up? Why bother with Grootka?"

Her face suddenly lit up, glowing a pleasantly pinkish brown. "It doesn't matter that he isn't especially representative. Who is? On the other hand, just about anybody is, in some sense. The point is, Grootka's interesting, and he is, after all, a cop. Whether you think so or no, all cops are more like other cops than they are like . . . well, schoolteachers. The reader is interested in his amusing adventures, and in the meantime, I can tell the history of the force."

"But," I protested, "when you hold up before your reader the spectacle (or is it spectacles?) of Grootka, won't he or she be tempted to believe that this is a typical policeman?"

"To an extent, yes," she conceded. "That's an inescapable consequence of writing about an individual as a member of a group. But if I do my job right the reader should see that Grootka is not every cop. Anyway, what is this Grootka? Some kind of monster? Everyone holds within herself an essentially human character, and as different as individuals might be, they aren't usually so different that they don't exemplify in some way the basic human experience."

"The basic human experience," I said. "What would that be?"

"Oh, you know . . . like nowadays anyone watching TV or reading the paper sees the word 'Detroit,' and they think: Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Well, we know that most cops don't have anything to do with that, but still . . . it happens on one's watch. Possibly, it has something to do with one's experience. So Kevorkian is relevant to any Detroit cop today, and vice versa. But that doesn't mean any cop is deeply relevant."

I could only gaze at her.

"You're pursing your lips," she said. "What is it?"

"The Germans have a word, selbstmord," I said. "It means suicide, but somehow I've always felt that it said a little more. It seems to say 'self murder.' As if one went out looking for one's self and, finding it, then murdered it. A more complex and dramatic notion, perhaps, than pa.s.sively inhaling a gas or taking a jar of soporific pills."

"There you are," Agge said, obviously pleased.

"I'm not thinking about Dr. Kevorkian, not deeply," I said. "I'm thinking about Grootka. But when you mentioned Kevorkian it reminded me of Grootka using that word. I don't know where Grootka picked up any German, but he meant it in the sense I was just mentioning. He said there was someone going around being him and he had to get rid of him."

Agge looked at me as if she didn't believe me. "Somebody was going around pretending to be Grootka, so he had to track this guy down and . . . kill him?"

"No, no, not pretending," I said. "Somebody was being him. I made the same mistake when he told me about it. It wasn't a case of someone impersonating him or resembling him, it was another him. So, of course, he had to kill this other Grootka."

"Of course," Agge said, with an uneasy laugh. "Why?"

"It seems obvious. If another you is walking around, who knows what he or she might do? And whatever this other self did, you would be, in some sense, responsible. You would have to kill this other you in defense of your primary self, so to speak. Eventually, I imagine, the other self might come looking for you. No, no." I shook my head. "Two selves would never do. Can't be tolerated. The question is: How did Grootka come to think this?"

"What happened?"

"I'm not sure. It was several years ago, at a time when I was no longer working with Grootka. I don't think anyone was-he didn't like partners, found them difficult to work with, and the feeling was mutual. It was not long before he retired . . . which was a whole 'nother set of problems, believe me."

"Do you think he was cracking up?"

"It sounds like it, doesn't it? But thinking back, I don't know that I felt that way at the time. It seems to me that he was pretty functional, he seemed okay."

She wanted to know, naturally, how this peculiar problem was resolved, but I couldn't satisfy her. As far as I could recall, it wasn't resolved. I didn't see much of Grootka at about this time and when I did more or less resume our previous relationship, the question had disappeared. Presumably he had worked it out. History Lady wasn't satisfied with this. It seemed such an unusual situation, calling for extraordinary measures. Surely Grootka must have worked it out. You just don't suggest one bright morning, she pointed out, that an alternate self is loose on the planet and has to be eliminated and then, some unknown but evidently not lengthy period later, pretend that the situation had never occurred.

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "I think that is what happens a lot of the time. Problems pop up then fade away. They seem remarkable on Monday, familiar on Tuesday, boring on Wednesday, and hard to remember on Thursday. Anyway, I wouldn't know how to find out what happened to this one."

"Really? I thought you were a detective."

I sighed openly. "I could look into it," I said.

"Great. When could we meet again?"

I thought about that. It seemed like a pleasant enough prospect. At present I was not urgently locked into any investigation. In fact, I'd decided to take a few weeks, even months, and just work at the precinct, clearing up back cases, helping out. In short, instead of rushing about focusing on major investigations, as I'd been doing until recently, I had now envisioned a lengthy period of simply pulling duty. There was no reason not to incorporate this little historical project into my unpressing agenda. And, of course, the prospect of seeing this young lady was not oppressive.

I figured I'd have to locate the files on Grootka, such as they were. That might take some time. But, what the heck . . . "Why not tomorrow?" I suggested.

"Terrific. And while you're at it, maybe you can find out what Grootka did on the Hoffa case."

"Hoffa? The Great Mystery. As you say, who didn't work on that one? Sure, why not?"

3.

Come Out "I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them."

-Daniel Hamm, from Steve Reich's "Come Out," 1966 It puzzled me, all this interest in Grootka. The man had been dead for . . . well, how many years, now? For the first time I realized it had been a good while. Four years, anyway. He had never interested anybody so much when he was alive, at least, not since he had retired. Well, that was not true: a killer is always of interest. People want to know what he's like, if he's different from the rest of us because he has killed a man. As an occupational group, cops have a high rate of killers among us. Still, even among cops, the killer is unusual. I used to hear about so-called killer cops more, it seems. There was a guy, Steve Something, who was supposed to be a killer cop. He'd killed fourteen men, all legit. That's what I heard. But later, when I tried to verify this, n.o.body seemed to remember the guy. They'd "heard of" him, but they "never took it seriously." And finally, I just couldn't track down this myth.

But I remember well, when I was in uniform, an older cop pointing out Grootka with definite awe in his voice. "See him?" the sergeant said. "That's Grootka. He's a killer." And it was a little scary. It meant: One of your colleagues is a killer, he has killed another human being. And: You may be called upon to kill, like this man. Scary. Later, I found out that it was even scarier than I'd suspected.

I hadn't worked with Grootka long before he confided to me that he was, in fact, a multiple killer. Well, I knew he had killed at least one bank robber (some said two, but I never checked it out for some reason), but one early morning, after sitting over a drink in a blind pig, on our way back to the shop, he obliquely referred to having killed another man, a mafioso. The conversation at the blind pig was one of those supercynical cop macabre routines. The guy who ran the pig, Jimmy Singleton, told about seeing a movie where murder victims are subst.i.tuted for wax images in a museum-an early 3-D thing, I think. That launched Grootka on a long ramble about bodies being encased in freshly poured concrete, dissected, ground into burger, dumped into sausage-making vats, immersed in acid baths . . . it went on and on. But later, as we were driving home, he observed, "Of course, the usual way is to bag 'em up and dump 'em in the trunk of an abandoned car. That's the way the Mob does it." Then he snorted a crude approximation of a laugh and said, "It works. If the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds only knew that was how I got rid of Raspa." He wheezed with laughter.

Raspa was an old-time thug, Grootka told me-before my time. His death had never been reported. "I don't even know his real name," Grootka said. "He was a real primitive, one of the guys from the old country, from Lucania-that's down in the south of Italy, somewhere. Hill country. I guess they're like hillbillies down there. Raspa could hardly speak any English. These guys, they came over here and they were like wild animals, they would do anything. Yanh, they were dago hillbillies, like these Paducah types we got. Peasants. You got a village up there, maybe five or six hundred people, half of them never been to the next village. They were hard men, full of superst.i.tion, real killers. Most of 'em was bandits back there, but kind of like folk heroes, like Robin Hood or some f.u.c.kin' thing, 'cause they're against the landowners and the gentry. They believe in witches and elves, the evil eye, that kind of s.h.i.t. You could never get in their heads."

I enquired how it had happened. Grootka shrugged. "It was him or me. I hadda blast him." He waved a hand cavalierly. It wasn't so much a confession as a kind of drunken boast. "These guys are-whatchacallit-disposable. They don't have no real family or nothing, no attachments, see. n.o.body gives a rat's a.s.s what happens to them, beyond a certain-you know-'Did he get the job done?' If he didn't, if he got popped instead, then it's 'f.u.c.k 'im.' I threw his a.s.s inna car trunk that got crushed and sold to Zug Island for smelting. I got the idea from them, from Umberto's old man, in fact. It's a good way to get rid of bad rubbish. Anyways, it saved the taxpayers a lot of grief and money . . . prob'ly saved a few taxpayer lives down the road, too."

Grootka's own words, more or less. Who Umberto or his old man were, I had no idea, then.

I don't know if I believed him at the time. I think I must have been a little loaded myself. Anyway, I forgot it until the Galerd Franz case. This was a weird, complex case involving a rapist-murderer who reappeared after a long absence. I won't go into it except to note that Grootka had confided to me that he thought he'd killed Franz once already, twenty years earlier. Obviously, he was wrong, but I think Grootka genuinely relished the opportunity to kill Franz "again."

Another significant aspect of this case was that Franz had accused Grootka of the rape-murder of a young girl, Mary Helen Gallagher. Several people have asked my opinion of this charge by Franz. I think a lot of them believed that Grootka was capable of the crime. To be sure, he was a violent man, no doubt a troubled man, and who knows what were the s.e.xual complications of that mind. But I do not believe that he killed Mary Helen Gallagher. If Galerd Franz hadn't suggested it, no one would ever have thought it of Grootka, and Franz was a psychopath.