La Donna Detroit

by Jon A. Jackson

  This, then, was the murder case.

  Mulheisen was puzzled. Which of these killings were actually murders? It was more like war. You didn’t prosecute soldiers for murder. But evidently, the French saw it differently. The priest was clearly an innocent party, although one wondered how the Ottawas were to see it that way—he had intervened in an action, had thrust himself into harm’s way. Presumably, his death was a regrettable accident, or at least an incidental consequence of his own foolhardy behavior. Not murder, in the intentional sense.

  The soldier, moreover, was one of those who had fired upon the attacking Ottawas; he was a combatant. Nonetheless, the French wanted retribution for both deaths, an eye for an eye, specifically, a trial and execution of the perpetrators.

  The Ottawas, like any of the indigenous peoples, made a clear distinction between these deaths. The Huron-Petuns and Miamis, while nominally allies under a treaty worked out by La Mothe, were traditional enemies of the Ottawas and they had instigated this conflict, if they had not initiated it. Blood retribution was the normal expectation of conflicts between enemies. But between friends—i.e, with the French—killings must be dealt with by two means: “covering the dead” (compensation in goods, gifts) and “raising up the dead” (providing a substitute, a slave). The Ottawas were sorry for the death of the priest and the soldier, and they eagerly offered to cover or raise up the victims, but they saw no reason to surrender their warriors to be executed. What purpose could be served by that?

  Mulheisen was intrigued. To be sure, in the present day distinctions were made in the nature of killings—first-degree homicide, premeditated murder, manslaughter, negligent homicide, and so on. And, of course, acts of war exempted combatants from even these distinctions. Seen that way, the indigenes’ attitudes didn’t seem quite so odd.

  He reflected that the indigenes’ willingness to allow the killing of innocent parties to be compensated by gifts, letting the perpetrator go free, suggested a deep conservatism: these people were living so close to the bone that a warrior’s bloody deeds could be excused, as it were, with ephemeral gifts—perhaps because every warrior was so valuable to the group. Imagine allowing a hit man to buy his way out of a murder conviction! After all, he was not professedly an enemy of the slain victim. (Although, Mulheisen speculated, perhaps the hit man could be seen as an enemy of all private persons, inasmuch as his actions were not undertaken in the service of society—any society—but for mere pay.)

  As it happened, negotiations covered the Ottawa dead to that party’s satisfaction. But the French were not satisfied with either covering or resurrecting the priest and the soldier. The problem was compounded by political considerations. The French knew very well that they were not powerful enough to continue to operate in the countryside without satisfactory resolution. Governor Vaudreuil, the French authority in Quebec, with whom La Mothe was not on good terms, insisted on French justice—the execution of those responsible. There was also the consideration that these issues must be resolved and seen to be resolved among the various factions of Algonquians and Iroquoians, or there would be widespread war in the frontier, a disastrous consequence.

  Le Pesant was the key figure. He took responsibility for the Ottawas’ actions. Vaudreuil was actually presented with two slaves to “raise up the gray coat” but rejected them, saying that if Le Pesant was responsible, only his blood would suffice. He ordered La Mothe to arrest him, although he knew very well that any attempt to seize the Ottawa leader would endanger the alliance and that no Ottawa had the authority to deliver Le Pesant to La Mothe. Evidently, Vaudreuil did not expect Le Pesant to be surrendered, which would embarrass La Mothe, Vaudreuil’s rival. But it would cut Le Pesant and his band off from the alliance, perhaps punishment enough.

  It was clear that neither French nor Algonquian ethics, by themselves, could resolve the issue. A middle ground was required. La Mothe’s solution was novel. He let it be known that Le Pesant’s death was not his primary aim, but that he wished “that great bear, that malicious bear” to be surrendered to him, after which time he would decide further. The Ottawas agreed. Apparently, they sensed the unique and unprecedented nature of the situation. Le Pesant was delivered as, in effect, a slave—a condition that had never attached to someone of his position. It was a kind of fiction, a staged drama. But it served the needs of the alliance and of both sides.

  The drama itself was highly edifying. Le Pesant appeared at the fort with his escort of Ottawas. The Huron-Petuns, Miamis, and French officials (including Vaudreuil) looked on from a distance while La Mothe addressed the trembling Le Pesant imperiously. The Ottawa escort begged for their chief’s life, offered another young slave, and asked to be allowed to return to Detroit. But La Mothe was not conceding anything.

  That night Le Pesant escaped from his prison, “leaving behind his shoes, his knife, and his shabby hat.” La Mothe locked up his escort for a day, in punishment, then released them. He declared that Le Pesant, nearly seventy, nearly naked, and unarmed, would surely perish alone in the woods. Privately, he assured the Ottawas that he had intended to pardon Le Pesant anyway. The matter was closed. Vaudreuil could do nothing and even grudgingly admired his rival’s creativity; the Huron-Petuns were evidently satisfied by the humiliation of Le Pesant and the Ottawas, and the alliance was restored. That Le Pesant soon reappeared at his old encampment in Michilimackinac was ignored.

  Ah, the beauties of fiction, Mulheisen thought. How gratifying. Le Pesant had yielded to French authority; he was allowed to disappear; a fiction of his death was accepted. Case closed, everybody satisfied. Mulheisen wondered if he had ever done anything like that, himself—accepted a fiction in order to resolve a sticky issue. Perhaps he had, but he couldn’t remember it.

  Unfortunately, history showed, as White conceded, that the drama was not completely successful: the Miamis were enraged and soon got their own revenge, killing Ottawas and even Frenchmen, kicking off another round of negotiations.

  Mulheisen put the book on the top of the READ box.

  5

  Cigar

  Humphrey was regaling Helen with amusing tales of “the guys.” They were walking along the Lake Saint Clair shore in front of the house. A blustery onshore wind buffeted them, making their eyes water, yet it wasn’t too cold. Spring was in the air. Already, Helen’s mother had visited. But today, the lake was dark blue-gray and choppy. The overcast was like an iron lid coming down on their heads, but it didn’t oppress them.

  Helen was dashing around, playing with a dog, one of the rangy Dobermans from the guard kennel. She called it Fritzy, although that was not its name. Humphrey was smoking a large, torpedo-shaped cigar.

  “His real name is Angelo,” Humphrey said, continuing a story, “but everybody calls him Mongelo, because he’s a biter.”

  “A biter? Well, he’s supposed to be, isn’t he?” Helen laughed and capered along the shore like a girl, tussling with the dog, tossing a stick for it to fetch. She looked like a teenager in her woolen cap. “He won’t bite me. He likes me.”

  “Not the dog,” Humphrey said, amused. “The guy I’m telling you about. Angelo. Mongelo. You know”—he made eating gestures with his hands—“mangia, mangia, like he eats a lot. He’s fat. Fatter than me.”

  “Oh, Unca Umby,” she cooed, snuggling him momentarily, caressing his cheeks and attempting a kiss, which he dodged. “You’re not fat. Not anymore.”

  “Well, like I was,” Humphrey said. He enjoyed her fooling. He liked her attempted kiss, but felt that for the sake of dignity, decorum, he should pretend not to like it. “Actually, Mongelo’s fatter than I ever was. The trouble is, he’s a biter. He bit a guy’s finger off.”

  “My god!” Helen stopped, appalled. “Why on earth would he do that? Is he crazy?”

  “Sure he’s crazy, whaddaya think?” Humphrey puffed appreciatively on his cigar. “They’re all crazy. Well, not all of them, but some. Yeah.” He nodded, thoughtfully, gazing out at the cold lake. “There’s some
crazy guys we got working for us. That’s one of the things, you know, when you’re in this business. Some of the guys who work for us aren’t wrapped too tight.”

  “Mongelo works for you?” she asked. She had taken his arm. The dog trailed along as they paced, patiently waiting for the stick in her hand to be thrown again. “What does he do?”

  “He bites people,” Humphrey said. They both laughed. He shrugged and took his cigar out of his mouth, holding it to the other side of him, away from her. “Well, though, that’s really the truth: he’s an enforcer for the loans. Guys don’t pay their loans, Mongelo bites ’em.”

  Helen was amused and interested. She wanted to know about the loans. They walked back. They were chilled now. Humphrey tossed his cigar into the chop of the waves. The dog looked puzzled but didn’t offer to retrieve it. “Let’s get back to the fire,” Humphrey said. He made a signal and one of the security men, discreetly standing beyond a fir tree, raised a device to his lips. The silent whistle instantly drew the dog away.

  Humphrey explained about the loan business over hot chocolate for Helen, coffee for himself. “There are always guys who need money, need it fast, no questions. Maybe they gambled, maybe they borrowed from where they work … and they don’t exactly have good credit, but they have access to money. So, you try to figure out if they can handle it. The interest is big, but so is their need. Can they pay it back before it’s too big a problem for them? That’s the question. It’s like all loan business, like a bank … with a difference—we collect. We don’t write it off. If they pay it back quick, the interest isn’t a problem. You’re doing them a favor. They’re grateful.

  “Say an opportunity pops up,” Humphrey went on. “The guy finds out he can get his hands on some merchandise that will make him a lot of money, but he doesn’t have the large. You want to help a guy, if he’s got a chance to do something for himself. And a lot of the time you can get a piece of the action. So you say, Okay, you can have the grand, the five, the ten, whatever he needs. Give him more than he needs, even—Don’t leave yourself short, you tell him. And you warn him, the vig can get steep, so pay up. The vigorish, the interest,” he explained.

  “But he doesn’t pay,” she prompted. This was not really news to her, but she’d never heard the actual details.

  “Yeah, sometimes the deal goes haywire, he screws it up, he lied about it, or he’s just stupid. Maybe it wasn’t really his deal. Or it was really a gambling debt. He didn’t borrow enough. All kinds of reasons.” He got out another of his cigars from the humidor cabinet, the big fat ones, torpedo shaped. He waved it. “You mind?”

  “Oh no,” she assured him, she didn’t mind. She liked the smell of cigars, good cigars. Her father had always liked cigars. “Let me try one,” she said. “Do you have any little ones?”

  Humphrey rummaged in the cabinet and found a small, well-made cigar, a “petit lancero.” He clipped it and lit it for her, then lit his own. He had discreetly turned on a device that whisked away the smoke, the aroma.

  “The vig can be a problem for the loaner,” he said, “for us. It gets to be too much, more than the guy can pay. Sometimes he gets scared, afraid of the collector, and he’ll do stuff he shouldn’t do, to get the money. It can cause problems. But you gotta enforce it. You send Mongelo around. You can’t have these guys thinking they can get away with this irresponsibility.”

  “And he bites their fingers?” she said. She enjoyed the little cigar, but she was finding the story a little distasteful. She was glad she didn’t have to deal with any Mongelo, in any respect.

  “That’s the problem,” Humphrey said. “He didn’t used to be so screwy. Used to be, he’d go around, put a little pressure on, twist his arm, maybe even slap the guy around a bit. But then he heard about Action Jackson.”

  Action Jackson was a legendary collector in Chicago, Humphrey explained. Like Mongelo, he was a big, fat man who bit people. Humphrey told the story, but he didn’t think he could tell her about Jackson’s worst actions, such as when he’d bit a woman’s nipples off. The woman was the mistress of the borrower, not the borrower himself. Jackson had gone to see the man but he wasn’t home. Jackson had sat around, waiting, but after a while his attention turned to the woman. He thought he’d rape her. That would send a message. He overpowered the woman, tied her up, stripped her, but then he didn’t have the urge—or so it was said. He ended up biting her nipples off. The guy got the message. He paid up. And then he went looking for Jackson.

  “Jackson went too far” was all Humphrey would say about it. But Helen wanted to know what had happened to him. She meant, Where is he these days? But Humphrey, still in the train of memory, said, “Oh, they reamed him. The guy he was collecting from, him and some others. You don’t want to know. He died from it. The guy was nuts, like I said.”

  Jackson had died hanging from a barbed plug hammered up his rectum, attached to a wire cable suspended over a girder in a warehouse. Humphrey remembered when he first heard about it, wondering how they had hoisted the man up and how the plug could have held him long enough for him to die of suffocation, his mouth duct-taped. It was a grotesque image: a naked fat man hanging by a wire up his ass. Like a great pig in a slaughterhouse. According to the stories, they’d gone off and left him, and his corpse wasn’t found for several days.

  Humphrey suddenly didn’t like the image and blanked it from his mind.

  He wondered how he could get it across to Helen that it wasn’t all like this, tawdry and violent and even a little disgusting. It was mainly just business. Business like ordinary business, not a lot different from your friendly bank, say, but with the principles carried a little bit further, carried as far as they could go. It didn’t happen that often. Guys needed money but couldn’t get it at a bank or any legitimate source. So they had to pay a big price. They almost always paid it back; they were grateful and they knew they could borrow again. That’s how it mainly worked. Mongelo was unusual.

  What concerned him now, Humphrey said, was that it looked like Mongelo had gone off the deep end. He might try to carry his imitation of Action Jackson to the same extremes, and that would cause problems. He had to do something about Mongelo before he went too far.

  “What Mongelo needs,” she suggested, “is to diet.”

  Humphrey laughed. Then he looked thoughtful. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “Maybe a forced diet.” He abruptly changed the topic. “So, you like the cigar?”

  “I like it very much,” she said. “Is it Cuban?”

  “Naw. You wouldn’t like Cuban.”

  “Papa always smoked Cubans,” she said. “Big ones. He used to give me a puff, secretly.”

  Humphrey remembered. He’d liked Big Sid Sedlacek. A man’s man. Full of jokes, smart, a guy who would go out on a limb for a buddy and back him up. He had a lot of stories about Big Sid, though he didn’t think his daughter would like all of them. But she was tough. He looked at her, thoughtfully. She’d been through a lot and she’d showed her mettle. She had her wits about her. Maybe she wouldn’t be as shocked as he thought.

  “Cubans are too strong,” he said. “I don’t even like them, most of ’em. I like the milder ones.” He puffed the torpedo.

  “That looks strong.”

  “But it’s not, not really. Here, have a puff.” He held it out to her and she bravely took a little puff.

  She smiled. “It’s pretty mild!”

  “I told you. Most people don’t know sh—, crap about cigars, even guys who smoke all the time. They hear other guys talking about Cubans, so they all want a Cohiba. Hell, most of the Cohibas they get—if they can get one—aren’t even Dominican, much less Cuban. They’re Honduran, or Guatemalan, sometimes not even that. Mexican, or Florida. But they got the label.”

  “How do they get the label?”

  “That’s our business,” he was delighted to tell her. “A label is a hell of a lot easier to make than a cigar. A real cigar, like a Cohiba or an H. Upmann, you got to grow the tobacco right, s
elect it, dry it, age it. You got to have top-notch rollers and makers, and then you got to age them again. There’s a lot to it. A good cigar is worth what you pay. But in this country, especially since Kennedy did us all a favor and slapped an embargo on the Cubans, cigar smokers here don’t know from Shinola about real cigars.”

  “What is Shinola?” she asked, abruptly. She tapped her little cigar on the crystal ashtray. She let it lie.

  “You don’t know Shinola?” Humphrey laughed. “It’s shoe polish. I think it’s still around.”

  “Shoe polish! I thought it was a cigar. So what is the business, your business?”

  “I’ll show you. Come on, let’s take a ride.” This was perfect, he thought. He’d been thinking about having her meet some of the people he worked with and Strom Davidson had come to mind, as a man of some class, not just another hoodlum. Strom would be interesting to her, he thought, but not too interesting.

  They drove into the city or, rather, they were driven into the city by a couple of the guys, nice-looking young men who sat silently in the front seat, the glass up between them and the passengers. The Cadillac had dark-tinted windows. It rolled through the rough neighborhoods where every block was missing at least two or three houses that had long ago burned and the lots had been graded and sodded. Many of these empty lots were still weedy, but the general effect seemed to be to let light and air into the old, rundown neighborhoods. That hadn’t been the object, presumably, but it was the effect.

  Eventually, somewhere west of Saint Aubin, a very old part of town, they entered a kind of warehouse district. The limo pulled up at a door served by a simple concrete stair of six steps. The young man on the passenger side hopped out and opened the car door for Helen. The driver opened the door for Humphrey.

  “You want us to go up, boss?” the driver asked.

  “No, that’s all right,” Humphrey said. “You guys wait here. We won’t be long.”